Lifeboat Foundation

Using new palm-sized devices, RIKEN researchers may have finally harnessed the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum to effectively ‘X-ray’ things without using harmful ionizing radiation.

Countless technologies—from smartphones and TVs to infrared instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) is an orbiting infrared observatory that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers longer wavelengths of light, with greatly improved sensitivity, allowing it to see inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today as well as looking further back in time to observe the first galaxies that formed in the early universe.

As Meta sets its sight on introducing its virtual reality headsets to the Chinese market, Mark Zuckerberg’s contentious remarks about Beijing in the past may pose a major obstacle to his China dream. According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, Meta is preparing to re-enter China by selling the Oculus Quest VR headset in China. If Tesla can sell cars and Apple can sell phones in China, why isn’t Meta present there? Zuckerberg asked in a recent internal meeting.

But some observers are quick to point out that Zuckerberg has a history of criticizing the Chinese government, a stance that will likely be amplified in the current climate of heightened tensions between the U.S. and China.… More.

Apple’s next version of the AirPods Pro equipped with USB-C will ship this fall, a report claims, and it may even help users discover hearing problems too.

Apple is rumored to be working on an updated version of the AirPods Pro that could arrive within months. That model is already believed to be using USB-C for its wireless charging case instead of Lightning, but it is thought that it could finally land this fall.

According to Mark Gurman’s “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, the AirPods Pro 2 is set to launch in the fall at the same time as the iPhone 15.

One tip that I always give to family members, friends, and passersby when asked, “How can I make my phone faster?” is straightforward yet typically hidden, and that’s adjusting the animation speed. The method of doing so is quick, simple, and absolutely free. And as a bonus, you’ll feel like the “guy behind the computer” from every action movie. Just follow the steps below.

A few taps and a swipe are all it takes to make your Android phone feel like new again.

Continue reading “Change this Android setting to instantly give your phone twice the speed” »

Quantum computing could revolutionize our world. For specific and crucial tasks, it promises to be exponentially faster than the zero-or-one binary technology that underlies today’s machines, from supercomputers in laboratories to smartphones in our pockets. But developing quantum computers hinges on building a stable network of qubits—or quantum bits—to store information, access it and perform computations.

Yet the qubit platforms unveiled to date have a common problem: They tend to be delicate and vulnerable to outside disturbances. Even a stray photon can cause trouble. Developing fault-tolerant qubits—which would be immune to external perturbations—could be the ultimate solution to this challenge.

A team led by scientists and engineers at the University of Washington has announced a significant advancement in this quest. In a pair of papers published June 14 in Nature and June 22 in Science, the researchers report that in experiments with flakes of semiconductor materials—each only a single layer of atoms thick—they detected signatures of “fractional quantum anomalous Hall” (FQAH) states.

Satellite-to-phone connectivity provider Lynk has made its debut in Palau, where the nation’s hundreds of islands make traditional cell coverage difficult to achieve. The company’s “cell towers in space” now cover the entire country — intermittently, but that’s a lot better than nothing, and service will improve as more satellites are added to the constellation.

Lynk is among the first of a new wave of direct satellite-to-phone providers, replacing the bulky, dedicated satphones of yore by connecting ordinary mobile devices to low Earth orbit. It’s difficult to engineer for many reasons, as you can imagine.

Apple’s SOS has the most high-profile use case, with the distinguishing characteristic of having to actually point your phone at an unseen satellite, but Lynk’s service requires no special behavior by the user — it just works like a roving cell tower, connecting when it passes overhead.

I’ve covered quite a few thermal cameras over the years, some standalone units and others that are built into smartphones. For the average user, they offer a performance and sensitivity that’s more than adequate.

But sometimes you need something that goes beyond more than adequate.

This is where the Xinfrared T2S Plus comes into play.

Continue reading “This thermal camera is so sensitive it can see you breathe” »

When I’m asked to check a box to confirm I’m not a robot, I don’t give it a second thought—of course I’m not a robot. On the other hand, when my email client suggests a word or phrase to complete my sentence, or when my phone guesses the next word I’m about to text, I start to doubt myself. Is that what I meant to say? Would it have occurred to me if the application hadn’t suggested it? Am I part robot? These large language models have been trained on massive amounts of “natural” human language. Does this make the robots part human?

AI chatbots are new, but public debates over language change are not. As a linguistic anthropologist, I find human reactions to ChatGPT the most interesting thing about it. Looking carefully at such reactions reveals the beliefs about language underlying people’s ambivalent, uneasy, still-evolving relationship with AI interlocutors.

Continue reading “The Boundary Between Human Language and ChatGPT Is Fuzzier Than You Think” »

The A17 Bionic chip initially used in the iPhone 15 Pro and ‌iPhone 15 Pro‌ Max later this year will fundamentally differ from a version of the same chip set to be manufactured in 2024, a new rumor claims.

The A17 Bionic is expected to be Apple’s first chip manufactured with a 3nm fabrication process, resulting in major performance and efficiency improvements over the 5nm technique used for the A14, A15, and A16 chips. The initial version of the A17 Bionic chip will reportedly be manufactured using TSMC’s N3B process, but Apple is planning to switch the A17 over to N3E sometime next year. The move is said to be a cost-cutting measure that could come at the expense of reduced efficiency.