Month: March 2022

Enlarge / One of Waymo’s Jaguar I-Paces on the streets of San Francisco. (credit: Waymo)

Waymo rides in San Francisco will start costing money soon, according to TechCrunch. The robotaxi spinoff from Alphabet has obtained a necessary permit from the California Public Utilities Commission that allows it to charge customers for their trips, something that should start happening later in March.

Originally, Waymo started teaching its robotaxis to drive in the flat, sunny expanse of Chandler, Arizona. And in October 2020, the company finally started offering an actual commercial ride-hailing service in the area.

Ironically, there are limits to the lessons you can learn in such a car-centric environment. Training an autonomous vehicle is all about mastering the edge cases, and there are many more of those in the dense, chaotic, pedestrian-filled environment of San Francisco than an Arizona suburb.

Enlarge (credit: Sala et al. 2022)

Early humans suffered frequent head injuries but often lived long enough for those injuries to heal. That’s the result of a study that analyzed twenty 350,000-year-old skulls from a cave in Spain. The study also found that recovery wasn’t inevitable—several of the individuals in the cave apparently died from violent blows to the head.

Welcome to the Pit of Bones

About 350,000 years ago, deep in a cave network in what is now northern Spain, the remains of at least 29 people somehow ended up at the bottom of a 13-meter-deep shaft. Paleoanthropologists have unearthed thousands of broken pieces of bone, which add up to the partial skeletons of at least 29 members of a hominin species called Homo heidelbergensis, which may have been a common ancestor of our species and Neanderthals.

The pit, called Sima de los Huesos, contains a mix of ages and genders. Paleoanthropologists are still debating whether the pit was a burial site or just a place where bones washed in with floodwaters.

Enlarge / Apple’s 2021 iPad—sans futuristic folding capability, of course. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Two different sources are now saying Apple plans to introduce a foldable iPad and MacBook hybrid product, though the release date for such a device would likely be a few years away.

The rumors first began to swirl when DSCC analyst Ross Young published a report claiming that Apple has been discussing a 20-inch foldable computing device with suppliers.

The device could be used in multiple ways. When it’s folded into a laptop-like shape, the hybrid’s bottom half could be used as a keyboard. When it’s unfolded, the device could be treated like a large tablet computer. Further, the hybrid could be used with an external keyboard to work as a portable monitor and all-in-one computer.

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  Cyberpunk 2077, patch 1.5, PlayStation 5, ray-tracing mode. [credit:
  CD Projekt Red
  ]

While video game consoles have finally reached the age of ray tracing, performing those graphical calculations in real time can still be tough on consumer-level hardware. A PS5 game like Gran Turismo 7, for instance, can only handle ray-traced visuals in replays thanks to the processing requirements.

With a newly filed patent, though, Sony engineer Mark Cerny lays out a method that could significantly speed up the ray-tracing process by offloading certain calculations from the GPU to specially designed ray-tracing unit (RTU) hardware. The outlines of the new ray-tracing process are laid out in a patent application titled “System and method for accelerated ray tracing with asynchronous operation and ray transformation.” The application was published in the European Union last week after being filed last August.

In Cerny’s method, the RTU hardware is specially designed to efficiently traverse so-called acceleration structures in a 3D environment, going through a stack of bounding volumes to identify points where a virtual light ray intersects with an object. Those intersections are then sent to a shader program running on the GPU, which determines whether the object is opaque (a “hit” for the ray-tracing algorithm) or transparent (i.e., the intersection can be ignored).

Enlarge / UHBR-certified DisplayPort 2.0 cables. (credit: VESA)

VESA, which makes the DisplayPort spec, today announced a certification program aimed at helping consumers understand if a DisplayPort 2.0 cable, monitor, or video source can support the max refresh rates and resolutions the spec claims.

Technology certifications, like DisplayPort and HDMI, generally provide an overview of associated products’ capabilities to give shoppers an idea of expected performance, like a monitor’s max speed or cable’s max bandwidth, before even using them.

VESA’s latest certification is around DisplayPort 2.0. The spec can support a max throughput of 80Gbps compared to DisplayPort 1.4’s 32.4Gbps. This enables extreme uses, like 16K resolution with display stream compression (DSC), 10K without compression, or two 8K HDR screens at 120 Hz.

Enlarge / Tipasa, a Roman site in Algeria, faces a high risk from sea-level rise. (credit: Ethel Davies)

Climate change is poised to impact not just our present but our history as well. According to the IUCN, climate change has now become “the most prevalent threat” to heritage sites around the world. Many wealthy countries like the United States have data about what’s likely to be impacted, but other parts of the world are facing a dearth of information on this issue.

New work performed by an international team of 11 researchers across various disciplines aims to address this lack of data for the continent of Africa. The team identified hundreds of sites with cultural importance and compared their locations to where future sea-level rise flooding and erosion is expected to occur in the future. “If you have erosion, you’re more likely to have flooding, and vice versa,” Joanne Clarke, a professor of archaeology at the University of East Anglia and one of the authors, told Ars.

Clarke noted that this information could be used to help protect the sites and better understand which parts of the continent need more protection. Further, she argued that the ways in which we look at the issue of climate change and heritage sites is skewed toward wealthier parts of the world, which are better able to manage the worst of the world’s shifting climate.