Month: May 2023

Enlarge (credit: CHANDAN KHANNA / Contributor | AFP)

Of all the changes Elon Musk has made to Twitter, blocking emergency and public transit services from tweeting automated alerts might have been his least popular. User backlash roared, as National Weather Service accounts got suspended. Then, one of the country's largest public transit services, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), had so much trouble tweeting, it decided to quit posting updates to Twitter.

Alarmed Twitter users who depend on these updates can perhaps rest easier now, though. Musk has abruptly reversed course. On Tuesday afternoon, the @TwitterDev account confirmed that, once again, at least some public services have been granted free access to Twitter's API, so they can continue tweeting out important updates.

"One of the most important use cases for the Twitter API has always been public utility," @TwitterDev's tweet said. "Verified gov or publicly owned services who tweet weather alerts, transport updates and emergency notifications may use the API, for these critical purposes, for free."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

Elon Musk yesterday threatened to reassign NPR's Twitter account to "another company" if the media organization doesn't start tweeting again. In "an unprompted Tuesday email" to NPR reporter Bobby Allyn, Musk wrote, "So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?" according to an NPR news article by Allyn.

Allyn pointed out that reassigning NPR's account solely for not tweeting would contradict Twitter's inactive account policy, which says that inactivity "is based on logging in," not on posting tweets. While accounts "may be permanently removed due to prolonged inactivity," Twitter's policy says that users can keep their accounts active simply by logging in at least once every 30 days.

"Musk did not answer when asked whether he planned to change the platform's definition of inactivity and he declined to say what prompted his new questions about NPR's lack of participation on Twitter," Allyn wrote.

Enlarge / EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton wants Europe to have its own secure satellite communications network. (credit: Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)

A consortium of nearly every major European satellite company announced Tuesday that it plans to bid for a proposed satellite constellation to provide global communications. Essentially, such a constellation would provide the European Union with connectivity from low-Earth orbit similar to what SpaceX's Starlink offers.

The bid, which includes large players such as Airbus Defence and Space, Eutelsat, SES, and Thales Alenia Space, comes in response to a request by the European Union for help in constructing a sovereign constellation to provide secure communications for government services, including military applications.

European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton announced the continent's plans for this constellation—known as Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite, or IRIS²—last November. The European Union will provide 2.4 billion euro, with additional contributions expected from the European Space Agency as well as private investments.

Roughly 5 billion years from now, our Sun will end, not with a bang but with a whimper. That's when it finally burns through all the fuel in its core and puffs outward into a red giant, swallowing all the inner planets of our Solar System in the process, including Earth. But no star has ever been caught in the act of gulping down a planet this way—until now. Astronomers have spotted a white-hot flash from a distant star in our Milky Way galaxy and concluded that it came from the final stage of this process, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Yes, it's a literal "Death Star," announced on the eve of Star Wars Day (May 4).

Like all stars, our Sun is a giant nuclear reactor, made up of hydrogen and helium gas. To produce light, it converts hydrogen into helium through fusion reactions, and that energy pushes back against the crushing weight of its outer layers. When all the hydrogen is turned into helium, the Sun will no longer generate sufficient energy to counteract the pull of gravity. The core will contract inward, heating up the interior to sufficient temperatures to fuse helium into carbon. Hydrogen fusion will migrate to the outer layers. The Sun will puff outward and turn into a red giant, expanding those outer layers as the core collapses. The outer layers will engulf the nearest planets, including Earth, which will plunge into the core and be vaporized, triggering an outburst of energy and matter. The Sun will continue to burn for a few more billion years before it ultimately cools into a black dwarf star.

This process only occurs a few times a year in the Milky Way. Astronomers have observed the early stages of the process (planets so close to their host stars that they will inevitably be engulfed when those stars expand) along with the aftermath of this stellar evolution (when the stars have puffed up and seem to have peculiar properties, such as their rotational speed or chemical composition). But scientists have never witnessed the actual devouring. That's what makes this discovery so exciting, according to co-author Kishalay De, an MIT postdoc: This is the first direct evidence of a crucial stage of stellar evolution.

Enlarge / The 7040U series has four different CPUs, mostly separated by the number of CPU and GPU cores. (credit: AMD)

Today AMD announced additional details about its new Ryzen 7040U series of laptop chips, which bring the company's newest Zen 4 CPU architecture and RDNA 3 integrated graphics into thin-and-light laptops. Though just part of AMD's (often-confusing) Ryzen 7000 laptop lineup, the 7040U processors will be the ones to hold out for if you want to maximize performance without stepping up to a larger laptop with a dedicated GPU.

AMD has delayed the announcement of these chips twice. AMD announced in mid-March that systems would begin shipping in April, and it's currently the beginning of May. One of the laptop makers offering a Ryzen 7040-series laptop, Framework, won't actually be shipping its preorders until sometime in Q3, though the larger PC companies will presumably be able to get things to market a bit sooner.

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  AMD published a number of broad, flattering performance comparisons. Here, AMD compares itself to the i7-1360P, which isn't quite Intel's fastest CPU for these kinds of PCs. [credit: AMD ]

For most apps and games, the most relevant thing about the Ryzen 7040 chips is the improved CPU and GPU performance. The top-end Ryzen 7 7840U combines 8 CPU cores running at speeds of up to 5.1 GHz and a Radeon 780M GPU with 12 RDNA 3 cores. The Ryzen 5 7640U has 6 CPU cores running at up to 4.9 GHz and a Radeon 760M GPU with 8 cores. The Ryzen 5 7540U has the same 6 CPU cores but with a lower-end Radeon 740M GPU with 4 cores, while the Ryzen 3 7440U combines the same Radeon 740M GPU with 4 CPU cores.