Topps Blog: 2022

Friday, 30 December 2022

This Week in Space: The Red Planet and the Pale Blue Dot

Hello, readers, and welcome back to the last This Week in Space of 2022. As the year draws down to a close, American aerospace — both public and private — has gone as quiet as a winter’s night. So, we’re consoling ourselves with a triple scoop of news from Mars. Climate scientists have used Nvidia’s RTX ray tracing to create a whole new version of the Blue Marble. Thursday also saw SpaceX launch the first of its Gen2 Starlink satellites. The cherry on top? We’ll wrap up with a few words on tonight’s once-in-a-lifetime skywatching opportunity.

NASA Explores a Winter Wonderland — on Mars

Mars is a cold and forbidding place, with barely a breath of carbon dioxide for an atmosphere. It’s winter in Mars’ northern hemisphere, just like here on Earth. And like here on Earth, there is a strange, stark beauty to the Martian winter. In celebration, NASA released a collection of strange and lovely images of wintry snowscapes on Mars.

Winter is cold on Mars. So cold, in fact, that most of the ‘snow’ on the Red Planet is actually carbon dioxide that froze right out of the air in sandy, cube-shaped crystals of dry ice. The atmospheric pressure is so low that snow from water ice seldom reaches most of the Martian surface. Instead, it sublimates away into vapor before it ever touches the ground. NASA explains, “Snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night.”

Because of how water molecules form bonds when they freeze into ice crystals, Earthly snowflakes have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which component atoms arrange themselves determines a crystal’s shape. In the case of carbon dioxide, molecules in dry ice always bond in forms of four when frozen.

“Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped,” said Sylvain Piqueux, a member of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team. “Thanks to the [MRO’s] Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.”

No Tannenbaum

The triangular spots dotting these snow-capped ridges aren’t Martian pine trees. They’re just a few of the complex patterns created when sunlight finally hits the snowy surface.

I’m still disappointed that this isn’t actually a tableau of Martian Christmas trees. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

What we’re seeing are spots where gases escape from beneath a blanket of snow. As a puff of gas rises to the surface, it brings along a wisp of fine sediment, which lands in a plume downwind. Scientists have learned to study these plumes, to learn more about Mars’ prevailing winds.

Tiny Fractures

The same phenomenon can create other exotic patterns, elsewhere on the Martian surface. Transparent carbon dioxide ice allows sunlight to pass through and warm the darker sands below. This vaporizes gases buried in the soil.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

NASA’s HiRISE orbiter captured this image near Mars’ north pole. Here, water ice frozen in the soil has fractured the ground — and the layer of translucent CO2 ice on top — into polygons. Repeated freeze-thaw cycles have deepened the meandering crevices. This image has a finer spatial resolution than the others, just 25 cm (9.8 in) per pixel.

Fresh From the Icebox

Looking like “holiday ribbon candy” (or the worst layer cake), these layers of dusty water ice deposits at the Martian North Pole are several miles thick. We can see the strata because of a trough that cuts into the deposits, revealing individual layers.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

HiRISE captured this image of carbon dioxide frost developing on the poleward-facing slope inside a Martian crater. Because it receives less sunlight, it’s cooler, so that’s where the ice condenses and freezes.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

For links to these full-res images and more, check out the JPL’s feature and the MRO team’s slideshow.

NASA Confirms Martian Dust Won’t Bury Perseverance Rover’s Sample Tubes

Last week, InSight sent home its very last image ever, before shutting itself down for good. Ultra-fine Martian dust struck the killing blow, starving the lander of energy by covering up its solar panels. There’s just something heartbreaking about the idea of everything slowly going dark for the tenacious little lander. Perhaps in response to the final shutdown, NASA has reached out to reassure the public that the ever-present dust poses little threat to the sample tubes its Perseverance rover is caching on Mars.

Image: NASA

The wind on Mars is constant, but since the atmosphere is so thin, the wind doesn’t carry much material. So, the sample tubes shouldn’t be in any danger from drifting sand or dust.

After Artemis 1 overshot a critical launch window, NASA and the ESA had to make some tough decisions about the future of those sample tubes. However, they’ve learned a lot from the runaway success of Ingenuity, the little space copter that could. The two agencies recently announced that they jointly scrapped plans to have a big, tanky rover collect the samples, in favor of two space helicopters à la Ingenuity. Turns out it’s ultra-convenient to just opt out of surface obstacles when exploring another planet. This change also obviates the problem of finding a heavy lift vehicle with a body wide enough to cram in a rover the size of a bus.

SpaceX Launches First Gen2 Starlink Satellites

SpaceX launched its first raft of Gen2 Starlink satellites from Canaveral on Wednesday evening. The new generation is larger and more capable than their first-gen counterparts. However, Gen2 is also distinguished by the orbital shell the satellites occupy, though the first batch of satellites appears to be of the older design.

Watch Falcon 9 launch 54 Starlink satellites to orbit → https://t.co/wGq3KkoDyY https://t.co/sHdWRcsqZV

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 28, 2022

SpaceX says the Gen2 expansion should ease the network congestion the company has been struggling with all year. Meanwhile, one last Falcon 9 launch remains for the year.

Scientists Re-create ‘Blue Marble’ With Powerful New Ray-Tracing Climate Model

Apollo 17 just had its 50th anniversary. Although it was the last crewed mission we’ve sent to the moon in 50 years, the mission also created the iconic ‘Blue Marble’ image of Earth. Now, in service to the dream of seeing and understanding our world as a whole, climate experts from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology have created a striking new image that takes the Blue Marble to a whole new level.

The image above was generated with the Nvidia Omniverse platform, using internal RTX ray tracing. But this is no ordinary photograph. The simulation is a fully formed world, featuring details that the Apollo crew’s camera simply couldn’t capture. This fine-scale modeling allowed the team to see beneath the ocean surface, studying the waves of warm water emanating from the African coast and tracking cold subsurface eddies that well upward, warmed by the sun.

