Si vives en los EE. UU. y buscas un precio razonable Samsung Teléfono inteligente de Promoción móvilHay buenas noticias para ti.
Boost Mobile, la cuarta red de telecomunicaciones más grande de Estados Unidos Anunciar Agregará dos nuevos teléfonos Galaxy a su portafolio Galaxia A15 5G y Galaxia A16 5G.
Precio y disponibilidad del Galaxy A15 5G y Galaxy A16 5G en Boost Mobile
Si eres un cliente nuevo o ya estás conectado a la red Boost Mobile, podrás obtener el Galaxy A15 5G por $169.99 y el Galaxy A16 5G por $199.99. Sin embargo, si está transfiriendo su número de cualquier otro proveedor a Boost Mobile, la compañía dice que puede “Obtén el nuevo Galaxy A15 en EE. UU. con los planes Unlimited+ y Unlimited Premium de Boost.“
La historia continúa después del vídeo.
Si bien el Galaxy A15 5G está disponible en Boost Mobile, el Galaxy A16 5G estará disponible en Boost Mobile el 20 de enero de 2025. Puede obtener los dispositivos en la tienda en línea oficial de la compañía o en tiendas fuera de línea. Además, Boost Mobile dice que estos teléfonos se pueden emparejar “Con cualquier plan de datos ilimitados de Boost Mobile desde $25 por mes.“
Especificaciones del Galaxy A15 5G y Galaxy A16 5G
Puedes ver las especificaciones del Galaxy A15 5G y Galaxy A16 5G en la imagen a continuación.
Al comentar sobre la incorporación de dos teléfonos Galaxy al portafolio de Boost Mobile, Sean Lee, vicepresidente senior de productos de consumo y marketing de la compañía, dijo:El Samsung Galaxy A15 5G y el Galaxy A16 5G ponen la increíble experiencia Samsung 5G en manos de los clientes a un mejor precio. En Boost Mobile, estamos comprometidos a brindar experiencias excepcionales a través de dispositivos de alta calidad que mantengan a nuestros clientes conectados, entretenidos y productivos a un precio asequible.”
De forma gratuita, el nuevo servicio de streaming respaldado por la BBC, ITV y otras emisoras públicas británicas estará disponible en Televisores Amazon Fire Las dos empresas dijeron el lunes, tras un “acuerdo histórico” con el gigante tecnológico estadounidense.
El acuerdo es una victoria para la BBC, ITV, Channel 4 y Channel 5, cuya empresa conjunta, llamada 'Everyone TV', se lanzó de forma gratuita a principios de este año y permite a los espectadores transmitir televisión en vivo y contenido bajo demanda de forma gratuita con la compra. de televisores inteligentes. Servicio de rodamientos.
Esta asociación ayudará a llevar el contenido de las cuatro emisoras públicas, que están obligadas por la ley del Reino Unido a proporcionar programación de interés público, a más hogares británicos, a través de televisores inteligentes que utilizan… Amazonas El famoso sistema operativo Fire.
“Un acuerdo de este tipo, entre un gigante tecnológico y quienes trabajan en interés público, es fantástico”, dijo Jonathan Thompson, director ejecutivo de Everyone TV.
“Representa un avance importante para ampliar la disponibilidad de Freely y garantizar así que las audiencias del Reino Unido puedan acceder a la televisión gratuita en el futuro”.
El lanzamiento de Freely en abril fue la primera vez que las cuatro emisoras públicas británicas se unieron para crear un servicio de streaming, mientras buscan una televisión en vivo preparada para el futuro en la era del streaming.
Ofrece gratuitamente 70.000 horas de contenido bajo demanda, más que cualquier otra plataforma de streaming importante en Gran Bretaña, incluida… netflix, disney, Amazon Primey AppleTVSegún datos de Ampere Analysis, con sede en Londres.
Every TV también firmó un acuerdo con el fabricante de televisores TCL, que incluirá Freely en sus nuevos televisores inteligentes 2024, dijo.
An AlphaFold3 model of a bacterial enzyme bound to a chemical.Credit: Isomorphic Labs
Since the powerhouse artificial intelligence (AI) tool AlphaFold2 was released in 2021, scientists have used the protein-structure-prediction model to map one of our cells’ biggest machines, discover drugs and chart the universe of every known protein.
