Connexion
Fruit flies aren't exactly famous for their brainpower; you've probably drowned more than one in a wine glass left too long on the patio table. And yet, working with roughly 140,000 neurons—a brain smaller than a poppy seed—Drosophila can sort through a huge range of smells in a fraction of a second, and then retain the memory of that scent for a long time.
In this, they do much better than current "electronic noses." Even the most advanced ones on the market tend to be expensive, painfully narrow in what they can detect, and quick to forget an odor the moment they learn a new one.
So why not just copy the fly? That's the question a growing number of researchers have been asking—including Kevin Max and Yang Shen at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, whose new algorithm, Spi-Fly, is described in a paper recently published in the journal Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering.
This year is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the original Quake by id Software, if you could believe it. To commemorate that, publisher Bethesda has released a new campaign chapter for the game, titled "Dawn of the Machine."
This is part of a series of new campaign chapters, all developed by MachineGames "in collaboration with id Software." MachineGames is best known for making the games in the relatively recent Wolfenstein reboot series, as well as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The Quake maps are made by a team dubbed "Quake Club," which includes several MachineGames employees who work on Quake maps in their spare time.
The ambition and scope of some of these maps is beyond what was typical for Quake maps back in the late '90s, thanks in part to the team's use of TrenchBroom, a newer map editor that works well on modern systems and is easier to work with and more capable than what folks were using in those days.
The Steam Machine is almost here. Valve chose possibly the worst time to announce new PC gaming hardware in late 2025, just as the AI boom sent storage and RAM prices through the roof. The upheaval delayed its new Steam Machine release, but Valve has announced its TV-friendly gaming PC will go on sale June 29 with a reservation-based system and a starting price of $1,049.
The Steam Machine will come in two variations: one with 512GB of storage and a more expensive one with 2TB. They'll retail for $1,049 and $1,349, respectively, and you'll be able to bundle a Steam Controller with either for an additional $79. Buying the 2TB model also gets you a pair of exclusive faceplates with red fabric and walnut finishes. Like the Steam Deck, the machine ships with the Linux-based SteamOS.
Both versions of the Steam Machine will run on a custom six-core AMD Zen 4 CPU with a peak clock speed of 4.8GHz. The integrated AMD RDNA3 GPU will feature 28 compute units and 8GB of dedicated DDR6 VRAM soldered to the board. The system will have its own 16GB allotment of DDR5 on the board. This should provide enough oomph (with upscaling tech) to play moderately demanding PC games on your TV.
It feels like there's no escaping AI right now, whether you’re trying to type a sentence without being interrupted by a digital “assistant” or struggling to find a new refrigerator that doesn’t require a Wi-Fi connection for some reason. You’d be forgiven for wondering if we’re in the midst of a quantum leap in tech or whether people are just hyping up a heap of slop.
So what should we make of the growing use of AI in weather and climate modeling?
The conversation didn't get off to a great start earlier this year when a National Weather Service office posted a forecast map featuring nonexistent cities in Idaho with names like “Whata Bod” and “Orangeotild.” Thankfully, that was just an AI-generated image produced for social media, not the actual forecast model. Meteorologists and climate scientists are not yet being replaced by large language model prompt engineers.
When we met Sterling Anderson in 2024, he was the chief product officer of Aurora, the self-driving startup he cofounded in 2016 after several years at Tesla. Just over a year ago, though, Anderson decamped from the startup world for something a little more established, taking over as chief product officer at General Motors, the nation's largest automaker. Since then, he's had a good view of how GM is entering what he calls the third epoch of engineering and design.
"There was a time when humans looked at birds and were like, 'OK, those wings seem to work pretty well. Let's go and design something that looks like them.'" Anderson said, describing the first age of engineering. "And they just kind of iterated their way to something that was marginally feasible."
The first few hundred years of inventing "was this era of highly empirical iterative design development and engineering," he said. "And by that I mean humans largely started with what we know or had seen, built prototypes of something that kind of looked like it and maybe tweaked some things, hoping to make it perform better, tested it, iterated, and kind of went through this slow guess-and-check process until we got to something that marginally worked."