Carl Sagan would be so pleased to see this.

Skywatchers Corner Special Edition: The Planets Align

This evening, skywatchers are in for a once-in-a-lifetime show. Just after sunset, all of the planets in the solar system (plus the moon!) will be visible in the sky at the same time, stretching out in a great cosmic arc across the southern sky.

Venus and Mercury are in conjunction, less than two degrees apart. Shortly after sunset, they’ll be visible low in the southwestern sky. Binoculars may help to get a clearer view of Mercury, as it’s located in a bright part of the sky, orbiting so close to the sun. By New Year’s Day, fleeting Mercury will have faded back into the solar glare. Meanwhile, Jupiter will graze the edge of the waxing moon with about the same two-degree separation.

Assuming clear skies, you’ll be able to spot Uranus and Neptune with binoculars or a telescope — a rarity all on its own. Neptune takes 165 years to orbit the sun, but Uranus takes 84. Consequently, the two planets spend a lot of time on opposite sides of the sky. This planetary conjunction won’t happen again for longer than it took the Inca Empire to rise and fall. To find Neptune in the sky, look between Jupiter and Saturn; to find Uranus, look between Jupiter and Mars.

Image adapted from Mulan (Disney, 1998). Original image: Walt Disney Pictures/Buena Vista, via Disney Twitter

By the way: If you didn’t already know about it, this criminally under-rated widget from NASA’s skywatching page shows the most accurate information we have on the real-time position of dozens of objects like Lucy, Vesta, OSIRIS-REx, Halley’s Comet, and 16 Psyche.

Image: NASA

When you click on it, here’s what you’ll see:

Image: NASA

From there, the tracker is clickable and zoomable, and it has all kinds of useful information about the satellites and celestial bodies it tracks. Enjoy it, and we’ll see you in the New Year.

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Microsoft Could Soon Bring Tabs to Windows Notepad

(Image: Microsoft) You’re not supposed to know this, but thanks to a recent social media gaffe, it’s fair game: Tabs are apparently coming to Windows Notepad. In a now-deleted tweet, a Microsoft senior product manager shared that Notepad—Windows’ lightweight word processor—will eventually allow users to open and edit multiple notes using tabs.

The tweet was published late last week and deleted just minutes later. In it, the product manager announced: “Notepad in Windows 11 now has tabs!” followed by a loudspeaker emoji. The text was accompanied by a screenshot of a tabbed version of Windows Notepad, which itself read “Confidential: Don’t discuss features or take screenshots.” Whoops.

(Image: Microsoft)

It doesn’t take a detective to put these context clues together. Microsoft is clearly testing tabs for Notepad, though given the fact that this clearly wasn’t meant to be made public, we don’t have many more details. Windows 11 came out just over a year ago, meaning it’s highly unlikely that Microsoft is saving the feature for a future operating system. Tabs will likely come to Notepad with some future iteration of the current OS, with Windows Insiders first to test the new feature.

It’d be kind to say that Notepad is a word processor for minimalists. As a writer, I can’t imagine ever using Notepad; it doesn’t have the features necessary for projects that truly matter, and if I just want to jot something down, a desktop sticky widget will do the trick while staying in a static location on my desktop. As a result, I struggle to understand why Notepad tabs would garner much celebration. But every computer user has their own tastes, and apparently, Notepad is useful for some. In fact, our colleagues at PCMag wrote up a handful of Notepad programming tips back in 2017 that still stand, and some of them might be a tad easier with tabs.

Microsoft seems to have a thing for tabs in general. In April it confirmed Windows 11’s File Explorer will eventually incorporate tabs, making it easier to search for and sort items without having to open a million separate Explorer windows. The feature officially rolled out in October just after the Windows 11 22H2 update.

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Scientists Discover the First Virus-Eating Organism

(Image: Konstantin Kolosov/Pixabay) The so-called “circle of life” dictates that if a living thing exists, it’s probably food for something else. Viruses, however, have historically managed to escape this unofficial rule. Although plenty of organisms eat viruses accidentally as they consume other living things, no organism has been known to munch viruses on purpose—until now.

A research team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has identified the first known “virovore,” or virus-eating organism. Biologist John DeLong was leading his colleagues in the search for virus-consuming microbes by taking freshwater samples from a nearby pond. Back at the lab, the team isolated the samples’ various microbes and added chlorovirus—an algae-targeting freshwater virus—to the water. Eventually, they found exactly what they were looking for: a ciliate (or single-celled organism with hair-like cilia) referred to as Halteria.

Halteria under a microscope. (Image: Don Loarie/Wikimedia Commons)

Scientists have known about Halteria’s existence for quite some time, but they’ve always thought the ciliate consumed only bacteria. But in the lab, Halteria showed an appetite for far more than their typical algae: They appeared to be devouring the added chlorovirus. When DeLong’s team eliminated all food sources other than chlorovirus from their sample tanks, Halteria grew 15-fold in just two days. Meanwhile, chlorovirus levels dropped to just 1% of its original population.

DeLong and his team sought to confirm Halteria’s appetite for chlorovirus by injecting the virus with fluorescent dye. Soon enough, Halteria began to glow. The team also saw that Paramecium bursaria, another freshwater-dwelling ciliate, appeared to consume chlorovirus; however, Paramecium didn’t grow in size or population after doing so.

Viruses are abundant in water and are chock-full of “raw materials” like nitrogen, phosphorus, and nucleic acids, making them a convenient snack for organisms willing to chow down on them. DeLong’s team believes the discovery of Halteria’s intentional virus consumption could guide broader ecological studies, such as those involving aquatic food webs. As they note in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, current food web models neglect the interactions between viruses and their predators; research like DeLong’s might inform the expansion of those webs to include the consumption of viruses.