Despite such successes, John Jumper — who leads AlphaFold’s development at Google DeepMind in London — is regularly asked whether the tool can do more. Requests include the ability to predict the shape of proteins that contain function-altering modifications, or their structure alongside those of DNA, RNA and other cellular players that are crucial to a protein’s duties. “I would say ‘no, you can’t put that into AlphaFold’,” Jumper says. “I would rather solve their problems.”
What’s next for AlphaFold and the AI protein-folding revolution
The latest version of AlphaFold, described on 8 May in Nature1, aims to do just that — by giving scientists the ability to predict the structures of proteins during interactions with other molecules. But whereas DeepMind made the 2021 version of the tool freely available to researchers without restriction, AlphaFold3 is limited to non-commercial use through a DeepMind website.
Frank Uhlmann, a biochemist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who gained early access to AlphaFold3, has been impressed with its capabilities. “This is just revolutionary,” he says. “It’s going to democratize structural-biology research.”
Another revolution
“Revolutionary” is how many scientists have described the impact of AlphaFold2 on biology since it was unleashed2 (the first version3, released in 2020, was good, but not game-changing, Jumper has said). The AI predicts a protein’s structures from its amino-acid sequence, often with startling accuracy that is on par with that of experimental methods.
A freely available AlphaFold database holds the predicted structure of nearly every known protein. The availability of the AlphaFold2 code has also allowed other researchers to easily build on it: an early hack enabled the prediction of interactions between multiple proteins, a capability included in an update to AlphaFold2.
Jumper’s ennui over explaining AlphaFold’s inability to predict other aspects of a protein’s ecosystem stems from their importance: protein modifications, such as the addition of a phosphate molecule, can allow cells to respond to external cues, an infection, for instance, and set off a chain of events in response. Interactions with DNA, RNA and other chemicals are essential to many proteins’ duties.
Real-world examples of these interactions are readily available in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), a repository of experimentally determined structures that is the foundation of AlphaFold’s capabilities. An ideal tool would be able to predict structures of a protein alongside its accessories, says Jumper. “We want to solve the whole PDB.”
Major upgrade
To create AlphaFold3, Jumper, DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and their colleagues made large changes to its predecessor: the latest version depends less on information about proteins related to a target sequence, for instance. AlphaFold3 also uses a type of machine-learning network — called a diffusion model — that is used by image-generating AIs such as Midjourney. “It’s a pretty substantial change,” says Jumper.
AlphaFold’s new rival? Meta AI predicts shape of 600 million proteins
AlphaFold3, the researchers found, substantially outperforms existing software tools at predicting the structure of proteins and their partners. For instance, scientists — especially those interested in finding new drugs — have conventionally used ‘docking’ software to physically model how well chemicals bind to proteins (usually with help from the proteins’ experimentally determined structures). AlphaFold3 proved superior to two docking programs, as well as to another AI-based tool called RoseTTAFold All-Atom4.
Uhlmann’s team has used AlphaFold3 to predict the structure of DNA-interacting proteins involved in copying the genome, a step that is essential to cell division. Experiments in which proteins are mutated to alter such interactions suggest that the predictions were usually spot on, Uhlmann says. “It’s an amazing discovery tool,” he adds.
“The structure-prediction performance of AlphaFold3 is very impressive,” says David Baker, a computational biophysicist at the University of Washington in Seattle. It’s better than RoseTTAFold All-Atom, which his team developed4, he adds.
Restricted access
Unlike RoseTTAFold and AlphaFold2, scientists will not be able to run their own version of AlphaFold3, nor will the code underlying AlphaFold3 or other information obtained after training the model be made public. Instead, researchers will have access to an ‘AlphaFold3 server’, on which they can input their protein sequence of choice, alongside a selection of accessory molecules.
How AlphaFold can realize AI’s full potential in structural biology
Uhlmann likes what he has so far seen of the server, which he says is simpler and quicker than the version of AlphaFold2 that he has access to at his institute. “You upload it and 10 minutes later, you’ve got the structures,” he says. For most scientists, “the server is really going to smash it. Everybody can do it.”
Access to the AlphaFold3 server, however, is limited. Scientists are currently restricted to 10 predictions a day, and it is not possible to obtain structures of proteins bound to possible drugs.
Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spin-off company in London, is using AlphaFold3 to develop drugs, both through its own pipeline and with other pharmaceutical companies. “We have to strike a balance between making sure that this is accessible and has the impact in the scientific community as well as not compromising Isomorphic’s ability to pursue commercial drug discovery,” says Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind’s head of AI science and a study co-author.
