Author: Brett Venter

South Africa is a surprisingly advanced location for global astronomy. We’re part of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project and now another, called HIRAX, has finally been funded. HIRAX is the Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment and you’re likely to hear more about the project in the near future. It’s funding of R35 million has been approved by the National Research Foundation (NRF), so now the construction of 1,024 six-metre radio telescopes can begin. I am the HIRAX, I speak to the stars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR8omHqly8E The project is the result of a partnership headed by the University of KwaZulu Natal…

You know what would make smartphones even more distracting than they already are? Console-quality graphics. That’s just what AMD and Samsung intend to fire at users of the South Korean company’s smartphones, thanks to a new partnership that will see AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture — which you can see in action in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 — coming to Exynos processors. Looks good for AMD This isn’t the first we’ve heard about a partnership between the two companies. There was talk in February of an Exynos-powered Samsung notebook that used the graphics company’s rendering tech. Now,…

There are several different sorts of portal in the world. There’s the Facebook Portal, which is terrifying. There’s the Portal video game, which is amazing. There’s also the Stargate, which is the most Kurt Russel portal of all. And then there’s the PORTAL: a video wall connecting two European countries together in real-time. Portal to somewhere else https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GrXTLe9ztA The weird construction looks like it was ripped right from science fiction, only you can’t step through it and instantly travel to another city. That would be pretty awesome, though. Instead, this pair of devices connecting the cities of Lublin, Poland and…

At some point, we have to start asking if Elon Musk is a for-real supervillain. The head of SpaceX (for the purposes of this article) tweeted over the weekend that construction has started on Deimos, the first SpaceX ocean spaceport. Who has an ocean spaceport? Honestly? Elon Musk, apparently. And what is it? It’s an offshore facility that the private space agency intends to use to launch and land its Starship rockets. SpaceX at sea https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1399088815705399305?s=20 Which is a really great idea, in theory. In the event of a crash or an explosion, having the event take place over the…

The 2021 Mars mission aside, NASA’s Artemis project is the next big thing in space exploration. The American space agency intends to set up a more solid presence on Earth’s moon, and it’s roping in several companies to make that happen. SpaceX has been contracted to create the lunar lander for NASA (though there’s some ‘debate’ on that point), and now the fate of the new Artemis rover has been decided. NASA shoots for the Moon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5869l2cKLZw General Motors (GM) has announced that it is partnering with Lockheed Martin to create the new Artemis lunar rover. Only ‘rover’ is the…

We’re not entirely sure how we’re supposed to take this news, but Amazon is installing ZenBooth meditation rooms in its warehouses as part of the company’s WorkingWell initiative. These are little spaces where its warehouse workers can escape for a few minutes to “…watch short videos featuring easy-to-follow wellbeing activities, including guided meditations, positive affirmations, calming scenes with sounds, and more.” They sound positively terrifying. Why do you need a ZenBooth? They’re terrifying because you’re not supposed to have to take frequent wellness breaks in a dedicated room in order to work at a warehouse. Lately Amazon has been under…

There are still in-person events taking place this year, despite reduced attendance by companies who normally participate. Blizzcon 2021, however, will not be one of them. The November event has been postponed to 2022, according to an announcement from Blizzard. Bumping up Blizzcon 2021 Saralyn Smith, executive producer of Blizzcon, confirmed the event cancellation in a post yesterday. The reasoning behind the cancellation was that the “…ongoing complexities and uncertainties of the pandemic” have slowed progress on planning the event to the point where Blizzard doesn’t feel like it could provide the sort of event it would like. But the…

Facebook has become one of the primary sources for information on the internet. Unfortunately, much of what you’ll encounter on the social network holds about as much credibility as a drunk ranting from the darkest corner of the pub at 2PM on a Monday. The company has, since 2016, trotted out various measures to suppress the spread of misinformation (though it can be argued that Facebook is structured to explicitly spread false information, since it tends to be more attractive and easy to spread). Now, it is going one step further — individual accounts are in line to be down-ranked,…

Several months ago we learned that Google Photos would be restricting its previously unlimited image uploads to just 15GB per person — the same 15GB that comes free with your Gmail account, no less, so you’re probably already using some of that storage. This is partly a reminder that the 1 June 2021 deadline is fast approaching. If you’ve got several terabytes of memories stored in Google Photos’ cloud, now is the time to do something about them. What to expect from Google Photos next week Google is aware that you might have large quantities of images backed up on…

Iceland is known for several things: its small population, Ari Eldjárn (who will make this list a little longer for us), and volcanos. But it’s the last point that we’re really concerned with. DJI teamed up with Ása Steinars, gave her one of its new FPV drones and got her to check out the eruption of Mount Fagradalsfjall back in March this year. The footage is… impressive. Iceland’s looking hot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV1wPhjrWls And yet, as impressive as getting up close and personal with an erupting volcano is on video, it must have been quite the experience to do it in person.…