Month: March 2016

A cluster of True North chips. (credit: IBM)

A lot of the science we cover at Ars focuses on technology development, where the risks involved mean that the early success represented by a publication doesn't typically mean an actual product will follow. So it's nice to be able to report on an exception to this rule. IBM's experimental neural processor, True North, has found a home at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

True North is a radically energy-efficient design with a circuitry designed to mimic the structure of the neural connections within an animal's brain. Each chip is a big cluster of small cores that can potentially communicate with any other core on the chip. Each of these cores has its own memory and communication hardware; the memory holds information on the other cores it communicates with and how strong those connections are. The communications then take the form of a series of "spikes," bursts of activity that carry information based on their frequency and strength.

The radically different design allows the chip to get work done despite a ludicrously low clock rate: just one kiloHertz. The trade-off is that it can only host neural network software—it was designed to be compatible with any networks developed for the popular Compass neural network software package. And compared to running Compass on a traditional processor, True North used 176,000-fold less energy.

Spotify AB has raised £695 million (~$1 billion) in convertible debt, and reportedly promised its investors that they would get a tasty equity return if the Sweden-based music streaming service goes public in the next year.

Private equity outfit TPG, and hedge fund Dragoneer Investment Group, along with an unknown number of Goldman Sachs' clients, agreed to sink cash into Spotify, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal was later confirmed by Spotify, with an agreement expected to close by the end of this week, Reuters reported.

Financial terms were kept secret. The WSJ earlier reported, however—citing sources familiar with the deal—that Spotify's new investors would be able to convert the debt into equity at a 20 percent discount if the company holds an IPO (initial public offering) within the next 12 months.

An autonomous monitoring transponder of the type used in the Coordinated Canyon Experiment.

All Daniel Sherer has ever wanted was for the government to pay him for a few days of lost work as a commercial fisherman after a scientific buoy suddenly popped into the path of his fishing boat in Monterey Bay on Saturday, January 15, 2016. As he tells it, his aim isn't to bilk the United States; he simply wants to be paid a fair amount for his lost earnings after the buoy took his boat out of commission. "I don't need a million dollars—I just want to be compensated for my days lost," he told Ars. "I want to be compensated for a diver going under the boat, I want to be compensated for cleaning the whole thing up, that's it."

As Ars reported on Monday, Sherer is the first named defendant in a lawsuit filed last week by federal prosecutors in California. The way the government sees it, Sherer and his fishing business partner are essentially hostage-takers, as they recovered a loose United States Geological Survey buoy, claimed ownership of it, and now demand $13,000 for its return.

Department of Justice lawyers have still not responded to Ars' request for comment.

(credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA)

Saturn's moon Enceladus is a relatively small body, only a bit over 500km across. That's not big enough to have retained much heat from its formation, nor to have a huge cache of radioactive material that can provide heat. Yet all indications are that the moon has an extensive under-surface ocean, which fuels geysers near the moon's south pole. Thermal imaging suggests that there are Gigawatts worth of heat being released in the area around the geysers.

All of which should be unsustainable. Most of the heat inside Enceladus must be produced by tidal forces, which deform the moon over the course of its orbit, creating internal friction. And there's no indication that these can generate sufficient heat. This implies that the geysers, and the E-ring of Saturn that they create, are a very temporary phenomenon, and we're lucky to have sent Cassini there while the geysers were active. But that may not be the case. Some scientists are now suggesting that Enceladus may be relatively young, and a separate study is saying that the geysers may be stable for up to a million years.

The new study is based on an attempt to create a physical model of Enceladus' plumes. These originate in a series of fissures known as the tiger stripes, shown on the left side of the moon in the image above. Together, these fissures add up to roughly 500km of active venting.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Amazon has added shoddy and non-standards-compliant USB Type-C cables and adapters to its list of restricted products. This means that third-party marketplace sellers can no longer sell USB Type-C products that aren't compliant with the relevant USB standards that they purport to support.

The crackdown is almost certainly in response to the glut of cheap USB Type-C cables that have flooded Amazon over the past year, and at least one example of a dodgy cable frying a Google engineer's Chromebook Pixel. In that case, the third-party seller stated that it was a standards-compliant USB 3.1 Type-C cable with SuperSpeed; as it turned out, the cable was completely missing the extra wires needed for SuperSpeed, and two of the other wires had been transposed. The miswired cable killed his laptop instantly.

Back in December, Amazon banned the sale of self-balancing scooters following a spate of reports of cheap hoverboards bursting into flames.