Enlarge (credit: RISC-V International )

The world's first laptop to use the RISC-V open source instruction set architecture (ISA) will reportedly start shipping in September.

The Roma laptop is available for pre-order on Xcalibyte's website , but the site merely takes interested parties' information without providing much detail or any pricing. According to a report from The Register on Friday, the laptop will start shipping in September, according to spokespeople from Xcalibyte, which did system tuning for the laptop, a company called DeepComputing, which engineered the laptop, and RISC-V International.

According to the announcement from DeepComputing (which shares the same CEO with Xcalibyte, The Register reported), Roma uses an unspecified quad-core processor with a 28 nm or, for the "pro" version, 12 nm node in a system-on-module (SoM) package. There's also an Arm SecurCore SC300 security enclave processor, an unnamed GPU and neural processing unit, and a feature accelerator.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto | Getty Images )

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The day after Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner sent a letter to Google warning it to be on alert for “exploitation of your platform by Russia and Russian-linked entities,” and calling on the company to audit its advertising business’s compliance with economic sanctions.

But as recently as June 23, Google was sharing potentially sensitive user data with a sanctioned Russian ad tech company owned by Russia’s largest state bank, according to a new report provided to ProPublica.

Enlarge / Cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev, and Sergey Korsakov pose with a flag of the Luhansk People's Republic on the International Space Station.

The Russian state space corporation responsible for spaceflight activities, Roscosmos, on Monday posted images to its official Telegram channel showing three cosmonauts with the tri-color flags of the Luhansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic.

The photos were taken recently on board the International Space Station and show smiling cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev, and Sergey Korsakov posing with the flags.

"This is a long-awaited day that residents of the occupied areas of the Luhansk region have been waiting for eight years," the Roscosmos message stated. "We are confident that July 3, 2022, will forever go down in the history of the republic."

Enlarge (credit: Lari Bat | Getty Images )

Google is closing a loophole that has allowed thousands of companies to monitor and sell sensitive personal data from Android smartphones, an effort welcomed by privacy campaigners in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decision to end women’s constitutional right to abortion.

It also took a further step on Friday to limit the risk that smartphone data could be used to police new abortion restrictions, announcing it would automatically delete the location history on phones that have been close to a sensitive medical location such an abortion clinic.

The Silicon Valley company’s moves come amid growing fears that mobile apps will be weaponized by US states to police new abortion restrictions in the country.

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A group of researchers has recently made an astounding discovery.

Using an innovative imaging technique, an international team of scientists has uncovered remarkable details of a pterosaur's soft tissue. Despite an age of approximately 145–163 million years, the wing membrane and the webbing between both feet managed to survive fossilization.

Armed with new data, the team used modeling to determine that this little pterosaur had the capacity to launch itself from the water. Their findings are published in Scientific Reports.

Enlarge / The California condor is a New World vulture, the largest North American land bird. This condor became extinct in the wild in 1987, but the species has been reintroduced in California and Arizona. (credit: OldFulica/Getty )

T he first California condor to reach Yurok ancestral land in over a century arrived by plane and car in late March of 2022. The small plane that carried Condor 746 had a rough landing, and the bird was irritable. He rattled around in a large dog crate during the three-hour drive to the tribe’s newly built condor facility, in a remote location in Redwood National Park.

Once there, he hopped into the flight pen, a tall enclosure of wire mesh, furnished with log perches and a drinking pool. At 8 years old, Condor 746 is an adult, his naked head bright pink instead of the black found in younger birds. He’s on loan from the captive breeding program at the Peregrine Fund’s World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho. His job is to act as the mentor for four juvenile birds who will become the founders of a reborn condor society in Yurok country.

“We have mentors because condors are so social,” says Joe Burnett, California Condor Recovery Program Manager at the Ventana Wildlife Society. Young birds in a pen with no adult will become unruly. “You get the Lord of the Flies syndrome,” says Burnett. He and his colleagues quickly learned that release programs need an adult to serve as a role model and enforce the social hierarchy that is crucial to the flock’s survival.

Enlarge / A variety of pain-relieving drugs are available both over the counter and by prescription. (credit: SelectStock/Getty )

Without the ability to feel pain, life is more dangerous. To avoid injury, pain tells us to use a hammer more gently, wait for the soup to cool or put on gloves in a snowball fight. Those with rare inherited disorders that leave them without the ability to feel pain are unable to protect themselves from environmental threats, leading to broken bones, damaged skin, infections, and ultimately a shorter life span.

In these contexts, pain is much more than a sensation: It is a protective call to action. But pain that is too intense or long-lasting can be debilitating. So how does modern medicine soften the call?

As a neurobiologist and an anesthesiologist who study pain, this is a question we and other researchers have tried to answer. Science’s understanding of how the body senses tissue damage and perceives it as pain has progressed tremendously over the past several years. It has become clear that there are multiple pathways that signal tissue damage to the brain and sound the pain alarm bell.

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It's the weekend, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a bundle at Apple's online store that doles out a $50 Apple Gift Card with the purchase of a new Apple TV media streamer. Apple says it will email the gift card within 24 hours of your purchase being shipped. This isn't a straightforward price cut, but if you know you'll use the gift card on a future Apple purchase—be it another device, an Apple subscription service, or something on the App Store—the bundle effectively matches the largest discount we've tracked for the Apple TV 4K. The promotion as a whole will run through July 14.

While we still recommend the more affordable Google Chromecast—which is also discounted today —for most people in need of a 4K media player, the Apple TV 4K might be worth it for those willing to pay for faster (and more futureproof) hardware and a simpler user interface that's less stuffed with ads than other streaming platforms. The device supports all the major apps and works with both Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos, though its lack of 120 Hz support is disappointing for the price. While some Roku devices now support AirPlay, Apple's box plays especially nice with other Apple devices, as well as platforms like HomeKit or Apple Arcade . The device is just overpriced, but this deal should lessen the blow.

It's worth noting that, according to a recent Bloomberg report , Apple is developing a refreshed Apple TV 4K with an updated chip and an extra gigabyte of RAM, so this bundle may be Apple's way of clearing out inventory before launching the new model. Exactly how much that new Apple TV 4K might cost is unclear. For now, though, the current Apple TV 4K is still plenty powerful for most streaming needs, so if you're already ensconced in the Apple ecosystem and have wanted to hop aboard, this might be a good opportunity.

Enlarge / Lindy Elkins-Tanton, second from left, and colleagues in Siberia. (credit: Scott Simper / ASU)

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a Siberian-river-running, arc-welding, code-writing, patent-holding, company-founding, asteroid-exploring, igneous petrologist professor. At various times, she has been a farmer, a trainer of competition sheepdogs, a children’s book author, and a management consultant for Boeing Helicopters. She’s currently a professor at Arizona State University , she helps run a learning company , and she is the principal investigator for NASA’s “Psyche” mission to a metal asteroid .

Her self-described “curvy” career path has taken her research into planet formation, magma oceans, mass extinctions, and mantle melting. The results she’s generated have been foundational and have earned her a constellation of prestigious awards. There is even an asteroid—Asteroid 8252 Elkins-Tanton—named after her.

Given all that, perhaps the biggest revelation in her new autobiography , A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, is that this stellar high achiever was plagued by the same doubts and lack of confidence that afflict the rest of us. She wavered between forestry and geology as she was applying for college, she was stymied by organic chemistry as a freshman, and she was told she either wasn’t studying hard enough or wasn’t good enough. At times she felt she didn’t belong, and at other times she was told so. But Elkins-Tanton overcame those obstacles—and others far more profound.