As higher resolutions and more frames per second become standard in photography and video creation, the demand for larger, more adaptable storage solutions is growing. In response, manufacturers are developing faster, more user-friendly storage options to meet the rigorous project timelines and extensive data requirements of creative professionals.
Western Digital has unveiled a new SD card for that market, and the SanDisk Extreme PRO SDUC UHS-I memory card packs a staggering 4TB of storage into the popular form factor. Yes, 4TB.
Announced at the NAB Show 2024 in Las Vegas, the 4TB Extreme PRO SDUC UHS-I memory card – along with the 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I and Extreme Pro microSDXC UHS-I memory cards also revealed at the event – are part of the company’s quest to meet the escalating requirement for the production and storage of more detailed, richer content.
Twice the capacity of microSD cards
The 4TB capacity doubles that of the largest microSD cards, earning it the title for the world’s largest removable memory card. It’s a giant leap from the 32MB of storage SD cards boasted in 1999.
The new card utilizes the Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard, capable of supporting up to 128TB of storage. Other media card formats available for creative professionals include XQD with a maximum storage capacity of 2TB, and CFexpress, known for its superior speed. Announced last year, the latest generation, CFexpress 4.0, supports up to four PCIe 4.0 lanes and 2GB/s per lane. Neither of those card formats can come close to offering 4TB of storage, however.
Attendees at this year’s NAB show had a preview of the 4TB SanDisk card, which is slated for release in 2025. Pricing details for the new product haven’t been released yet, but don’t expect it to be cheap.
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Spectra Logic has introduced the Spectra Cube tape library, a cloud-optimized system for on-premise, hybrid cloud, and IaaS environments that is designed to be quickly deployed, dynamically scaled, and easily serviced without tools or downtime.
The Spectra Cube library is managed by the company’s recently announced LumOS library management software, which provides secure local and remote management and monitoring.
The tower is compatible with LTO-6, LTO-7, LTO-8, and LTO-9 technology generations and will reportedly support LTO-10 when it becomes available. LTO-6 support allows users to read old tapes all the way back to LTO-4 with an LTO-6 tape drive. The solution features high tape cartridge exchange performance, a TeraPack Access Port for easy tape handling, and drive interfaces including Fibre Channel and SAS.
Up to 30PB of native capacity
With a capacity-on-demand expansion model, the Spectra Cube allows for additional tape slots and drives to be enabled via software without downtime. The library offers up to 30PB of native capacity and supports up to 16 partitions for shared or multi-tenant environments.
“As cloud data continues to grow rapidly, the escalating costs of public cloud storage have forced a reckoning, leading to significant interest in moving data to more economical locations including on-prem clouds and hybrid clouds,” said Matt Ninesling, senior director of tape portfolio management at Spectra Logic.
“Compared to typical public cloud options, Spectra Cube solutions can cut the costs of cold storage by half or more, while providing better data control and protection from existential threats like ransomware.”
The price of a fully-fledged Spectra Cube library ranges from under $60,000 to over $500,000 depending on configuration, number of tape drives, amount of media, and other additions to the base library.
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The Ecology of Collective BehaviorDeborah M. Gordon Princeton Univ. Press(2023)
Collective behaviours are present throughout nature — from groups of genes being activated simultaneously to shoals of fish swimming in unison for protection against predators and mounds of insects working together to build nests. But biologist Deborah Gordon worries that the evolutionary biologists who study how these phenomena evolved are missing a trick, because they often don’t consider that the ever-changing environments in which animals live are fundamental to shaping such behaviours. In The Ecology of Collective Behavior, she tries to set the record straight.
Gordon has spent decades studying the natural history of two ant species that live in very different environments, paying acute attention to how the insects’ stirring, dynamic habitats shape their behaviour. These observations form the bedrock of her book.
Survival of the nicest: have we got evolution the wrong way round?
