Cadmium zinc telluride (CZT), a hard-to-manufacture semiconductor produced by only a handful of companies, is enabling a quiet revolution in medical imaging, science, and security by delivering faster scans, lower radiation doses, and far more precise X-ray and gamma-ray detection. "You get beautiful pictures from this scanner," says Dr Kshama Wechalekar, head of nuclear medicine and PET. "It's an amazing feat of engineering and physics." The BBC reports: Kromek is one of just a few firms in the world that can make CZT. You may never have heard of the stuff but, in Dr Wechalekar's words, it is enabling a "revolution" in medical imaging. This wonder material has many other uses, such as in X-ray telescopes, radiation detectors and airport security scanners. And it is increasingly sought-after. Investigations of patients' lungs performed by Dr Wechalekar and her colleagues involve looking for the presence of many tiny blood clots in people with long Covid, or a larger clot known as a pulmonary embolism, for example.

The 1-million-pound scanner works by detecting gamma rays emitted by a radioactive substance that is injected into patients' bodies. But the scanner's sensitivity means less of this substance is needed than before: "We can reduce doses about 30%," says Dr Wechalekar. While CZT-based scanners are not new in general, large, whole-body scanners such as this one are a relatively recent innovation. CZT itself has been around for decades but it is notoriously difficult to manufacture. "It has taken a long time for it to develop into an industrial-scale production process," says Arnab Basu, founding chief executive of Kromek.

[...] The newly formed CZT, a semiconductor, can detect tiny photon particles in X-rays and gamma rays with incredible precision -- like a highly specialized version of the light-sensing, silicon-based image sensor in your smartphone camera. Whenever a high energy photon strikes the CZT, it mobilizes an electron and this electrical signal can be used to make an image. Earlier scanner technology used a two-step process, which was not as precise. "It's digital," says Dr Basu. "It's a single conversion step. It retains all the important information such as timing, the energy of the X-ray that is hitting the CZT detector -- you can create color, or spectroscopic images."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Substrate, a small U.S. startup, said on Tuesday that it had developed a chipmaking tool capable of competing with the most advanced lithography equipment made by Dutch firm ASML. Substrate's tool is the first step in the startup's ambitious plan to build a U.S.-based contract chip-manufacturing business that would compete with Taiwan's TSMC in making the most advanced AI chips, its CEO James Proud told Reuters in an interview. Proud wants to slash the cost of chipmaking by producing the tools needed much more cheaply than rivals. [...]

An engineering feat that has eluded even large companies, lithography needs extreme precision. ASML is the only company in the world that has been able to make at scale the complex tools that use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) to produce patterns on silicon wafer at a high rate of throughput. Substrate said that it has developed a version of lithography that uses X-ray light and is capable of printing features at resolutions that are comparable to the most advanced chipmaking tools made by ASML that cost more than $400 million apiece. The company said it has conducted demonstrations at U.S. National Laboratories and at its facilities in San Francisco. The company provided high resolution images that demonstrate the Substrate tool's capabilities. "This is an opportunity for the U.S. to recapture this market with a homegrown company," Oak Ridge National Laboratory director Stephen Streiffer, an expert on high-energy x-ray beams, said in an interview. "It's a nationally important effort and they know what they're doing."

Liquefied CO2 will be transported by ship to "the world's first carbon shipping port," reports the Washington Post — an island in the North Sea where it will be "buried in a layer of spongy rock a mile and a half beneath the seabed."

Norway's government is covering 80% of the $1 billion first phase, with another $714 million from three fossil fuel companies toward an ongoing expansion (with an additional $150 million E.U. subsidy). As Europe's top oil and gas producer, Norway is using its fossil fuel income to see if they can make "carbon dumping" work. The world's first carbon shipment arrived this summer, carrying 7,500 metric tons of liquefied CO2 from a Norwegian cement factory that otherwise would have gone into the atmosphere... If all goes as planned, the project's backers — Shell, Equinor and TotalEnergies, along with Norway — say their facility could pump 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide underground each year, or about a tenth of Norway's annual emissions...