Because of the restriction on modelling protein interactions with possible drugs, “I can’t see it having the impact AlphaFold2 had”, says Brian Shoichet, a pharmaceutical chemist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has been using AlphaFold structures to hunt for therapeutic candidates.
Sergey Ovchinnikov, an evolutionary biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, had hoped to develop a web version of AlphaFold3, as he and his colleagues have done for AlphaFold2 shortly after its code was released. But based on the ample information provided in the latest Nature paper, it shouldn’t take long for other teams to create their own versions, he says. “I would expect open-source solutions before the end of the year.”
The King officially gave his final approval: the controversial reform to the UK’s Investigative Powers Act (IPA) is all set to become law. The government seeks to widen its digital surveillance capabilities “to protect the British people” in spite of technological change. Technologists and digital rights experts foresee a rather different outcome, however, reminiscent of a privacy nightmare.
The so-called “Snooper’s Charter” is already highly controversial, experts say, and these amendments are seen as “significant privacy-weakening changes.” Worse still, this reform isn’t the only legislative effort to broaden the UK’s surveillance laws. With two more proposals on the table and the danger of the Online Safety Bill’s new powers looming in the background, it looks like we are only at the tip of the UK Surveillance State iceberg—which not even security software like VPN services can shield us from.
“From a civil society perspective, the IPA and its amendments are a problem because they enable suspicionless mass surveillance. From an Internet perspective, the danger of these laws is that they give the government the power to introduce (or preserve) systemic vulnerabilities in communication services on which we all depend,” Robin Wilton, Director at the Internet Society, told me.
What’s the Investigatory Powers Act reform all about?
Officially introduced into the House of Lords during the latest King’s speech in November, the amendments to the already infamous 2016 Investigatory Power Act gives authorities more control over citizens’ data and the platforms they use.
Legislators agreed to expand the definition of Bulk Personal Datasets (BPDs) by creating a new category of personal data that law enforcement can gather when “the individual has low to no reasonable expectation of privacy.” The likes of CCTV footage or images posted to social media are examples of the data that falls within this category and subject to lower safeguards.
According to Wilton, though, there is no such thing as personal data with no privacy implications. He believes this “redefining work” is rather a way to expand the data the government can access, to the detriment of people’s privacy. BPDs have indeed formed a “largely opaque part of the UK security services’ data collection regime for years,” he said, due to a lack of transparency on how this information is collected and used.
“For the Government to be weakening the safeguards for personal data, in an era when we know that data mining and machine learning are constantly finding new ways to interpret and act on personal data, is irresponsible, and dangerously short-sighted,” Wilton added.
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Authorities will also be permitted to access internet connection records to surveil suspects and identify who connects to what app or website, at what time, and so on. Agencies can already access this data under specific criteria—for example, when the person of interest’s identity is known—but the changes widen the purpose. That’s something the Director of privacy advocacy group Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo, described as “generalized surveillance,” Politico reported.
While legislators eventually added a ‘triple-lock’ authorization process for surveilling parliamentarians in the latest round of talks, the now agreed Bill remains pretty much the same as its early versions.
(Image credit: Shutterstock/Bloomicon)
Weaker privacy isn’t the only casualty of the IPA’s reform, either. Experts warn that the changes may eventually compromise Britons’ data security. That’s because, under the agreed amendments, tech companies must seek approval from the Home Office before adding new security or privacy features, encryption included.
Talking to the Financial Times in November, Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker described the law as a “bellicose proposal” that “will make it nearly impossible for any service to operate with integrity in the UK.” CEO and CO-Founder of UK-based encrypted service provider Element, Matthew Hodgson also expressed his concerns. He told TechRadar, “When pairing this with the new requirement to not introduce changes during a review process, we’re essentially looking at companies being prevented from changing their own products.”
The government argues these measures are necessary to prevent companies from designing services that may prevent lawful access to users’ information. Yet, technologists claim this will actually undermine our online safety.
Commenting on this point, Andrew Sullivan, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Internet Society, told me: “You shouldn’t have vulnerable systems if you know about them. If you know that there’s a problem, you should tell people. Writing legislation that allows the government potentially to drag its heels if they have some reason to do so, it’s bad for everybody.”
Did you know?
