Lifeboat Foundation

Apple’s Vision Pro launch resembles its Apple Watch debut in more ways than one, but to me the most telling similarity is in the marketing approach. Apple has striven to distance the Vision Pro from the existing crop of virtual reality (and even mixed reality) devices — many of which are objective failures — by exclusively focusing on the term “spatial computing”; however, the marketing seems focused on identifying a few key use cases it thinks will best drive consumer interest.

The company took the same approach with the Apple Watch, which like its face computer cousin, was more or less a solution in search of a problem when it originally debuted. Apple initially focused on a lot of features the Apple Watch has now actually done away with entirely, including its Digital Touch stuff that was meant to be a new paradigm for quickly communicating with friends and loved ones across distances. In general, it was presented as a relatively robust and full-featured platform nearly on par with the iPhone in terms of future potential.

The intervening years and generations of Apple Watch have seen it grow considerably in terms of pure technical capability and specifications, yet the marketing and focus around the product from Apple’s side has been more economical, spending outsized effort at the areas that seemed to resonate best with users — including health and wellness, and more recently, safety.

The ‘ten electron’ rule provides guidance for the design of single-atom alloy catalysts for targeted chemical reactions.

A collaborative team across four universities have discovered a very simple rule to design single-atom alloy catalysts for chemical reactions. The ‘ten electron rule’ helps scientists identify promising catalysts for their experiments very rapidly. Instead of extensive trial and error experiments of computationally demanding computer simulations, catalysts’ composition can be proposed simply by looking at the periodic table.

Single-atom alloys are a class of catalysts made of two metals: a few atoms of reactive metal, called the dopant, are diluted in an inert metal (copper, silver, or gold). This recent technology is extremely efficient at speeding up chemical reactions but traditional models don’t explain how they work.

After half a year of knowing nothing technically about the Apple Vision Pro, Apple has spelled out many of the specs of the unit. Here’s what you need to know.

For Apple’s own reasons, it’s been reticent to detail the Apple Vision Pro. However, when the Apple Store came back up, there was a new technical specs page attached to the order page, and now on the company’s homepage.

Undisclosed at launch, there are three storage capacities. Apple Vision Pro headsets come in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB storage configurations. At this time, it doesn’t appear that RAM quantities differ as they do in the iPad as storage configurations climb, as the spec sheet claims a universal 16GB of RAM across all units.

A research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed “supramolecular ink,” a new technology for use in OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays or other electronic devices. Made of inexpensive, Earth-abundant elements instead of costly scarce metals, supramolecular ink could enable more affordable and environmentally sustainable flat-panel screens and electronic devices.

“By replacing precious metals with Earth-abundant materials, our supramolecular ink technology could be a game changer for the OLED display industry,” said principal investigator Peidong Yang, a faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley.

“What’s even more exciting is that the technology could also extend its reach to organic printable films for the fabrication of wearable devices as well as luminescent art and sculpture,” he added.

Testing will begin in Taiwan as Google looks to drop Samsung’s Exynos foundation.

Should we colloquially call this ‘MS-DOS 11.0’?

For the past decade, researchers have been exploring hafnia’s ferroelectric properties, particularly in a crystal phase where it exhibits electric polarization.

To revolutionize high-performance computing, scientists and engineers are making strides in harnessing the potential of hafnium oxide, commonly known as hafnia. The latest study outlines processes for manipulating hafnia, aiming to pave the way for the next generation of computing memory.

For the past decade, researchers have explored hafnia’s ferroelectric properties, particularly in a crystal phase exhibiting electric polarization.

Continue reading “These hafnia molecules could pave the way for next-gen memory devices” »

PRESS RELEASE — It is hard to imagine our lives without networks such as the internet or mobile phone networks. In the future, similar networks are planned for quantum technologies that will enable the tap-proof transmission of messages using quantum cryptography and make it possible to connect quantum computers to each other.

Like their conventional counterparts, such quantum networks require memory elements in which information can be temporarily stored and routed as needed. A team of researchers at the University of Basel led by Professor Philipp Treutlein has now developed such a memory element, which can be micro-fabricated and is, therefore, suitable for mass production. Their results were recently published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

Team designed a photonic chip in a way that reduced the speed of light by more than 10,000 times. That could boost performance and applications in light sensing, communications and computing.