A new report reveals the exciting trajectory of clean energy investments. According to a recent articlepublished in CleanTechnica, investments in clean energy have nearly doubled compared to dirty energy investments in 2024.

The report also notes that as more businesses and homes move to renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, investments in dirty energy appear to have peaked.

“What is perhaps most notable and jumped out to me is how much was being invested in energy efficiency (which typically offers the best return on investment) and power grids and storage,” commented CleanTechnica’s Zachary Shahan. “At the same time … we really shouldn’t be investing in fossil fuels at all at this point!”

The new analysis emphasizes how important solar energy is compared to other renewable energy sources. According to CleanTechnica, solar power investments are outpacing investments in all other generation technologies put together since solar panel costs have decreased by 30%.

Countries all across the world may contribute to reducing atmospheric pollution as they move toward renewable energy sources. Clean energy sources, including solar and wind power, don’t produce any hazardous pollutants when they are installed.

Large-scale installations of renewable energy also help lower local populations’ energy costs.

For instance, large solar projects can, in accordance with EnergySage’s predictions, cut local communities’ energy expenses by 5-20%. According to Forbes, households can save anywhere between $25,500 and $33,000 on electricity costs after solar panels are paid for.
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“Clean energy is winning and will keep on winning, led by solar energy,” Shahan said. “The future appears promising. (However, unless we speed up this shift considerably, it’s also hot.)”

Most of the time, less is more , especially for maintaining connectivity without adding clutter. Presenting the NanoPhone, a fully working smartphone the size of a credit card that’s ideal for situations in which you need access and to keep in touch but don’t want to carry around your larger device.

The NanoPhone keeps you connected without the inconvenience of having something bulky with you, whether you’re hitting the gym, going on a hike, lounging on the beach with a new book, or attending a formal event. At just $100 (reg. $200), the NanoPhone is also a reasonably priced backup smartphone, so you can leave your pricey one at home and take on a little more risk.

Even though it is small, the NanoPhone has a powerful battery. With all the smooth connectivity you would expect from a larger smartphone, you can make calls, surf the web, stream videos, and download your favorite apps, like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
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It also offers front and rear cameras to record memorable events and record family video chats. It weighs less than three ounces and boasts a three-inch HD touch screen along with a long battery life.

Noise-canceling earphones, such as the AirPods Pro, are excellent for blocking outside noise when you’re traveling, but there’s a catch: they don’t interface with airplane in-flight entertainment systems. Fortunately, there are Bluetooth transmitters like the Twelve South AirFly Duo that take care of it for you. At Best Buy and Amazon, you can get one for $44 and it may even be on sale.

The Duo is incredibly easy to use because of its built-in 3.5mm cable. Just insert it into the headphone port of the seatback entertainment system, connect it with your Bluetooth-enabled wireless headphones or earbuds, and you’re ready to go. The best part about this is that you’ll probably wind up with even better sound quality because, more often than not, your own Bluetooth headphones are superior to the corded earbuds that airlines usually provide. It can be connected to another pair of speakers if you and your traveling buddy want to watch the same shows together.
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The wireless headphone adapter is an excellent purchase because of its many benefits, besides audio sharing. Because USB-C is supported, you can fast recharge when the time comes. The Duo’s ability to link wireless headphones to other devices—from a Nintendo Switch to compatible treadmills—will come in handy long after your flight has ended.

Capturing 4K footage with an iPhone 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max might quickly use up a terabyte of storage. Besides offering up to 2TB of additional storage, Lexar’s new Professional Go Portable SSD with Hub also allows mobile filmmakers to capture ProRes video at 60 frames per second and provides a couple extra USB-C connections for attaching other equipment.

Several businesses have released SSD drives specifically made for the iPhone, enabling 60 frames per second of 4K ProRes video recording, which is limited to 30 frames per second when recording to the internal storage of the 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max. The unique feature of Lexar’s solution is its small size and matching USB-C hub, which ensures that the iPhone can still be used with devices like handheld gimbals.

The storage solution from Lexar comprises two primary parts. The SSD itself is the smaller of the two; it has read and write speeds of 1,050 MB/s and 2TB, respectively, and is available in 1TB and 2TB capacities. The SSD can be mounted on the bottom of the iPhone by connecting it directly to the USB-C connection, or it can be positioned out of the way against the back of the iPhone by using the provided angled adaptor.