First, she describes the red harvester ant Pogonomyrmex barbatus, which lives in the harsh, parched deserts of New Mexico. Affectionately known as pogos, these ants are deep red and around 10 millimetres long — an impressive size for an ant. They live in colonies, which contain more than 10,000 female workers, and rely on seeds scattered on the desert floor for both food and water. Seed sources change slowly throughout the year as plants wax and wane; there is mostly a plentiful and constant supply of food. But collecting seeds is hazardous. Deserts are dry, so pogos live in a catch-22 world: they must risk desiccation to gather the water they need.
Gordon shows that this delicate trade-off is achieved by a slow but robust mechanism through which foragers recruit nestmates in the search for food. When a female returns to the nest with her bounty, she releases hydrocarbons from her outer cuticle to indicate to her sisters that there’s food out in the desert.
A fleeting touch from a forager’s antennae sends others scuttling out of the nest. They head out in random directions, but that’s OK, because the seeds are spread out on the desert floor, not clustered in patches. Plentiful food and favourable environmental conditions — days that are not too hot, for instance — mean that many foragers return to the colony and recruit many others. Conversely, under bleaker circumstances, fewer ants return to muster recruits. In this way, simple positive feedback regulates the steady collective behaviour of thousands of ants.
Bumblebees show uniquely human behaviour
Next, Gordon turns to the arboreal turtle ant, Cephalotes goniodontus, which forages in the canopies of Mexico’s dry tropical forests. Unlike the desert harvesters, turtle ants spread their brood across many nests perched in the canopy, connected by a complex net of tangling vines, shifting leaves and moving stems. Their food sources are ephemeral — foragers must exploit bursts of nectar from transient floral blooms.
Each foraging turtle ant lays a trail of pheromones wherever she goes — independent of whether she has discovered a food source or not — while following the trails laid by others. These trails constantly bifurcate, and paths can change on an hourly basis. Which route should each forager follow?
The answer is simple, Gordon reveals. The ants follow the smelliest path — the one with the strongest pheromone signal — and keep reinforcing profitable trails until something tells them to stop, such as the presence of a predator or a broken branch. This ensures that the ants can find the most lucrative foraging spot and rapidly adjust the information flow if needed, changing their behaviour in a constantly changing environment.
Red harvester ants clean their nest together.Credit: Clarence Holmes Wildlife/Alamy
Unpredictable environments
Pogos and turtle ants solve similar problems in distinct ways. How they do it is dictated by their environment. Gordon borrows concepts from network science to describe how turtle ants function in modules — units in which most information flow occurs — to keep communication local, enabling them to respond rapidly to the ever-changing availability of resources. By contrast, the centralized regulation of pogos is the epitome of low modularity: the nest is the sole source of communication.
Gordon argues that the nature of the environment and the resources it provides determine the types of collective-foraging mechanism that evolve — not just for ants, but for all social organisms. The extent to which ecology drives the evolution of social behaviour in this way has been overlooked, she suggests.
How STRANGE are your study animals?
I agree that researchers need to better recognize that organisms exist, and have evolved, in a dynamic, often unpredictably messy world, and to acknowledge that this influences their behaviour. I admire how the author takes inspiration not only from careful field experiments — removing ants or changing the amount of available resources and observing how the insects respond — but also from the classical science of natural history. Many evolutionary biologists could learn a lot by rediscovering this way of working.
But I am less convinced by Gordon’s suggestion that her ideas are at odds with the ‘prevailing theory’ for social behaviour. Inclusive fitness theory — an idea put forward by UK evolutionary biologist William Hamilton in 1964, and accepted widely in the field — suggests that social behaviours evolve when the benefits of cooperating with relatives exceed the costs (W. D. Hamilton J. Theor. Biol. 7, 1–16; 1964). Hamilton’s ideas stemmed from his observations of wasps, ants, bees and birds in their natural habitats, and are supported by strong experimental and theoretical evidence.
Hamilton’s theory suggests that cooperation will prevail in unpredictable environments, with some animals choosing to help raise their relatives’ young rather than having their own (P. Kennedy et al. Nature555, 359–362; 2018). This phenomenon is seen often in the natural world, from slime moulds to termites. Thus, the idea that dynamic environments help to shape social behaviour is already part of the accepted theory of social evolution.
