From Tom's Hardware: Gabriele Gorla, Director of Engineering at Nvidia, told Igor's Lab that Nvidia buys its 4-to-1 12VHPWR (four eight pins to one 12-pin) power adapters from two companies: Astron and NTK. While both adapters are designed up to the specifications defined by the PCI-SIG standards body, they are still quite a bit different 'inside' as they use slightly different contacts. Astron apparently uses double-slot spring contacts, whereas NTK sticks to a long single-slot spring contact that has lower resistance and it is easier to detach.

According to Igor's Lab, Zotac and Gigabyte have said the adapter from NTK is less prone to failure even after multiple mating cycles. Astron argues, according to Nvidia, that its adapter performs in accordance with specifications (i.e., its resistance is below 1.5 mOhm). Meanwhile, as Igor's Lab points out, Astron's 12VHPWR adapter has its thick 14AWG wires rigidly soldered to 2mm^2 soldered pads, which is a point of failure, especially for contacts on the edges of the adapter.

While Igor's Lab details how to distinguish between adapters from Astron and NTK, it is impossible to tell which of them will ship in a particular box with a GeForce RTX 4090 inside. Meanwhile, the report says that Nvidia will keep using 3-to-1 12VHPWR adapters from Astron and NTK supplied with GeForce RTX 4080, but will only use 2-to-1 12VHPWR adapters from NTK with GeForce RTX 4070 Ti boards.

From the article: Blood transfusions are an important way to replace lost blood, often saving lives in the worst possible circumstances. But not everyone can get the procedure. Some patients with rare blood group types don’t meet the requirements. But what if they could use blood grown in a lab?

The National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. announced on Monday that it has started a clinical trial where researchers will be administering laboratory-grown red blood cells to patients. Notably, this is the first time ever that red blood cells grown in a lab will be given to another person as part of a blood transfusion trial.

The study––called the RESTORE trial––is a joint research initiative between the NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) and the University of Bristol, as well as various researchers at the University of Cambridge.

In a YouTube video from NHS, University of Bristol researcher Ash Toye explains that RESTORE is a clinical trial set up to assess whether lab-grown red blood cells are similar, or possibly even better, than a donor’s own blood cells produced inside the body.

“We’re hoping that because they’re so freshly made and ready to go that they’ll be better. If that’s true, then this will be a world first because effectively we’ve taken a cell produced in the donor and we’ve put them into a volunteer who is not related to the donor and they’ve been matched,” he said.

From the article: The pandemic forced many children to be isolated at home without consistent social interactions. This unprecedented situation left many concerned about the consequences of such isolation for children. Of course, one obvious consequence is loneliness, but does loneliness mean children will experience depression? Researchers at the University of New South Wales conducted a meta-analysis of research investigating the connection between loneliness and depressive symptoms. The results, published in Behavior Change, indicate that loneliness may be a significant risk factor for depression.

As the world exits this stage of the global pandemic, it provides an opportunity to assess the response, what worked, and what did not, and to gather data to support future decisions. Researchers Carissa Dunn and Gemma Sicouri sought to analyze previous literature to determine if loneliness was a significant factor in the increased rates of depression symptoms in children and adolescents during the pandemic years.

The research team searched for studies published between 1900-2020 with human participants under 18. Search terms used were ‘loneliness,’ ‘isolation,’ ‘depression,’ and ‘children’ or ‘adolescents .’This process elicited 3,664 articles whittled down to 44 studies that fit the meta-analysis criteria. The criteria included: full text in English, peer-reviewed and empirical, participants were younger than 19, and the study included “standardized and validated measure(s)” of depression and loneliness as well as a cross-sectional relationship between loneliness and depression.

The chosen 44 studies were published between 1983-2021 and included a total of 27,214 children between the ages of 9-18. Approximately one-half of the participants were female. Statistical analysis of these studies revealed there was a moderate correlation between loneliness and depressive symptoms. This indicates that when feelings of loneliness increase, depressive symptoms increase.

From the article: A new study using electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of brain responses of five-month-old infants showed that they can individuate faces of their mothers i.e., generate specific neural responses associated with recognition of faces, when briefly shown pictures of their mother’s face, but only under certain conditions.

The findings indicate that young infants can identify their mother’s face at a glance, under different angles and with different facial expressions, but only if it is not mixed with too many other faces. The study was published in the Cortex.

Recognizing people based on their faces is extremely important for social interactions. This is also a very complex task. Yet, in spite of its complexity, adult humans are typically able to recognize the identity of thousands of faces. They can also do it extremely quickly, at a glance, in less than a second.

From the article: The NightWare system uses “the Apple Watch heart rate sensor, accelerometer, and gyroscope to detect a nightmare and then disrupt it through haptic feedback, generating gentle pulses on the wrist that gradually increase until the user is roused from the nightmare, but not from sleep,” Apple says. It’s also the only FDA-approved digital therapeutic for treating nightmares.

NightWare has already been prescribed to 400 patients in the United States, according to Apple. Almost all of the patients are active-duty military or veterans.