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الخميس، 26 مايو 2022

NEWS TECHNOLOGIE

Back in the April AMD made news by saying it was “gonna try to make a big splash with overclocking” with its upcoming Zen 4 CPUs. That would be somewhat of a departure from Zen 3, as it’s not exactly known for its overclocking headroom. Now that Computex has come and gone, we’ve been able to see Zen 4 in action.Despite AMD’s statements, it’s not clear how much the overclocking situation has changed. While Zen 4 clearly allows for overclocking, Zen 3 has never impressed in this regard. Zen 4 may not, either.

As a refresher, at Computex AMD showed a prototype 16C/32T Ryzen 7000-series “Raphael” CPU running Ghostwire: Tokyo. A CPU clock speed monitor was running in the corner, so we could see its clock speeds. Although clocks fluctuated in the low 5GHz range during the demo, the chip did hit a notable peak of 5.5GHz. Dr. Su said this is normal, as it will hit variable clocks depending on the workload. We don’t know what the actual boost clock of the chip is, but it’s clearly higher than the 5950X’s 4.9GHz.

In an interview with PCWorld, AMD’s Robert Hallock confirmed nothing fancy was required to hit those clocks. He said they were using a standard 280mm AIO cooler you can buy online. This is a not-so-subtle reference to the time Intel was caught using a chiller to cool a 28-core desktop Xeon chip. Regardless, he said the CPU wasn’t overclocked, and that “most of the threads” were running at 5.5 GHz. This begs the question: if it can hit 5.5GHz on its own, how high can it go with an overclock?

There’s one additional thing to point out. AMD released info on its upcoming AM5 chipsets (above) and you’ll note it doesn’t list overclocking as a feature offered on B650 boards. AMD has clarified that, saying it will indeed allow overclocking. This means every motherboard in the stack will allow it, so it’s open season when AM5/Zen 4 launch this fall.

But what kind of results can we expect? Color us skeptical, but we’re still not expecting much. For example, the 5.5GHz AMD showed off is the current high water mark for 16 core CPUs. It’s the current single core boost clock of Intel’s binned Core i9-12900KS, after all. If AMD is allowing its 7000-series CPU to get to 5.5GHz on its own, right out of the box, it seems like going even further might be a fool’s errand. As we’ve stated before, if AMD could get it to run at 6GHz without fancy cooling, why limit it to 5.5GHz? Even if it’s rated for a single-core boost of 5.5GHz, and you get it up to 5.7GHz, that’s still less than a four percent single-core overclock.

Over the last five years, AMD has chosen to leave relatively little on the table for manual overclockers, preferring instead to ship CPUs that run quite close to their maximum possible frequencies out of the box. While it may still be possible to manually overclock an AMD Ryzen for performance gain, we’ve had far more luck cranking up clocks on high core count CPUs like the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, where all-core overclocks of 300-500MHz are possible given sufficient cooling. In this kind of scenario, OCing can still pay dividends over and above stock clock — but Threadripper is a workstation platform and a workstation platform limited to artificially lower clocks at that.

For Zen 4 AMD has cranked up the power requirements by a significant amount, which will also allow it to raise clocks. It’s gone from 105W TDP on the 5950X to 170W TDP, with a maximum socket power of 230W. That’s a huge boost, and will give AMD some added flexibility. Still, it seems like the song will likely remain the same. The lion’s share of the benefits could ultimately come down to overclocking, but not on core clock speeds. Instead it’ll be left to overclocking memory and Infinity Fabric, just as it was on Zen 3. Even Robert Hallock himself has noted that’s where most of the gains have historically come from on AMD’s CPUs. This is seemingly confirmed by reports that AMD is focusing heavily on memory overclocking with Zen 4, via its new EXPO technology.

None of this is meant to be a slight to AMD, because as we’ve said before the world has changed when it comes to overclocking. For both AMD and Intel, the days where they could leave 20-30 percent of a CPU’s clock improvement (or more) on the cutting room floor are long gone. As transistor density increases and node sizes decrease, it’s becoming more difficult to achieve higher clock speeds while keeping thermals in-check. This has been the pattern for some time now, and there’s no reason to think that will suddenly change with Zen 4. Intel and AMD may make some limited carve-outs for overclockers, but we expect both companies to reserve the vast majority of their performance improvements for themselves.