A four-port USB-C hub can also be used with the SSD, although the SSD and the iPhone’s angled connector take up two of the ports. You can connect accessories like lighting, microphones, or an external power source with a maximum power delivery of 30W to the remaining two USB-C ports.

Although though Lexar is primarily marketing the SSD and hub as an attachment for the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, Android devices with a USB-C connector, USB On-The-Go (UTG) support, and “a USB load capacity of above 4.5W” can also use it.

Through Kickstarter, Lexar can offer its Professional Go Portable SSD with Hub to customers at a discounted price for those who contribute to the campaign. The SSD costs $129 for the 1TB model and $209 for the 2TB model when purchased alone. Accessories like a protective case and an angled USB-C converter are also included. The price of the 1TB SSD increases to $159 with the USB-C hub accessory, or $239 with the 2TB option. In addition, accessories like a cold shoe adaptor for attaching tripods and other photographic gear are included.
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With deliveries expected in September, the full retail price for the 1TB SSD with hub and the 2TB SSD with hub will be closer to $239 and $349, respectively.

It is simple to have your computer or tablet screen visually hacked in public, which allows someone to steal private information. Plastic screen coverings are one technique to stop this from happening, as they make it harder for someone to view the document unless they are directly in front of it. Microsoft might develop a technology that encrypts text graphically as you read it.

A system that encrypts a document so that only the reader can decipher it is described in a recent Microsoft patent. By changing the letters in the text section of the original document, the approach encrypts the document. The document is then shown in a private mode using an alpha-blended version that combines the encoded and original copies of the text. Next, the system takes advantage of eye tracking to show the user the decoded portion of the document at their fixation point and the encoded version at the periphery of their field of vision.

This issue is currently addressed by a wide range of products on the market, from hardware privacy screens to software that uses webcams and eye tracking to let light from the screen enter the eyes of the intended user while blocking light from the screen from entering the eyes of onlookers. They are all limited, though.
Because it is challenging to attain 100% light efficiency, privacy screens make the display appear dull to the intended user’s eyes. In the meantime, reading the text becomes more challenging when non-fixed portions of the screen are arbitrarily blurred or dimmed—it becomes like reading through a telescope.

The Ponemon Institute claims that visual hacking is a common issue. The institute carried out an experiment in the US in 2015 that showed how simple it was to use visual hacking to get confidential firm information. In 2016, 3M supported an enlarged version of this project with offices in China, France, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, and the UK.
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According to the 3M investigation, in 91% of the worldwide trials, information was visually hacked by an undercover white hat hacker. An undercover visual hacker was able to collect information in 15 minutes or less in nearly half of the global trials. Only 32% of the hacker efforts were successful, and 52% of the sensitive data was taken from staff computer screens. The outcomes matched those of the smaller study conducted by the Ponemon Institute.

The brain may be able to hold nearly 10 times more information than previously thought, a new study confirms.

Like computers, the brain’s memory storage is measured in “bits,” and the number of bits it can hold rests on the connections between its neurons, known as synapses. Historically, scientists thought synapses came in a few sizes and strengths, and this limited the brain’s storage capacity. However, this theory has been challenged in recent years—and the new study further backs the idea that the brain can hold about 10-fold more than once thought.   
 
In the new study, researchers developed a highly precise method to assess the strength of connections between neurons in part of a rat’s brain. These synapses form the basis of learning and memory, as brain cells communicate at these points and thus store and share information. 

Time in the brain doesn’t follow the steady ticking of the world’s most precise clocks.

By better understanding how synapses strengthen and weaken, and by how much, the scientists more precisely quantified how much information these connections can store. The analysis, published April 23 in the journal Neural Computation, demonstrates how this new method could not only increase our understanding of learning but also of aging and diseases that erode connections in the brain.

“These approaches get at the heart of the information processing capacity of neural circuits,” Jai Yu, an assistant professor of neurophysiology at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the research, said in a recent communication. “Being able to estimate how much information might be represented is an important step towards understanding the capacity of the brain to perform complex computations,” he added.