[At the Heidelberg Materials cement factory in Brevik, Norway], when hot CO2-laden air comes rushing out of the cement kilns, the plant uses seawater from the neighboring fjord to cool it down. The cool air goes into a chamber where it gets sprayed with amine, a chemical that latches onto CO2 at low temperatures. The amine mist settles to the bottom, dragging carbon dioxide down with it. The rest of the air floats out of the smokestack with about 85 percent less CO2 in it, according to project manager Anders Pettersen. Later, Heidelberg Materials uses waste heat from the kilns to break the chemical bonds, so that the amine releases the carbon dioxide. The pure CO2 then goes into a compressor that resembles a giant steel heart, where it gets denser and colder until it finally becomes liquid. That liquid CO2 remains in storage tanks until a ship comes to carry it away. At best, operators expect this system to capture half the plant's CO2 emissions: 400,000 metric tons per year, or the equivalent of about 93,000 cars on the road...

[T]hree other companies are lined up to follow: Ørsted, which will send CO2 from two bioenergy plants in Denmark; Yara, which will send carbon from a Dutch fertilizer factory; and Stockholm Exergi, which will capture carbon from a Swedish bioenergy plant that burns wood waste. All of these projects have gotten significant subsidies from national governments and the European Union — essentially de-risking the experiment for the companies. Experts say the costs and headaches of installing and running carbon-capture equipment may start to make more financial sense as European carbon rules get stricter and the cost of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide goes up. Still, they say, it's hard to imagine many companies deciding to invest in carbon capture without serious subsidies...

The first shipments are being transported by Northern Pioneer, the world's biggest carbon dioxide tanker ship, built specifically for this project. The 430-foot ship can hold 7,500 metric tons of CO2 in tanks below deck. Those tanks keep it in a liquid state by cooling it to minus-15 degrees Fahrenheit and squeezing it with the same pressure the outside of a submarine would feel 500 feet below the waves. While that may sound extreme, consider that the liquid natural gas the ship uses for fuel has to be stored at minus-260 degrees. "CO2 isn't difficult to make it into a liquid," said Sally Benson, professor of energy science and engineering at Stanford University. Northern Pioneer is designed to emit about a third less carbon dioxide than a regular ship — key for a project that aims to eliminate carbon emissions. The ship burns natural gas, which emits less CO2 than marine diesel produces (though gas extraction is associated with methane leaks). The vessel uses a rotor sail to capture wind power. And it blows a constant stream of air bubbles to reduce friction as the hull cuts through the water, allowing it to burn less fuel. For every 100 tons of CO2 that Northern Lights pumps underground, it expects to emit three tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, mainly by burning fuel for shipping.
Eventually the carbon flows into a pipeline "that plunges through the North Sea and into the rocky layers below it — an engineering feat that's a bit like drilling for oil in reverse..." according to the article.

"Over the centuries, it should chemically react with the rock, eventually being locked away in minerals."

In Iceland, "a volcanic system has awoken after an 800-year slumber," according to a multimedia CNN Special Report. "But in another part of Iceland, scientists and engineers are hoping to harness magma's immense power to solve the planet's biggest problem..."

It all started in 2009 when Bjarni Pálsson, an engineer with Iceland's national power company, accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. "Armed with new technology and know-how, he is going back in..." The ambition of the geothermal experts and volcanologists that comprise the Krafla Magma Testbed is to convert the immense heat and pressure into a new "limitless" form of supercharged geothermal energy — a tantalizing prospect as the world struggles to end its relationship with planet-heating fossil fuels. "This has never been done before," said Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson, director of the Geothermal Research Cluster, which developed the project....

If all goes to plan, the first borehole will be completed in 2027 and will mark the first time anyone has ever implanted sensors directly into a magma chamber... If the first drilling experiment succeeds, the team will move onto the second borehole, due to be completed in 2029 — and this could be the global gamechanger. It's here the team will attempt to harness the intense heat of magma to produce a new kind of extreme geothermal energy, many times more powerful than conventional...

