Earth’s Days Are Getting Longer—Thanks to the Moon

More than a billion years ago, a day on Earth lasted just 18 hours, a new study reports. The distance from our planet to the moon, scientists say, is one major reason for the extra six hours we have today.
Our faithful rocky companion used to lie far closer to our planet—close enough to alter the way it moves, researchers reported Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“As the moon moves away, the Earth is like a spinning figure skater who slows down as they stretch their arms out,” explained Stephen Meyers, study co-author professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in a statement. Scientists think the moon is now moving about 1.5 inches away from our planet every year, but this wasn't always the case.
As planets and other astronomical bodies move through space, they influence each other’s movements in a complex display of orbital gymnastics. The force exerted by these objects can affect everything from sunlight distribution to climate change over many thousands of years. Rock can offer a record of some of these changes over hundreds of million years.
But in the history of our solar system—which stretches back billions of years—a few hundred million isn’t all that much. This uncertainty is compounded by something called solar system chaos—a theory that predicts small, early changes in the movement of the planets can eventually lead to massive variations.
Meyers and his team used statistics to marry geological observations and astronomical theory. By combining these disciplines, researchers aim to probe our planet’s—and our solar system’s—past. “The geologic record is an astronomical observatory for the early solar system,” Meyers said in the statement. “We want to be able to study rocks that are billions of years old in a way that is comparable to how we study modern geologic processes.”
The researchers integrated a sophisticated statistical method called “TimeOpt” with tools from astronomy and geology to get a better handle on our planet’s uncertain past. Using a 1.4-billion-year-old rock layer from China and a 55-million-year-old layer from the southern Atlantic Ocean, the team were able to test their idea. “We are looking at its pulsing rhythm, preserved in the rock and the history of life,” Meyers said in the statement.
The method, they discovered, could reliably evaluate Earth’s rotation and orbit around the sun. They used it to estimate the growing space between Earth and the moon over time, and the slow but inevitable stretching of our days. Next, they want to apply their method to other intervals of geologic time, added study co-author and Lamont Research Professor at Columbia, Alberto Malinverno in the statement.

                   5G is (finally) coming... next year 

Intel announced it was partnering with Sprint to drive Intel-powered devices that run on coming-soon fast 5G data networks. These systems, from Acer, Asus. Dell, HP, Lenovo and Microsoft, are expected sometime in 2019.
Better battery life through smarter displays
After years of promoting gains in CPU efficiency for increased laptop battery life, Intel is switching gears, hoping to give your PC a boost through a redesigned display. It's called Intel Low Power Display Technology, and can hypothetically improve a laptop's battery life by 4 to 8 hours.
These 1-watt panels, made by Sharp and Innolux, use a combination of hardware changes and Intel GPU software to draw less power. Intel claims you won't be able to see a difference in brightness or resolution. Onstage at Computex, Intel showed a time-lapse video of one such display lasting for 25 hours of continuous video playback.


Everyone loves talking about creators right now. If you edit photos or video, create animation, design buildings or make music, almost every hardware, OS and app company wants you to think it's made its products expressly for you.
Intel calls a line of new laptops and desktops from partners -- including Asus, Dell and MSI -- its Creator PCs. These include systems with new Core i7 and Core i9 CPUs, Thunderbolt 3 and Optane SSDs, all designed, an Intel exec told us, to "solve pain points in the creation process."
AI in a box
It seems like every current tech keynote or press conference needs to at least mention AI. Intel is embracing the concept through tools that should make it easier for app developers to use powerful Intel CPUs to drive AI.
This takes on two forms: First, a new "AI for PC" developer program, with tools and training for developers, and second, an actual AI dev kit coming in late 2018, with reference code and other software.
To demonstrate the importance of AI, Intel presented a demo of a new concept PC from Asus, called Project Precog (yes, like in Minority Report), which has a dual-screen design and "intelligent" features. That includes face and object recognition and an intelligent display that adapts to suit your task (turning from a virtual keyboard to a drawing pad depending on what your hands are doing). That followed a series of other prototypes discussed during the keynote, including the dual-screen Yoga Book 2 laptop, which features a similar dual-screen design and intelligent display to the Precog.
But Intel was also looking to the past, not just the future.
This year marks both Intel's 50th anniversary and the 40th anniversary of the x86 architecture.
In honor of these key anniversaries, Intel announced a limited edition 8th-gen Core i7-8086K processor, which the company says is "the first-ever CPU with a 5.0GHz turbo frequency." The CPU will be part of ongoing sweepstakes, giving away 8,086 chips.