I think the confusion arises because Gordon conflates proximate (mechanistic) and ultimate (evolutionary) processes. Her book offers useful insights into the proximate processes that regulate collective behaviour on a day-to-day basis, and the role of the environment in shaping and maintaining such behaviours. I agree that the interactions between organisms and their environments have become increasingly overlooked because fewer researchers are studying animals in their natural environments. But these insights are not at odds with the prevailing theory of how collective behaviours evolve.
In her final chapter, Gordon remarks: “The whole appears to be more than the sum of the parts, because the parts do not sum — they intertwine, jostle, and respond.” This heartening statement is a great description of the ecological and evolutionary complexities that shape our world. It’s these complexities that all biologists should keep in mind.
On Monday, April 8, the shadow of a total solar eclipse will pass over North America: stand in the right spot, and for a few minutes the moon will completely block out the sun, thanks to a rare alignment of celestial objects.
If you’re not able to get into a spot along the ‘path of totality’ yourself, you don’t have to miss out – there are plenty of ways to watch this spectacular natural show on the web, wherever you happen to be in the world. We’ve picked out some options below.
One benefit of staying at home is you don’t need any special protective eyewear to watch online – something which is an absolute must if you’re looking at the eclipse directly (here’s NASA’s safety advice).
For those of you planning to watch live, you need to know timings: the shadow created by the total eclipse hits Mexico’s Pacific coast at 11.07am PT – that’s 2.07pm ET, 7.07pm in the UK, or 4.07am AEST on Tuesday, April 9 in Australia.
The shadow’s path will move rapidly up through the US and leave the east coast of Canada at 5.16pm NDT – so 1.16pm PT / 4.16pm ET / 9.16pm BST in the UK, and 6.16am AEST on April 9 in Australia. You’ve got a couple of hours to tune in, basically.
Now that you’ve checked your schedule, here’s where to watch.
NASA livestream
Of course NASA has a livestream of the event, which you can watch here. The organization says it’ll be sharing views from several telescopes in the US as the eclipse moves across the United States, and there’ll be expert commentary and an interactive live chat too.
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University of Maine livestream
Head here to watch the livestream coming from the High Altitude Science Balloon maintained by a team from the University of Maine. The balloon will be able to climb up to heights of around 90,000 feet (27,432 meters), which may help with any cloud cover issues.
TimeAndDate.com is going all in on the total solar eclipse: you can visit the site for explainers, animations, timings, and plenty more besides, and you can watch the moon blot out the sun by following the livestream of the celestial event from here.
McDonald Observatory livestream
It helps to watch the total solar eclipse with commentary from people who know what they’re talking about: and that’s the case with the McDonald Observatory livestream right here. Be wowed by the sights of the eclipse and learn some science at the same time.
Local channels and streaming apps
An ABC News special will be on Disney Plus and Hulu (Image credit: ABC)
YouTube livestreams aren’t the only way to watch the solar eclipse: plenty of local and national TV channels will be covering it too, so you can tune in anywhere you can get access to these channels (including NBC, CNN, and ABC) on the web or through apps.
Google TV is actually going to showcase some of these channels for you: head to the For You tab from the front screen. Viewers in the US can also tune into a special on Disney Plus or Hulu, from 11am PT / 2pm ET, and the free NASA app is another way to watch along.
Readers of a certain age will for the rest of their lives be haunted by a specific string of bleeps, boops, fuzzes, and machine noises. It’s a far cry from the buttery smooth connections we have grown used to today – but indeed our our first interfacing with the World Wide Web was through a dial-up connection that boasted blistering speeds of 56.6 kilobits per second if you used a specific modem.
Eventually, thanks to a rather special chip – known as the Amati Communications Overture ADSL Chip Set – we transcended. Gone was the age of torrid speeds and images that took an age to load up, and we ushered in a new age in which maximum speeds were almost 2,000 times faster to up to 100 megabits per second. This paved the way for a new kind of internet full of multimedia.