If they succeed, the implications could reverberate around the world, Ingólfsson said. There are an estimated 800 million people living within roughly 60 miles of an active volcano.
The report includes a map showing volcano sites around the earth where similar drilling could theoretically unleash the same intense magma-powered extreme geothermal energy.

Iceland's plan is to drill down 1.2 miles — about 2 kilometers — into a magma chamber that's around 1,800 Fahrenheit (nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius). The engineering feat "won't be easy," the article acknowledges. "But as humans heat the planet at record speed with fossil fuel pollution, there is increasing pressure to perform moonshot feats of engineering to save us from ourselves."

The Washington Post interviewed Lebanese officials, people close to Hezbollah, and Israeli, Arab and U.S. security officials and politicians about a years-long plan (originated at Mossad headquarters) that ultimately killed or maimed "as many as 3,000 Hezbollah officers and members — most of them rear-echelon figures... along with an unknown number of civilians... when Israel's Mossad intelligence service triggered the devices remotely on September 17." In the initial sales pitch to Hezbollah two years ago, the new line of Apollo pagers seemed precisely suited to the needs of a militia group with a sprawling network of fighters and a hard-earned reputation for paranoia... Best of all, there was no risk that the pagers could ever be tracked by Israel's intelligence services. Hezbollah's leaders were so impressed they bought 5,000 of them and began handing them out to mid-level fighters and support personnel in February. None of the users suspected they were wearing an ingeniously crafted Israeli bomb...

Israeli officials had watched with increasing anxiety as the Lebanese group added new weapons to an arsenal already capable of striking Israeli cities with tens of thousands of precision-guided missiles. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service responsible for combating foreign threats to the Jewish state, had worked for years to penetrate the group with electronic monitoring and human informants. Over time, Hezbollah leaders learned to worry about the group's vulnerability to Israeli surveillance and hacking, fearing that even ordinary cellphones could be turned into Israeli-controlled eavesdropping and tracking devices. Thus was born the idea of creating a kind of communications Trojan horse, the officials said. Hezbollah was looking for hack-proof electronic networks for relaying messages, and Mossad came up with a pair of ruses that would lead the militia group to purchase devices that seemed perfect for the job — equipment that Mossad designed and had assembled in Israel.

The first part of the plan, booby-trapped walkie-talkies, began being inserted into Lebanon by Mossad nearly a decade ago, in 2015. The mobile two-way radios contained oversized battery packs, a hidden explosive and a transmission system that gave Israel complete access to Hezbollah communications. For nine years, the Israelis contented themselves with eavesdropping on Hezbollah, the officials said, while reserving the option to turn the walkie-talkies into bombs in a future crisis. But then came a new opportunity and a glitzy new product: a small pager equipped with a powerful explosive. In an irony that would not become clear for many months, Hezbollah would end up indirectly paying the Israelis for the tiny bombs that would kill or wound many of its operatives.

Because Hezbollah leaders were alert to possible sabotage, the pagers could not originate in Israel, the United States or any other Israeli ally. So, in 2023, the group began receiving solicitations for the bulk purchase of Taiwanese-branded Apollo pagers, a well-recognized trademark and product line with a worldwide distribution and no discernible links to Israeli or Jewish interests. The Taiwanese company had no knowledge of the plan, officials said... The marketing official had no knowledge of the operation and was unaware that the pagers were physically assembled in Israel under Mossad oversight, officials said... In a feat of engineering, the bomb component was so carefully hidden as to be virtually undetectable, even if the device was taken apart, the officials said. Israeli officials believe that Hezbollah did disassemble some of the pagers and may have even X-rayed them.
"Thousands of Apollo-branded pagers rang or vibrated at once, all across Lebanon and Syria," according to the article, with a short sentence in Arabic that said "You received an encrypted message." The two-button de-encryption procedure "ensured most users would be holding the pager with both hands when it detonated," according to the article, although "Less than a minute later, thousands of other pagers exploded by remote command, regardless of whether the user ever touched his device. The following day, on September 18, hundreds of walkie-talkies blew up in the same way, killing and maiming users and bystanders..."