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NEWS TECHNOLOGIE

(Photo: Andy Holmes/Unsplash) Sometimes experiments don’t go as planned. Case in point: when some scientists set out on making hamsters more “peaceful” via gene editing, they accidentally made the fuzzy little rodents more aggressive instead.

Neuroscientists at Georgia State University (GSU) wanted to see how vasopressin, a mammalian hormone, influenced social behavior. They used a relatively novel technology called CRISPR-Cas9—which allows scientists to edit organisms’ genomes—to suppress a vasopressin receptor in Syrian hamsters. The expectation was that preventing the hamsters’ bodies from utilizing vasopressin would result in calmer, more peaceful behavior—but the result was anything but.

Instead, cutting vasopressin out of the hamsters’ system resulted in “high levels of aggression,” particularly toward hamsters of the same sex. Though “normal” male hamsters are notoriously more aggressive than female ones, the startling change occurred in both sexes.

(Photo: Henri Tomic/Wikimedia Commons)

Previous studies have suggested that more—not less—vasopressin correlates with higher levels of cooperability. In 2016, researchers at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena found that administration of vasopressin in humans resulted in an increased tendency to “engage in mutually beneficial cooperation.” This aligns with even earlier research, which showed that vasopressin may be responsible for regulating social behaviors related to sexual expression and aggression.

“This suggests a startling conclusion,” said H. Elliott Albers, a neuroscience professor and the leader of the study, in a GSU statement. “Even though we know that vasopressin increases social behaviors by acting within a number of brain regions, it is possible that the more global effects of the Avpr1a receptor are inhibitory. We don’t understand this system as well as we thought we did.”

Syrian hamsters are ideal test subjects for a number of research purposes, including those targeting social behavior, cancer, and even COVID-19. “Their stress response is more like that of humans than other rodents. They release the stress hormone cortisol, just as humans do. They also get many of the cancers that humans get,” said Professor Kim Huhman, Associate Director of the Neuroscience Institute at GSU. “Their susceptibility to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 makes them the rodent species of choice because they are vulnerable to it just as we are.”

GSU’s Neuroscience Institute and similar establishments intend to continue investigating the effects of suppressed or increased vasopressin in mammals. As the related body of research grows, so might treatments for depression and other mental illnesses.

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NEWS TECHNOLOGIE

Decades ago, Microsoft used its might to turn Internet Explorer into the de facto standard for web browsing. That got the company into hot water with regulators, but it was all for naught. Internet Explorer was on the decline for a long time before Microsoft moved to Edge. Now, it’s the end of the line for IE. Microsoft is following through with its plans to retire IE as announced last year, and the big day is just three weeks away on June 15th.

As recently as the early 2000s, Microsoft’s browser held almost the entire market. Then came the likes of Firefox and Opera, which began eating into Microsoft’s lead. The tipping point came in 2009 at a time when people began expecting more from their desktop browsers, but Microsoft was hesitant to add modern features to IE. That’s the year Google released Chrome, which caused a precipitous drop in IE usage. Google was neck and neck with IE by mid-2012, and then it left Microsoft’s browser (and everyone else) in the dust.

Microsoft began updating Internet Explorer more regularly, but the damage was done. It moved to the Edge browser in 2015 with the release of Windows 10, but even that didn’t reverse the company’s online fortunes. It recently scrapped the old Edge and moved to a version based on the same open source Chromium code as Google Chrome.

Microsoft has been moving toward killing IE for several years, but its usage share is still around 0.38 percent, according to StatCounter. Edge, meanwhile, enjoys a four percent market share, and Chrome is around 64 percent. While IE’s user base is tiny, even a fraction of a percent of the entire internet-using population is still a lot of people. Microsoft is naturally urging these folks to upgrade to Edge in advance of June 15th, and it’s not taking “no” for an answer.

The upcoming deadline isn’t just the end of support — Microsoft hasn’t updated Internet Explorer since 2020. This is when Microsoft will begin actively disabling Internet Explorer on Windows 10 systems. These computers will all have Edge pre-installed, so users will have another browser ready to go. In the days and weeks after June 15th, users who try to load Internet Explorer will find themselves redirected to Edge. Microsoft has recently clarified that it may also roll out a system update that streamlines the process.

Anyone still on an older (and unsupported) version of Windows with Internet Explorer could technically continue using it, but this setup is an inadvisable security nightmare. It’s time for IE stragglers to get with the times, whether they want to or not. For those who need to access sites and services that inexplicably only play nicely with Microsoft’s old browser, Edge offers an IE tab mode.