Digital Subscriber Line/Loop (DSL) was the technology that gave us access to the web by taking advantage of existing phone lines to transmit data through a modem – and many companies were working on competing standards for DSL. For the standard that emerged, we owe everything to Amati Communications – a startup that emerged from Stanford.
The chip that started the web boom
Amati Communications was one of many that were working to develop a new approach to accessing the internet when they devised the DSL modulation approach known as discrete multitone (DMT). This is a way of making a phone line resemble hundreds of subchannels and improving transmission by robbing bits from the poorest channels and donating them to the wealthiest channels, according to IEEE Spectrum. It eventually became a global standard for DSL and the chipset became universally adopted many years later.
The company continued to promote its iconic chipset throughout the 90s, selling in very modest amounts at the start — but enjoying a fast rise as the decade drew to a close and we neared the dot-com bubble.
Then, in 1997, Texas Instruments acquired the firm for $395 million – which was the company’s first deal in the hardware segment. The semiconductor manufacturer, based in Texas, was keen to deliver broadband multimedia services – including high-speed internet access and real-time video – over phone lines using the DSL technology that Amati had pioneered.
By the 2000s, the chipset was shipping in the millions, and zippier broadband access was gradually making its way throughout homes and offices around the developed world. While we may be relishing in its demise now – with the rise of full-fibre broadband – it’s worth appreciating just how significant that initial jump away from the dreaded dial-up tone was, and the possibilities it opened up across society.
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Engineers at StorageReview decided to do something incredibly geeky for this year’s Pi day (March 14 – 3/14) – beat their own record for calculating Pi. Considering that the previous record, achieved last year, was 100 trillion digits, the challenge was no mean feat. While – spoiler alert – they smashed the record, it did take them 75 days to accomplish it.
The task was achieved using a dual processor 128-core AMD EPYC 9754 Bergamo system, equipped with 1.5TB of DRAM and nearly a petabyte of Solidigm QLC SSDs.
The team started their computation on December 14, 2023, and finished on February 27, 2024, spanning 75 days. They used the Chudnovsky (1988) algorithm to calculate Pi, and the computation required a total memory of 1.36 TiB.
New challenges
The journey to 105 trillion digits of Pi – the new record – was not without fresh challenges. The team had to deal with performance-related issues, which led them to delve into the intricacies of parallel computing and hardware interactions. They discovered a CPU hazard specific to the Zen4 architecture involving super-alignment and its effects on memory access patterns.
The engineers also encountered a critical floating-point arithmetic error within the AVX512 code path of the N63 multiply algorithm. With remote assistance from the developer, Alexander Yee, they were able to diagnose and fix the problem, resulting in the successful computation.
Summing up, StorageReview’s Jordan Ranous noted, “The run to 105 trillion digits of Pi was much more complex than we expected. Upon reflection, we should have expected to encounter new issues; after all, we’re completing a computation that had never been done before. But with the 100 trillion computation completed with a much more “duct tape and chicken wire” configuration, we thought we had it made. Ultimately, it took a collaborative effort to get this rig across the finish line.”
Was it worth it? Ranous says, “While we rejoice with our partners in this record-breaking run, we must ask, “What does this even mean?” Five more trillion digits of Pi probably won’t make a huge difference to mathematics. Still, we can draw some lines between computational workloads and the need for modern underlying hardware to support them. Fundamentally, this exercise reflects that the proper hardware makes all the difference, whether an enterprise data center cluster or a large HPC installment. For the Pi computation, we were completely restricted by storage. Faster CPUs will help accelerate the math, but the limiting factor to many new world records is the amount of local storage in the box.”
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You can watch the video of the record breaking attempt below.
Security researchers have found a relatively easy and cheap way to clone the keycards used on three million Saflok electronic RFID locks in 13,000 hotels and homes all over the world.
The keycard and lock manufacturer, Dormakaba, has been notified, and it is currently working to replace the vulnerable hardware – but it’s a long, tedious process, which is not yet done.