"As Hezbollah reeled, Israel struck again, pounding the group's headquarters, arsenals and logistic centers with 2,000-pound bombs," the article concludes. And the strike "convinced the country's political leaders that Hezbollah could be put on the ropes, susceptible to a systematic dismantling using airstrikes and, eventually a ground invasion..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Imagine exploring the intricate world within a single cubic millimeter of human brain tissue. It might seem insignificant, but within that tiny space lies a universe of complexity -- 57,000 individual cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and a staggering 150 million synapses, the junctions where neurons communicate. All this information translates to a mind-boggling 1,400 terabytes of data. That's the kind of groundbreaking achievement researchers from Harvard and Google have just accomplished.

Leading the charge at Harvard is Professor Jeff Lichtman, a renowned expert in brain structure. Partnering with Google AI, Lichtman's team has co-created the most detailed 3D reconstruction of a human brain fragment to date. This intricate map, published in Science, offers an unprecedented view of the human temporal cortex, the region responsible for memory and other higher functions. Envision a piece of brain tissue roughly half the size of a rice grain but magnified to reveal every cell and its web of neural connections in vivid detail. This remarkable feat is the culmination of nearly a decade of collaboration between Harvard and Google. Lichtman's expertise in electron microscopy imaging is combined with Google's cutting-edge AI algorithms. [...]

The newly published map in Science reveals previously unseen details of brain structure. One such discovery is a rare but powerful set of axons, each connected by up to 50 synapses, potentially influencing a significant number of neighboring neurons. The team also encountered unexpected structures, like a small number of axons forming intricate whorls. Since the sample came from a patient with epilepsy, it's unclear if these formations are specific to the condition or simply uncommon occurrences.

quonset writes: Just over two weeks ago, NASA figured out why its Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped sending useful data. They suspected corrupted memory in its flight data system (FDS) was the culprit. Today, for the first time since November, Voyager 1 is sending useful data about its health and the status of its onboard systems back to NASA. How did NASA accomplish this feat of long distance repair? They broke up the code into smaller pieces and redistributed them throughout the memory.

From NASA: "... So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well. The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft's engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 1/2 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 1/2 hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft. During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.

Texas-based Intuitive Machines' inaugural moon mission began early Thursday morning, heading toward what could be the first U.S. lunar landing in more than 50 years. From a report: Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander launched from Florida on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, beginning the IM-1 mission. "It is a profoundly humbling moment for all of us at Intuitive Machines. The opportunity to return the United States to the moon for the first time since 1972 is a feat of engineering that demands a hunger to explore," Intuitive Machines vice president of space systems Trent Martin said during a press conference.

The IM-1 lander, named "Odysseus" after the mythological Greek hero, is carrying 12 government and commercial payloads -- six of which are for NASA under an $118 million contract. NASA leadership emphasized before the launch that "IM-1 is an Intuitive Machines' mission, it's not a NASA mission." But it marks the second mission under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to deliver science projects and cargo to the moon with increasing regularity in support of the agency's Artemis crew program. The agency views CLPS missions as "a learning experience," NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration in the science mission directorate, Joel Kearns, told press before the launch.
UPDATE: See their first images transmitted from space....

Kylie Robison writes via Fortune: Beginning on Monday, Slack employees will be expected to set aside their regular work duties and to instead plug away at various modules on Salesforce's Trailhead online learning platform, Fortune has learned. The goal is for Slack's employees to reach Trailhead's Ranger level, a feat that requires roughly 40 hours on the learning platform, whose modules include topics like "Learn about the Fourth Industrial Revolution" and "Healthy Eating." A large percent of Slack's roughly 3,000 staff have neglected to hit the target, according to sources inside the company. And since Salesforce provides Trailhead to other businesses as a way to "upskill" employees, some speculate that the slackers at Slack make for bad optics.