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Discrete GPU Sales Plummet to Historic Lows

If you’ve been looking at the GPU market recently and thinking, “nope,” you’re not alone. Jon Peddie Research has released its year-end summary, and it paints a grim picture: Shipments of discrete GPUs have fallen to levels not seen in almost 20 years. It’s an unexpected situation given the recent deluge of GPUs in the channel thanks to the death of crypto. Plus AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have released all-new GPUs this year too. Despite the bounty of silicon at their disposal, gamers are just not buying GPUs right now.

Peddie’s full report is voluminous, coming in at 345 pages with 245 charts. It’s been summarized by the good folks at Tom’s Hardware and includes some interesting stats. Note that some of the numbers were calculated using other data Peddie has obtained. Overall, there were 6.9 million discrete GPUs shipped in Q3 of 2022. For the year-over-year period, 14 million GPUs were shipped, a 42% decline. That includes just GPUs from the big names: AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. The GPU market hit similar doldrums right before the pandemic, shipping just 7.4 million units. Still, the number for Q3 2022 is the lowest ever recorded by Jon Peddie Research.

Discrete Desktop GPU shipments over time. (Image: JPR/Tom’s Hardware)

As far as market share goes, over the last quarter Nvidia strengthened its market position. According to Peddie’s research, it now controls 86% of the discrete market. AMD actually lost market share in this period, and now only controls around 10%. Intel’s launch of its A700-series GPUs allowed it to capture 4% of the market. That’s pretty impressive since its GPUs have only been selling for a single quarter. Nvidia grew its market share despite the declining shipment numbers. For Q3, it shipped almost 6 million GPUs compared with AMD shipping less than a million. It’s unclear how many units Intel moved in this period. Still, it seems Intel’s launch for Arc was quite successful.

Discrete Desktop GPU market share. (Image: JPR/Tom’s Hardware)

The reasons for the steep decline in GPU shipments aren’t perfectly detailed in the summary. However, we can make a few guesses. This entire year has seen a rapid slowdown in the PC market as the pandemic began to fade. People went outside again and turned off their PCs. There’s also been increasing economic anxiety for most of the year as well. This has been punctuated by mass layoffs at major companies recently, such as Meta and Amazon. Additionally, a lot of PC upgraders held off in the third quarter in anticipation of all the new hardware coming out.

Many people might have examined the new CPUs and GPUs and concluded prices were too high. This issue has affected both AMD on the CPU front and Nvidia on the GPU side. AMD had to dramatically lower Zen 4 prices for Black Friday and has largely kept them in place. Nvidia hasn’t lowered prices, but so many scalpers tried to return RTX 4080 cards that Newegg halted refunds for them.

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Thursday, 29 December 2022

NASA Confirms Dust Won’t Bury Perseverance Mars Sample Tubes

NASA is moving forward with plans to bring samples from Mars to Earth for more intense study than is possible on the red planet, and its robotic explorers are already laying the groundwork. The Perseverance rover has deposited a cache of sample tubes on the surface as a backup for the eventual return mission, but images of the lightsaber-like tubes lying on the dusty landscape led some to wonder if they were going to be covered in dust by the time the lander shows up. NASA has clarified its plans to say that, no, the tubes will still be easily spotted when the time comes.

Perseverance began setting out the tubes earlier this month. They’re just sitting on the surface, surrounded by uneven soil and small rocks, but there is a general misconception about how much dust gets around on Mars. While it’s true that the planet’s dust storms have doomed more than one surface mission, that’s because it doesn’t take much dust to coat a solar panel. The amount of dust accumulating on Mars is actually quite small.

NASA explains that the planet’s atmosphere, which is just 1% as dense as Earth’s, can produce extreme gusts of wind. However, it doesn’t carry very much material. As evidence, the team points to Curiosity, which has spent years on Mars and came through the 2019 global dust storms only moderately dustier. Even the stationary InSight lander is far from buried, although its solar panels are now blocked by a thin layer of Martian fines.

How much dust does a Mars spacecraft gather after nine years on the surface? Take a look at @MarsCuriosity’s top deck after nine years: dusty, but hardly unrecognizable. pic.twitter.com/eVQcTgzQ84

— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) December 23, 2022

Perseverance is bristling with cameras, spectrophotometers, and other scientific brick-a-brack, but it can’t do all the science NASA might like. Before sending the robot to Mars, engineers at JPL had to determine which instruments could feasibly be miniaturized and hardened to travel to another planet. Naturally, there are a lot of experiments that you can’t do remotely, and it’s the same for every space mission. That’s why NASA devised the rover’s sample caching system.

As Perseverance explores the planet, it collects rock cores and soil samples in its specially designed, ultra-clean tubes. It has already saved 21 samples from around Jezero Crater, and if all goes as planned, it will meet up with the lander in about nine years to drop them off. However, planetary exploration is all about redundancy. In case Perseverance doesn’t last that long on Mars, it’s setting up the sample depot with duplicate tubes that can be collected by the lander’s helicopter scouts. NASA expects the tubes will be easy to spot, plus the team is keeping a precise record of their locations. Returning these surface samples to Earth is a major undertaking, and NASA isn’t cutting any corners.

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Nintendo Has Internally Canceled the Switch Pro

(Credit: Will Greenwald) If you’ve been waiting for a more powerful version of the Nintendo Switch to hit shelves, you might want to direct your anticipation elsewhere. Nintendo has reportedly canceled its plans to release a Switch Pro, extinguishing console gamers’ hopes for an upgraded handheld in the process.

According to video game reporter and enthusiast John Linneman, the Switch Pro was at one point a real Nintendo project—before the company decided to kill it. It seems that after some internal debate, Nintendo has ultimately decided to direct any effort it would’ve put into a Switch Pro toward a next-gen console instead.