Although first discovered back in 2022, the researchers have disclosed more information on the flaws, dubbed “Unsaflok”, in order to raise awareness.
Cheap card cloning
The flaws were discovered at a private hacking event was set up in Las Vegas, where different research teams competed to find vulnerabilities in a hotel room and all devices inside. A team, consisting of Lennert Wouters, Ian Carroll, rqu, BusesCanFly, Sam Curry, shell, and Will Caruana, focused their attention on the Dormakaba Saflok electronic locks for hotel rooms. Soon enough, they found two flaws which, when chained together, allowed them to open the doors with a custom-built keycard.
First, they needed access to any card from the premises. That could be the card to their own room. Then, they reverse-engineered the Dormakaba front desk software and lock programming device, which allowed them to spoof a working master key which can open any room on the property. Finally, to clone the cards, they needed to break into Dormakaba’s key derivation function.
To forge the keycards, the team used a MIFARE Classic card, a commercial card-writing tool, and an Android phone with NFC capabilities. All of this costs just a few hundred dollars, it was said.
With their custom-built keycard, the team would be able to access more than three million locks, installed in 13,000 hotels and homes all over the world.
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Following the publication of the findings, Dormakaba released a statement to the media, saying the vulnerability affects Saflok systems System 6000, Ambiance, and Community. It added that there is no evidence of these flaws ever being exploited in the wild.
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Farmed reticulated pythons grow quickly when being fed trapped rodents or waste protein from other meat-producing industries (Paul Starosta/Getty).
Large pythons are better at converting their food into edible protein than many other farmed animals, including chickens, pigs, cows, salmon and crickets. Reticulated pythons (Malayopython reticulatus) and Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) on farms could fast for months without losing much weight, which could help to ensure food security during economic or climatic disruptions, says herpetologist and study co-author Dan Natusch. “Farming pythons could be a big part of the solution for a part of the world that is already suffering from severe protein deficiency.” Python farming is well established in Asia and the meat is “pretty tasty and versatile”, Natusch adds. Detailed analyses of python farms’ environmental impact and of the meat’s nutritional content are now needed, says food systems scientist Monika Zurek.
A think tank is urging UK universities to share information on misconduct investigations to make it more difficult for sexual harassers to hide their past. A 2018 review of more than 300 sexual misconduct cases in US academia found that more than half of the perpetrators were serial harassers, who often relocated to different institutions and repeated the same pattern of misconduct. Supporters of the Misconduct Disclosure Scheme point out that it has already proved its worth in the humanitarian sector.
Remnants of an ancient viral infection are essential for producing myelin, a protein that insulates nerve fibres, in most vertebrates. Certain viruses insert DNA into the genetic material of the cells they invade. Sometimes, these insertions become permanent and even aid evolutionary processes. Myelin helps nerves to send electrical signals faster, grow longer and thinner so they can be packed in more efficiently. “As a result of myelin, brains became more complex and vertebrates became more diverse,” says stem-cell biologist and study co-author Robin Franklin.
Researchers living with long COVID say they have been mostly left to fend for themselves or to navigate workplace accommodation policies that aren’t tailored for them. “It felt like they threw everything at me to advocate for myself,” says one social scientist. Some long-haulers have found ways to manage their symptoms, which can include cognitive impairment and fatigue, whereas others rely on compassionate supervisors. Some advocates are calling for a culture shift in which “every person would feel like they can ask for what they need and be supported in that request, even if, ultimately, they don’t get exactly what they want”, says Emily Shryock, director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Disability Cultural Center.
Are you a diva, captain, ghost, ant or bumble bee? Clinical psychologist Olga Lehmann invented these ‘personas’ to help her reflect on a difficult collaboration. She recommends creating a team agreement that lays out general rules of behaviour among co-authors before starting work on a grant proposal or paper. Her hard-won advice: schedule regular check-in meetings, plan for conflict and show empathy to others — but have an exit strategy if things get personal.