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NEWS TECHNOLOGIE

(Photo: Intuition Robotics) New York State is helping hundreds of older residents remain connected with loved ones by distributing robots to their homes.

The program is being organized by the New York State Office for the Aging (NYSOFA) in partnership with Intuition Robotics, an Israeli tech startup. Intuition Robotics’ central product is ElliQ, a robot “sidekick” tasked with preventing loneliness among the elderly. The voice-activated robot doesn’t perform physical tasks, but rather attempts to keep older adults in touch with their families and communities while monitoring basic wellness goals.

The NYSOFA will give out more than 800 ElliQ robots as part of its ongoing effort to “battle social isolation and support aging-in-place,” per the organization’s press release. Older adults—especially those who “age in place,” meaning they remain in their homes instead of going to a care home or assisted living community—have always been more at risk of isolation due to decreased mobility and the recent aging of the baby boomer generation. The first year or so of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this problem, given widespread advisories to stay home and limit face-to-face interaction. And in the US, elderly adults are more likely to live alone than anywhere else in the world.

ElliQ aims to mitigate this issue by gently reminding its human companions to call their loved ones—something they can do using ElliQ itself. The aesthetically-pleasing tabletop robot looks almost like a lamp and sits on a flat base, to which a speaker and a simple tablet are also attached. Older adults can use the tablet to conduct video calls with family, send text and photo messages, and participate in exercise programs. ElliQ can also present companions with the news, the weather, music, games, and other information or entertainment options. The robot uses daily check-ins and regular assessments to help companions track their mental and physical health, then share that health information with trusted loved ones with the companion’s consent.

(Photo: Intuition Robotics)

“Despite misconceptions and generalizations, older adults embrace new technology, especially when they see it is designed by older adults to meet their needs,” said NYSOFA Director Greg Olsen in the release. “For those who experience some form of isolation and wish to age in place, ElliQ is a powerful complement to traditional forms of social interaction and support from professional or family caregivers.”

NYSOFA case managers will determine eligibility for the ElliQ distribution program using a few criteria, like age, Wi-Fi access, and ease of socialization with those outside their homes. Once recipients are identified, Intuition Robotics will meet with them to provide installation and training.

“We’ve long believed that connecting older adults with local communities via ElliQ will add an important element in providing holistic support to older adults aging in place,” said Intuition Robotics co-founder and CEO Dor Skuler. “This partnership with NYSOFA helps us further that mission through an innovative initiative that we are incredibly proud to be part of.”

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NEWS TECHNOLOGIE

Getting from point A to point B in the solar system is no simple feat, and inefficient, heavy rockets aren’t always the best way. Therefore, NASA has announced it is moving ahead with a new solar sail concept that could make future spacecraft more efficient and maneuverable. The Diffractive Solar Sailing project is now entering phase III development under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which could eventually lead to probes that use solar radiation to coast over the sun’s polar regions.

The concept of solar sails is an old one — they were first proposed in the 1980s. The gist is that you equip a vessel with a lightweight sail that translates the pressure from solar radiation into propulsion. The problem is that a solar sail has to be much larger than the spacecraft it’s dragging along. Even a low-thrust solar sail would need to be almost a square kilometer, and you need to keep it intact over the course of a mission. Plus, you have little choice but to fly in the direction of sunlight, so you have to make tradeoffs for either power or navigation. Futuristic diffractive light sails could address these shortcomings.

This work is being undertaken at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory under the leadership of Amber Dubill and co-investigator Grover Swartzlander. The project progressed through phase I and II trials, which had the team developing concept and feasibility studies on diffractive light sails. The phase III award ensures $2 million in funding over the next two years to design and test the materials that could make diffractive light propulsion a reality.

A standard lightsail developed by the Planetary Society in 2019.

A diffractive light sail, as the name implies, takes advantage of a property of light known as diffraction. When light passes through a small opening, it spreads out on the other side. This could be used to make a light sail more maneuverable so it doesn’t need to go wherever the solar winds blow.

The team will design its prototypes with several possible mission applications in mind. This technology most likely won’t have an impact on missions to the outer solar system where sunlight is weaker and the monumental distances require faster modes of transportation. However, heliophysics is a great use case for diffractive lightsailing as it would allow visiting the polar regions of the sun, which are difficult to access with current technology.