In the human brain, there are over 100 trillion synapses between neurons. Chemical messengers are launched across these synapses, facilitating the transfer of information across the brain. As we learn, transferring information through specific synapses increases. This “strengthening” of synapses enables us to retain the new information. In general, synapses strengthen or weaken in response to how active their constituent neurons are — a phenomenon called synaptic plasticity. 

However, as we age or develop neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, our synapses become less active and thus weaken, reducing cognitive performance and our ability to store and retrieve memories. 

Scientists can measure the strength of synapses by looking at their physical characteristics. Messages sent by one neuron will sometimes activate a pair of synapses, and scientists can use these pairs to study the precision of synaptic plasticity. In other words, given the same message, does each synapse in the pair strengthen or weaken in the same way? 

Measuring the precision of synaptic plasticity has proven difficult in the past, as has measuring how much information any given synapse can store. The new study changes that. 

To measure synaptic strength and plasticity, the team harnessed information theory, a mathematical way of understanding how information is transmitted through a system. This approach also enables scientists to quantify how much information can be transmitted across synapses, while also considering the “background noise” of the brain. 

This transmitted information is measured in bits, such that a synapse with a higher number of bits can store more information than one with fewer bits, Terrence Sejnowski, co-senior study author and head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, said in an email. One bit corresponds to a synapse sending transmissions at two strengths, while two bits allow for four strengths, and so on.

The team analyzed pairs of synapses from a rat hippocampus, a region of the brain that plays a major role in learning and memory formation. These synapse pairs were neighbors, and they activated in response to the same type and amount of brain signals. The team determined that, given the same input, these pairs strengthened or weakened by the same amount, suggesting the brain is highly precise when adjusting a synapse’s strength.

The analysis suggested that synapses in the hippocampus can store between 4.1 and 4.6 bits of information. The researchers had reached a similar conclusion in an earlier study of the rat brain, but they’d crunched the data with a less-precise method. The new study helps confirm what many neuroscientists now assume—that synapses carry much more than one bit each, Kevin Fox, a professor of neuroscience at Cardiff University in the U.K. who was not involved in the research, said in a recent communication.   
 
The findings are based on a tiny area of the rat hippocampus, so it’s unclear how they’d scale to a whole rat or human brain. It would be interesting to determine how this capacity for information storage varies across the brain and between species, Yu said. 
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In the future, the team’s method could also compare the storage capacity of different areas of the brain, Fox said. It could also study a single area of a single brain region in both healthy and pathological conditions.

As it gets better at remembering your preferences, interests, and personal information, ChatGPT is starting to resemble your most reliable assistant. It will even use these memories in subsequent conversations. A minor change like this might give generative AI a more human appearance and possibly open the door to general artificial intelligence (general AI), which would allow an AI brain to function more like the gray matter in your brain.

The restricted test was published by OpenAI in a blog post, wherein it was explained that the purpose of the test was to evaluate ChatGPT's (both the free and ChatGPT Plus versions) memory of your messages across all chats.

With this upgrade, ChatGPT can now remember things you specifically tell it to remember or vaguely recall fascinating details it learns along the road, like your favorite peanut butter on cinnamon raisin bagels.

One advantage of ChatGPT's memory is that it doesn't have to start new talks from scratch. When a ChatGPT has memory, it resembles a helpful assistant that is aware of your preferences, such as your preference for coffee in the morning or your dislike of scheduling meetings before 10 AM.

According to OpenAI, the memory will be used for subsequent prompts in practice. If you inform ChatGPT that your three-year-old child enjoys giraffes, giraffe-themed birthday card ideas may come up in later ideation discussions.

Instead of just repeating back to you what it remembers about your preferences and interests, ChatGPT will make better use of that data to serve your needs.

An AI that can recall several chats and use that data to assist you may seem a little unsettling to some people. It's likely for this reason that OpenAI allows users to choose not simply to get the memories by utilizing the "Temporary Chat" option, which makes ChatGPT appear to be experiencing some amnesia.

ChatGPT allows you to go into settings and erase memories, similar to how you can remove Internet history from your browser (Kind of like targeted brain surgery). You can also tell ChatGPT to forget something in a chat.