In a message to employees in mid-September, Slack CEO Lidiane Jones wrote that the one week shutdown, dubbed "Ranger Week," is intended to give everyone "dedicated time to make a lot of progress towards the goal." Jones wrote in her message that the product development engineering (PDE), customer experience (CE), Biz Ops, and communication departments are expected to participate in Ranger Week. "It's important that we all reach Ranger status this year, and I want to ensure that everyone has focus time to upskill on Trailhead," Jones wrote in the message to staff. "I know this will disrupt and slow V2MOM progress for many of us -- we are making this a priority now so we can quickly get back to work on our roadmaps," she said, referring to the company's annual forward-looking strategy planning document which stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures. [...]

"We really are canceling all meetings next week to facilitate this heads-down time, even 1:1s," Slack's chief of staff to the CTO wrote to employees on Wednesday. "We don't know yet what will happen to people who haven't hit Ranger by Jan. 31. At a minimum, it will make Slack look bad compared to the other clouds. Please do use the time next week to make as much progress as you can!" [...] Still, the work stoppage is somewhat porous. Slack's CTO noted that "deploys, on-call rotations, and interviews" will still happen as normal, and while no executive has used the word "mandatory," it's considered strongly encouraged. According to Insider, some workers at Slack are "gaming" the platform to speed through the sessions.

"Kairan Quazi will probably need someone to drive him to work at SpaceX," writes the Los Angeles Times — because "He's only 14." The teen is scheduled to graduate this month from the Santa Clara University School of Engineering before starting a job as a software engineer at the satellite communications and spacecraft manufacturer... The soft-spoken teen said working with Starlink — the satellite internet team at SpaceX — will allow him to be part of something bigger than himself. That is no small feat for someone who has accomplished so much at such a young age...

The youngster jumped from third grade to a community college, with a workload that he felt made sense. "I felt like I was learning at the level that I was meant to learn," said Kairan, who later transferred to Santa Clara University... Kairan's family told BrainGain Magazine that when he was 9, IQ tests showed that his intelligence was in the 99.9th percentile of the general population. Asked if he's a genius, he recalled his parents telling him, "Genius is an action â it requires solving big problems that have a human impact." Once accepted to the engineering school at Santa Clara University as a transfer student, Kairan felt that he had found his freedom to pursue a career path that allowed him to solve those big problems.

While in college, Kairan and his mother made a list of places where he could apply for an internship. Only one company responded. Lama Nachman, director of the Intelligent Systems Research Lab at Intel, took a meeting with 10-year-old Kairan, who expected it to be brief and thought she would give him the customary "try again in a few years," he said. She accepted him. "In a sea of so many 'no's' by Silicon Valley's most vaunted companies, that ONE leader saying yes ... one door opening ... changed everything," Kairan wrote on his LinkedIn page...

Asked what he plans to wear on his first day, Kairan joked in an email that he plans "to show up in head to toe SpaceX merch. I'll be a walking commercial! Joking aside, I'll probably wear jeans and a t-shirt so I can be taken seriously as an engineer."

"A teenage girl's incurable cancer has been cleared from her body," reports the BBC, "in the first use of a revolutionary new type of medicine...." Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital used "base editing" to perform a feat of biological engineering to build her a new living drug. Six months later the cancer is undetectable, but Alyssa is still being monitored in case it comes back.

Alyssa, who is 13 and from Leicester, was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in May last year.... Her cancer was aggressive. Chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, were unable to rid it from her body.... The team at Great Ormond Street used a technology called base editing, which was invented only six years ago [which] allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions. The large team of doctors and scientists used this tool to engineer a new type of T-cell that was capable of hunting down and killing Alyssa's cancerous T-cells....

After a month, Alyssa was in remission and was given a second bone-marrow transplant to regrow her immune system.... Alyssa is just the first of 10 people to be given the drug as part of a clinical trial.
Her mother said that a year ago she'd been dreading Christmas, "thinking this is our last with her". But it wasn't.

And the BBC adds that applying the technology to cancer "only scratches the surface of what base editing could achieve.... There are already trials of base editing under way in sickle-cell disease, as well as high cholesterol that runs in families and the blood disorder beta-thalassemia."

