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Walmart is reportedly laying off more than 100 employees in its technology offices in Silicon Valley, part of larger corporate layoffs across the country. The company’s tech workers in the San Francisco Bay Area are being axed as part of Walmart’s plan to lay off around 1,500 corporate employees across the country, according to a report by the San Francisco Chronicle. Positions within Walmart’s global technology, U.S. e-commerce fulfillment, and advertising divisions will reportedly also be hit as a result of the company being restructured. The company, however, did not disclose all of the locations that will be affected.

Betelgeuse is our next door supergiant. It is almost 1000 times bigger than our sun and possibly it has already exploded in a giant supernova. How would we notice, how fast would the process be and what could we expect to see from Earth? Something happened in 2019 Betelgeuse is currently in the final stages of its short life. So when the red supergiant abruptly darkened in late 2019, the behavior led many to speculate that it might be about to explode. The loss of brightness was far greater than anything previously recorded. Analyzing data from Hubble Space Telescope and...

Scientists say they have created an experimental new high-tech window coating that works similarly to polarized lenses on sunglasses by allowing all of the visible light through while also reflecting unwanted heat. If added to existing buildings and car windows, the new coating could reduce internal temperatures in hotter climates without sacrificing any of the visible light while also reducing energy usage for indoor air conditioning by as much as 30%. The new coating was developed by researchers from Notre Dame University who were looking for a cheap yet viable way to reduce the use of air conditioning in cars...

Despite skeins of bank regulations supposed to prevent another financial meltdown, Silicon Valley Bank, the country’s 17th-biggest bank, went down in flames last week. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but when a financial institution goes under, you have to wonder: where were the regulators? After all, there were more red flags than you see at a CCP convention. Consider the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the body created in 2010 after the financial crisis, which was meant to avert just this sort of collapse. The council is chaired today by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and includes 9 other voting...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the U.S. banking system was strong after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last week. Partial transcript as follows: MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to get straight to it because the markets will soon reopen for trading. Does the government need to intervene and take emergency measures because of SVB’s failure? YELLEN: Well, let me say America’s economy relies on a safe and sound banking system that can provide for the credit needs of our households and businesses. So whenever a bank, especially one, like Silicon Valley Bank with...

Two of Silicon Valley Bank’s top chiefs dumped millions of dollars worth of stock just two weeks before the firm collapsed Friday, records show. CEO Greg Becker offloaded over $3.5 million worth of stocks — which amounted to nearly 12,500 shares — in a pre-planned, automated sell-off on Feb. 27, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing. That same day, the bank’s third-in-command CFO Daniel Beck sold $575,180 in stocks, Newsweek reported. Silicon Valley Bank, the once leading tech lender, was shut down by federal authorities just 11 days later. Becker and Beck sold off their massive stakes...

Silicon, the standard semiconducting material used in a host of applications—computer central processing units (CPUs), semiconductor chips, detectors, and solar cells—is an abundant, naturally occurring material. However, it is expensive to mine and to purify. Perovskites—a family of materials nicknamed for their crystalline structure—have shown extraordinary promise in recent years as a far less expensive, equally efficient replacement for silicon in solar cells and detectors. Now, a study led by Chunlei Guo, a professor of optics at the University of Rochester, suggests that perovskites may become far more efficient. Researchers typically synthesize perovskites in a wet lab, and then apply...

A silicon-based powder that generates hydrogen when mixed into water EPRO Advance Technology Stir this silicon-based powder into water, and hydrogen will bubble out, ready for immediate use. Hong Kong company EPRO Advance Technology (EAT) says its Si+ powder offers an instant end to the difficulties of shipping and storing green energy. This is the second powdered hydrogen advance we've learned about this week, designed to solve the same problems: transporting hydrogen is difficult, dangerous and expensive, whether the costs are for cryogenic cooling in a liquid hydrogen system, or for compression to around 700 times the normal sea-level air...

The 0.34 nm gate-length side-wall monolayer MoS2 transistor device structure and characterization. Credit: Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04323-3A team of researchers working at Tsinghua University in China has created a sub-1-nm gate in a MoS2 transistor. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group outlines how they created the super tiny gate and explains why they believe it will be difficult for anyone to beat their record. For most of the history of microcomputing, Moore's Law has held up—researchers and engineers have managed to double the speed and capability of computers regularly by reducing the size of their components....

A reader directed me to this Twitter thread from someone who goes by the name Hazard Harrington, who works in Silicon Valley. I have no way of verifying the truth of the person or his position, but it certainly squares with a lot of other accounts of how woefully woke Silicon Valley has become—the more so in the time of COVID—so I am reasonably confident it is authentic: I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before. Wanted to give a rundown of what it’s like from the inside right now. Obviously insanely radically...