“I think at one point internally, from what I can understand from talking to different developers, is that there was some sort of mid-generation Switch update planned at one point, and that seems to be no longer happening,” said Linneman on the podcast Digital Foundry this week. “And thus, it’s pretty clear that whatever they do next is going to be the actual next-generation hardware.”

(Credit: Lucas Santos/Unsplash)

Nintendo gamers have been wondering for years now whether the company would eventually put out a more capable version of its best-selling console. The Switch has naturally become a tad outdated since its 2017 release: It can’t put out 4K graphics at 60 frames per second (fps) like the more recent PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X, making for a slightly less graphically impressive experience than console gamers can otherwise enjoy these days. It now also has to compete with the Steam Deck, which can output 4K resolution while sharing a library with the user’s PC.

To its credit, Nintendo did put out an OLED version of the Switch in 2021. For an extra $50, the Switch OLED produces richer colors and deeper blacks than its predecessor…but without any performance upgrades. Fans have been hoping for a Switch Pro that would support 4K while offering increased computing power, as predicted in 2020 by Bloomberg’s Takashi Mochizuki. Speculation only increased from there: A bigger and better Switch dock and a DLSS-enabled model were both rumored within the last couple of years. Now it’s clear that if these features come to Switch at all, it’ll be through a next-gen iteration—not a Pro version of the Switch we’re already familiar with.

According to Linneman, a next-gen console may indeed hit shelves within the next year or so. He mentioned on Digital Foundry that a “Nintendo Switch 2” could come out in 2023 or 2024, likely after the long-awaited Legend of Zelda sequel has already been released. The new console is expected to use the Nvidia T239 chip, as reported by one reliable leaker in particular, and include new graphic features like ray tracing.

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Nvidia Reportedly Planning $799 MSRP for RTX 4070 Ti

Nvidia started releasing its much anticipated RTX 40-series video cards over the past few months. Both the GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are out there, if you know where to look, but the high prices have kept many gamers from upgrading. There may be some hope for slightly stingy enthusiasts. A new report claims that Nvidia has settled on a $799 MSRP for the upcoming RTX 4070 Ti, putting it several hundred lower than the RTX 4080.

Over the past few years, it became almost impossible to buy a video card as cryptocurrency mining and supply chain difficulties constrained supply. Nvidia seems to have gotten used to being able to sell every shipment of GPUs at full price. People were even willing to pay several times the MSRP for a capable card. As the Ada Lovelace launch approached, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said we should expect GPU prices to go up, not down.

At least in this one case, the pricing appears to be moving lower than it might have been. Previous rumors pointed to an $899 launch price for the RTX 4070 Ti, but now Nvidia has told its partners that it’s planning to knock $100 off of that. That’s a relief after unofficial overseas pricing topped $1,000.

The GeForce RTX 4090 was the first of Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace GPUs to launch, and it sold well in spite of the sky-high $1,600 retail price. But that’s the top-of-the-line — there’s always someone who wants the best hardware in their rig and will pay to get it. The RTX 4080 takes a big step down in performance, although it can still run every modern PC game with ease. Still, consumers weren’t as willing to spend $1,200 on the second-best. Nvidia may have seen this coming, though. It opted to pull the 12GB version of the 4080 prior to launch — this card may end up rebranded as the 4070 Ti.

Lackluster RTX 4080 sales are probably responsible for Nvidia’s pre-launch price cut, but we cannot discount government action. GPUs are covered under “Section 301” tariffs, which add 25% to import costs. These fees were on hold for the past few years but were scheduled to resume in January. However, the tariffs were postponed for an additional nine months earlier in December. That gives Nvidia and its partners more breathing room to account for the 4080’s weak sales.

The lower MSRP, if it survives to launch in the coming weeks, could make the RTX 4070 Ti the sweet spot for gamers. It can reportedly outperform the RTX 3090, and it won’t have the same unreasonably large footprint as the RTX 4090. Nvidia has an announcement planned for early 2023, and we expect to get more details about the launch at that time.

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Report: Poor iPhone 14 Plus Sales Prompt Apple to Reevaluate iPhone 15 Lineup

(Credit: Eric Zeman) Apple made some pretty big changes to its phone lineup this year. Instead of offering a regular-sized phone and a mini version, it ditched the small handset in favor of “big and bigger” phones. That translates to 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch models for the base 14 and 14 Plus, as well as for the Pro and Pro Max like before. Apparently, that approach has failed, according to analysts. Apple is specifically concerned about poor sales of its newest model, the 6.7-inch iPhone 14 Plus. It’s the first time Apple has offered a non-pro phone in this size. It’s reportedly so alarmed over its poor sales, it’s reevaluating the iPhone 15 lineup.

To recap, in the past Apple used to use the same silicon in all of its phones. So the iPhone 13, 13 Pro, and 13 Mini all had an A15 chip inside. The main differentiator between the regular and Pro models were things like the 120Hz ProMotion display and more camera options. That changed for the iPhone 14 lineup. It reserved the new A16 chip for the Pro phones and gave the regular phones the older A15 silicon instead. It also introduced the 14 Plus, which had the same parts as the 14 but with a bigger display and battery.

For the iPhone 14 Apple asked its customers, “Do you like big phones, or bigger phones?”

Right after it launched, famed Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo noted it had likely sold more poorly than the model it replaced, the 13 Mini. The 14 Plus turned off small phone aficionados, who held off on upgrading. Now, several months later, it seems the pattern has held and iPhone 14 Plus phones are gathering dust. Another problem with the 14 Plus is its price, which starts at $899. That’s $100 more than the regular iPhone 14. Meanwhile, the iPhone 14 Pro starts at $999, while the Pro Max is $1,099. For many people, it’s worth it to just spend an extra $200 for all the Pro features.

