owl brings us an interesting bit of space history for your weekend enjoyment:https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/us-military-launched-needles-space/
Ometecuhtli writes:https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-06-01/worlds-largest-plant-seagrass-meadow-shark-bay-giant-clone/101112726"[...] But researchers have today revealed there's a plant about 4,500 years old and measuring 180 kilometres across living right under our noses in Western Australia.Genetic testing has revealed that what was once thought to be part of a giant seagrass meadow in the shallow waters of Shark Bay, near Carnarvon, was actually a single massive clone of Posidonia australis seagrass[...] "We were a bit suspicious because the plants around there don't act like normal seagrass," Dr Breed said. "They don't flower as much, don't seed as much, so these signs of reproductive activity were a little bit unremarkable."But when they took samples from 10 meadows throughout the Shark Bay area, they never expected nine of them to return a genetic match.Instead, they were planning to use their research to inform which plants to use for restoration of the meadows, to help with their resilience against threats like bleaching...[...] Being a clone probably helps to explain why this single plant has been so successful.[...] Polyploidy in this case has occurred because at some stage, a Posidonia plant has hybridised with another related species.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
takyon writes:The Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has exceeded 1.1 exaFLOPS (Rmax), leading the June 2022 TOP500 list as the world's fastest supercomputer and the first truly "exascale" system.Frontier uses 9,408 64-core Epyc 7A53 CPUs and 37,632 AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs. It has 4.6 petabytes each of DDR4 and High Bandwidth Memory.Frontier also reached #2 on the June 2022 Green500 list at 52.227 gigaFLOPS/Watt, behind the smaller Frontier Test & Development System:
canopic jug writes:Digital librarian, Karen Coyle, has written about controlled digital lending (warning for PDF), where an artificial scarcity is applied to digital artifacts to limit concurrent access similar to the limitations that a finite number of objects exhibit in libraries' physical collections. This concept raises a lot of questions about not just copyright and digital versus physical, but also about reading in general. Some authors and publisher associations have already begun to object to controlled digital lending. However, few set aside misinformation and misdirection to allow for a proper, in-depth discussion of the issues.
Tech Review is running a piece on a new/recent approach to self driving, https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/05/27/1052826/ai-reinforcement-learning-self-driving-cars-autonomous-vehicles-wayve-waabi-cruise/