Lotus-1-2-3, an ancient spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (and later IBM), has been ported to a new operating system. drewsup writes: As reported by The Register, a Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast called Tavis Ormandy (who is also a bug-hunter for Google Project Zero), managed to successfully port the program onto Linux, which seems to be quite the feat of reverse engineering. It's important to stress that this isn't an emulated program, but rather the original 1990 Lotus 1-2 -- for x86 Unix running natively on modern x86 Linux.

"Mirror, mirror...is deployed," NASA tweeted Saturday, confirming that the James Webb telescope "has taken on its final form. For the next ~6 months, the space telescope will cool down, calibrate its instruments, and prepare to #UnfoldTheUniverse."

With a diameter of 21.3 feet, the telescope's mirror is the largest mirror ever launched into space — a joint effort with the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency. "Good news keep coming," the ESA tweeted yesterday. " Mike Menzel, NASA Webb Mission Systems Engineer said yesterday in press brief that Webb might have 'quite a bit of fuel margin... Roughly speaking, it's around 20 years of propellant', adding that's still to be determined."

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco writes that "For years naysayers have confidently declared that the numerous automated operations necessary to fully deploy the James Webb Space Telescope were going to guarantee its failure. Today they've been proven wrong."

From NASA.gov: "Today, NASA achieved another engineering milestone decades in the making. While the journey is not complete, I join the Webb team in breathing a little easier and imagining the future breakthroughs bound to inspire the world," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "The James Webb Space Telescope is an unprecedented mission that is on the precipice of seeing the light from the first galaxies and discovering the mysteries of our universe. Each feat already achieved and future accomplishment is a testament to the thousands of innovators who poured their life's passion into this mission...."

The world's largest and most complex space science telescope will now begin moving its 18 primary mirror segments to align the telescope optics. The ground team will command 126 actuators on the backsides of the segments to flex each mirror — an alignment that will take months to complete. Then the team will calibrate the science instruments prior to delivering Webb's first images this summer.

"I am so proud of the team — spanning continents and decades — that delivered this first-of-its kind achievement," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate in NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Webb's successful deployment exemplifies the best of what NASA has to offer: the willingness to attempt bold and challenging things in the name of discoveries still unknown."

Soon, Webb will also undergo a third mid-course correction burn — one of three planned to place the telescope precisely in orbit around the second Lagrange point, commonly known as L2, nearly 1 million miles from Earth. This is Webb's final orbital position, where its sunshield will protect it from light from the Sun, Earth, and Moon that could interfere with observations of infrared light. Webb is designed to peer back over 13.5 billion years to capture infrared light from celestial objects, with much higher resolution than ever before, and to study our own solar system as well as distant worlds.

"The successful completion of all of the Webb Space Telescope's deployments is historic," said Gregory L. Robinson, Webb program director at NASA Headquarters. "This is the first time a NASA-led mission has ever attempted to complete a complex sequence to unfold an observatory in space — a remarkable feat for our team, NASA, and the world."
Saturday the Canadian Space Agency tweeted "Wow.... Congratulations to everyone involved. We can't wait to see what the telescope has in store for the international astronomy community!"

Axios reports: IBM has created a quantum processor able to process information so complex the work can't be done or simulated on a traditional computer, CEO Arvind Krishna told "Axios on HBO" ahead of a planned announcement.

Why it matters: Quantum computing could help address problems that are too challenging for even today's most powerful supercomputers, such as figuring out how to make better batteries or sequester carbon emissions.

Driving the news: IBM says its new Eagle processor can handle 127 qubits, a measure of quantum computing power. In topping 100 qubits, IBM says it has reached a milestone that allows quantum to surpass the power of a traditional computer. "It is impossible to simulate it on something else, which implies it's more powerful than anything else," Krishna told "Axios on HBO...."

Krishna says the quantum computing push is one part of his approach to return the company to growth.
"Some people think of it as science fiction," Krishna says of quantum computing in a preview clip from the Axios interview. "I think of it now as a feat of engineering."