A lightsail with the ability to essentially redirect thrust from a continuous stream of sunlight would be able to enter orbit over the poles. It may even be possible to maneuver a constellation of satellites into this difficult orbit to study the sun from a new angle. In a few years, NASA may be able to conduct a demonstration mission. Until then, it’s all theoretical.

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NEWS TECHNOLOGIE

We’ve all been there: We’re in VR but we’re stuck in our living room and unable to take our metaverse experience to the local coffee shop. (Have we all been here? And are we certain we want to go? -Ed)

Zotac’s VR GO 4.0 backpack PC is hoping to change that. It’s a full-blown workstation-slash-mobile gaming PC in a backpack form factor. As its name implies, it’s the fourth generation of Zotac’s wearable PCs. It’s essentially a slim PC with a desktop GPU that you can strap to your back. It can sit on your desk like a regular computer, then be unplugged for on-the-go VR gaming. It even includes hot-swappable batteries and an RTX GPU to boot. The VR Headset is sold separately, of course.

What Zotac has done here is build a small form factor (SFF) PC, then attached it to a wearable harness. It’s also added the ability unplug it so it runs on battery power, though you won’t be spending hours in the metaverse. The 6000mAh battery is only rated for 50 minutes of playtime. Thankfully it comes with a second hot-swappable battery, but carrying around extra batteries is probably not enjoyable. You can buy as many extra batteries as you like though, but it’s unclear how much they cost. A similar battery for the 2.0 version costs $149.

Despite its form factor it seems like a pretty decent gaming PC, albeit with some unexpected components. For example it has an 11th Gen Tiger Lake Core i7-11800H CPU, which is a 45W mobile part. Why Zotac didn’t go for an Alder Lake part is a mystery. The GPU is weird though; it’s an Nvidia RTX a4500 “professional” Ampere card with 16GB of VRAM. We reached out to Zotac about why it chose this particular GPU, but didn’t hear back. Suffice to say it’s a very strange inclusion in a product marketed towards gamers. This is the kind of GPU you use to run professional compute applications, not Beat Saber. The company is also offering the same solution in a new SFF workstation. This may be a configuration the company settled on for several projects — the workstation has the same specs as the VR GO, but isn’t mounted in a harness.

The VR GO lets you easily add more memory and upgrade the M.2 SSD. (Image: Zotac)

Other specs include 16GB of DDR4 SO-DIMM memory, a 512GB M.2 SSD, Wi-Fi 6e and all the usual connectivity options. It allows expansion via USB and has HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 for desktop duty. Naturally, it also has RGB lights because you need that on a PC you wear on your back. It’s great for battery life, after all.

Overall, this is a weird product from Zotac. The marketing copy it included with it is PR word salad about breaking boundaries and envisioning new experiences. In other words, the same old metaverse bollocks we’ve heard before. It even includes bizarre mentions of “boosting data science model training” and running engineering simulations. We’re kind of baffled by it, to be honest. It’s also hard for us to envision a scenario where we’d want to use a VR headset in an environment other than a spacious living room. Oh, and did we mention it weighs 11lbs? Due to its size Zotac includes a metal support frame and a support strap that goes around your waist. Suffice to say, you will know you are wearing this thing despite its reported “all day comfort.” Perhaps it’s a good thing the battery only lasts 50 minutes.

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الأربعاء، 25 مايو 2022

NEWS TECHNOLOGIE

“TV will rot your brain!” We’ve all heard that old canard. The idea that screen time makes kids dumber is a staple of the “Father, I cannot click the book” genre of boomer humor. But science is turning that narrative on its head. A newly published report using data from an ABCD Study indicates that screen time doesn’t rot kids’ brains after all. On the contrary: video games might actually make kids smarter.

The ABCD Study

The Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study is a gigantic longitudinal study of American child health and brain development.

The ABCD study timeline.

Participants begin at 9-10 years of age. Through its massive slate of tests and surveys, the project records a wide array of behavioral, biometric, and genetic information from participants and their parents. Then, project scientists follow up with participant families until the kids are 19-20 years old.

Data from the project is freely available for other researchers to use in their own studies. Once or twice a year, the ABCD Study releases another updated dataset. Now, researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Karolinska Institutet of Sweden have used that data to find out what video gaming really does to childrens’ brains.

Video Games Can Make Kids Smarter

“For our study,” two of the new study’s authors explain in a joint statement, “we were specifically interested in the effect of screen time on intelligence – the ability to learn effectively, think rationally, understand complex ideas, and adapt to new situations.”

