Month: July 2020

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm is announcing its midcycle chip upgrade today: the Snapdragon 865 Plus. Like always, these "Plus" chips are higher-clocked versions of the major designs that were released earlier in the year, but new for the 865 Plus specifically is Wi-Fi 6E compatibility.

First, the speed increases: Qualcomm is promising a 10-percent faster CPU and GPU, thanks to faster clock rates. The CPU is officially up to 3.1Ghz now, and since the GPU on the Snapdragon 865 runs at 600MHz, the Plus version should be up around 660MHz.

The big news, though, is the addition of Qualcomm's "FastConnect 6900" connectivity chip, which, along with peak speeds of up to 3.6 Gbps, will bring Wi-Fi 6E to smartphones. Currently, Wi-Fi works in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, but 6E will extend Wi-Fi into the 6GHz spectrum. Theoretical top speeds won't increase, but the extra spectrum will help Wi-Fi work better in crowded areas. You can only fit so many bits into the current 2.4GHz and 5GHz airways, and if you and all your neighbors are filling the airwaves and causing a traffic jam, everyone will have to slow down. Six gigahertz Wi-Fi will add more lanes for traffic.

Enlarge / Black wheels and a black grille are a few small clues to the fact that this Mazda 3 has a turbo. (credit: Mazda)

On Wednesday morning, Mazda confirmed something enthusiasts had long hoped for: for model year 2021, the carmaker will offer a turbocharged engine as an option for the Mazda 3 hatchback and sedan. The engine is the company's 2.5L Skyactiv-G power plant, and when installed in a Mazda 3, it bumps the 3 squarely into hot-hatch territory (or hot-sedan territory, as appropriate) with 250hp (186kW) and 320lb-ft (434Nm). (If you have to feed it 87 gasoline instead of 93, power and torque decrease to 227hp (170kW) and 310lb-ft (410Nm).)

Before enthusiasts get their hopes too high, it does appear as if the turbocharged Mazda 3 will only come in all-wheel drive and only with a six-speed automatic transmission. Visually, the tweaks to the Mazda 3 Turbo are pretty subtle. There are larger tailpipes, and it wears black 18-inch alloy wheels and gloss black grilles, side-mirror housings, and spoilers.

Mazda will also offer a pair of naturally aspirated engine options for MY2021 Mazda 3s. There's the 186hp (139kW), 186lb-ft (252Nm) 2.5L Skyactiv-G version; we first drove this back in 2019 and have a review coming in the next week or so now that we've had more time in both the sedan and hatchback versions. (Spoiler alert: we still love it.) And that car will still be available as a front-wheel-drive hatchback with a manual transmission; otherwise, a six-speed auto is the only option whether FWD or AWD.

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  After the rain cleared Tuesday, media were permitted an opportunity to visit an LC-39A surrounded by photo-worthy puddles. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

8:30am ET Saturday Update: SpaceX first tried to launch its tenth batch of Starlink satellites on June 26 before standing down a couple of hours before liftoff, citing the need to perform additional "pre-flight checks."

Then, on its second attempt this past Wednesday, the company scrubbed its launch attempt due to poor weather.

Will the rocket company fare better today? Weather conditions are not ideal, with a 40 percent chance of "no-go" conditions due to cumulus clouds and electrical discharge in the atmosphere. What we do know is that the company's 57 Starlink satellites, all fitted with innovative "visorsats" to reduce their brightness, and two BlackSky Earth observation satellites are ready to go.

Enlarge / A new review study has bad news for scientists keen on using task-oriented fMRI to draw conclusions about any one person's brain. (credit: Duke University)

It all started with a rejected grant proposal. Ahmad Hariri, a neuroscientist at Duke University, was interested in using so-called "task fMRI"—in which subjects perform specially designed cognitive tasks while having their brains scanned—combined with genetic testing and psychological evaluations. The goal was to identify specific biomarkers for differences in how people process thoughts and emotions that might determine whether a given subject would be more or less likely to experience depression, anxiety, or age-related cognitive decline like dementia in the future.

"The idea was to collect this data once, then collect it again and again and again and be able to track changes in an individual's brain over time to help us understand what changes over the course of their lives," Hariri told Ars. So he submitted a funding proposal outlining his plans for a longitudinal study along those lines. The proposal hypothesized that an individual's history of trauma, for instance, would map onto how their amygdala reacted to threat-related stimuli. And that would, in turn, enable the researchers to say something about the future mental well-being of the individual.

Hariri and his team designed four core, task-related measures to that end: one targeting the amygdala's threat response, one targeting the hippocampus and memory, one targeting the striatum and reward, and the fourth targeting the prefrontal cortex and executive control. He thought he was on solid scientific ground. So he was shocked when the proposal wasn't even scored by reviewers, based on skepticism regarding the reliability of fMRI to collect that kind of data.