Rebranded Ethernet Technology Consortium Unveils 800 Gigabit Ethernet

The Ethernet Technology Consortium, the non-IEEE, tech industry-backed consortium formerly known as the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium, has announced a new 800 Gigabit Ethernet technology. AnandTech reports: As for their new 800 Gigabit Ethernet standard, at a high level 800GbE can be thought of as essentially a wider version of 400GbE. The standard is primarily based around using existing 106.25G lanes,…

Verizon Now Handling an Average of 800 Million Wireless Calls a Day

Phone calls have made a comeback in the pandemic. While the nation’s biggest telecommunications providers prepared for a huge shift toward more internet use from home, what they didn’t expect was an even greater surge in plain old voice calls, a medium that had been going out of fashion for years. From a report: Verizon said it was now handling an…

How Robert Cringely Scored 5 Million N95 Masks From China

This week, tech pundit Robert Cringely described how a chance conversation with China-based entrepreneur Anina led to a friend with a garment factory “now making fully certified N-95 respirators with no clear distribution plan.”
Late on a Sunday night with the tech world in shut-down, how long would it take for me to find someone looking for up to five million N-95…

Disneyland Is Closed. 31,000 Employees Given 18-Day Paid Vacation

There’s a Three Stooges movie where aliens try to attack the earthlings where it will hurt them the most — Disneyland. The Los Angeles Times points out that in fact the park has been closed just three times in the park’s 65-year-history. But now Business Insider reports: As the spread of the novel coronavirus impacts cities and communities around the world,…

Turbulent convection at the heart of stellar activity

In their interiors, stars are structured in a layered, onion-like fashion. In those with solar-like temperatures, the core is followed by the radiation zone. There, the heat from within is led outwards by means of radiation. As the stellar plasma becomes cooler farther outside, heat transport is dominated by plasma flows: hot plasma from within rises to the surface, cools, and…

India’s Yes Bank Breakdown Disrupts Walmart’s PhonePe Among Dozen Other Services

Tens of millions of merchants and users in India are struggling to make online transactions and use several popular services after the nation’s central bank seized control of Yes Bank, the fourth largest lender in the country. From a report: The emergency takeover of the private sector bank has taken off several financial startups that rely on it for facilitating services…

The Rich Are Preparing for Coronavirus Differently

The new coronavirus knows no national borders or social boundaries. That doesn’t mean that social boundaries don’t exist. An anonymous reader shares a report: “En route to Paris,” Gwyneth Paltrow wrote on Instagram last week, beneath a shot of herself on an airplane heading to Paris Fashion Week and wearing a black face mask. “I’ve already been in this movie,” she…

Physicists model the supernovae that result from pulsating supergiants like Betelgeuse

Betelgeuse has been the center of significant media attention lately. The red supergiant is nearing the end of its life, and when a star over 10 times the mass of the Sun dies, it goes out in spectacular fashion. With its brightness recently dipping to the lowest point in the last hundred years, many space enthusiasts are excited that Betelgeuse may…

What’s new on Coursera for Business – January 2020

By Kyle Clark, Senior Skills Transformation Consultant 2020 is already proving to be an exciting year for skill development on Coursera. Our university and industry partners launched over 60 courses in January – an average of 2 courses per day. Our new courses range in topic from IT automation and feature engineering to visual analytics, […]
The post What’s new on Coursera…

Current Model For Storing Nuclear Waste May Not Be Sufficiently Safe, Study Says

pgmrdlm quotes a report from ABC News: The current model the U.S. and other countries plan to use to store high-level nuclear waste may not be as safe as previously thought. The materials used to store the waste “will likely degrade faster than anyone previously knew” because of the way the materials interact, according to research published Tuesday in the journal…