In particular, their model looked at how much time kids spent staring at glowing rectangles, and even how they used their screen time. For example, most of the kids in the study used their screen time in three different ways: watching videos (e.g. YouTube), socializing online, or playing video games. It compared gamers and non-gamers on tasks including reading comprehension, memory, visual-spatial processing, and executive function.

The researchers wanted to cover a wide variety of subdomains of intelligence. “However, intelligence is highly heritable in the populations we’ve studied so far,” study author Dr. Bruno Sauce explained to us over Zoom. Furthermore, “genetic and socioeconomic factors were our two major confounders.” So, to account for variations in these factors, the researchers rolled in genetic data and socioeconomic information from the participants’ parents.

After two years, results showed that screen time had no negative effect on cognitive skills. On the contrary: kids who had stuck with gaming showed a subtle but persistent improvement in their IQ.

Play is Practice

“Our results support the claim that screen time generally doesn’t impair children’s cognitive abilities,” said study coauthor Torkel Klingberg, from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Instead, “playing video games can actually help boost intelligence.”

Listen, I could have told you that. The ideas of spell slots, mana regen, and cooldown timers all contributed to my emotional literacy. Bullet hell games improved my reaction times and made me better at dodging skillshots. Learning to play different types of games — League of Legends, Oxygen Not Included, Satisfactory, Foundation — taught me a lot about learning the rules in any given system. And let me tell you something, League made me a lot more chill about losing, and better at taking criticism.

Image from the study. Original caption: Density plot of time spent Gaming (raw values) between boys and girls at ages 9–10.

Here’s the thing. Play is practice. For example: Learning to ride a bike improves your dexterity and timing. So does learning to play Super Mario Bros. You’re literally improving your DEX stat in real life. That skill then makes it easier to learn in other situations that require coordination, balance, and strength. Likewise, team sports encourage cooperation and build conflict resolution skills. First-person shooters and racing games can even improve a person’s reflexes. The effect is the same for boys and girls. Popular Mechanics reports that in tests, “participants playing a first-person shooting game were up to 50 percent better at identifying, locating, and tracking objects—skills that are also critical in real race driving—than nongamers.”

Games Can Rewire the Brain — For the Better

Even Geico agrees that skill-building driving games can make teens better drivers. However, not all games have the same beneficial influence. Treat the world like it’s GTA:V, and we become more inclined to break the law. Driving games help when they’re designed to build driving skills.

That’s how video games can make kids smarter in real life. Games use practice to build skills, and building intelligence requires a wide variety of skills. It’s all about learning. “Higher intelligence seems to mean you learn faster,” explained Dr. Sauce. “And higher intelligence in a given subdomain tends to correlate with higher intelligence in other subdomains.”

“The story may be more complicated,” Dr. Sauce told us. “There’s a lot we still don’t know about the plasticity of intelligence. But it matches parallel findings we’ve seen about deliberate practice.”

Through practice over time, these skills enmesh themselves into the brain. In addition to improving dexterity, games that build real-life skills can also buff your real-life INT stat. In short, the right games can rewire the brain, for the better.

Then Why Did Brain Training Games Flop?

Do you remember when brain training games were new? They promised everything from increased IQ to protection against Alzheimer’s disease. There was some science to back up the claims. For one thing, there’s a correlation between cognitive performance and overall brain health. It’s also true that testing out skills as we learn seems to result in better learning outcomes than simply re-reading. Furthermore, people with higher IQ scores often score higher in other tests of cognitive skills. But brain games have largely failed to deliver on their loftier promises.

One reason is that there’s simply more to brain health than memory recall, executive function, or any other single thing. It turns out getting good at sudoku isn’t the same thing as protecting the brain against aging-related diseases. Data from other studies suggest that staying active and engaged — using your mind and body — is highly important to overall brain health.

Crossword puzzles and brain training games can’t fix genetic diseases. But they do train cognitive skills. “It seems that cognitive training does have some benefits,” Dr. Sauce told us, “but those benefits are much narrower in scope than the hype cycle originally suggested. I think that romantic era is gone, and we’re much more skeptical about that — at least, I am.”

Instead, the rollerblading grannies might just have the right idea. To get sharp and stay healthy, it’s important to have fun and learn new things throughout life. It’s official. Science says: go play!

The research is published in Nature Scientific Reports. We’d like to thank Dr. Bruno Sauce, who graciously allowed us to pepper him with questions. Feature image by RebeccaPollard, CC BY SA 2.0.

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