Apple is reportedly taking this situation very seriously, according to a new blog from a reliable supply chain source. Macrumors flagged the post, written by a person named yeux1122. It claims Apple is assessing the situation, and considering two corrective actions. The first is to further differentiate the Pro and non-Pro phones. In doing so, it would lead to the second option: reducing the price of the Plus model. Apple seems intent on neutering its regular phones, with the hope of upselling people to the Pro phones instead. That’s because Apple believes Android poses no threat to the high-end of the market, according to Ming-Chi Kuo.

For the iPhone 15 lineup, it seems the phones will be differentiated even further. On a related note, it was reported before the iPhone 14 launch that Apple was seeing flagging sales of its Mini and SE models. That’s likely why it ditched the small version and went super-sized. Now it turns out, that approach didn’t pan out the way Apple thought it would. At least, not at $899, causing Apple to once again go back to the whiteboard.

The iPhone 15 lineup is still a year away, so there’s not much information about what they’ll look like. The only big rumor is that it will bring its much-hyped Dynamic Island to its entire lineup. It’s currently only available on the Pro models. It’s uncertain whether it’ll once again offer a small phone, or stick with the 6.7-inch iPhone 15 Plus at a lower price. And of course, they’ll be the first iPhones with a USB-C connector due to new European regulations.

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FTX Customers File Class Action Lawsuit Demanding Access to Frozen Funds

(Credit: Kanchanara/Unsplash) Until recently, FTX was one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, controlling billions of dollars worth of digital money. That changed in November when the company suffered a liquidity crisis and collapsed, taking customer funds with it. As bankruptcy courts in the US and Bahamas try to untangle the mess, a group of former customers has filed a class action lawsuit seeking priority access to the company’s remaining funds.

The collapse of FTX was, in part, a follow-on effect of the continuing drop in crypto prices that began earlier this year. After seeing the likes of Celsius and Three Arrows fall apart this year, it should not have been a surprise when FTX ran into trouble, and yet it did come as a shock to the crypto world. The fall began when another major crypto firm known as Binance pulled FTX’s FTT token, following allegations the company improperly shared funds with its sister hedge fund Alameda Research. Customers rushed to withdraw funds, which FTX was unable to cover, and then Binance backed out of a deal to acquire FTX after getting a look at the books. When it all came tumbling down, FTX froze customer accounts, and multiple parties are now litigating over who should get what’s left.

It’s now looking like FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried inappropriately took funds from customer accounts to use in other trading activities, leaving little in its accounts after the company fell apart. This entirely believable presumption is at the heart of the new legal action, which was filed in Delaware bankruptcy court by four individuals who claim to represent the entire class of former FTX customers, which could include up to 1 million people. When financial firms go under, non-corporate customers are usually last in line to get reimbursed, and that means they don’t get everything they are owed. The lawsuit asks the courts to put customers at the front of the line.

Bankman-Fried was recently released from custody on a $250 million bond pending trial. (Credit: Cointelegraph/CC3.0)

According to the filing, FTX’s terms did not allow it to “comingle” customer funds with investments, nor to use those funds for general operating expenses. Thus, the frozen cryptocurrency “never belonged to FTX or Alameda” and should be returned to customers before the company’s debts are paid. It’s unclear if this lawsuit has any chance of success, but it will certainly muddy the waters of an already messy bankruptcy. FTX was based in the Bahamas, and recent allegations suggest the company’s leadership misappropriated funds to purchase extensive real estate holdings, as well as stakes in other crypto firms like Robinhood.

Bankman-Fried is facing multiple felony charges for his mishandling of FTX. If convicted, he could face more than 100 years in prison. Several other FTC and Alemeda leaders have already pleaded guilty to lesser charges and are cooperating with investigators.

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PowerColor Begins Collecting Serials of Overheating Radeon 7900 Series GPUs

The saga of the overheating Radeon 7900 series GPUs is ongoing, and sadly it still seems like a confusing mess. There have been a few new developments since it was initially reported last week. Some users have tried to RMA their cards due to hotspots hitting 110C, but have been denied. Amidst the confusion, one of AMD’s partners is now stepping in to try to add some organization to the situation.

To recap, the brouhaha started a week ago. A website in Germany noticed several users on its forums reporting radical temperature deltas on AMD-designed Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPUs. Those are the red and black “reference” designs. The issue does not appear to affect partner boards with different coolers. This hints that the issue is due to the way the cooler interacts with the chiplets on the PCB. In some cases, the delta between the main die and a hotspot was as high as 53C, which seems out of spec. That resulted in cards running at 110C, resulting in thermal throttling and fans running at full speed. AMD announced it was investigating the issue, which brings us to now.

A thread on the AMD subreddit is titled, “Do not buy a 7900 XTX, or anything else for that matter, directly from AMD.” The user is experiencing the overheating issue, and says AMD told them it’s all “in-spec.” However, the thread got enough attention that AMD agreed to RMA the board. Another Redditor with the same issue was also refused an RMA by AMD. In the thread, they report AMD told them, “The temperatures are normal.” This has caused quite an uproar in the r/AMD subreddits.

The Radeon Technology Group engineer’s post on Reddit.

Finally, an AMD engineer waded into the thread to provide some clarity (image above). An engineering lead named Kevin says AMD is aware of the issue and actively investigating by collecting serials and trying to reproduce the problem. Additionally, Kevin says that a delta of 90C on the main die with a 110C hotspot is “within spec.” However, he says a delta of 70C and 110C is “not ideal.” Kevin says they’re looking at whether it can be mitigated via firmware or drivers, but “it’s not clear yet.”

Since there was still some confusion among Redditors about who to speak with about the issue, a hero emerged. A user named PowerColorSteven waded into the choppy waters to offer PC component vendor PowerColor‘s assistance. Steven said everyone should email him, or message him on Reddit, regardless of which card they have. He will begin to collect serials, and then hand that information off to AMD. When describing the number of people afflicted, he wrote “def more than a handful.”