Buried in FBI laboratory reports about the anthrax mail attacks that killed five people in 2001 is data suggesting that a chemical may have been added to try to heighten the powder's potency, a move that some experts say exceeded the expertise of the presumed killer. The lab data, contained in more than 9,000 pages of files that emerged a year after the Justice Department closed its inquiry and condemned the late Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator, shows unusual levels of silicon and tin in anthrax powder from two of the five letters. Those elements are found in...

Scientists have been chasing silicon-based lasers for years—they’d provide a faster, cheaper way to move data across or between computer chips. Now researchers say they’ve gotten efficient light emission from silicon by forcing it into a new shape. Replacing copper wires with beams of light makes it possible to send data from one transistor on a chip to another, or from one chip to another, at higher speeds and with less power, without having to worry about the excess heat generated by electrical resistance. Other types of lasers can do that, but the semiconductors they’re made of are more expensive...

While most reconfigurable materials can toggle between two distinct states, the way a switch toggles on or off, the new material's shape can be finely tuned, adjusting its physical properties as desired. The material, which has potential applications in next-generation energy storage and bio-implantable micro-devices, was developed by a joint Caltech-Georgia Tech-ETH Zurich team in the lab of Julia R. Greer. Most materials that are designed to change shape require a persistent external stimulus to change from one shape to another and stay that way: for example, they may be one shape when wet and a different shape when dry—like...

The recent movement to investigate, and even break up, the current tech oligarchy has gained support on both sides of the Atlantic, and even leapt across the gaping divide in American politics. The immediate concerns relate to such things as the control of key markets by one or two firms, the huge concentration of wealth accruing to the tech elite and, increasingly, the oligarchy’s control over and manipulation of information pipelines. What has not been discussed nearly as much is the end game of the oligarchs. What kind of world do they have in mind for us? (snip) For an...

Rather than try to impose the numerous costly mandates and socialistic programs of the Green New Deal, policymakers should focus on improving U.S. industry and making the nation more mineral-independent, a move that would allow for greater technological innovation in the future, both within and outside of the energy sector.

Researchers have created a field-effect transistor using a single-crystal, “paint-on” perovskite Illustration: North Carolina State University =================================================================== Transistors, and the conductive traces that connect them, are routinely created by the billions on the surface of silicon wafers, which are later cut into the individual “chips” that power our computers, phones, watches, and countless other electronic gadgets. But few people think much about how those silicon wafers are made in the first place. It’s quite tricky. Very pure sand (silicon dioxide) has to be melted, at which point a seed crystal of elemental silicon is brought in contact with the melt,...

Before man can cross the vast distances of space, the designs of spacecraft’s sails will be key – striking a delicate balance between mass, strength in addition to reflectivity. Working with NASA, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientists have created the fresh material out of silicon in addition to its oxide, silica. The team has figured out that will super-thin structures made of This specific composite can transform infrared light waves into a momentum that will would likely accelerate a probe to 134,000,000 mph. Speeds like This specific can carry a little probe to our closest stellar neighbours, a huddle...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) warned against the unchecked power of big tech during an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Sunday, recommending that America “looks at all the tools we have to protect free speech and prevent[s] the Internet from becoming a vehicle for censorship.” “The nexus of power in media has moved from New York City to Silicon Valley,” Cruz told host Breitbart News Deputy Political Editor Amanda House. “At this point, a handful of companies enjoy power that famed publisher William Randolph Hearst, at the height of yellow journalism, could never have imagined.” “We’ve heard reports from whistleblowers of...

Evan McMullin doesn’t want you to know who his donors are. The failed Never Trump presidential candidate has stayed in the public eye as a sort of attack dog against President Trump and other Republicans, while keeping secret the names of the donors paying him to do so. McMullin’s recently founded non-profit organization, Stand Up Republic, jumped into the Alabama Senate race this week with a $500,000 ad buy against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. One of the ads features a man saying Roy Moore “makes Republicans and us Christians look bad.”

Until recently, it was easy to define our most widely known corporations. Any third-grader could describe their essence. Exxon sells gas; McDonald’s makes hamburgers; Walmart is a place to buy stuff. This is no longer so. Today’s ascendant monopolies aspire to encompass all of existence. Google derives from googol, a number (1 followed by 100 zeros) that mathematicians use as shorthand for unimaginably large quantities. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too narrow. They now aim to build driverless cars, manufacture phones and conquer death. Amazon, which once called...