OpenAI has no timeframe for when it will make ChatGPT memories available to all users; as of right now, this is a test available to a select group of free and ChatGPT Plus users.

OpenAI is also giving its new app-like GPTs Memory capabilities, allowing programmers to incorporate the feature into custom chatty AIs. The memories kept within the GPT will not be accessible to those developers.
It is more difficult to create an AI with long-term memory than one with a fleeting, at most, recollection of prior discussions. Naturally, there are privacy implications. Do you have to worry about your details showing up in other people's ChatGPT discussions if ChatGPT is randomly memorizing bits and pieces of information that it deems interesting or relevant about you? Most likely not. Memories won't be included in ChatGPT's training set, according to OpenAI.

OpenAI adds in its blog, "We're taking steps to assess and mitigate biases, and steer ChatGPT away from proactively remembering sensitive information, like your health details - unless you explicitly ask it to." That might help but ChatGPT must understand the difference between useful and sensitive info, a line that might not always be clear.

In the end, this upgrade might have important ramifications. Even though ChatGPT can appear fairly human during prompt-driven talks, more than a few billion neurons still separate us from one another from its hallucinations and hazy memories of sometimes even how the conversation began.
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Recollections, particularly information that is casually relayed back to you during ChatGPT talks, have the power to alter your perception. Our shared experiences and recollections of other individuals influence our connections with them. They help us shape our conversations and encounters. It's the way we bond. We'll undoubtedly feel closer to a ChatGPT that recalls our dislike of spicy cuisine and our passion for anything Rocky Balboa.

Tack One, a Singapore-based startup, wants to help make sure your kids, elderly parents and pets are safe with AI-powered location technology. Recently, the company unveiled its new generation of GPS device, Tack GPS Plus.

The startup launched its GPS Tracker in 2021 to address the frustration of the short battery life on the market and lower the tracking service cost, making location tracking extremely affordable. Tack One’s battery lasts 30 days on a single charge, and its subscription fees start from $2.95 monthly for a two-year subscription plan.

The updated version of its GPS Tracker is a small device that includes a combination of technology such as GPS, Wi-Fi, an Internet of Things (IoT) mobile network, and AI and smart sensors designed for lower-power devices.

The new Tack GPS Plus now adds a patent-pending indoor elevation finder feature, which uses sensors with intelligent algorithms that allow users to locate missing kids, the elderly, patients, pets, or valuable goods in multistory buildings. The company claims Tack GPS Plus reduces search time in high-rise cities by offering vertical distance and geographical coordinates.

The Tack GPS Plus can be widely used by parents, caregivers, pet owners, and more. The company says the demand for location technology is rising in many areas, including the caregiving of patients with chronic conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, personal and family security, protection against loss of assets, and even disaster prevention.

Along with Tack GPS Plus, the company introduced its new mobile app, OurSphere, which lets users keep tabs on multiple Tack devices. OurSphere includes a new functionality that enables real-time location sharing among app users. That means OurSphere app users without a Tack device can share locations in the same app in a family or business setup. Co-founder and chief operating officer of Tack One Eric Yeo said it provides a web dashboard for enterprise users managing large numbers of Tack devices. Users can download the app in mid-January. (Existing Tack GPS users will receive a free app update to OurSphere.)

Tack GPS Plus follows the company’s second product, a palm-sized autonomous flood-detection device called Tack EVO FloodFinder. The company rolled out the flood monitoring device in Thailand and Singapore, which is for corporate users and government agencies in areas of disaster response or environment and water management, Yeo said.

The startup plans to extend the service coverage to more countries, from 30 to over 120 countries, while maintaining a low subscription rate. The company will focus on launching in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia countries, Yeo noted.
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Tack GPS Plus is now available for $79 on the company’s official website and will then be sold on Amazon, Lazada, and Shopee around mid-January. The company offers $3.95/ month for a one-year subscription plan and $4.95/month for a month-to-month subscription plan.

MediaTek has big plans for its upcoming major smartphone chip release, which it describes as "a radical departure from conventional thinking" in terms of processing architectural design. This is, according to Finbarr Moynihan, vice president of corporate and worldwide marketing at MediaTek.