After harsh criticism from the tech world, the UK government eventually admitted the Online Safety Act’s Clause 122 cannot currently be enforced as the client-side scanning technology needed for this isn’t available right now. What’s deemed as the ‘spy clause’ wasn’t completely removed from the law, but rather postponed until it is “technically feasible” to deploy.
Sullivan believes legislators might have taken inspiration from large intelligence agencies that generally exploit product vulnerabilities to access people’s communication and other data. “The challenge with this sort of approach is that there’s essentially no way to know who else knows about this vulnerability,” he added.
Digital rights groups, cryptographers, academics, VPN, and encrypted messaging app providers are also worried the IPA amendments may be used together with the new provisions under the Online Safety Act to obtain greater control over public communications.
The law, which finally received Royal Assent in October 2023, especially attracted harsh criticism for its efforts to weaken encryption for enabling authorities to access, collect, and read anyone’s conversation to facilitate the hunt for illegal materials linked, for example, to children’s sexual abuse or terrorism.
Preventive surveillance
Contrary to what its name suggests, also the second version of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill (DPDI2) looks like everything but good news for people’s privacy.
After officially being presented in March 2023, 26 privacy advocate groups—including Open Rights Group, Privacy International, Liberty, Big Brother Watch, and Index on Censorship—signed an open letter warning the proposed changes would create “a greatly weakened data protection structure” instead.
Things got far worse last November, though, as Sunak and his ministers also added new powers to spy on Brits’ bank accounts as a means to clamp down on financial frauds. This means that instead of the Department for Work and Pensions requesting each benefit claimant’s account details if they suspect wrongdoings, banks will be expected to run blank monthly checks.
“Such proposals do away with the longstanding democratic principle in Britain that state surveillance should follow suspicion rather than vice versa and it would be dangerous for everyone if the government reverses this presumption of innocence,” said Carlo from the Big Brother Watch, adding that the government should probably be better off investing money to help people in need instead of spying of them.
Many politicians are speaking out against extended welfare surveillance powers (see video below). Yet, the Department for Work and Pensions is already hiring up to 25 covert surveillance officers to snoop on benefit claimants, raising concerns among other employees—the Big Issue reported.
Please watch this 🧵 of videos from today’s EXCORIATING speeches in parliament shaming the government’s attempt to spy on all our bank accounts.The media has barely reported this as the Govt is quietly rushing in these powers – but parliamentarians are fuming. Must watch! https://t.co/KMsI2oizazApril 22, 2024
Then, in an effort to clamp down on shoplifters, the government also plans to invest over £55 million in expanding facial recognition systems across England and Wales. This investment follows what’s known as Project Pegasus, under which some of the UK’s biggest retailers like Marks & Spencer, Boots, and Primark already run their CCTV images via police databases using facial recognition technology.
Again, civil societies have been very critical of this proposal. Facial recognition is, in fact, well-known to be way far from flawless.
Carlo deemed the government’s plan an “abysmal waste of public money on dangerously authoritarian and inaccurate facial recognition surveillance.”
“Criminals should be brought to justice—but papering over the cracks of broken policing with Orwellian tech is not a solution. Live facial recognition may be commonplace in China but these Government plans put the UK completely out of sync with the rest of the democratic world,” she added.
A land grab
With the general elections scheduled for later this year, the current UK government is trying to push as many laws as possible before its mandate is up—and, as we have seen, more surveillance and investigative powers are a pressing front.
However, according to the Internet Society and other experts, politicians seem to miss the point when it comes to the tech world. Similar to the Online Safety Act and online child sexual abuse, there are no quick and convenient fixes to systemic social and economic problems. Likewise, enforcing these might weaken the country as a tech hub while bad actors find other ways to keep committing crimes.
All in all, Wilton believes this rash of laws is rather a “land grab” than anything else. “Just as framing the anti-encryption debate in terms of child abuse is intended to toxify any opposition to it, so this legislative program will toxify any future attempts to repeal surveillance laws—assuming, of course, that a future Government would want to repeal them,” he told me.
“After all, as Snowden clearly demonstrated, the Blair and Brown Governments were every bit as keen on surveillance as the current one.”
On the outskirts of Beijing sits a set of unassuming buildings marked ‘X’, for ‘extreme’. Inside the Synergetic Extreme Condition User Facility (SECUF), researchers from all over the world are pushing matter to its limits with extreme magnetic fields, pressures and temperatures, and examining it in new ways with extremely precise resolution in time.
