Fnord666 writes:It looks like the launch date for the James Webb Space Telescope has slipped again. It was slated to launch this coming Halloween but now it will be at mid-November at the earliest.According to Ars Technica:
takyon writes:AMD's Ryzen 5000G APUs now have a release date for the DIY market: August 5th. The 8-core Ryzen 7 5700G has a suggested price of $359, while the 6-core Ryzen 5 5600G will be $259.AMD announced the Radeon RX 6800M, 6700M, and 6600M discrete GPUs for laptops, promising better performance, efficiency, and battery-constrained performance. The Radeon RX 6800M is a 40 compute unit design (equivalent to the Radeon RX 6700 XT on desktop) with 12 GB of VRAM.AMD biggest announcements were the introduction of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and the demonstration of a 3D chiplet design. FSR uses a spatial scaling algorithm to upscale game graphics for higher frame rates at a given resolution. The algorithm competes with Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), but will be released as open source and work with some older AMD GPUs, integrated graphics, as well as competing products from Nvidia and Intel (it was shown running on an Nvidia GTX 1060).AMD CEO Lisa Su also showed off a modified, delidded Ryzen 9 5900X CPU prototype, with "3D V-Cache technology". It was identical to the standard 5900X with the exception of through-silicon via (TSV) stacked L3 cache. This allowed the 5900X prototype to have 192 MB of total L3 cache instead of 64 MB (96 MB per 8-core chiplet). AMD claims it can run games with an average of +15% performance (simply due to the larger cache size), and some version of this will appear in products that are starting production at the end of 2021.Related: TSMC "5nm", "3nm", Stacked Silicon, and MoreOriginal SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
[Ed note: This is highly summarized; it is well-worth reading the entire article.]upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people:
takyon writes:Google's 80-acre megacampus will take over a chunk of San Jose - Google does not yet know the cost of the 10- to 30-year construction project
mrpg writes:https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210514134119.htmClimate change is exacerbating problems like habitat loss and temperatures swings that have already pushed many animal species to the brink. But can scientists predict which animals will be able to adapt and survive? Using genome sequencing, researchers show that some fish, like the threespine stickleback, can adapt very rapidly to extreme seasonal changes. Their findings could help scientists forecast the evolutionary future of these populations.Journal Reference:Alan Garcia‐Elfring, Antoine Paccard, Timothy J. Thurman, Ben A. Wasserman, Eric P. Palkovacs, Andrew P. Hendry, Rowan D. H. Barrett. Using seasonal genomic changes to understand historical adaptation to new environments: Parallel selection on stickleback in highly‐variable estuaries. Molecular Ecology, 2021; 30 (9): 2054 DOI: 10.1111/mec.15879Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
Beryllium Sphere (r) writes:Up to now, people have been discouraged from getting antibody tests to measure what their COVID vaccination did. The reasoning behind that advice is that since nobody knew what a given level meant in actionable terms, it was not useful information.That just changed.Nature has published the results of research into the relationship between antibody levels post-vaccination and vaccine efficacy, with plenty of different vaccines.An easy-to-read overview is at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01372-6The full paper, with the methodology and conclusions, is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01377-8 (It looks like careful work but it's over my head in places.)The bottom line is that they found a clear correlation and protection levels keep going up as antibody levels go up, though there's some diminishing returns at the very top end where the mRNA vaccines are.The cool part is they figured out what antibody level would give you the 50% protection that we would have been willing to accept from a vaccine. The mRNA vaccines leave you with an order of magnitude more. That's quite a comforting safety factor against variants and gradual decline.Journal References: