Month: February 2024

In its last hurrah before being shut down, a 40-year-old fusion reactor in the UK set a new world record for energy output — bringing the decades-old promise of clean, limitless energy one step closer to reality. Scientists at the Joint European Torus (JET) — a huge, donut-shaped machine known as a tokamak — produced a record 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds, surpassing the previous record of 59 megajoules set in 2021. This equates to a power output of 12.5 megawatts, enough to power around 12,000 households.   The UK’s nuclear minister Andrew Bowie called the latest breakthrough…

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Google just rebranded Bard to Gemini, an AI chatbot that can generate images, but the tool has also improved exponentially since its launch last year.

With inline image editing, you can perform some basic edits without leaving Copilot.

The Google Gemini AI app is live in the Google Play Store. Here’s how to install it and use it on your supported device. You can also replace Google Assistant.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is 2024’s first big game disappointment, but not all hope is lost for its future.

Xiaolang Zhang, the former Apple employee who pleaded guilty to stealing information about the development of the company’s self-driving vehicle, has been sentenced to 120 days in prison followed by a three-year supervised release. Zhang was arrested back in 2018 at San Jose International Airport just as he was about to board a flight to China. He initially pleaded not guilty until he changed his tune in 2022 and admitted to stealing trade secrets. In addition to serving time behind bars, he also has to pay restitution amounting to $146,984, according to the court document of his sentencing first seen by 9to5Mac. Zhang originally faced up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

The former Apple employee worked as a hardware engineer for the company’s decade-old autonomous vehicle initiative codenamed Project Titan. Based on Apple’s complaint, Zhang transferred a 25-page document containing engineering schematics of a circuit board for the company’s self-driving vehicle to his wife’s laptop via AirDrop. He also saved a copy of technical manuals that described Apple’s prototype to that laptop, in addition to stealing circuit boards and a Linux server from the company’s development labs. 

Zhang resigned from Apple following a paternity leave and a trip to China, telling the iPhonemaker that he was going to work in the country for XPeng Motors. That reportedly triggered an investigation, since XPeng is also working on autonomous driving technology, which revealed that Zhang was caught on CCTV taking hardware from Apple’s labs and transferring files to his wife’s computer. He’s expected to surrender himself by June 19, after which he will be sent to a minimum-security facility as close as possible to his home in San Jose, California. 

Apple’s self-driving vehicle has been in the works for a decade, but it has yet to launch a product consumers can buy. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman recently reported that the company changed its plans and is now developing an EV like Tesla’s instead of a full-fledged autonomous vehicle. The long-awaited Apple Car is now projected to debut no earlier than 2028. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ex-apple-engineer-sentenced-to-six-months-in-prison-for-stealing-self-driving-car-tech-110537599.html?src=rss