One particularly tantalizing goal of many researchers using this $US220-million toolbox is to discover new superconductors, materials that conduct electricity without resistance. “This kind of combination of extreme conditions offers a very good chance for new discoveries,” says SECUF’s founding director Li Lu, a condensed-matter physicist at the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Physics (IOP) in Beijing.
Understanding the mechanisms that underlie superconductivity is an important step in the global race to finding a material that exhibits this phenomenon at room temperature, instead of under frigid conditions. Such a discovery could open the door to faster computers and cut electricity consumption, among other benefits.
Under extreme conditions, matter exhibits properties that would otherwise remain hidden. For instance, when some ordinary-seeming materials are subjected to high pressures and extreme cold, they become superconductors. But measuring superconductivity can be finicky, because it can show up differently depending on the technique used, says Konstantin Kamenev, a physicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who specializes in extreme-conditions engineering and instrumentation. The ability to mix and match such conditions at a single facility allows researchers to characterize their samples more fully and efficiently than they could otherwise. “It’s like a one-stop shop,” says Jinguang Cheng, a condensed-matter physicist at the IOP.
Extreme toolbox
Since September last year, all 22 experimental stations at SECUF have moved to full operation after a one-year trial period. Tucked into a corner of one of SECUF’s brightly lit rooms, Cheng oversees a station that combines a cubic anvil cell — a device that squeezes materials under enormous pressure on six sides — with two superconducting magnets and helium-based cooling systems. The sample-torturing instrument can be used to measure a range of electronic properties and characteristics. Although conventional high-pressure tools, such as diamond anvils, can accommodate samples that are only the width of a human hair, SECUF’s cubic anvil cell can compress larger samples, making it easier to measure electronic properties in finer detail, says Cheng.
He says that he and his colleagues have, in this way, discovered a handful of superconductors, including a rare magnetic one1 and another based on manganese2.
The quantum oscillation station combines two superconducting magnets with ultra-low temperatures. Credit: Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Behind a yellow warning barrier at the other end of the room sits a powerful superconducting magnet. Rui Zhou, a condensed-matter physicist at the IOP, and his colleagues have set up a station that combines the magnet with ultra-low temperatures to perform nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements. The technique tracks the behaviour of atomic nuclei in high magnetic fields. It offers a way of peering into the mechanisms that underlie high-temperature superconductors — those that operate above −195.8 °C.
SECUF’s magnet produces a weaker field — just 26 tesla — than do those at other facilities, such as the record-holding 45 T hybrid magnet, which is partially superconducting, at the US National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) in Tallahassee, Florida, and the 37 T resistive magnet at France’s National Laboratory for Intense Magnetic Fields in Grenoble, which require a lot of power to run. But it can maintain a stable magnetic field for up to one month instead of a few days or hours, because it guzzles much less power, says Zhou. That makes it possible for researchers to conduct longer experiments on the same sample, he explains.
The cubic anvil cell is located on the back wall, with black and yellow hazard tape. It can accommodate much larger samples than other high-pressure devices.Credit: Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Another magnet system is enabling other types of superconductivity research. Gang Li, a condensed-matter physicist at the IOP, heads a station that combines blisteringly cold temperatures with a 30 T superconducting magnet and a 20 T one to detect quantum oscillations — physical phenomena that are used to map the electronic ‘fingerprint’ of materials. Last July, Alexander Eaton, a condensed-matter physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues spent two weeks using the station to unpick the electronic properties of an unusual superconductor called uranium ditelluride3. “It was the only place we could do the experiment we wanted to do,” says Eaton.
Mix and match
Other superconductivity researchers are using multiple tools at SECUF. Guanghan Cao, a condensed-matter physicist at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, used the cubic anvil cell and NMR to probe an intriguing chromium-based material he had discovered by accident. Cao and his colleagues spotted hints of superconductivity when they subjected it to high pressures using the cubic anvil cell4. Over at the NMR station, the researchers were also able to catch a glimpse of the compound’s magnetic properties. The ability to measure the material in multiple ways in one location enabled the researchers to conduct a more in-depth study in less time. “That’s really convenient for us,” Cao says.
Superconductivity isn’t the only phenomena researchers are pursuing at SECUF. Some researchers are using ultrafast lasers to study the properties of semiconductors, whereas others are using a range of instruments to hunt down elusive quantum states of matter. The facility is open to domestic and international users alike, and all proposals are considered equally, says Cheng. But the process will be more selective for all researchers this year to give successful applicants more time at each station, he adds.