For those who may not be familiar with MediaTek, the company is the fourth-largest chip design/manufacturer of its kind in the world. It is based in Taiwan, and Moynihan supplied some statistics on the firm's impressive and growing penetration of the technology sector:

“We think we will have over 50% market share for Android in the European market this year, so more than half of the Android phones there will be powered by MediaTek. In the U.S. market, we probably are a little lower, probably around 45% of the market for Android by volume.”

MediaTek powers a lot of midrange devices in the U.S. and U.K., including the OnePlus Nord N300 and Motorola Edge (2022). But it’s still eyeing the flagship market with its Dimensity 9000-series chips, and it’s seeing considerable success in this space in China.

“By our calculations, we’re probably somewhere between 20% and 30% of the market in China for flagship phones if you just talk about the Android market,” Moynihan said. “Given that figure was zero two years ago, we feel pretty good about it.”

Amazon is MediaTek’s biggest customer in the U.S., with everything from its Fire smart televisions to the Amazon Fire Max 11 tablet being powered by the company’s chips. MediaTek is making inroads into automotive too, having struck a partnership with Nvidia recently.

The next significant MediaTek chip release, currently referred to as the Dimensity 9300, is the subject of persistent rumors. According to reports, it will abandon the big core/small core architecture we're used to seeing and employ an all-big core design. This suggests that instead of using small, "efficiency" cores for simple operations, the device may combine large and "performance" cores to handle everything instead. Moynihan’s comments certainly suggest this is the direction the company will take.

“The CPU architecture [of the next chip] is very different. We’re leaning heavily into the big cores of the X series and the A7-series that ARM offers and not the little cores,” he told Digital Trends. “It’s going to have a pretty big step up in computing capability, both single-core and multi-core, which will bring advantages to a lot of different use cases. It’s going to be an interesting architecture from a computing perspective.”

Larger cores are used for tougher activities like gaming and multitasking, while smaller cores are used for simpler ones like basic computation. Larger cores are generally employed in multi-core designs by chipmakers like Qualcomm and Apple. So what is the benefit of using only large cores?

“It will benefit application responsiveness and multiple applications running at the same time. It will have advantages for gaming, and advantages in the camera and video use cases,” Moynihan said. “The computing benefits will be useful for generative AI applications, [a space] which is moving fast, and we’re not going to have everything optimized using Accelerated Processor Unit (APU) hardware to accelerate it. I think it’ll it will bring advantages for a lot of different use cases.”

But how will the functions currently carried out by smaller efficiency cores be handled by this new architecture? Moynihan explained MediaTek's perspective:

“A lot of [the functionality] will be ‘wake up, do something quickly, and then shut down,’ all performed using clever power management techniques. Instead of using a medium-sized core for a task, if you can use a big core for a fraction of that time and then shut it down and get the same job done, it can be more power efficient overall,” he explained.

If MediaTek follows history, the new processor will probably be unveiled at the company's annual technology conference, which will most likely be in late October or early November. By then, we'll have seen what Apple's A17 Bionic chip in the iPhone 15 is capable of, as well as perhaps Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon chip.
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If the Dimensity 9300 proves to be as revolutionary and distinctive from the competition as Moynihan claims, MediaTek's strategy might make the flagship chip market later this year very interesting.

On all iPhones and iPads, the default image format is HEIC. Along with Apple, HEIC files are supported by Canon, Sony, Qualcomm, and Samsung. Here is all the information you need about the HEIC file format.

The HEIC format was developed by the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) in the middle of 2015. One reason Apple made HEIC the default format on all iPhones is because it requires around half the storage of a JPG file of comparable quality. A HEIC file also contains an alpha channel for transparent images, a depth map for LiDAR scans, depth estimates, and more. It provides more versatility overall than a JPG file.

For example, a JPEG file needs 10MB of space to have the same visual quality as a 5MB HEIC file. Even though 5MB on today's smartphones doesn't sound like much, when you consider thousands of images, the overall space-saving can reach gigabyte levels. Additionally, it causes speedier upload and file transfer rates on the internet. The HEIC file format is supported by Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, two standard editing programs used by photographers.
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Although HEIC format capture is enabled by default on iPhones and iPads, you can disable it. To turn on or off the HEIC format on your iOS device, Open Settings/Camera/Formats/Most Compatible.