Imagine you’ve just arrived in another country, you don’t speak the language, and you stumble upon a construction zone. The air is thick with dust. You’re tired. You still stink like airplane. You try to ignore the jackhammers to decipher what the signs say: Do you need to cross the street, or walk up another block, or turn around?
On Wednesday, Neuralink introduced the first human subject to receive the company’s brain implant, a 29-year-old man who has been paralyzed from the shoulders down for eight years after a diving accident.
Wi-Fi 7 devices can now be certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The new standard can provide higher throughput, linked wireless bands for better stability, and reduced latency. It also can make people who skipped over Wi-Fi 6E feel like they made the smart move.
Wait for new technology, or buy now? No matter how good a gadget is, there will almost certainly be something better arriving soon. Manufacturers work out the kinks and prices fall. Figuring out which new technologies are worth the early adopter tax, and which to pass on until they improve, is a real challenge.
Last week, Meta announced an AI-powered audio compression method called "EnCodec" that can reportedly compress audio 10 times smaller than the MP3 format at 64kbps with no loss in quality. Meta says this technique could dramatically improve the sound quality of speech on low-bandwidth connections, such as phone calls in areas with spotty service. The technique also works for music.
Last week, Swiss software engineer Matthias Bühlmann discovered that the popular image synthesis model Stable Diffusion could compress existing bitmapped images with fewer visual artifacts than JPEG or WebP at high compression ratios, though there are significant caveats.
For all the "wireless charging" tech available, there are still a lot of power cables slithering throughout homes. Even wireless charging stations require a cord. That's what makes the impending arrival of over-the-air wireless charging, which sends power without a cable or pad, exciting. Thus far, the technology has been limited to commercial uses in the US, but Belkin is expected to release a true wireless charging product for individuals this year.
In November 2020, Microsoft unveiled Pluton, a security processor that the company designed to thwart some of the most sophisticated types of hack attacks. On Tuesday, AMD said it would integrate the chip into its upcoming Ryzen CPUs for use in Lenovo's ThinkPad Z Series of laptops.
Samsung is using artificial intelligence to automate the insanely complex and subtle process of designing cutting-edge computer chips.
The South Korean giant is one of the first chipmakers to use AI to create its chips. Samsung is using AI features in new software from Synopsys, a leading chip design software firm used by many companies. “What you’re seeing here is the first of a real commercial processor design with AI,” says Aart de Geus, the chairman and co-CEO of Synopsys.
Like Dogecoin devotees, the mayor of Reno, and the leaders of El Salvador, Aldo Baoicchi is convinced cryptocurrency is the future. The CEO and founder of Canadian scooter maker Daymak believes this so strongly that when he unveiled the company’s first autonomous car last month, the 2023 Spiritus, he touted a bonus feature: the ability to mine cryptocurrency when the car is parked. Baiocchi told WIRED the company is still developing software for this purpose, but designers want cryptomining for car owners to be as simple as pressing a button.
