Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostgreSQL major version 13. PostgreSQL 13  includes improved functionality and performance from enhancements such as de-duplication of B-tree index entries, improved performance for queries that use partitioned tables, incremental sorting to accelerate data sorts, parallel processing of indexes with the VACUUM command, more ways to monitor activity within a PostgreSQL database, new security capabilities, and more. This release also adds support for bool_plperl, which simplifies writing Perl procedures.

Amazon Rekognition is a machine learning (ML) based service that can analyze images and videos to detect objects, people, faces, text, scenes, activities, and inappropriate content. Celebrity Recognition makes it easy for customers to automatically recognize tens of thousands of well-known personalities in images and videos using ML. Celebrity recognition significantly reduces the repetitive manual effort required to tag produced media content and make it readily searchable. Starting today, customers can get higher accuracy (lower false detections and rejections) and increased coverage of global celebrities. In addition, customers get three new attributes for each celebrity recognized: presentation of gender, expression, and smile. This metadata helps further refine content search and filtering workflows. For example, customers can now easily search for images where a particular actor is smiling, or measure the coverage of female versus male celebrities in event photos to ensure fair representation.

AWS Compute Optimizer now helps customers understand impact of migrating to Graviton2-based instances by recommending up to 3 Graviton2-based instance type options for x86-based Linux instances.

This book sounds like a good, worthwhile read. It’s from MIT Press and is called Living with Robots: What Every Anxious Human Needs to Know. Due out in September, it’s designed to be a lively and accessible guide to what robots can and can’t do, looking beyond the hype, the publishers promise. It covers areas …

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Here’s where China starts to become an ideological threat to the West. China has surprised and intrigued the world with its crack down on successful companies and rich entrepreneurs. What does it want to achieve? Some say Xi wants to prioritise common prosperity over extreme wealth for a few. And who can disapprove of  that? …

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Korea’s Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has grown what is thought to be the most perfect artificial graphene yet – with no wrinkles, folds or ‘adlayers’ (islands of multiple-layer graphene) – using a process that appears to be scalable to larger quantities. The same team, from IBS’s Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials (CMCM), had previously reported single-crystal …

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Diodes has introduced ICs that extend the physical range of PCIe 3.0 and SATA3 connections, while meeting Microsoft’s ‘modern stand-by mode’ requirements. Operating from a 3.3V rail, in stand-by mode, the 1-lane (or 2 channel) PI3EQX12902E consumes 1.7mW, whihc rises to 3.3mW for the 2-lane (4 channel) PI3EQX12904E. A pin selects PCIe 3.0 or SATA3 mode, …

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The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)and Hewlett Packard Enterprise  have unveiled a testbed supercomputer to prepare critical workloads for future exascale systems. Called Polaris, the supercomputer will be built by HPE, and hosted and managed by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility. It …

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SEMI’s July billings figure was up 49.8% y-o-y at $3.81 billion. “The start of the second half of 2021 further extends a robust sales uptrend for North America-based semiconductor equipment manufacturers,” says SEMI CEO Ajit Manocha. “Capacity demand across the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain continues its strong growth, reflecting the role of semiconductor equipment as …

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Group14 Technologies of Woodinville, Washington State and two year-old Slovakian battery developer InoBat are getting together to manufacture silicon-lithium EV batteries. Group14 Technologies makes lithium-silicon battery materials utilising its silicon anode. The companies aim to produce customisable, high-energy-density car batteries. Group14 says it can produce 120 tons per year of its silicon anode material –  SCC55TM …

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