It seems as if, for now, PowerColorSteven is the point man on this operation. All information should flow through him, which will then be disseminated to AMD and its partners. Remember that unlike Nvidia, some of its partners make reference boards. Once he’s collected enough data, he says he’ll post all the info he has. The big question seems to be, why is it hitting 110C to begin with, and is that within spec like AMD says it is? Also, what is it about AMD’s design that is enabling this behavior?

One interesting ripple is Wccftech dug up an old AMD blog post about the RX 5700 series from 2019. The blog discussed operating temperatures for the card. In it, AMD explained 110C is just fine. It reads, “Operating at up to 110C Junction Temperature during typical gaming usage is expected and within spec.” Of course, that’s a different architecture, but it would be surprising if that’s also expected behavior on the 7900 XTX. If AMD has to admit that publicly to defuse this crisis, it could make it worse. For reference, most GPUs are expected to run at about 70C or so, and most are able to do that too, including AMD’s cards. Our sister site PCMag detected no overheating in its review of the RX 7900 XTX (below).

For now, this is an ongoing investigation. However, at this point, it can be labeled a real problem, and not user error or a handful of bad cards. We don’t know how widespread it is yet, but hopefully, we’ll find out more soon. It’s a real bummer for AMD though, which has always been in a David vs. Goliath scenario with Nvidia. AMD also has a history of buggy drivers and has been working hard on regaining gamers’ confidence. This is surely a setback, but it’s not clear how it will impact AMD’s reputation with gamers.

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Wednesday, 28 December 2022

Scientists Discover ‘New’ Organ Hidden Within Your Face

(Credit: Valstar et al/Radiotherapy and Oncology) You’d think that existing exclusively within the human body would give way to a complete knowledge of the organs hidden within. Instead, we’re constantly discovering new parts of the weird and glorious biological machine we each call home. The latest in these discoveries are the “tubarial glands,” a pair of small organs responsible for producing saliva.

Oncologists from the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam were conducting cancer research earlier this year when they happened upon the “new” glands. Radiation oncologist Wouter Vogel, oral and maxillofacial surgeon Matthijs Valstar, and their team have been working to improve the research community’s understanding of cancers occurring in the head and neck. They were using positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) scans—known for helping to track metastasizing prostate cancer—to study patients’ mouth, throat, and other cancers when the scans’ radioactive glucose lit up an unfamiliar part of the face.

Scan after scan, the same part of the patients’ faces continued to glow. Exactly 100 consecutive patients and cadavers possessed the same strange bright spot, prompting Vogel and Valstar to investigate. Contrary to what they expected, the spot wasn’t an anomaly—it was a whole new organ consisting of two salivary glands.

(Credit: Valstar et al/Radiotherapy and Oncology)

The team has dubbed the glands “tubarial glands” for their location within the body. They’re about the same size as the body’s three main salivary glands but sit on either side of the nasopharynx, which connects the nasal passages to the rest of the human body’s respiratory system. Most salivary and mucous glands within the nasopharynx are microscopic in size, which explains Vogel’s and Valstar’s surprise during the initial PET/CT scans.

The discovery is highly relevant to the team’s main oncological mission. Radiotherapy, which is used to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors, can trigger complications within salivary glands. “Patients may have trouble eating, swallowing, or speaking, which can be a real burden,” Vogel said in a statement.

Researchers at University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) subsequently studied 723 cancer patients and found that increased radiotherapy correlated with increased salivary gland issues, including with the newly-discovered tubarial glands. As a result, radiotherapists will need to avoid delivering radiation to this portion of the body as they do with more familiar salivary glands.

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Man Discovers Entire Underground City After Knocking Down Basement Wall

(Photo: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen/Wikimedia Commons) Most people who take a sledgehammer to one of their walls end up finding nothing more than some shoddy plumbing. But for one man in Turkey, a renovation attempt in 1963 led to the discovery of a lifetime. Knocking down a basement wall revealed a multi-layered underground city, which researchers are now understanding to have housed up to 20,000 people.

The man—whose name remains under wraps even after several decades—resided in the Turkish providence of Cappadocia. He’s said to have been working on an interior home upgrade when he demolished the one barrier dividing his residence from that of people from as far back as the 8th or 7th centuries BCE. The hole in his wall opened up to a tunnel, which gave way to more tunnels, allowing archaeologists at the Turkish Department of Culture to inspect the newly-discovered city firsthand.

Now referred to as Derinkuyu, the city is believed to have housed early Christians who fled from the Romans, plus Muslim Arabs seeking refuge from the Arab-Byzantine wars. Compared with other hideouts, Derinkuyu offered a decent level of security: Many people didn’t know about the underground labyrinth at all, and if residents were found out, they could use the city’s many intricate escape routes to avoid harm. They even used stone “doors” to block passageways, sealing themselves and their families inside with select livestock and other supplies until intruders gave up and left.

A “ventilation well” in Derinkuyu. (Photo: Nevit Dilmen/Wikimedia Commons)

Certain features suggest that even non-refugees who lived in Derinkuyu resided there exclusively. Ventilation shafts, water channels, and wells as deep as 180 feet helped facilitate survival without requiring residents to venture above ground. Those who lived in Derinkuyu—temporarily or long-term—used torches to see in the city’s perpetual darkness. Though much of Derinkuyu is made up of corridors, its total 172 square miles include many living quarters complete with bedrooms and kitchens, making for a relatively comfortable home.

Derinkuyu’s 18 floors also made for quite the lively city. The Phrygians, a group of ancient Indo-European people known for their impressive building skills, are believed to have constructed Derinkuyu with multiple functionalities in mind. Areas not used as dwellings were made into markets, meeting areas, schools, and houses of worship. Residents largely kept livestock in chambers close to the city’s surface to avoid odor and gas buildup, while underground churches were often accompanied by individual study chambers.

