Month: April 2024

Enlarge / The plague bacteria, Yersina pestis, is a close relative of the toxin-producing species studied here. (credit: Callista Images)

Life-forms with no brain are capable of some astounding things. It might sound like sci-fi nightmare fuel, but some bacteria can wage kamikaze chemical warfare.

Pathogenic bacteria make us sick by secreting toxins. While the release of smaller toxin molecules is well understood, methods of releasing larger toxin molecules have mostly eluded us until now. Researcher Stefan Raunser, director of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology, and his team finally found out how the insect pathogen Yersinia entomophaga (which attacks beetles) releases its large-molecule toxin.

They found that designated “soldier cells” sacrifice themselves and explode to deploy the poison inside their victim. “YenTc appears to be the first example of an anti-eukaryotic toxin using this newly established type of secretion system,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Nature.

Enlarge / Artistic rendition of a black hole merging with a neutron star. LIGO/VIRGO/KAGRA detected a merger involving a neutron star and what might be a very light black hole falling within the "mass gap" range. (credit: LIGO-India/ Soheb Mandhai)

The LIGO/VIRGO/KAGRA collaboration searches the universe for gravitational waves produced by the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. It has now announced the detection of a signal indicating a merger between two compact objects, one of which has an unusual intermediate mass—heavier than a neutron star and lighter than a black hole. The collaboration provided specifics of their analysis of the merger and the "mystery object" in a draft manuscript posted to the physics arXiv, suggesting that the object might be a very low-mass black hole.

LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington state, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced VIRGO, came online in 2016. In Japan, KAGRA is the first gravitational-wave detector in Asia and the first to be built underground. Construction began on LIGO-India in 2021, and physicists expect it will turn on sometime after 2025.

To date, the collaboration has detected dozens of merger events since its first Nobel Prize-winning discovery. Early detected mergers involved either two black holes or two neutron stars, but in 2021, LIGO/VIRGO/KAGRA confirmed the detection of two separate "mixed" mergers between black holes and neutron stars.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Canadian telecom Bell Canada has been pushing its cloud-based DVR service to its Fibe TV subscribers for years. While it has given customers advantages, like the ability to view their recordings from more devices, such as phones, compared to using local DVR storage, users don't have as much control over the recordings as they thought they had.

On May 1, Fibe TV will automatically delete recordings stored on its Cloud PVR (personal video recorder) offering once the recordings hit 61 days of age, as confirmed by Canadian online newspaper Daily Hive. Currently, customers maintain access to recordings stored via Cloud PVR for 365 days.

Fibe TV apparently started alerting customers of the upcoming change this month.

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  Chipolo's trackers. The keychain tracker takes a CR2023 battery; the card is not rechargeable. [credit: Chipolo ]

After an announcement that ended up being a year early, Android's version of Tile/AirTags is ready to launch. Google has been gearing up on the software side of things to enable a Bluetooth tracking network on Android, and the company's two tracking tag hardware partners, Pebblebee and Chipolo, now have ship dates. The two companies each have a press release today, with Pebblebee saying its trackers will ship in "late May" while Chipolo says it will ship "after May 27th." Google has a blog post out, too, promising "additional Bluetooth tags from Eufy, Jio, Motorola and more" later this year.

Both sets of devices have been up for preorder for a year now, and it doesn't seem like anything has changed since. Both companies are offering little Bluetooth trackers in a keychain tag or credit card format, and Pebblebee has a third stick-on tag format. They'll all be anonymously tracked by Android's 3 billion device Bluetooth tracker network, and the device owner will be able to see them in Google's "Find my device" app.

Chipolo's "One Point" key chain tag is the only thing that takes a CR2032 coin cell battery, while the company's credit card tracker is not rechargeable. Pebblebee's key chain, credit card, and stick-on tracker all have rechargeable batteries, including the wallet card, which is very rare! Nothing has UWB for precise location tracking—everything uses a speaker. Both companies sell multiple SKUs of what look like the exact same product, but are locked to Google's or Apple's network—no switching allowed.

Enlarge / The TSMC facility in Phoenix, Arizona. (credit: The Washington Post / Contributor | The Washington Post)

The US Department of Commerce has proposed another round of CHIPS Act funding up to $6.6 billion for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which President Joe Biden hopes will "support the construction of leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing facilities right here in the United States."

With this award—which includes additional funding up to $5 billion in low-cost government loans—TSMC has agreed to increase funding in Arizona fabrication plants to $65 billion. That's the largest foreign direct investment in a new project in US history, the Commerce Department said, and it will fuel construction of TSMC's third Arizona fab.

According to Biden, "these facilities will manufacture the most advanced chips in the world," putting the US "on track to produce 20 percent of the world’s leading-edge semiconductors by 2030."