I have a drawer full of USB cables and every time I want to connect a device, I have to try them out. USB-C was supposed to simplify things: One cable for everything, that was the promise. In practice, it’s a different story: There are cables that can only charge. There are some that transfer data. Some also transmit image information, which can then be used as a monitor cable.
And then there is always the question of speed: 30 or 100 watts of charging power? USB 2.0 speed with 480 megabits or USB 3.2 or even Thunderbolt with up to 40 gigabits per second? Unfortunately, the cable labelling often doesn’t help to bring order to the cable chaos. And then devices run or charge unnecessarily slowly because the wrong cable has been used.
The more LEDs light up, the better the cable.
Inexpensive cable tester solves cable problems
Fortunately, this has now come to an end for me: An inexpensive cable tester from Treedix makes testing cables child’s play: Simply plug it in, check the LEDs, and I know whether my cable is “good” or whether I can stuff it in the other cable box in the basement. The one where I also keep SCART and jack cables.
The tester’s small, clever circuit board is powered by an inexpensive CR2032 button battery and offers a number of USB ports. In addition to two USB-C 3.0 ports, there are two USB-A ports (USB 2.0 and USB 3.0) as well as mini-USB, micro-USB, Type-B, Lightning, and a hard drive connector (Micro-B 2.0).
The functionality is as simple as it is efficient. Simply plug both ends of the cable to be tested into the device and the cable tester will display a series of LEDs. Basically, the more LEDs that light up, the better the cable.
This cable has significantly fewer functions than the upper cable: For example, the data lines are missing.
Meaning of the individual LEDs on the cable tester
Unfortunately, the cable tester does not currently support Thunderbolt or USB 4.0 — but this is not a problem, as both cable types have to be labelled as standard anyway. What’s more, these cables are relatively expensive and should therefore be easy to remember — at least that’s how it is for me.
The different LEDs light up depending on the cable standard.
No household should be without a USB cable tester
For me, the small cable tester is also more of an aid to sorting the countless other cables. Ragged USB-C charging cables can look just like the high-quality cables from the digital camera — with the difference that they don’t work in the same way. The cable tester helps me a lot here — and in my opinion, no household should be without one. Especially as it’s inexpensive and easy to use.
Sony is paying approximately $460 milliion to purchase Peanuts [PDF] and its characters, including Snoopy and Charlie Brown, created by Charles M. Schulz. That’s a 41 percent stake Sony is buying from Canadian firm WildBrain. Since Sony bought 39 percent of the franchise back in 2018, this will give the company an 80 percent stake. The deal is still subject to regulatory approvals, but Peanuts will become Sony’s consolidated subsidiary once it’s closed. Schulz’s family still owns the remaining 20 percent stake in the franchise.
Schulz launched the Peanuts universe in comic strips 75 years ago, back in 1950. The franchise has grown massively since then, spawning animated series, cartoon musicals and movies that made Snoopy a household name. The company said that it has focused on expanding the Peanuts IP since it bought 39 percent of the brand years ago. “With this additional ownership stake, we are thrilled to be able to further elevate the value of the ?PEANUTS? brand by drawing on the Sony Group?s extensive global network and collective expertise,” Sony Music Entertainment Japan CEO Shunsuke Muramatsu added.
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In late September, a Spanish military plane carrying the country’s defense minister to a base in Lithuania was reportedly the subject of a kind of attack—not by a rocket or anti-aircraft rounds, but by radio transmissions that jammed its GPS system.
The flight landed safely, but it was one of thousands that have been affected by a far-reaching Russian campaign of GPS interference since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The growing inconvenience to air traffic and risk of a real disaster have highlighted the vulnerability of GPS and focused attention on more secure ways for planes to navigate the gauntlet of jamming and spoofing, the term for tricking a GPS receiver into thinking it’s somewhere else.
US military contractors are rolling out new GPS satellites that use stronger, cleverer signals, and engineers are working on providing better navigation information based on other sources, like cellular transmissions and visual data.
But another approach that’s emerging from labs is quantum navigation: exploiting the quantum nature of light and atoms to build ultra-sensitive sensors that can allow vehicles to navigate independently, without depending on satellites. As GPS interference becomes more of a problem, research on quantum navigation is leaping ahead, with many researchers and companies now rushing to test new devices and techniques. In recent months, the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its Defense Innovation Unit have announced new grants to test the technology on military vehicles and prepare for operational deployment.