Researchers believe Derinkuyu was abandoned centuries (at minimum) before the Cappadocia resident stumbled upon it. Though the city was first found 60 years ago, archaeologists are still working to uncover all of the labyrinth’s secrets, with fragments of Darinkuyu’s history having been discovered just this year.

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SpaceX Launches First Gen2 Starlink Satellites

SpaceX recently asked for FCC approval to begin its Starlink Gen2 deployments before the end of 2022, and it followed through. Today, the company launched 54 new Starlink satellites to orbit that will form the first element of the firm’s Gen2 network. However, SpaceX hasn’t discussed what, if anything, is different about these satellites — they were launched aboard a Falcon 9, and the true next-gen Starlink hardware will require Starship, which has yet to reach orbit.

The Falcon 9 rocket blasted off in the early hours of Wednesday on the Starlink 5-1 mission. It was the 60th Starlink mission for 2022 with just one more on the schedule. The mission itself was the kind of textbook perfection we’ve come to expect from the Falcon 9. After sending the second stage on its way, the first-stage booster came down for a landing on the company’s A Shortfall of Gravitas drone ship. The satellites were released in the planned orbit, making them the first to count toward the company’s 7,500 allotment from the FCC.

Although SpaceX did not offer details on the satellites, the hardware is visible in the video stream after the payload faring was jettisoned. The 54 satellites are stacked inside, very much like all the past Starlink launches, but the Gen2 satellites are supposed to be much larger and more capable. So what makes this a “Gen2” mission? The satellites were deployed in a new orbital shell authorized by federal regulators for the enhanced Starlink network. It’s possible these satellites will be used to test features of the true Gen2 hardware, or perhaps they will be used to beef up connectivity until Starship is ready.

Watch Falcon 9 launch 54 Starlink satellites to orbit → https://t.co/wGq3KkoDyY https://t.co/sHdWRcsqZV

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 28, 2022

SpaceX says the Gen2 expansion will alleviate the congestion issues that have plagued Starlink throughout 2022. At launch in 2020, Starlink provided speeds around 100Mbps, which was several times higher than traditional satellite internet, while also offering latency not that far off from wired broadband. However, the demand for Starlink access has caused speeds to slow, and the company is planning to institute residential data caps in the coming months.

Previously, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he hoped to complete the first orbital test of Starship in 2022, but that didn’t happen. The company’s new megarocket hasn’t flown in months, but SpaceX has been conducting static fire tests with the Super Heavy first stage, which is required to boost Starship into orbit. When complete, Starship will be capable of deploying the more powerful Gen2 Starlink satellites, but that’s just the start. SpaceX also plans to use Starship to support NASA’s Artemis lunar landings, perform sub-orbital surface-to-surface transport on Earth, and reach distant destinations like Mars. And Musk still insists he wants to colonize the red planet.

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Priced at $1,000 Overseas

(Photo: Baidu) After Nvidia famously yanked the RTX 4080 12GB from its launch schedule, people thought Nvidia realized it had gone too far. Nvidia claimed the GPU was simply named wrong, and having two RTX 4080s was confusing. That “unlaunched” GPU was priced at $899, so it seemed logical that when it was relaunched as the RTX 4070 Ti, Nvidia would lower the price. After all, the RTX 3070 Ti had a launch price of $599. However, some Chinese e-tailers have already listed the upcoming GPU, and the prices are kind of shocking. Multiple retailers are listing the GPU and its variants, and all are priced over $1,000 USD.

The RTX 4070 Ti is the 4080 12GB, rebranded. It’s supposed to launch at CES, which is right around the corner. Due to its impending launch, it’s already being listed overseas. Several Chinese sellers are offering the GPU for sale, and all are rather expensive. For example, according to TechSpot, two e-tailers are selling cards from Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, and Colorful. The prices start at 7,000 RMB, which translates to $1,003. The prices go up from there, peaking at $1,200 for the Inno3D RTX 4070 Ti iChill. It seems like the Founders Edition will start at $1,000, with the overclocked versions going for more.

Listings from Chinese e-tailers paint a grim picture of the upcoming RTX 4070 Ti launch. (Image: Techspot)

Nvidia still hasn’t announced the price of the RTX 4070 Ti, so we can’t jump to conclusions just yet. However, it was rumored the company would lower the price of the poor-selling (by some accounts) RTX 4080 16GB, and that never came to pass. The reason it never happened was the 4080 performs quite well against the less expensive Radeon RX 7900 cards. Plus, it doesn’t suffer from some of the issues that seem to be plaguing the new Radeons, melting cables aside.

The RTX 4080 12GB’s original $899 price is a huge price jump for a card using the smaller x04 die. In this case, it’s the AD104, which is 295mm². The AD103 die in its big brother, the $1,200 RTX 4080 16GB, is 100mm larger. It also has a 192-bit memory bus, which is unheard of for a card in this class. It was those factors along with its high price that likely made Nvidia reconsider its branding. Therefore, since it was cancelled at $899, some thought it might arrive at $799 or so. With the prices being so high overseas, we’re not so certain anymore.

The specs of the RTX 4070 Ti are already known, so it’ll be an interesting launch.

In the end, the price will likely be determined by how it fares against the Radeon 7900 series GPUs. Those are priced at $999 and $899, making it a very interesting situation for Nvidia because the $899 Radeon RX 7900 XT is notably slower than the RTX 4080. That could be exactly where the RTX 4070 Ti lands on the benchmark charts. That makes it feasible Nvidia sticks to its guns and launches at $899., which would immediately outrage gamers who think Nvidia is jacking up prices too much. As an example, the 4080 received a $500 price increase from the RTX 3080. A lot of people opined that it’s a great card, just priced wrong, including us.

Nvidia has already released benchmarks for the RTX 4070 Ti, formerly the 4080 12GB.

