Month: July 2020

The busy schedule begins July 14 with the United Arab Emirates’ first-ever interplanetary effort. Three missions are poised to launch toward the Red Planet this month, including NASA’s car-sized Perseverance rover, which will hunt for signs of ancient Mars life and cache samples for future return to Earth. For more, check out this NBC News…

A new site is in the works that could eventually produce billions of doses of a vaccine. The exec [Musk] says Tesla is working to produce a molecule printer in conjunction with German vaccine maker CureVac. Musk calls the printers “RNA microfactories” that can produce vaccines and other mRNA-based therapies by inputting a recipe. CureVac…

Intel revealed new details about Thunderbolt 4, the next-gen of its universal cable connectivity solution, delivering increased minimum performance requirements, expanded capabilities and USB4 specification compliance. For the first time, Thunderbolt 4 will offer docks with up to four Thunderbolt ports and universal cables up to 2 meters in length. Intel’s upcoming mobile PC processors,…

Amorphous boron-nitride could be the next insulator used in future generations of integrated circuits. Boron nitride has the potential to form a 2D crystalline material with an hexagonal structure. And it was in this area that researchers had been working before coming across the properties of the amorphous form of the material. For more tech…

Fraunhofer HHI (together with partners including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Sony) is celebrating the release and official adoption of the new global video coding standard H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC). This new standard offers improved compression, which reduces data requirements by around 50% of the bit rate relative to the previous standard H.265/High…

I don’t normally post these upcoming changes, but this looked interesting. Here is just one change Microsoft is freshening up the Start menu with a more streamlined design that removes the solid color backplates behind the logos in the apps list and applies a uniform, partially transparent background to the tiles. This design creates a…

Shortly after canceling one of its most confusing services, Google has now disabled by default an important Google Photos feature relied upon by millions of users. Google has announced that it is changing the way the Google Photos app will perform automatic backups. From now on, images saved onto your device by messaging apps will…