Tracking changes
Perhaps the most obvious way to navigate is to know where you started and then track where you go by recording the speed, direction, and duration of travel. But while this approach, known in the field as inertial navigation, is conceptually simple, it’s difficult to do well; tiny uncertainties in any of those measurements compound over time and lead to big errors later on. Douglas Paul, the principal investigator of the UK’s Hub for Quantum Enabled Precision, Navigation & Timing (QEPNT), says that existing specialized inertial-navigation devices might be off by 20 kilometers after 100 hours of travel. Meanwhile, the cheap sensors commonly used in smartphones produce more than twice that level of uncertainty after just one hour.
“If you’re guiding a missile that flies for one minute, that might be good enough,” he says. “If you’re in an airliner, that’s definitely not good enough.”
A more accurate version of inertial navigation instead uses sensors that rely on the quantum behavior of subatomic particles to more accurately measure acceleration, direction, and time.
Several companies, like the US-based Infleqtion, are developing quantum gyroscopes, which track a vehicle’s bearing, and quantum accelerometers, which can reveal how far it’s traveled. Infleqtion’s sensors are based on a technique called atom interferometry: A beam of rubidium atoms is zapped with precise laser pulses, which split the atoms into two separate paths. Later, other laser pulses recombine the atoms, and they’re measured with a detector. If the vehicle has turned or accelerated while the atoms are in motion, the two paths will be slightly out of phase in a way the detector can interpret.
Last year the company trialed these inertial sensors on a customized plane flying at a British military testing site. In October of this year, Infleqtion ran its first real-world test of a new generation of inertial sensors that use a steady stream of atoms instead of pulses, allowing for continuous navigation and avoiding long dead times.
A view of Infleqtion’s atomic clock Tiqker.
COURTESY INFLEQTION
Infleqtion also has an atomic clock, called Tiqker, that can help determine how far a vehicle has traveled. It is a kind of optical clock that uses infrared lasers tuned to a specific frequency to excite electrons in rubidium, which then release photons at a consistent, known rate. The device “will lose one second every 2 million years or so,” says Max Perez, who oversees the project, and it fits in a standard electronics equipment rack. It has passed tests on flights in the UK, on US Army ground vehicles in New Mexico, and, in late October, on a drone submarine.
“Tiqker operated happily through these conditions, which is unheard-of for previous generations of optical clocks,” says Perez. Eventually the company hopes to make the unit smaller and more rugged by switching to lasers generated by microchips.
Magnetic fields
Vehicles deprived of satellite-based navigation are not entirely on their own; they can get useful clues from magnetic and gravitational fields that surround the planet. These fields vary slightly depending on the location, and the variations, or anomalies, are recorded in various maps. By precisely measuring the local magnetic or gravitational field and comparing those values with anomaly maps, quantum navigation systems can track the location of a vehicle.
Allison Kealy, a navigation researcher at Swinburne University in Australia, is working on the hardware needed for this approach. Her team uses a material called nitrogen-vacancy diamond. In NV diamonds, one carbon atom in the lattice is replaced with a nitrogen atom, and one neighboring carbon atom is removed entirely. The quantum state of the electrons at the NV defect is very sensitive to magnetic fields. Carefully stimulating the electrons and watching the light they emit offers a way to precisely measure the strength of the field at the diamond’s location, making it possible to infer where it’s situated on the globe.
Kealy says these quantum magnetometers have a few big advantages over traditional ones, including the fact that they measure the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field in addition to its strength. That additional information could make it easier to determine location.
The technology is far from commercial deployment, but Kealy and several colleagues successfully tested their magnetometer in a set of flights in Australia late last year, and they plan to run more trials this year and next. “This is where it gets exciting, as we transition from theoretical models and controlled experiments to on-the-ground, operational systems,” she says. “This is a major step forward.”
Delicate systems
Other teams, like Q-CTRL, an Australian quantum technology company, are focusing on using software to build robust systems from noisy quantum sensors. Quantum navigation involves taking those delicate sensors, honed in the placid conditions of a laboratory, and putting them in vehicles that make sharp turns, bounce with turbulence, and bob with waves, all of which interferes with the sensors’ functioning. Even the vehicles themselves present problems for magnetometers, especially “the fact that the airplane is made of metal, with all this wiring,” says Michael Biercuk, the CEO of Q-CTRL. “Usually there’s 100 to 1,000 times more noise than signal.”
After Q-CTRL engineers ran trials of their magnetic navigation system in a specially outfitted Cessna last year, they used machine learning to go through the data and try to sift out the signal from all the noise. Eventually they found they could track the plane’s location up to 94 times as accurately as a strategic-grade conventional inertial navigation system could, according to Biercuk. They announced their findings in a non-peer-reviewed paper last spring.
In August Q-CTRL received two contracts from DARPA to develop its “software-ruggedized” mag-nav product, named Ironstone Opal, for defense applications. The company is also testing the technology with commercial partners, including the defense contractors Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin and Airbus, an aerospace manufacturer.
An illustration showing the placement of Q-CTRL’s Ironstone Opal in a drone.
COURTESY Q-CTRL
“Northrop Grumman is working with Q-CTRL to develop a magnetic navigation system that can withstand the physical demands of the real world,” says Michael S. Larsen, a quantum systems architect at the company. “Technology like magnetic navigation and other quantum sensors will unlock capabilities to provide guidance even in GPS-denied or -degraded environments.”
Now Q-CTRL is working on putting Ironstone Opal into a smaller, more rugged container appropriate for deployment; “Ironstone Opal’s first deployment was, and looked like, a science experiment,” says Biercuk. He anticipates delivering the first commercial units next year.
Sensor fusion
Even as quantum navigation emerges as a legitimate alternative to satellite-based navigation, the satellites themselves are improving. Modern GPS III satellites include new civilian signals called L1C and L5, which should be more accurate and harder to jam and spoof than current signals. Both are scheduled to be fully operational later this decade.
US and allied military users are intended to have access to far hardier GPS tools, including M-code, a new form of GPS signal that is rolling out now, and Regional Military Protection, a focused GPS beam that will be restricted to small geographic areas. The latter will start to become available when the GPS IIIF generation of satellites is in orbit, with the first scheduled to go up in 2027. A Lockheed Martin spokesperson says new GPS satellites with M-code are eight times as powerful as previous ones, while the GPS IIIF model will be 60 times as strong.
Other plans involve using navigation satellites in low Earth orbit—the zone inhabited by SpaceX’s internet-providing Starlink constellation—rather than the medium Earth orbit used by GPS. Since objects in LEO are closer to Earth, their signals are stronger, which makes them harder to jam and spoof. LEO satellites also transit the sky more quickly, which makes them harder still to spoof and helps GPS receivers get a lock on their position faster. “This really helps for signal convergence,” says Lotfi Massarweh, a satellite navigation researcher at Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands. “They can get a good position in just a few minutes. So that is a huge leap.”
Ultimately, says Massarweh, navigation will depend not only on satellites, quantum sensors, or any other single technology, but on the combination of all of them. “You need to think always in terms of sensor fusion,” he says.
The navigation resources that a vehicle draws on will change according to its environment—whether it’s an airliner, a submarine, or an autonomous car in an urban canyon. But quantum navigation will be one important resource. He says, “If quantum technology really delivers what we see in the literature—if it’s stable over one week rather than tens of minutes—at that point it is a complete game changer.”
This story was updated to better reflect the current status of Ironstone Opal.
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While too much of the popular dairy product can spell tummy troubles and high cholesterol for some, new research suggests that eating more high-fat cheese and cream could be linked to a lower risk of developing dementia. While the findings published today in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, do not prove that it lowers the total risk of the disease, it shows an association.
The high-fat debate
High-fat cheeses include cheddar, Brie, and Gouda, and contain more than 20 percent fat. High-fat creams such as whipping cream, double cream, and clotted cream typically contain 30 to 40 percent fat. These items are usually labeled as “full-fat” or “regular” versions in grocery stores.
“For decades, the debate over high-fat versus low-fat diets has shaped health advice, sometimes even categorizing cheese as an unhealthy food to limit,” said Emily Sonestedt, PhD, a study co-author and nutritional epidemiologist at Lund University in Sweden, said in a statement. “Our study found that some high-fat dairy products may actually lower the risk of dementia, challenging some long-held assumptions about fat and brain health.”
In this new study, the team analyzed data from 27,670 people in Sweden with an average age of 58 at the beginning of the study. The participants were followed for an average of 25 years. Over the course of the study, 3,208 people developed dementia.
For one week, the participants kept track of what they ate and answered questions about how often they ate certain foods. They also spoke with the researchers about how they prepared their food.
The researchers then compared people who ate 50 grams (about 1.7 ounces) or more of high-fat cheese every day with people who ate less than 15 grams (about half an ounce) daily. Fifty grams of cheese is about two slices of cheddar and a half a cup of shredded cheese and is roughly 15 grams. A serving of cheese is typically one ounce or 28 grams..
Of those who ate more high-fat cheese, 10 percent developed dementia by the end of the study. Of those who ate less, 13 percent developed dementia.
Risk factors
After adjusting for age, sex, education, and overall diet quality, the team found that people who ate more high-fat cheese had a 13 percent lower risk of developing dementia compared to those who ate less.
