Month: February 2024

Enlarge / A cover image for Neuromancer included in Apple's press release. (credit: Apple)

It's been a long time coming: A TV series adapted from the famed William Gibson novel Neuromancer will air on Apple TV+. The streamer ordered 10 episodes.

The order comes after decades of failed attempts to greenlight a screen adaptation of the 1984 science fiction novel. The most recent widely known failed attempt was by Deadpool director Tim Miller in 2017.

The series will be helmed by showrunner, writer, and producer Graham Roland, who until now was best known as the creator of the AMC TV series Dark Winds and for helming the series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime Video. Roland will share a co-creator credit on Neuromancer with J.D. Dillard, a TV writer known for his work on the recent Twilight Zone reboot series.

We've been following the annual Dance Your PhD contest for several years now, delighting in the many creative approaches researchers have devised to adapt their doctoral theses into movement—from "nano-sponge" materials and superconductivity to the physics of atmospheric molecular clusters and the science of COVID-19. This year's winner is Weliton Menário Costa of the Australian National University for his thesis "Personality, Social Environment, and Maternal-level Effects: Insights from a Wild Kangaroo Population." His video entry, "Kangaroo Time," is having a bit of a viral moment, charming viewers with its catchy beat and colorful, quirky mix of dance styles and personalities—both human and kangaroo.

As we reported previously, the Dance Your PhD contest was established in 2008 by science journalist John Bohannon. It was previously sponsored by Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and is now sponsored by the AI company Primer, where Bohannon is the director of science. Bohannon told Slate in 2011 that he came up with the idea while trying to figure out how to get a group of stressed-out PhD students in the middle of defending their theses to let off a little steam. So he put together a dance party at Austria's Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, including a contest for whichever candidate could best explain their thesis topics with interpretive dance.

The contest was such a hit that Bohannon started getting emails asking when the next would be—and Dance Your PhD has continued ever since. It's now in its 16th year. There are four broad categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social science, with a fairly liberal interpretation of what topics fall under each. All category winners receive $750, while Costa, as the overall champion, will receive an additional $2,000.

Enlarge / Ford was the first OEM to announce it was switching to J3400, and it's the first automaker to gain access to the Tesla Supercharger network. (credit: Ford)

Today, Ford electric vehicles gained access to the Tesla Supercharger network. Last May, the Blue Oval was the first automaker to throw its lot in with what was then called the North American Charging Standard and is now known as J3400. Ford proved to be the first domino falling, and with Stellantis' announcement earlier this month that it too would move to J3400, the more compact DC fast-charging plug will be the de facto standard in the next couple of years.

Until Ford made the switch, every non-Tesla EV in North America had settled on the Combined Charging Standard 1 plug (with the exception of the Nissan Leaf, which still uses CHAdeMO). CCS1 and J3400 use the same electronics communication protocols—only the actual plug and socket are different.

But it will take some time for car makers to start building J3400 ports into their EVs. That should begin next year, probably with the introduction of model year 2026. This means that EVs older than MY26 will need to use a passive adapter to mate a J3400 charger cable with a CCS1-equipped EV.

Enlarge / Midrange GPUs like AMD's Radeon RX 7600 or Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 can benefit a lot from DLSS and FSR upscaling, which can improve image quality and framerates beyond what the hardware can render natively. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

One of the most interesting developments in 3D gaming in the last half-decade or so is the advent of advanced upscaling technologies—features like Nvidia's Deep-Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), and Intel's Xe Super Sampling (XeSS). These technologies all aim to provide better, sharper image quality when playing at non-native resolutions, and when they're working well, they can boost frame rates and help squeeze a bit more life out of an older or lower-end GPU.

The problem has been that game developers need to actually support these technologies in their games, and it's incumbent on developers to support each individual upscaling technology. DLSS usually looks a bit better than FSR, but it requires an Nvidia GPU; FSR works on just about anything but doesn't look quite as good. (Intel's XeSS exists somewhere in the middle, in that it works with any modern GPU but looks best when it can leverage Intel's GPU hardware.)

Microsoft is stepping in to try to straighten up this muddle of conceptually similar, executionally different technologies with a new API called DirectSR (the SR is for Super Resolution). The new API was announced in a blog post about Microsoft's 2024 Game Developers Conference sessions, and it was developed by Microsoft "in partnership with GPU hardware vendors."