Hello, and welcome to The Edge, the newsletter that brings you groundbreaking stories from the frontiers of technology and science.
We’ve got some great stories for you today including record-breaking lightning strikes, optical observations of a black hole merger and the Fugaku supercomputer claiming the throne as the world’s fastest. For today’s Start-up Stories we’ll be talking about ExoAtlet. As always, we’ve added extra stories under each article should you find yourself in a curious state of mind.
Somehow, invisible black holes became visible
Artist depiction of the event. Image credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)
Scientists spot flash of light from colliding black holes. But how?
Astronomers from Caltech recently reported that they’d observed a collision between two black holes in a distant part of space. This isn’t necessarily a rare finding. However, the fact that that a bigger black hole nearby illuminated the colliding black holes, is. So rare is this finding that, if confirmed, it will be the first time optical observations of a black hole merger have ever been made.
Detected in May 2019, the collision took place around 4 billion light-years away from earth, in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole named J1249+3449. J1249+3449 is unbelievably massive - 100 million times more massive than the sun, with a diameter roughly the size of Earth’s orbit around the sun. At some point, the two smaller black holes ventured into J1249+3449’s accretion disk - a disk of gas, dust and stars slowly being pulled toward the black hole’s event horizon - and merged
According to the astronomers, the force of the merger sent the now-merged black hole speeding out of the accretion disk at around 700,000 kilometres per hour. As it sped away, the merged black hole lit up the surrounding gas in the accretion disk, producing light a trillion times brighter than the sun. The crucial factor here is that black holes are not supposed to be visible - not even light can escape their gravity, meaning any light that could illuminate the black hole can’t reach us here on Earth. Yet, for the first time ever, such light was observed. The new findings suggest that it’s possible to visualise black holes by observing any matter in their surroundings that they light up. Finding ways to closely observe black hole mergers in accretion disks may enable scientists to answer important questions about how matter and black holes interact.
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to get sucked into a black hole, click here
New speeds, new possibilities
The Fugaku supercomputer. Image credit: SingularityHub
The World’s New Fastest Supercomputer Is an Exascale Machine for AI
Supercomputers are incredible machines. Enormous and energy-hungry, these multi-million dollar machines process numbers and data at a blistering pace. Most often, that computing power is aimed at complex tasks that normal computers can’t process, like protein simulations to help cure diseases or climate modelling.
Every two years, supercomputers around the world take a test to determine which is best in class. For the last two years, America’s Summit supercomputer was the fastest on the planet. However, that throne has now been usurped by Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer. Fugaku runs 2.8 times faster than Summit, clocking a max speed of 415 petaflops, measured by Top500’s high-performance linpack benchmark (HP-L). In other words, Fugaku can complete a simple mathematical task 415 quadrillion times per second. To put that in context, for humans to achieve what Fugaku does in a second, every human on Earth would need to perform a calculation every second for 20 months, without taking a break.
Aside from these ridiculous speeds, Fugaku is excellent at machine learning as well. In the past, supercomputers were mainly used for medical or military applications. These days, they’re becoming increasingly important for the running of machine learning algorithms. Fugaku will be able to do machine learning algorithm calculations at 1.4 exaflops, the fastest speed in the world.
Supercomputers vs quantum computing
Here’s how to install iOS 14 beta
An exciting, possibly buggy, experience. Image credit: Apple
How to get the iOS 14 beta on your iPhone
Last week, Apple made a bunch of announcements at WWDC 2020, one of which was a series of updates on the upcoming 14th iteration of their iPhone operating system.
The public beta of iOS 14 will be available in July of this year, and the iPhone 12 (which will come with iOS 14) will likely be released in September. However, if you’re really itching to get your hands on the new operating system, follow the steps here to download the developer beta. Full disclosure, prepare for a few bugs and less-than-optimised performance.
Getting the developer beta requires you to have an iPhone no older than the iPhone 6S. Also, to get the beta, you need to sign up to be an Apple developer and pay a small fee. Nonetheless, if you go for it, you’ll get to experience early versions of some wild new iPhone features.
How to be a good beta tester
Thunder and lightning
What your average lightning strike might look like. Image credit: Michał Mancewicz/Unsplash
435-Mile ‘Megaflash’ Lightning Bolt Breaks World Record
Thunder storms are awesome, beautiful events but can be quite terrifying. Now, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the U.N’s weather agency, has officially disclosed the record for the longest megaflash lightning bolt. The record-holder? A 700 km long bolt that appeared in Brazil on October 31st 2018.
The massive flash is the longest single lightning bolt ever recorded, many times longer than what you see in the image above. The previous record was from 2007 and happened in Oklahoma - that specific flash was ‘only’ 321 kilometres long. As per the WMO statement, the 2018 megaflash’ distance is the equivalent distance of London to Basel, Switzerland.
Next to this record-breaking lightning flash, another record was broken recently. On March 4th, 2019, the record for the longest-lasting single lightning bolt was broken. Recorded in Argentina, the bolt lasted 16,73 seconds, beating the French 2012 record of 7,74 seconds.
What causes lightning?
Start-up Stories
ExoAtlet
Image credit: ExoAtlet
ExoAtlet is a company that develops and produces a range of robotic technologies, which include bionic exoskeletons. These exoskeletons are designed to assist patients with locomotive impairments in their lower limbs.
ExoAtlet are involved with exorehabilitation as well, which is the combination of exoskeleton training and other rehabilitation methods like physiotherapy. One of ExoAtlet’s main goals is to build an ecosystem for exorehabilitation in Europe. This involves partnerships with research centres, retirement homes and hospitals to advance research in the field. They also work with universities to train upcoming physical therapists in the use of exoskeletons.
Over 5000 patients have used ExoAtlet’s exoskeleton devices to date. Currently, ExoAtlet’s product range consists of the ExoAtlet I, ExoAtlet II and Bambini, one of the first exoskeletons designed for children.