Technology
This was the hottest year yet for the UK
2022 will go down because the warmest yr within the books but within the UK, in keeping with provisional figures from the Met Workplace nationwide climate service. A record-smashing summer time heatwave was the burning cherry on high of 11 months of unusually toasty climate within the UK.
That makes this yr the most popular throughout the UK since annual record-keeping started 139 years in the past. Zooming in on England particularly, 2022 may even high the listing of warmest years on the earth’s oldest instrumental file of temperature — the Central England temperature sequence that began 364 years in the past.
Information set this yr won’t maintain for very lengthy
“The nice and cozy yr is according to the real impacts we anticipate because of human-induced local weather change. Though it doesn’t imply yearly would be the warmest on file, local weather change continues to extend the possibilities of more and more heat years over the approaching a long time,” Mark McCarthy, head of the Met Workplace Nationwide Local weather Data Centre, mentioned in a press launch at present.
A sweltering heatwave in July wreaked havoc in communities used to a milder local weather. For the primary time, the Met Workplace issued a “Pink Excessive” warmth warning for components of England. Knowledge facilities reported “cooling associated” failures. Rail tracks and an airport runway buckled beneath the oppressive warmth. Firefighters in England and Wales responded to an uptick in wildfires sparked by the unusually sizzling, dry climate. In England and Wales, there have been 3,271 extra deaths throughout this summer time’s warmth spells.
The UK notched its highest day by day most temperature, 40.3 levels Celsius (104.54 Fahrenheit) in Coningsby, Lincolnshire on July nineteenth. It might have been “nearly inconceivable” for the mercury to rise above 40 levels Celsius within the UK with out human-induced local weather change, McCarthy mentioned in a July assertion.
However even that jaw-dropping determine alone wasn’t sufficient to make it a record-breaking yr for the UK. “The record-breaking temperatures in July have definitely boosted the general temperature values for the yr, however that isn’t the total story,” McCarthy mentioned in at present’s assertion.
2022 began off with a bang. January 1st was the warmest New 12 months’s Day on file for the UK, reaching 16.3 Celsius (61.34 levels Fahrenheit) at St James’s Park in London. In actual fact, each month this yr apart from December has been hotter than common, in keeping with the Met Workplace. The climate service nonetheless has just a few days left to doc earlier than releasing a last quantity for the way sizzling this yr has been. But it surely’s already clear that it has surpassed 2014, when the earlier file for the annual common temperature throughout the UK was set at 9.88 levels Celsius (49.78 levels Fahrenheit).
Technology
Head of Canada’s intelligence agency warns Canadians not to use TikTok
Canada’s security agency is trying to dissuade Canadians from using TikTok, telling users that their data is “available to the government of China.”
In an interview with CBC News set to air on Saturday, David Vigneault, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said that “there is a very clear strategy on the part of the government of China … to be able to acquire … personal information from around the world,” the CBC reports.
“They’re using big data analytics, they have amazing computer farms crunching the data, they are developing artificial intelligence … based on using this data,” Vigneault added.
The Chinese government’s ability to access user data is at the forefront of US efforts to regulate — and potentially even ban — the app. Congress passed a bill that would ban TikTok unless it divests from its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, in April. TikTok sued the US government over the law in May, arguing that the looming ban is unconstitutional.
TikTok has previously claimed that staffers in China are unable to access US and European users’ data. The company has undertaken two massive corporate restructuring efforts — Project Texas and Project Clover, referring to the US and European endeavors, respectively — to silo off user data from China. US user data is hosted in Oracle’s cloud infrastructure and isn’t supposed to be accessible by anyone outside the US, though a recent report by Fortune suggests efforts to secure US user data have been “largely cosmetic.”
“These assertions are unsupported by evidence, and the fact is that TikTok has never shared Canadian user data with the Chinese government, nor would we if asked,” TikTok spokesperson Danielle Morgan told The Verge.
Technology
Microsoft’s Surface AI event: news, rumors, and lots of Qualcomm laptops
The Snapdragon X Plus is Qualcomm’s entry-level laptop chip. It has 10 cores, 42MB of cache, a maximum multithreaded frequency of 3.4GHz, and an NPU with 45 tera operations per second (TOPS, or how many mathematical calculations it can solve in a second) to assist with fancy-smancy generative AI applications. But keep in mind, TOPS is an arbitrary measurement that can sound more impressive than it is because it doesn’t necessarily take into account the type or quality of those calculations.
Technology
New Teslas might lose Steam
Tesla might be dropping Steam support on some new deliveries of Model X, according to a message from the company shared by a Reddit user who is expecting to take delivery of the long-range version of the electric SUV.
Tesla’s message alerts the customer that the company is “updating the gaming computer” in the Model X and says it’s “no longer capable of playing Steam games.” The message ends with a button for the customer to confirm they will proceed with the delivery.
There’s no indication that other Tesla models will be affected. And we’re not seeing any signs that the automaker plans to remove Steam from current owners’ vehicles through a software update. However, Tesla’s already seems to be leaning toward dropping Steam support for some other models.
Steam isn’t available in the Cybertruck, for example, and Tesla hasn’t said whether it plans on bringing the gaming platform to its bestselling Model Y and Model 3 vehicles, despite newer models sporting improved AMD Ryzen processors. The company has already removed some games over the years, including Sonic the Hedgehog.
-
Politics1 week ago
RFK Jr said a worm ate part of his brain and died in his head
-
World1 week ago
Pentagon chief confirms US pause on weapons shipment to Israel
-
World1 week ago
Convicted MEP's expense claims must be published: EU court
-
News1 week ago
Students and civil rights groups blast police response to campus protests
-
Politics1 week ago
California Gov Gavin Newsom roasted over video promoting state's ‘record’ tourism: ‘Smoke and mirrors’
-
Politics1 week ago
Ohio AG defends letter warning 'woke' masked anti-Israel protesters they face prison time: 'We have a society'
-
News1 week ago
Nine Things We Learned From TikTok’s Lawsuit Against The US Government
-
Politics1 week ago
Biden’s decision to pull Israel weapons shipment kept quiet until after Holocaust remembrance address: report