“If we want to aim for precision, we need to go further than relying on proxies,” says sociologist Madeleine Pape, who is part of an interdisciplinary group of researchers advocating for more complex ways of studying sex-related variation. They say that using the category ‘women’ as a proxy for the presence of a uterus can underestimate, for example, the incidence of uterine cancer. “Women aren’t a one-size-fits-all,” Pape says. “Variation is worth understanding and worth engaging with if we want to actually address gender disparities in health.”
Gabriel Renato Castro is the founder and chief executive of Spiral Blue Food Spa in Chincolco, Chile.Credit: Karl Mancini/Pulitzer Centre
Marine biologist Gabriel Renato Castro is growing microorganisms such as cyanobacteria to make fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural products that help crops survive droughts, pests and a lack of arable soil. “To understand the macrouniverse, we need to understand the microuniverse,” he says. “My ultimate goal is to share my knowledge with local community members in Chile, so they can develop more resilient and sustainable agricultural practices.” (Nature | 3 min read)
Quote of the day
In her poem Infant, Name Once Known, anthropologist Jenny Davis honours the remains of an unknown child that used to be part of her university’s teaching collection. (Sapiens | 1 min read)
Cerebras Systems has unveiled its Wafer Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3), dubbed the “fastest AI chip in the world.”
The WSE-3, which powers the Cerebras CS-3 AI supercomputer, reportedly offers twice the performance of its predecessor, the WSE-2, at the same power consumption and price.
The chip is capable of training AI models with up to 24 trillion parameters, a significant leap from previous models.
CS-3 supercomputer
The WSE-3 is built on a 5nm TSMC process and features 44GB on-chip SRAM. It boasts four trillion transistors and 900,000 AI-optimized compute cores, delivering a peak AI performance of 125 petaflops – that’s the theoretical equivalent to about 62 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
The CS-3 supercomputer, powered by the WSE-3, is designed to train next-generation AI models that are 10 times larger than GPT-4 and Gemini. With a memory system of up to 1.2 petabytes, it can reportedly store 24 trillion parameter models in a single logical memory space, simplifying training workflow and boosting developer productivity.
Cerebras says its CS-3 supercomputer is optimized for both enterprise and hyperscale needs, and it offers superior power efficiency and software simplicity, requiring 97% less code than GPUs for large language models (LLMs).
Cerebras CEO and co-founder, Andrew Feldman, said, “WSE-3 is the fastest AI chip in the world, purpose-built for the latest cutting-edge AI work, from mixture of experts to 24 trillion parameter models. We are thrilled for bring WSE-3 and CS-3 to market to help solve today’s biggest AI challenges.”
The company says it already has a backlog of orders for the CS-3 across enterprise, government, and international clouds. The CS-3 will also play a significant role in the strategic partnership between Cerebras and G42, which has already delivered 8 exaFLOPs of AI supercomputer performance via Condor Galaxy 1 and 2. A third installation, Condor Galaxy 3, is currently under construction and will be built with 64 CS-3 systems, producing 8 exaFLOPs of AI compute.
It’s World Sleep Day, and so you’d expect all of the top sleep brands to roll out the biggest discounts on the best mattresses, right? That’s definitely what I’d have expected, and I’m in a position to know about such things; I’ve been writing about mattresses for the past few years and I’m thoroughly well acquainted with all the ins and outs of mattress deals.
I have to tell you, though: I’m a little disappointed. Doing my rounds of all the main sleep brands this morning I’ve barely seen any mention of World Sleep Day, and seriously, come on guys. It’s a whole day dedicated to your stock in trade, but all I’m seeing is March sales, spring sales and a St. Patrick’s Day sale (cheers, Saatva).
Fortunately a handful of brands are making a bit of an effort this weekend; I’ve found that two of our top-rated mattresses are available right now for the lowest prices ever, another that’s almost the cheapest I’ve ever seen it, plus a deal from Purple that’s the best value I’ve seen even if it’s not the lowest price. These are the best mattress deals you’re likely to see this weekend; read on for all the details.