Apple Finds Issue With Logic Board In Some 2018 MacBook Airs, Offers Free Repair

Apple says a “very small number” of MacBook Air models have an issue with the main logic board and can be replaced at no cost to customers. 9to5Mac reports: Apple’s memo to repair staff notes that it has identified “an issue” with the main logic board specifically in Retina, 13-inch, 2018 MacBook Air models with certain serial numbers. Apple will be…

Xiaomi Threatens Legal Action Against Users Who Call Its Mimoji App a Copycat of Apple’s Memoji

From a report: Apple’s Memoji may have become the more popular 3D avatar feature for smartphones, but Xiaomi wants people to know that its similarly-named version — Mimoji — came first, despite increasingly confusing overlap between the apps’ names and features. Moreover, it’s apparently threatening legal action against writers who call it a copycat without providing proof. In September 2017, Apple…

Algorithms Help Turbines Share the Wind

carbonnation writes: As Spock so elegantly opined, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Today Stanford U researchers presented the clearest proof to date that self-sacrifice can also benefit wind farms. In their demonstration at an Alberta wind farm, one turbine sacrifices a fifth of its generating potential to enable better performance by…

What Bill Gates Wishes More People Knew About Paul Allen

Microsoft’s original co-founder Paul Allen was honored posthumously with a lifetime achievement award for philanthropy this week at the Forbes Philanthropy summit. Bill Gates remembers Allen as “one of the most intellectually curious people I’ve ever known,” adding “I wish more people understood just how wide-ranging his giving was,” and shared his remembrances at the ceremony: Later in life, Paul gave…

Honesty is Majority Policy in Lost Wallet Experiment

If you find a wallet stuffed with bank notes, do you pocket the cash or track down the owner to return it? We can each speak for ourselves, but now a team of economists have put the unsuspecting public to the test in a mass social experiment involving 17,000 “lost” wallets in 40 countries. From a report: They found that a…

Small currents for big gains in spintronics

University of Tokyo researchers have created an electronic component that demonstrates functions and abilities important to future generations of computational logic and memory devices. It is between one and two orders of magnitude more power efficient than previous attempts to create a component with the same kind of behavior. This could have applications in the emerging field of spintronics. …

‘Robots’ Are Not ‘Coming For Your Job’ — Management Is

merbs writes: If the robots are simply “coming,” if they just show up and relieve a helpless lot of humans of their livelihoods, then no one is to blame for this techno-elemental phenomenon, and little is to be done about it beyond bracing for impact. Not the executives swayed by consulting firms who insist the future is in AI customer service…

Physicists ‘teleport’ logic operation between separated ions

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have teleported a computer circuit instruction known as a quantum logic operation between two separated ions (electrically charged atoms), showcasing how quantum computer programs could carry out tasks in future large-scale quantum networks. …

PlayStation Gamers Are Now Authoring Their Own Games With ‘Dreams’ For PS4

dryriver explains the new buzz around “Dreams” for PS4 (now in open access). Created by the studio that made PS4’s Big Little World, Dreams “is not a game. It is more of an end to end, create-your-own-3D-game toolkit that happens to run on PS4 rather than a PC… essentially an easy to use game-engine a la Unity or UnrealEngine.” Dreams lets…

Europe Sticks a Knife Into Vegan Meat

The European Union is trying to put vegetables back in their box. From a report: The trading bloc’s agriculture committee wants to ban vegan food products from using terms such as burger and sausage on their labels. The logic is that consumers expect their burgers to be made of pork or beef and will be duped by plant-based pretenders. More likely…