This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 27)
Every week, we scour the web for important, insightful, and fascinating stories in science and technology.
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Computing
IBM Has Unveiled Chip Technology That Could Help Extend Moore’s Law Another DecadeSophia Chen | MIT Technology Review ($)
"To fit more transistors on a chip, engineers across the industry are eyeing a pivot to an approach familiar to urban planners: build up. On Thursday, IBM announced it has created a chip that uses this strategy. The new architecture, known as a nanostack, vertically stacks transistors in two layers on a silicon chip."
Artificial Intelligence
AI Is Designing Radio Chips That Humans Couldn’t Even ImagineKaushik Sengupta | IEEE Spectrum
"Some of the...chips look more like modern art than circuit layouts. Yet in many cases, the physical prototypes bested state-of-the art circuits in terms of performance. The real achievement, however, is that it took the AI orders of magnitude less time to conceive a working design than it would a human designer."
Science
A Dark Dimension Could Link Two of the Universe’s Great UnknownsSteve Nadis | Quanta Magazine
"Even though scientists have assumed that dark energy and dark matter 'don’t have anything to do with each other,' said Tim Tait, a particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, 'you can imagine a case where one influences the other. And it would not be surprising if [they] were manifestations of a kind of unified theory of the dark universe.'"
Biotechnology
New Effort Will Get Genome Sequences for Entire Endangered Species ListJohn Timmer | Ars Technica
"Over 2,300 plant and animal populations remain on the [endangered species] list, requiring ongoing government intervention. On Thursday, it was announced that all of those species would see their genomes sequenced and tissue samples preserved to aid future conservation efforts."
Future
AI Was Supposed to Kill Engineering Jobs, but New Data Suggests They’re the Most ResilientMarina Temkin | TechCrunch
"Software engineering, in theory, is the professional field most vulnerable to automation, given the rapid adoption of AI-powered coding tools. However, researchers at venture firm SignalFire say the hiring data tells a different story. 'The rationale given for lots of layoffs is consistently AI, and specifically they’ll say AI with respect to code; they’ll say one engineer could do the job of however many engineers in the past,' said Asher Bantock, SignalFire’s head of research. 'What we’re seeing on the ground is a little inconsistent with that.'"
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Computing
This Flying Solar-Powered Platform Could Deliver Better Internet From the AirRachel Courtland | MIT Technology Review ($)
"As soon as August, a giant silver bullet will cut its way through the dry air of the southwestern US and cross the Pacific to reach the coast of Japan. Once there, the roughly 200-foot-long craft, built by the New Mexico–based company Sceye, will park some 18 kilometers above the ocean’s surface, in a wispy-thin layer known as the stratosphere. Then it will use a custom-built antenna to supplement Softbank’s 5G network, a test that will include beaming data straight to devices."
Computing
A New Paper Argues Microsoft Exaggerated Its Quantum Claims a Year AgoSophia Chen | The Verge
"A critique published in Nature Wednesday calls the basic technology behind Microsoft’s 'breakthrough' quantum computing chip the Majorana 1 into question. ...In a peer-reviewed article, Henry Legg, a physicist at the University of St. Andrews, reanalyzed Microsoft’s data on their device and argued that the company’s researchers did not conclusively demonstrate a working topological qubit in the first place."
Artificial Intelligence
The AI World Is Getting 'Loopy'Russell Brandom | TechCrunch
"'Two years ago, we wrote source code by hand. We started to transition so agents write the code. And now we’re transitioning to the point where agents are prompting agents that then write the code,' [said Claude Code creator Boris Cherny]. 'As big as the step from source code to agents was, loops are just as important and as big a step.'"
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