There are over 100 known forms of dementia, but the four main types are Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia, and fronto-temporal dementia. When looking at specific types of dementia, the team found people who ate more high-fat cheese had a 29 percent lower risk of vascular dementia.
There was also a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease among those who ate more high-fat cheese. However, that risk was only lower for those who do not have the APOE e4 gene variant—a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
Additionally, the team compared people who consumed 20 grams (roughly 0.7 ounces) or more of high-fat cream per day to people who consumed none. For example, 20 grams of high-fat cream is about 1.4 tablespoons of heavy whipping cream and a recommended serving is about 1 to 2 tablespoons. After similar adjustments, the researchers found that those who consumed high-fat cream daily had a 16 percent lower risk of dementia, compared to those who did not consume any.
They did not find any association between dementia risk and eating low-fat cheese, low-fat cream, high- or low-fat milk, butter, or fermented milk (yogurt, kefir, and buttermilk).
‘When it comes to brain health not all dairy is equal’
One important limitation of this study is that all of the participants were from Sweden, so results may not be the same for other populations. Sonestedt notes that in Sweden, cheese is often eaten uncooked, whereas in the United States it is often heated or eaten with meat. Sweden also has universal health coverage, which the U.S. lacks. Universal coverage typically leads to better health outcomes. Despite spending significantly more money than peer nations, Americans live shorter lives and face more barriers to basic care, so socioeconomics, pollution exposure, and other lifestyle factors can skew nutrition studies like this one.
“These findings suggest that when it comes to brain health not all dairy is equal,” said Sonestedt. “While eating more high-fat cheese and cream was linked to a reduced risk of dementia, other dairy products and low-fat alternatives did not show the same effect. More research is needed to confirm our study results and further explore whether consuming certain high-fat dairy truly offers some level of protection for the brain.”
In case you hadn’t heard, there’s currently a RAM crisis affecting the PC market. The high demand by AI companies for RAM has led to a shortage of supply and pushed prices sky high. It’s a big hassle for those wanting to upgrade or build a new PC as they’re faced with paying exorbitant prices for modules. But there are a few things you can do to skirt around the situation. Here I suggest a few ideas.
Buy bundles for RAM
While the cost of individual RAM kits can leave one’s eyes watering, savvy shoppers have managed to score some great deals on RAM bundles. Buying anything in groups to save a few dollars is generally a good idea and the same can be said for RAM. Some bundle deals even include free RAM. For example, Newegg had a bundle deal on a gaming motherboard and free RAM going on Black Friday: If you bought this Asus TUF Gaming mATX motherboard you got 16GB of free Team Group DDR5 RAM as well.
Consider a prebuilt PC
If you’re in the market for a whole PC, you may as well buy a prebuilt PC and get your RAM that way. While buying individual components and building a rig can be extremely expensive in light of the RAM crisis, most companies selling prebuilt PCs still offer their products within a reasonable price range. For example, while a pair of 16GB DDR5 RAM modules can cost as much as $640 on Amazon, you can currently buy a BeastCom Q3 Gaming PC with 16GB DDR5 RAM for as little as $522 — that’s with all the other components added too — a motherboard, CPU, and the tower, included.
That makes a compelling case for choosing DDR4 RAM for any RAM upgrades or new builds, perhaps pairing the RAM with a Ryzen 5800X3D or Core i7-14700K if you’re building a new rig. DDR4 RAM is still considered good enough for most uses in 2025. It offers significant value for gaming and productivity tasks, with speeds of 3,200MHz or higher being sufficient for most games. While DDR5 offers faster speeds and higher capacities, the performance difference is often minimal for everyday use. You’ll need to be willing to use slightly older platforms and parts to go this route, but you can still find excellent performance available.
Shop the secondhand market
Good bargains can be found shopping in the secondhand market for PC parts with RAM being one of the more reasonable purchases among the different components for sale. As a general tip, don’t just look for standalone RAM sales, if you’re a savvy shopper you should also target old desktops or laptops with the intention to harvest the RAM inside.
Wait it out
Of course, the other thing you could do if you don’t want to pay exorbitant prices right now is wait until RAM prices come back down to a reasonable level. Even though it seems like the crisis won’t end, the day will come when suppliers will catch up with demand.
We saw this happen with the GPU shortage back in 2023 and 2024. GPU prices have since stabilized and returned to mostly normal. So, if your rig is doing swell and doesn’t need any big performance boosts, hold tight for a year or longer and you might be able to save some cash.
Buildings can leak a lot of heat. Scientists think the remedy might come in the form of fireproof, transparent “Bubble Wrap.”
Physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a new material called the Mesoporous Optically Clear Heat Insulator, or MOCHI for short. Unlike the name, MOCHI is no dessert—it’s a nearly transparent, long-lasting silicon gel that insulates so well, you could hold a flame on your palm without getting burned. Sounds unlikely? Here’s the video evidence, courtesy of the team:
Scaled up, MOCHI could be a thin sheet applied to windows to make buildings more energy efficient, according to a recent Science paper on the material. Further down the line, MOCHI could also appear in “applications ranging from extraterrestrial habitats to lightweight apparel,” Ivan Smalyukh, study senior author and a physicist at CU Boulder, told Gizmodo in an email.
Bubble wrap air-trappers
MOCHI appears flat and transparent on the surface, but zoomed in, the material is actually a collection of tiny pores thinner than the width of a human hair, according to the paper. The secret to MOCHI’s insulating abilities lies within these small air bubbles, which trap incoming or outgoing heat within their networks.
This mechanism is similar to aerogels, which NASA uses to insulate its Mars rovers. However, the air-trapping bubbles in aerogels are typically scattered throughout the material and reflect light, giving the final material a cloudy appearance.
By contrast, MOCHI reflects around 0.2% of incoming light. About 90% of the material is air, making the material almost completely transparent, Smalyukh explained. For one of their experiments, Smalyukh and colleagues applied MOCHI to a cold window and found that doing so stopped roughly 95% of heat transfer, somewhat like high-performance building roofs and walls—but transparent, he added.
CU Boulder researchers show off the transparency of MOCHI. Credit: Glenn J. Asakawa/CU Boulder
Is your building leaking?
According to Smalyukh, a major motivation for this project was the not-so-ideal energy efficiency of buildings worldwide. Specifically, buildings consume around 40% of energy worldwide, but poor insulation often leads to heat leaks that increase how much energy residents use to keep themselves comfortable, he said.
By contrast, most existing insulation materials are opaque and look unattractive when used on windows or building exteriors. MOCHI was devised to address both issues.
“Suitable building materials and technologies could allow for comfortable indoor environments at no or minimal energy consumption,” he said. “Thus, windows may finally even acquire new functions, well beyond what they are known for throughout the millennia of uses.”
A MOCHI barbecue
That said, MOCHI is still under development, as fabrication still takes quite a long time, the researchers admitted in a statement. But the team is hopeful. MOCHI ingredients are on the cheaper side, which “bodes well” for bringing the product to markets, Smalyukh said in the statement.
The team also sees much potential for MOCHI as a solution for energy sustainability. For instance, MOCHI could be repurposed as solar panels for buildings, especially in climate zones with limited access to sunlight, Smalyukh explained.
As of now, the researchers continue to test and refine their product. It’s also led to some interesting moments, like using MOCHI as a miniature grill to cook some sausages.
OpenAI has introduced an app directory that’s now available right inside ChatGPT, the company announced. "Apps extend ChatGPT conversations by bringing in new context and letting users take action like order groceries, turn an outline into a slide deck or search for an apartment," the company wrote in a blog post. OpenAI also noted in a help document that "connector" apps like Google Drive are now simply called "apps."
The new apps section (on iOS, Android and web) is divided into Feature, Lifestyle and Productivity categories, letting you connect to commonly used apps and sites like Booking.com, Spotify and Dropbox. To use an app, simply click on it, hit "Connect" then authorize the app to access ChatGPT. With that done, you can then start a chat related to that app. In the case of Dropbox, for instance, you’ll be able to "gather insights, prepare briefs and summarize reports or internal documents," according to the description. Once connected, any app can be accessed by doing an @ mention of it.
A new addition that came along with the store is an Apple Music app that, like Spotify, helps users find music, create playlists and manage their libraries through a chat interface. Another is DoorDash, which lets you transform recipes, meal planning and staples into "an actionable shopping cart."
Along with the app directory, OpenAI is now allowing developers to submit apps for review and publication in ChatGPT according to the company’s app submission guidelines. It also published resources to help developers build such apps, including best practices, open-source example apps, an open-sourced UI library for chat-native interfaces and a step-by-step quickstart guide. That’s on top of the software developer kit (SDK) that OpenAI introduced in October.
OpenAI noted that for now, developers can only monetize apps by linking out from the ChatGPT app to the native app or website — but the company is exploring internal monetization options as well. Privacy was also emphasized, with companies required to provide "clear" policies.
The new feature is a big part of Sam Altman’s promises to make ChatGPT more versatile with the addition of custom "GPT" bots. "Over time, we want apps in ChatGPT to feel like a natural extension of the conversation, helping people move from ideas to action, while building a thriving ecosystem for developers," the company wrote.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/8vfVGJo
