Daily Tech News 30 October 2023

• Small Hadron Collider: Scientists have for the first time fired up the world's tiniest particle accelerator. (Space)
  
  While early accelerators were much much smaller than today's giants like the Large Hadron Collider - which is an underground ring five miles across - this new device, called a nanophotonic electron accelerator, or NEA, reverses the trend entirely.
  
  It's the size of a dime.
  
  The electrons it produces have a millionth of the energy of the particles in the LHC, and there are far fewer of them, so the overall beam energy is tiny.
  
  What it does allow you to do though is produce a small and perfectly focused beam of radiation exactly where you want it. Targeting cancer? The beam is sharper than any scalpel.
  
  While it has been proven to work, practical uses - like performing surgery without having to cut the patient open - are likely still years off.

• Apple's M3 CPU is expected to be announced today. (WCCFtech)
  
  It probably won't be a lot faster than the M2, but if it at least supports more memory it will be a big improvement.
  
  With all variants of Apple's CPUs the memory is soldered onto the CPU module. You can't upgrade it, ever. So if you don't configure enough RAM in your new Mac you've just bought some very expensive e-waste. And with current the M1 iMac you can't configure enough RAM. 16GB is all you can have.
  
  (I have 64GB in my budget HP laptop.)
  
  
  
• Lenovo is set to release YAPALAT - yet another perfectly adequate large Android tablet. (Notebook Check)
  
  The Tab M11 has a definitely mid-tier but not awful CPU with two A75 and six A55 cores, a roughly 1920x1200 screen, and up to 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.
  
  Make that screen anywhere from 7" to 9" rather than 11" - keeping the same resolution - and I'll buy three of them.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, I kind of had the impression that the block of land my house is on had no two sides parallel.
  
  Looking at the subdivision plan again after eighteen months I was reminded that this is not true at all. The land is rectangular, but the house is at an angle.
  
  This may or may not become relevant in the near future.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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