Scientists from Osaka University have manufactured the world's first 3D-printed Wagyu beef by using stem cells isolated from Japanese cattle, according to a press release. The product looks like a realistic steak piece containing muscle, fat, and blood vessels. Interesting Engineering reports: Because of its high marble content, Wagyu (Japanese cow) beef is one of the most sought-after and expensive meats in the world. Marbling, or sashi in Jaoan, refers to the visible layers of intramuscular fat that give the beef its rich flavors and distinctive texture, and because most cultured meats produced thus far resemble mince composed of simple muscle fibers rather than the complex structure of real beef steaks, 3D printing Wagyu is an extremely difficult feat.

The researchers used two types of stem cells, bovine satellite cells and adipose-derived stem cells, insulated from Wagyu cows, according to the paper published in the journal Nature Communications. Then, they incubated and coaxed the cells into becoming the various cell types required to generate individual fibers for muscle, fat, and blood vessels. These were piled into a 3D stack to resemble the marbling of Wagyu. Then, the researchers adapted a technique inspired by the one used to produce Japanese Kintaro candy, an old traditional sweet formed in a long pipe and cut into slices. The stacks were sliced perpendicularly to form lab-grown beef slices, which allowed a great degree of customization within the complex meat structure. This was how they were able to mimic the famous texture of Wagyu. According to the researchers, the synthetic meat "looks more like the real thing" and the process can be used to create other complex structures.

silverjacket writes: A feature article at The New Yorker: 'A typical computer chip is the size of a fingernail. Cerebras's is the size of a dinner plate. It is the largest computer chip in the world.' An excerpt from the story: Even competitors find this feat impressive. "It's all new science," Nigel Toon, the C.E.O. and co-founder of Graphcore, told me. "It's an incredible piece of engineering -- a tour de force." At the same time, another engineer I spoke with described it, somewhat defensively, as a science project -- bigness for bigness's sake. Companies have tried to build mega-chips in the past and failed; Cerebras's plan amounted to a bet that surmounting the engineering challenges would be possible, and worth it. "To be totally honest with you, for me, ignorance was an advantage," Vishra said. "I don't know that, if I'd understood how difficult it was going to be to do what they did, I would have had the guts to invest."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Coming on the heels of the Neuralink announcement earlier this month -- complete with video showing a monkey playing Pong with its mind, thanks to a wireless brain implant -- researchers with the BrainGate Consortium have successfully demonstrated a high-bandwidth wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) in two tetraplegic human subjects. The researchers described their work in a recent paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions in Biomedical Engineering. As for the latest Neuralink breakthrough, Ars Science Editor John Timmer wrote last week that most of the individual pieces of Neuralink's feat have been done before -- in some cases, a decade before (BrainGate is among those earlier pioneers). But the company has taken two important steps toward its realization of a commercial BCI: miniaturizing the device and getting it to communicate wirelessly, which is harder than it sounds.

According to [John Simeral of Brown University, a member of the BrainGate consortium and lead author of the new paper], the BrainGate wireless system makes the opposite tradeoff -- higher bandwidth and fidelity -- because it wants all the finer details of the data for its ongoing research. In that regard, it complements the Utrecht and Neuralink systems in the BCI space. The new BrainGate system is based on the so-called Brown Wireless Device (BWD) designed by Arto Nurmikko, and it replaces the cables with a small transmitter that weighs about 1.5 ounces. The transmitter sits atop the user's head and connects wirelessly to an implant electrode array inside the motor cortex.

