Month: May 2021

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  The Android lock screen, now with lots of different colors. [credit: Google ]

Google I/O kicks off today, and the big news is that Android 12 is getting a huge new design. Google calls the new design "Material You," and just like in the leaks, it's a UI that changes colors like a chameleon. For now, this design will only show up in Google Pixels, but Google says it will roll out across the ecosystem to the web, Chrome OS, smart displays, cars, watches, tablets, and every other Google form factor.

The new interface is powered by a "color extraction" API that can pull the colors out of your wallpaper and apply them to the UI. This sounds exactly like the Palette API that was introduced in Android 5.0 (along with the original introduction of Material Design), but it's apparently a second swing at the color extraction idea, and Google is heavily using it in the UI now. The demo interfaces featured customized highlight colors, clock faces, widget backgrounds, and more, all matching the color of your wallpaper.

Besides new colors, there are also tons of layout changes to the quick settings and notification panel. We'll dive into this more as soon as we get some code to play with, which might only be when the final version of Android launches.

Enlarge / The new Intel H20 looks like a standard NVMe SSD—but it packs both slow QLC NAND and ultra-fast Optane into separate chips on the same M.2 drive. (credit: Intel)

Intel has a new consumer-targeted storage product, called Optane H20—as in H twenty, not water. The new device is an M.2 2280 format drive, using QLC (Quad Level Cell) NAND storage running behind an Optane cache layer.

This isn't Intel's first try at an Optane-backed hybrid SSD—the first, 2019's Optane H10, made its way into a few consumer laptops but didn't make much of a splash. H20 is a second try, with a significantly improved QLC SSD and NAND controller.

What’s a QLC?

Conventional NAND SSDs store data by maintaining charge levels in individual cells aboard a solid-state medium. How much data each individual cell stores is configurable and has dramatic impact upon the cost, performance, and longevity of the NAND as a whole:

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  Your password is bad—want us to change it? [credit: Google ]

Google has taught the Google Assistant a fun new trick: it can now change your website passwords for you.

We'll still need to see how this feature works in the real world, but Google's demo says you'll be able to tap a single button to have Google register a new password with whatever site you're on.

Google is combining a few puzzle pieces to make this happen. Google Password Manager has long been able to store your passwords thanks to integration into Chrome and Android. It has also been able to generate secure passwords, making it easy to register a new account. Google scans your credentials against a big list of compromised usernames and passwords every time you log in, and if it detects bad credentials, the "Check Password" screen will pop up. In the past, this screen has left the next steps up to you, but a "change password" button from the Google Assistant will now appear on supported sites.

Enlarge / Coming soon: Nearly identical versions of these GPUs, only with "LTR" logos—and new measures to reduce their mining hash rates. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3000-branded graphics cards are receiving an update off the factory lines starting this month: hardware-level flags meant to slow down the mining of the popular cryptocurrency Ethereum. Nvidia's Tuesday announcement confirmed that most consumer-grade GPUs coming out of the company's factories, ranging from the RTX 3060 Ti to the RTX 3080, will ship with a new sticker to indicate a "Lite Hash Rate," or "LHR," on the hardware, driver, and BIOS level.

If this move sounds familiar, that's because Nvidia already took a massive swing at the cryptomining problem, only to whiff, with February's RTX 3060. That GPU's launch came with promises that its Ethereum mining rates had been cut in half from their full potential rate—a move meant to disincentivize miners from buying up limited stock. And in the GPU's pre-release period, Nvidia PR Director Bryan Del Rizzo claimed on Twitter that "it's not just a driver thing. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter."

Yet shortly after that card's commercial launch, Nvidia released a developer-specific beta firmware driver that unlocked the GPU's full mining potential. Remember: that's firmware, not a BIOS rewrite or anything particularly invasive. With that cat out of the bag, the RTX 3060 forever became an Ethereum mining option.

Enlarge / Illustration of antibodies (red and blue) responding to an infection with the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (purple). (credit: Getty Images)

From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of researchers' nagging questions involved trying to understand what constitutes immunity to future infections. People who had been infected by the virus produced varying amounts of antibodies, and it wasn't clear what levels were needed to provide protection. Similar issues applied to figuring out how long protection lasted, given that antibody levels appeared to decline over time. Those questions have implications for whether we will eventually need booster shots to maintain our immunity.

The most common way of looking at immunity at the beginning of the pandemic was to check for neutralizing antibodies, which could block the virus's ability to infect new cells. But we've gone through much of the pandemic without knowing exactly how levels of these antibodies relate to protection.

Evidence has been building that neutralizing antibodies directly correlate with protection, and a new paper provides some of the most decisive evidence yet. The authors also provide some hints about the sort of decline in immunity we might expect.