Although researchers from all over the world are using the facility, Ali Bangura, a condensed-matter physicist at the NHMFL, says that SECUF could give China an edge over other countries in the quest to achieve room-temperature superconductivity. By expanding the scope of measurements on offer in one location, SECUF “substantially increases the likelihood of groundbreaking discoveries”, says Bangura.
As AI becomes more of a common presence in my companies and organizations across the world, questions are inevitably being asked about the effect the technology will have on human jobs.
With its core task of taking large and complex sets of data, analyzing it to find trends or anomalies, and creating detailed reports, accountancy and finance sounds like a prime example of an industry where AI could supplant human workers – but is this the case?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Oracle NetSuite has been at the forefront of integrating AI tools and services in its eponymous platform, revealing a host of new releases in recent months, but how is the company gearing up to tackle the age of AI?
Time for growth
“There’s an overall challenge when you want to rejuvenate your product, that it’s going to change how it works – it’s on us to make it as natural a transition as possible,” Evan Goldberg, EVP and founder of NetSuite, told us at the company’s recent SuiteConnect London event.
“We’re doing major changes to our user experience – we’ve been investing in it for seven years, and… we’ll keep showing more and more of it,” he added, “it’s meant to be easily adoptable, we’re thinking about the whole next-gen user experience…AI should be super-easy to adopt.”
The company is well set to monitor industry feeling on change and growth, with both Goldberg and Nicky Tozer, SVP EMEA at NetSuite, noting that things are looking rosy right now.
“Even though there is more optimism on growth – people are very cognizant for that growth to be efficient,” Goldberg notes.
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“There’s still enough uncertainty – nobody is going out there and saying we’re just going to go out and spend.”
“People are optimistic that there is going to be improvement, but they aren’t sure when that is going to be,” Tozer adds, highlighting that customers are needing to justify ROI on technology such as AI at higher levels more than ever before – across both boards and investors.
(Image credit: Future / Mike Moore)
“The mantra over the past few years has been about doing more with less,” Goldberg had said in his earlier keynote at the event, “that’s the goal of every technology advance, from the assembly line to the Internet, and that’s certainly the big goal of AI…You need to find your engine for growth.”
When we asked him about this idea of “doing more with less” and how it will actually work in practice, Goldberg notes that automation, and freeing up human workers for more useful tasks is the ultimate aim.
“That’s always the goal of automation – to be able to do things faster and easier – and now even sometimes better than you’ve been able to do them before,” he noted.
Goldberg uses the example of programmers as a role that AI could supposedly easily take over from real people, but, at present, AI seems to be doing far better at assisting them.
“AI tools are really good at writing code, but it turns out that there’s a lot of other things to do as a software engineer – and a lot of those are very high value tasks,” he notes.
“No technology advance so far has ended up with mass unemployment – so I think it’s a good bet that this one won’t either.”
(Image credit: Pixabay)
Looking forward, NetSuite is confident that further growth is on the way, even as companies of all sizes look to pivot and get the most out of AI.
“What we will do is accentuate our existing advantages over competitors – we have the most extensive suite that is truly built from the ground up, for everything to work together,” Goldberg says.
“I’m excited about the fact things are changing so rapidly in the technology landscape, and we have spent much of the past few years putting ourselves in a position where we can leverage it really quickly, experiment, get the technology out to customers, iterate, revise it, and so on.”
The Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear (a) are the latest wireless earbuds from Nothing, unveiled earlier this month – and the updates are already getting underway, with an upgrade to the Transparency Mode coming soon.
That’s the word from Nothing CEO Carl Pei, who says the improvements will be “noticeable”. He’s also asked for users to keep on providing feedback on the wireless earbuds, so further tweaks can be made in the future.
In our Nothing Ear (a) review, we were massively impressed with what the earbuds had to offer, praising the “superb” sound quality, the comfort, the battery life, and the noise cancellation technology – and the $99 / £99 (around AU$192) price.
The Nothing Ear earbuds are a little more expensive at $149 / £129 (around AU$250), but both feature a Transparency Mode you can use if you want to hear what’s happening around you without taking the earbuds out.