NASA's goal of reaching the Moon's surface as many as 21 times over the next two and a half years will require an overhaul of the agency's approach to buying lunar landers and success in rectifying the myriad problems that have, so far, caused three of the last four US landing attempts to falter.
It will also require improved oversight of NASA's industrial base and better management of a supply chain that has often failed to deliver on time.
These landers are separate from NASA's Human Landing System program, which has contracts with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop and deliver human-rated landers to ferry crews to and from the lunar surface for the agency's Artemis program. Alongside the crew landers, dozens of robotic and cargo landings will deliver payloads to scout for a future Moon base and demonstrate technologies for larger vehicles, mining and resource utilization, and sustained operations during the two-week-long lunar night.
Last year, we noted how the long-standing vagaries of HDMI licensing and open source AMD driver development combined to prevent the upcoming Steam Machine from receiving official support for the HDMI 2.1 display standard. Now, though, it seems that AMD is making real progress on adding full HDMI 2.1 compliance to its Linux amdgpu driver in the near future.
In patch series notes for an amdgpu driver update posted on Friday (and noticed by Phoronix), AMD's Harry Wentland says that the company is finally adding HDMI FRL (Fixed Rate Link) support to the popular Linux display driver. That's the feature that allows for higher bandwidth on compatible HDMI cables compared to the TMDS standard found on HDMI 2.0 and earlier. That in turn enables direct support for higher resolutions, dynamic HDR, and features like Variable Refresh Rate that aren't supported in HDMI 2.0.
Wentland notes that this update is still just "a representative subset of HDMI compliance," in part because it is missing the code to support the Display Stream Compression (DSC) that allows for even higher resolutions and frame rates up to 10K at 100 Hz. But Wentland adds that DSC support "is still being tested and will be sent out later," and that "a full compliance run" for HDMI 2.1 is "in the works." An AMD driver developer with the handle agd5f also commented on Phoronix, noting that "a full implementation [of HDMI 2.1] will ultimately be available once the patches are ready and have completed compliance testing."
Valve and its SteamOS operating system have already done what a bunch of companies (including Apple) have been trying to do for decades: make a dent in Windows’ dominance in PC gaming.
I mean, sure, according to Valve’s own statistics, Microsoft remains dominant. Over 92 percent of PCs in the Steam Hardware Survey run some version of Windows. But five years ago, this number was just over 96 percent. Ten years ago, it was just under 96 percent. Fifteen years ago? It was 96 percent. Go back any further than that and Steam only runs on Windows in the first place, itself a testament to Microsoft's ubiquity.
Between April 2021 and now, Linux’s share has climbed from under 1 percent to over 5 percent. This is a small number, and it's not all SteamOS (Valve's OS isn't broken out, but Arch, the base distribution for SteamOS, accounts for about 0.33 of that just-over-5-percent). But it’s also more than these numbers have ever moved. By making Windows games run on Linux, rather than trying to push game developers to make Linux-native ports, Valve has done via organic word-of-mouth success what the company utterly failed to do in the early 2010s when it tried to take on Windows directly.
Since time immemorial, serious PC gamers have proselytized about the superiority of mouse and keyboard control schemes over the more input-limited handheld controllers used by most console gamers (and others). In recent years, though, many PC gamers have started keeping a spare Xbox controller (or similar) nearby for the increasing number of PC games designed primarily or exclusively with thumbsticks and buttons in mind.
Valve's upcoming Steam Controller (not to be confused with the 2015 controller of the same name) is the Steam maker's effort to replace those controllers with something more explicitly designed for the PC, and for the upcoming Steam Machine. After spending a few weeks with the controller, though, we're not quite sure it sets itself apart from the competition enough to justify its high $99 asking price.
From the first time you hold a Steam Controller in your hands, it's clear that this is a well-made piece of hardware. There's a sturdy build quality to all the pieces that makes the controller feel solid in the hand, with just enough heft to feel substantial without being too heavy.
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