Month: July 2022

Enlarge / The two newly imaged galaxies, with the older one at right. (credit: Naidu, et. all.)

One of the design goals for the James Webb Space Telescope was to provide the ability to image at wavelengths that would reveal the Universe's first stars and galaxies. Now, just a few weeks after its first images were revealed, we're getting a strong indication that it's a success. In some of the data NASA has made public, researchers have spotted as many as five galaxies from the distant Universe, already present just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. If confirmed to be as distant as they appear, one of them will be the most distant galaxy yet observed.

Opening up

For many of its observatories, NASA allows astronomers to submit proposals for observation and allows those users to have exclusive access to the resulting data for a time afterward. But for its newest instrument, NASA has a set of targets where the data will be made public immediately, for anyone to analyze as they wish. Some of these include locations similar to one of the first images released, where a large cluster of galaxies in the foreground acts as a lens to magnify more distant objects.

(You can look at the details of one of the datasets used for this analysis, called GLASS, which used the cluster Abell 2744 to magnify distant objects, which were urther magnified by the telescope.)

Enlarge / The M2 MacBook Air's logic board. The M2 is the big chip in the center-left with the Apple logo printed on it. (credit: iFixit)

If you read iFixit's teardowns, in-depth reviews, or follow any tech YouTubers, you may have learned that the new M2-equipped MacBook Air is heatsink-less, in addition to being fanless.

While not something every MacBook Air owner will notice, we ran some tests, and the M2 MacBook Pro was 30 percent faster than the exact same M2 in the MacBook Air. More adventurous YouTubers have gone further—the Max Tech channel installed thin thermal pads on the MacBook Air's M2 that significantly boosted the chip's performance in both real-world and synthetic benchmark tests, while lower the chip's maximum temperature from a toasty 108° Celsius to a less-toasty 97° Celsius.

Thermal pads, heatspreaders, and heatsinks all work the same way: they make close contact with the processor and conduct heat away from it. As that heat is spread over a larger surface area, it becomes easier to dissipate, making it easier to keep the processor cool. The M1 MacBook Air included a passive heatspreader (that is, one without a fan) that conducted heat away from the chip, while the M1 and M2 MacBook Pros use active cooling systems that pull in cool air and eject hot air for even more effective cooling.

Enlarge / Morfydd Clark is Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. (credit: Amazon Studios)

With roughly six weeks to go before its premiere on Amazon Video, the upcoming Lord of the Rings prequel TV series, The Rings of Power, took advantage of a massive San Diego Comic-Con stage to debut its most enticing trailer yet.

Based on notes and lore penned by J.R.R. Tolkien, the new TV series will revolve around his series' "Second Age" era—as in, thousands of years before characters like Frodo and Sam existed. This week's trailer begins to truly set the stage of epic battle between the recovered populations of men, dwarves, and elves, and a dreaded evil rising once more from Middle-earth—which goes by "many names" but is clearly personified by Sauron.

"Have you heard of Sauron?"

• 

  An ominous hand appears.

The character of Galadriel, previously played by Cate Blanchett but now entrusted to Morfydd Clark (His Dark Materials), is the first in the trailer to see a vision of a newly rising evil, while Prince Durin IV (played by Owain Arthur) is warned directly that Sauron's forces are planning to "bury us all beneath the mountain" (that being Khazad-dûm). We also finally see the new series' previously teased "Stranger" character, played by Daniel Weyman, who accosts Theo, the son of Bronwyn, in a shared prison cell and grimly asks, "Have you heard of Sauron?"