There were two participants in the clinical trial -- a 35-year-old man and a 65-year-old man -- both of whom were paralyzed by spinal cord injuries. They were able to continuously use the BCI for a full 24 hours, even as they slept, yielding continuous data over that time period. (The medical-grade battery lasts for 36 hours.) "We can learn more about the neural signals that way because we can record over long periods of time," said Simeral. "And we can also begin to learn a little bit about how people actually will use the system, given the freedom to do so." His team was encouraged by the fact that one of its study participants often asked if they could leave the wireless transmitters on a little longer. He has a head tracker he can use as a fallback, but several nights a week, he would choose to use the wireless BrainGate system because he liked it. "Right now, we typically decode or interpret the spiking activity from networks of neurons," said Simeral. "There are other encoding mechanisms that have been studied in the brain that have to do with how the oscillations in the brain are related to these spiking signals. There's information in the different oscillation frequencies that might relate to, for example, sleep state, attention state, other phenomenon that we care about. Without a continuous recording, you've surrendered the ability to learn about any of those. Learning how this all happens in the human brain in the home as people are behaving and having different thoughts requires having a broadband system recording from the human brain."

"The ability to potentially have individuals with disability using these systems at home on demand, I think is a great step forward," said Simeral. "More broadly, going forward, having more players in the field, having more funding, is important. I see nothing but great things from all of these interactions. For our own work, we see things on the horizon that were impossible five years ago, when there was essentially nobody in the corporate world interested in this space. So I think it's a very promising time."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A small miracle happened at 3:31am ET on Monday morning. Ingenuity, a tiny NASA helicopter, became the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet, Mars. This engineering feat was done with Linux, open-source software, and a NASA-built program based on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) open-source F (pronounced F prime) framework. GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and his team and the JPL Ingenuity crew took a long hard look into the helicopter's code and found that "nearly 12,000 developers on GitHub contributed to Ingenuity's software via open source. And yet, much like the first image of a black hole, most of these developers are not even aware that they helped make the first Martian helicopter flight possible."

They'll know now. Friedman wrote: "Today, we want to make the invisible visible. So, we have worked with JPL to place a new Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge on the GitHub profile of every developer who contributed to the specific versions of any open-source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity." The developer list was created by JPL providing GitHub with a comprehensive list of every version of every open source project used by Ingenuity. GitHub could then identify all the contributors who made these projects and their dependencies. Some of those honored, such as Linux's creator Linus Torvalds, are famous developers. Many others labor in obscurity -- but now their work is being recognized. Timothy Canham, a JPL embedded flight software engineer, notes Ingenuity's program is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 running at 2.2GHz, which is "far faster than the Mars Perseverance's rover processors," according to ZDNet. The reason this older chip was used is because it meets NASA's High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) radiation standards.

Canham also says the flight control software on Ingenuity runs at 500Hz. The flight software "is used to control the flight hardware and read sensors 500 times per second in order to keep the helicopter stable." Canham added: "We literally ordered parts from SparkFun [Electronics]. This is commercial hardware, but we'll test it, and if it works well, we'll use it."

An anonymous reader shares a report: I'm fairly sure cars were supposed to be flying by now, but instead we've managed something else that would have felt like science fiction a decade ago: playing Xbox games on your fridge. That's right, someone has managed to get Microsoft's xCloud service running on a Samsung smart fridge. Instagram user Richard Mallard has managed this feat of modern engineering, sideloading the Android version of the Xbox Game Pass app onto his fridge. The app runs in portrait mode on Samsung's smart fridge, but games appear at the correct aspect ratio alongside cheese, beers, and whatever other essentials you store in a fridge.

A reader quotes Inverse: In an incredible feat of remote engineering, NASA has fixed one of the most intrepid explorers in human history. Voyager 2, currently some 11.5 billion miles from Earth, is back online and resuming its mission to collect scientific data on the solar system and the interstellar space beyond.

On Wednesday, February 5 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern, NASA's Voyager Twitter account gave out the good news: Voyager 2 is not only stable, but is back at its critical science mission.

"My twin is back to taking science data, and the team at @NASAJPL is evaluating the health of the instruments after their brief shutoff," the account tweeted... In a statement, NASA confirmed that Voyager 2 is back in business. "Mission operators report that Voyager 2 continues to be stable and that communications between the Earth and the spacecraft are good...."

The fix is no mean feat: It takes 17 hours one-way to communicate with Voyager 2 from Earth, which is the furthest away manmade object in space. That means a single information relay takes 34 hours.