Mannerisms

A heat wave is sweeping across South Asia, with temperatures having reached 44°C in India’s Jaipur and 50°C in Pakistan’s Shaheed Benazirabad in April. Where temperatures used to heat up from May and throughout June, such levels are now creeping earlier. According to NASA, there is “unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate”. Temperature records are being ...

Is molydenum disulphide the silicon replacement? I don’t know, but there’s mileage in assuming it will be, Ed confides to his diary. It supports high current density, has a tuneable bandgap, forms atomically-thin wafers, is compatible  with silicon – all of which suggest it could be a substrate for 2D ICs. Fabrication challenges can be skated over for now as ...

In the days when a semiconductor company’s customers were expected to be grateful for whatever product a semi company threw over the wall, an industry executive, later to become a semiconductor CEO himself, tells this yarn: ”In the mid-eighties one of the very largest semi companies in the business decided that hearing the voice of the customer would be a ...

44% of the respondents in Sweden surveyed by Statista Consumer Insights between April 2024 and March 2025 reported  mental health problems such as depression, stress or anxiety. Australia, the US and the UK came in at No.s 2, 3 and 4 on the scale. The share was  lower in India, France, Italy and China. According to the UN, one in ...

Dreams can be more important than you think. “When I was 23, I suddenly woke up,” an entrepreneur said at a university Conmencement address, “I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and I grabbed a pen and started writing. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and ...

Next month the EU is expected to throw in the towel on its aspirations of gaining technological independence from the USA. On June 4th the EU  is due to publish its  ‘International Digital Strategy for Europe’. According to a draft of the strategy document seen by Bloomberg: “The network effects that allowed online platforms to grow to unprecedented size are ...

The CEOs of Google and Microsoft say that up to  30% of their companies’  code is now being generated by AI tools. The CEO of Meta’s says he’ll invest between $60-65 billion in 2025 “to support our artificial-intelligence efforts,” adding that “maybe half of the engineering work on future Llama models would be handled by AI agents over the next ...

1. Ship Your Enemies Glitter: A service that sends glitter to annoy enemies, generating $20,000 in weeks. 2. The Banana Phone: A phone shaped like a banana that sold tens of thousands of units. 3. I Want to Draw a Cat for You: A cat-drawing service that earned over $200,000. 4. Poop Senders: A revenge service sending animal poop, earning ...

Sitting at a beach bar in South Carolina last week, the guy in the next seat opened a conversation about life, events and drink in that companionable way Americans have. It turned out he was not only drinking a Margarita but actually lived in a place called Margaritaville. Research revealed that there are 20 resort towns in the USA called ...

A COMPLETELY new method of car ignition, using transistors, will be shown by Joseph Lucas (Electrical) at the International Motor Show opening at Geneva tomorrow (Thursday). So, 64 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of March 15th 1961 The story concluded: Although it will at first be confined to racing cars, it could eventually come into wide ...

Military spending reached a record high of $2.7 trillion last year, says data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). More than 100 countries increased their military spending in 2024, with Europe’s military spending surpassing levels seen at the end of the Cold War, driven mainly by the war in Ukraine, while the Middle East’s expenditure reached an estimated ...

Stock markets are as volatile as teenagers at the moment with tech shares particularly skittish – it’s too good an opportunity  to miss, Ed confides to his diary. Accordingly, I have concocted some market-moving rumours. Huawei’s EUV machines are being successfully mass produced at a third of the cost of ASML’s machines. Intel 18A is yielding at 60%/30% TSMC A16 ...

Intel has many challenges of which the most formidable may be the CEO’s pledge:  “We are going back to basics by listening to our customers.” Many will chuckle at this ambition – Intel has a less than exemplary record in customer care – possibly harking back to Andy Grove’s famous remark about dealing with non-compliant parts: “Ship the shit”. Mind ...

Together, China and the United States accounted for almost half of world military expenditure in 2024. The U.S. was the biggest defense spender at  $997 billion. This made up 37 percent of the world’s military spending. China came in second place with the equivalent of an estimated $314 billion, accounting for 12 percent of the global military budget. China increased spending ...

  Moral: Genius is always remembered

If Nvidia does what it is rumoured to be thinking of doing, it will really set the cat among the pigeons.  It is said that Nvidia is thinking of hiving off its China operation to become a separate unit operating as a domestic Chinese company.  This would allow the unit to compete with domestic China chip suppliers without being affected ...

Intel’s CEO is said to be on a mission to make the company an engineering-led organisation rather than a bureaucracy. The scale of the job losses is gruesome – 15,000 last year; 21,000 this year – reducing the head count from 124,800 in 2023 to 88,800 this year representing a 28% cut in two years. It is said that the ...

Thanks to The Real Review for this one – the ten best tech movies: Snowden Jobs The Current Wars Super Pumped Office Space The Social Network Blackberry The Internship WarGames Tetris

It is reassuring to see that the EU is able to regulate itself when the commission behaves idiotically. The EU Court of Auditors has said that there is no chance of the EU Chips Act meeting it’s 20% global market share by 2030. That was obvious to everybody. None of the European companies was putting in leading edge  capacity while ...

THE Americans are spending £3 10s. a year per head of their population on space development and the Russians an equivalent amount. But the British, the most inventive, scientific and engineering nation in the world, are devoting not more than a penny per head. The point was made by Mr. Woodrow Wyatt, Labour MP for Bosworth, who was given leave ...