However, with the RTX 4070 Ti launch drawing near, Nvidia has a decision to make. It could easily undercut AMD by offering it at $799, but that leaves a yawning price chasm between the two GPUs in the stack. That’s not something Nvidia usually does. With the 30 series, Nvidia had Ti versions for every card it sold, and sometimes more than one version of the same GPU with different memory allocations.

Complicating things is Nvidia has already released its own benchmarks for the RTX 4070 Ti. Those show it being neck-and-neck with the RTX 3090 Ti in rasterization. That’s a $1,000 GPU, at least, so $899 doesn’t seem so crazy. Time will tell, as the GPU is expected to be unveiled at CES alongside the 40-series mobile products. Reviews for the newest member of the Ada Lovelace family are expected on Jan. 4.

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NASA Takes the Sting Out of Cold Weather on Earth By Detailing Winter on Mars

As a spate of nasty winter weather has buffeted much of the US in the past week, NASA is reminding us how much worse it could be. You could be living on Mars, which some people inexplicably want to do. Temperatures on the red planet can drop as low as -189 degrees Fahrenheit (-123 degrees Celsius), producing cubic snowflakes in the depth of winter and geysers of carbon dioxide as springtime approaches. Sounds lovely, right?

Scientists believe that Mars had a more temperate climate billions of years ago, but today it’s a frigid wasteland with a thin atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide. However, there’s enough atmosphere that it does snow during winter. According to NASA, there are two kinds of snow on Mars: water ice and dry (carbon dioxide) ice. You’ll never find a patch of water ice snow as it sublimates (transitions from solid to gas) before it can reach the surface. Dry ice snow, on the other hand, falls in great enough quantities that you could snowshoe across it. If you found the right crater rim shielded from sunlight, you might even be able to ski down it.

The shape of snowflakes is a reflection of the conformation of molecules when they freeze. Water forms a hexagonal crystal, so the snowflakes on Earth have six sides. However, the snow on Mars is cubic in shape. That’s a result of the shape of carbon dioxide crystals, which have four sides. Dry ice snowflakes are very small, though. Data from the Mars Climate Sounder suggests Martian snowflakes are smaller than the width of a human hair.

Mars has a longer year than Earth does — about 687 Earth days. The planet’s last winter happened in the summer of 2022, and it’s currently smack in the middle of spring. The transition from winter to spring on Earth means rain showers and blooming plants, but not so on Mars. As dry ice builds up on the surface of Mars, ic will cover large swaths of the surface, but it doesn’t block light like water ice. At the end of winter, the sheet of translucent dry ice begins to crack to form a patchwork pattern (see top), and gaseous carbon dioxide under the surface warms in the sunlight. The gas eventually bursts through as a geyser, blasting dust and debris upward. Scientists are beginning to focus more on these “spring fans” to study winds on Mars.

According to NASA’s Curiosity rover, the daily high temperature on Mars is currently hovering between 0 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit (about -17 to -6 Celsius). That’s warmer than it’s been in some parts of the US lately. But come next summer, we’ll be basking in the heat on Earth while it snows carbon dioxide on Mars.

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Tuesday, 27 December 2022

TSMC to Announce 3nm Mass Production Has Begun

(TSMC’s Fab 18. Credit: TSMC) In a move that analysts are saying is quite rare, TSMC said it’ll be holding a celebratory ceremony on Dec. 29 at its Taiwan HQ. The company will be announcing it’s begun mass production of its highly anticipated 3nm process, known as FinFlex. Though it was expected TSMC would begin 3nm production around this time, it’s unusual for the company to hold an event to celebrate the achievement. The reason it’s crowing about it, some analysts say, is to pacify critics in China who have berated the company for its plans to begin producing advanced nodes in the United States. The move by TSMC seems to be to assure them it will always build its most advanced products in Taiwan.

News of the ceremony comes from Focus Taiwan via 9to5mac. It says the company will place the final beam on a newly expanded fab in the ceremony. This process is known as “topping out” and means the facility is ready to begin high-volume production. The Taiwan source says the company currently produces 5nm silicon at this site, which is dubbed Fab 18. It could theoretically be the fab that makes chips for AMD, Nvidia, and Apple. TSMC recently held a similarly high-profile event at its Arizona fab, with Apple CEO Tim Cook and President Joe Biden in attendance, where the company announced it’ll begin producing 4nm chips in Arizona in 2024. It’ll eventually begin 3nm production in America too, but not for a few years.

FinFlex lets companies choose different FIN configurations for each functional block on the die. (Credit: TSMC)

The main criticism TSMC has faced has been in response to its plan to triple its investment in its US fabs. On Dec. 6, it announced it was going to spend $40 billion to expand its facilities. That’s up from the original $12 billion it had earmarked for its Arizona operation. It’ll begin with 4nm production in 2024, then 3nm production in 2026. Four years from now, 3nm will be far from cutting-edge technology. Still, the move by TSMC could allow companies like Apple to say they’re using American-made silicon for the first time.

Also, a recent op-ed in a government-approved publication accused the US of tricking TSMC into moving some of its advanced nodes to the states. The paper argued that the US government was essentially trying to steal China’s most advanced technology. The move makes sense given all the saber-rattling from Beijing recently. Taiwan is the biggest silicon fab company in the world and is responsible for over 60% of the world’s chips.

TSMC’s roadmap as of 2022.

The move by TSMC to hold a ceremony might also be to silence critics who have said 3nm was delayed. Samsung announced high-volume production of 3nm silicon way back in July. Still, TSMC’s previous roadmap showed it beginning 3nm production in 2022. However, by holding an event on Dec. 29 it seems it reached that goal, but just by a hair. Apple is widely expected to be its first 3nm customer. The company is yet to announce the M2 Pro and Max SoCs, which are predicted to be made on the 3nm process. Its A17 SoC for the iPhone 15 is also expected to utilize TSMC’s newest node.

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