Coming soon
Noticeable improvements to transparency mode coming for Ear and Ear (a) soon.Thanks for all the feedback so far, keep it coming!April 26, 2024
We didn’t notice any problems with Transparency Mode when we were testing the Nothing Ear (a), and we haven’t seen any widespread complaints from other users – but it’s always good to see improvements and enhancements added through software updates.
Transparency Mode is perfect when you’re chatting to someone face to face, for example, and want to leave the earbuds in your ears. The on-board mics pipe in sounds from your environment, so you can hear what the other person is saying.
Pei didn’t give any timeline for when the update for the earbuds might appear, only that it would be “soon”. There’s also no indication of what other tweaks could be included in the same software update when the time comes.
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We’d rank both the Nothing Ear and the Nothing Ear (a) as being among the best wireless earbuds available on the market right now, and if they’re going to get regular software updates over time, they’ll continue to get even better.
Edge, Microsoft’s default web browser in Windows 11, is getting new text editing capabilities, including Copilot-assisted rewriting, improved clipboard functionality, and support for handwritten text in forms and web pages via a stylus.
Windows Copilot is the AI assistant that Microsoft has been busy integrating into Windows 11 and various other products, including Microsoft Edge. It was presented as eventually being able to help you with any task on your device, and while it still looks like there’s a way to go before Copilot lives up to that lofty ambition, it is getting there.
The new feature, AI Compose, will make rewrite suggestions for text selected by users in editable parts of a web page and can assist writers with possible phrasing improvements and pointers on sentence structure. It’ll also allow users to change the text suggestions’ tone, format, or length.
MSPowerUser compares the new functionality to the popular AI-powered writing assistance tool Grammarly. Apparently, this update will make Copilot more competitive with Google’s large language model and AI assistant project, Gemini, which is rumored to bring similar features to Google’s rival Chrome web browser.
(Image credit: Shutterstock/Jacob Lund)
Adding support in for digital pens and more
Edge will also get support for digital pen writing that will let users write in web pages’ input fields directly, turning their handwriting into text. Microsoft also describes in a blog post that users will be able to make use of Windows Ink support in Edge to do the following with digital pens:
Enter text by writing with a pen in or near an input field
Delete text by scribbling over words to delete them
Add or remove spaces by drawing vertical lines in the text
Add line breaks by drawing horizontal lines
Other text-related updates that are coming to Edge include a new EditContext API tool for web developers that’s intended to simplify the process of creating custom text editors, an enhanced copy-and-paste function that allows users to copy and paste formatted rich HTML content more reliably, and more control for web developers over Edge’s text prediction function.
I think this certainly has the potential to be a very helpful addition to Edge, because as Microsoft itself points out, a lot of the web’s success in general is due to its form submission and text editing capabilities. Microsoft has also stated that it would like feedback to improve the feature if needed, and this is a feature where it could take the initiative and actively encourage users to try the feature.
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Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau and finance minister Chrystia Freeland hold copies of the 2024 federal budget.Credit: David Kawai/Bloomberg via Getty
Researchers in Canada got most of what they were hoping for in the country’s 2024 federal budget, with a big boost in postgraduate pay and more funding for research and scientific infrastructure.
“We are investing over $5 billion in Canadian brainpower,” said finance minister Chrystia Freeland in her budget speech on 16 April. “More funding for research and scholarships will help Canada attract the next generation of game-changing thinkers.”
Canadian PhD students and postgrads plan mass walkout over low pay
Postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers have been advocating for higher pay for the past two years through a campaign called Support Our Science. They requested an increase in the value, and number, of federal government scholarships, and got more than they asked for. Stipends for master’s students will rise from Can$17,500 (US$12,700) to $27,000 per year, PhDs stipends that ranged from $20,000 to $35,000 will be set to a uniform annual $40,000 and most postdoctoral-fellowship salaries will increase from $45,000 to $70,000 per annum. The number of scholarships and fellowships provided will also rise over time, building to around 1,720 more per year after five years.
“We’re very thrilled with this significant new investment, the largest investment in graduate students and postdocs in over 21 years,” says Kaitlin Kharas, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, Canada, and executive director of Support Our Science. “It will directly support the next generation of researchers.”
Although only a small proportion of students and postdoctoral fellows receive these federal scholarships, other funders tend to use them as a guide for their own stipends.
Many postgraduates said that low pay was forcing them to consider leaving Canada to pursue their scientific career, says Kharas, so this funding should help to retain talent in the country.
