Often, reprogramming a microcontroller involves placing it in reset, flashing the code, and letting it fire back up. It usually involves shutting the chip down entirely. However, [bor0] has built a virtual machine that runs on the ESP32, allowing for dynamic program updates to happen.
The code is inspired by the CHIP-8, a relatively ancient interpreter that had some gaming applications. [bor0] had already created a VM simulating the CHIP-8, and repurposed it here, taking out the gaming-related drawing instructions and replacing them with those that control IO pins. Registers have also been changed to 16 bits for added flexibility and headroom.
It’s probably not something with immediate ground-breaking applications for most people, but it’s a different way of working with and programming the ESP32, and that’s pretty neat.
A vocal critic of the Russian leadership is Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster who repeatedly ranked world number one for 20 years before turning his attention to politics. He tells leaders to “help Ukraine fight against the monster you helped create.” Kasparov speaks with Walter Isaacson.
AMD has finally lifted the lid on its Ryzen 6,000 series mobile chips and the core 6nm design is far more than just an optical shrink. The resulting “massive increase in yield” means far more CPUs spilling out of TSMCs foundry, which can only help an industry in a chip supply crisis.
These Zen 3+ CPUs are going to be making their way to gaming laptops soon, and promise great things for notebooks this year. Intel’s Alder Lake mobile CPUs are also going to be dropping at the same time, plus we’ve got Nvidia’s mobile 3,070 Ti and 3,080 Ti to look forward to as well. If you’ve been putting off getting a new mobile gaming machine, then your patience should pay off nicely.
There are so many places and things to explore in the universe! From distant. exoplanets to faraway galaxies that might host intelligent life, to massive black holes, to. bright stars. However, there is a problem with space exploration; distance! Everywhere. you want to go in deep space is far! For example, Elon Musk wants to put humans on. Mars permanently while NASA wants to send astronauts there. However, any traveler. going to Mars has to endure a grueling trip through harsh space that lasts not less than. five months, even with the most powerful rocket in history! If only we could find a faster. way to travel through space! Also, the next star to us is about 4.5 light-years away. making it impossible to visit with the current space technologies! However, an. accidental discovery promises to fix that problem by enabling faster than the speed of. light travel! What is the discovery, how does it affect space travel, and how does it affect. you personally? Join us as we explore how NASA scientists accidentally discover the. world’s first Warp Bubble! Warp travel is not strange to fans of the Star Trek franchise. The warp drive is a. charming futuristic technology from Star Trek Universe, which since its first episode in. 1966, includes ten television series and thirteen feature films. In these series and. movies, characters explore the universe using powerful and fast spaceships, traveling. from planet to planet and communicating with a crew of aliens. The torsion engine is the. center of attraction because, without it, the story would be implausible. The universe is. strange, unimaginable, and insanely large, and even if you want to visit the next star. the immense cosmic distances create an almost impossible barrier! Let’s take a look at the next star, Proxima Centauri, 4.5 light-years away. This distance. means it takes 4.5 years to reach the star if you could manage to attain the speed of. light! Light flies at full cosmic speed and acts as a sort of universal speed cap, so any. other method takes longer! In fact, if you decide to use the fastest space probe ever. built, the long journey through the interstellar void would take nearly eight thousand. years! So, it makes sense to stay put to Earth and its immediate environment! Of course, the Star Trek crew didn’t stay close to the Earth because they found a. solution! This solution makes long-distance travel possible by shortening the distance! The torsion engine, using warp drive tech, achieves this by juggling space and time. making for great entertainment! Warp drive was destined to remain imaginary until a. scientist suddenly realized that such an engine was really possible at the end of the last. century! The physicist was Miguel Alcubierre, and he came up with a theory that rocked the. scientific community globally. In 1994, Alcubierre watched an episode of Next. Generation while doing his Ph.D. research on Einstein’s general theory of relativity. where heavy masses can curve space and time. And so Alcubierre picked up a scrap of. paper, did the calculations, and laid the foundation for an article that appeared in the. science magazine later that year! In his paper, Alcubierre describes how you can compress space and time in front of a. spacecraft and stretch it back behind the ship so that you have to travel a much smaller. distance to the desired destination safely trapped in what he calls a torsion bubble! In. visualization, the concept was compared to a surfer riding a wave and a metaphor often. used to describe how a ship could travel the stars. There is, however, a problem with. Alcubierre’s warp bubble! You see, the warp engine is tough to build in reality! You can’t. just curve space forcefully with normal mass! To do so, you need exotic matter, which. has negative gravity! Dozens of Warp Engine publications would follow in the following decades. But they. also remained theoretical exercises and thought experiments that manipulated the. formulations of the theory of relativity in search of new insights. The need for the foreign. matter remained! That was until Eric Lentz, a physicist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the. US, stepped in. He watched Star Trek as a kid. However, he has not been able to forget.
For those looking for a mindful, meditative discussion on Zen, human nature, politics, and everything in between — a podcast episode with Emer Gentway.
Listen now | Zen and the art of disbelieving the obvious.
When CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to Meta and committed to the metaverse, he said that gaming would lead the way.
That’s an interesting comment, considering that Facebook has billions of social media users, while game companies like Roblox and Microsoft (Minecraft) have amassed hundreds of millions of gamers. In fact, the entire game industry’s reach is about as big as Facebook’s alone, at around three billion people.
Though, the numbers of users isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to building a metaverse that people actually want to go to. It’s challenging to predict who will win, as the incumbents in the space — game companies — may not have an advantage if another party enters the space and creates an ambitious next-generation metaverse. But it is important to note that, Zuckerberg isn’t alone in believing in gaming.
No matter how big that number sounds, it isn’t much compared to standalone blockchain-based games. Axie Infinity, an NFT-focused video game developed on the Ethereum network, surpassed $1 billion in total trade volume in August 2021, perhaps the most prominent 30-day period in the history of NFTs.
With so much interest in NFTs, it’s only natural that developers have begun to develop the infrastructure necessary to handle what will undoubtedly become a massive secondary market for these assets. In addition, holders want real tangible benefits to holding NFTs, and in a crowded gaming market, new entrants need to differentiate to survive.
2022 is likely the year NFT games become more mainstream, especially now that many crypto investors own these assets. And real innovation, not just in NFTs but in gameplay and mechanics themselves, will be the driving force.
Dr Jim Green, NASA Office of the Chief Scientist, looks at the science behind the blockbuster movie: The Martian.
The bestselling book about an astronaut stranded on Mars was brought to life in Ridley Scott’s film, The Martian. Before production started, Ridley called NASA to obtain information about NASA’s plans for human exploration of Mars as well as the science of Mars that would contribute to a realistic look and feel of the film in keeping with the approach laid out in Andy Weir’s book.