“This is going to move us from a searing brain drain to a brain gain, and position us to compete on the world stage,” says Chad Gaffield, chief executive of the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities, based in Ontario, which supported the campaign.
‘Determined to thrive’
The budget also includes marked boosts for basic research. There is an extra $1.8 billion over five years in core funding for the three federal grant-awarding research councils, as well as $400 million for upgrades to the TRIUMF particle accelerator in Vancouver, and more cash for several other large facilities and institutes across the country. There will also be more than $2 billion for the artificial-intelligence sector in Canada.
“[This budget] really emphasizes that Canada is determined to thrive in the twenty-first century based on science and research,” says Gaffield.
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Others have pointed out that the vast majority of the money in the budget for the research councils is backloaded, with just $228 million coming in the next two years. This means that the gains will be slow, and could be vulnerable to changes in the political climate, says Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a consultancy in Toronto. “Do not count on this money being there after an election,” he posted on X (formerly Twitter). Canada’s next federal election is due in October 2025, and the opposition Conservative Party is campaigning on reigning in spending.
The budget also makes some changes to how science funding is organized. Instead of ten different programmes for scholarships and fellowships, with differing levels of support, there will now be a single programme with just three levels — master’s degrees, PhDs and postdoctoral fellowships. Kharas says that this should simplify the system.
The government will also create a new “capstone” research-funding organization to better coordinate the work of the three granting councils and “help to advance internationally collaborative, multi-disciplinary and mission-driven research”, the budget says. It will also create an advisory Council on Science and Innovation, comprised of leaders from academia, industry and the non-profit sector, which will develop a national science-and-innovation strategy to guide priority setting and increase the impact of federal investments. “This should help move us towards a more efficient, well-coordinated and nimble way of supporting research in Canada,” says Gaffield. “I look forward to working with the government to optimize it.”
Apple is easing up its self-repair policy, allowing iPhone owners to fix their devices with used parts instead of forcing them to buy new replacements. The tech giant told The Washington Post the update will apply to screens, batteries, and cameras among other things.
Apple states in its announcement post that they have plans to grow the program to include biometric sensors. The changes are scheduled to take effect this autumn, starting, Apple confirmed with TechRadar, with the iPhone 15 and future models.
Parts pairing, where the serial number of a component is matched with the iPhone, remains an important aspect of the repair process. Apple states the technology is important in determining whether a part is genuine and “critical to preserving the privacy, security, and safety of iPhone.” They will, however, relax some of the restrictions surrounding parts pairing.
Neither customers nor service providers will need to give Apple a phone’s serial number when ordering replacements – so long as you’re not fixing the logic board, in which case then you do. Calibration will occur right on the iPhone after the genuine part has been installed.
Maintaining quality
This is a big deal because, as The Washington Post explains, attempting to use “components harvested from other iPhones” results in performance problems. Colors on fixed displays may not look as vibrant as they once did.
But all that changes several months from now. You can expect the same level of quality regardless of whether a part is used or right out of the factory. The policy change could even be helpful for users who can’t afford out-of-warranty costs or don’t have an Apple Store near them.
Alongside the update, Apple is going to expand the availability of its Activation Lock tech to iPhone parts. The feature was originally “designed to limit… theft” by preventing access to lost or stolen devices. Moving forward, if an iPhone under repairs notices a part has either Activation Lock or Lost Mode activated, calibration for that replacement will be disabled. What’s more, the company plans to upgrade an iPhone’s Parts and Service History to show information about whether a part is new or used.
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No word on how much these parts will cost or where people can buy them. Presumably, it’ll all be done through the company’s Self Service Repair Store. We’ve reached out for info and we’ll update this story if we hear back.
Potential future changes
Aftermarket parts built by third parties will not be allowed. The Washington Post states that if you try to install one of those components, you’ll receive a warning stating the part isn’t legitimate and certain features won’t work such as the battery health readout.
Of course, things can always change. Apple was once famously against the right to repair, and yet here they are, providing the parts themselves. We could see additional repair policy changes later in the year moving into 2025. Parts pairing, in particular, is currently caught in the crosshairs. Oregon recently banned the practice back in late March although the law won’t take effect until January 2025. The EU is considering doing the same, but nothing is set in stone.
John Ternus, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Apple, defended parts pairing in an interview with TechCrunch by calling the practice “not evil.” However, if there’s one thing we’ve learned is that with the right motivation, Apple can change its mind.
