Geek News

Facebook Spaces is no longer just a place for you to hang out with friends and family in your list: you can also use it to form bonds with people in the Groups you're in. You can now host or join a VR Space with up to four people from a Group, so you can discuss shared interests in virtual reality. The social VR app allows you to connect with new people in a deeper way: you could, for instance, conduct practice sessions together using VR props if you're all part of a music or a stand-up comedy group. You could perform in one Space as a band and livestream your performance to friends. You could also watch videos together or just chat and get to know one another at a deeper level in a VR environment. By opening up Spaces to Groups, Facebook has amped up the social aspect of the app. Since that also means you could end up in a single VR environment with people you don't know that well -- or at all -- Facebook has ensured you can report people and mute or pause the experie...

Android phonemaker Essential is skipping over Android Oreo 8.0 despite running a beta program for the platform these past two months. Apparently, it discovered several stability issues in 8.0 during testing, which it believes will be addressed by 8.1. So, instead of rolling out 8.0 to the public, the company has decided to "focus [its] energy" on its successor. The downside is that it will push back Oreo's release to the Andy Rubin-designed Essential phones a few weeks, but those who can't wait that long can alway sign up for 8.1's beta release. In its announcement, Essential said it's launching a beta program for Oreo 8.1 to be able to fine-tune the build with the help of users' feedback. Interested users will have to have enough tech savvy to be able to install the platform, and they can also expect to deal with bugs until the stable release. Essential didn't reveal when the beta will be available, so those who'd like to take part in the tes...

Tech titans like Intel and IBM have already begun developing chips for AI that mimic the way the human brain works -- it is, after all, the most powerful computer there is. The field of "neuromorphic computing" is still in its very early stages, though, and one of its pioneers' greatest challenges is copying neural synapses. Those are the small structures where information passes when it moves from one neuron to the next. That's why a team of MIT engineers have set out to develop an artificial synapse that works like the real deal and have successfully come up with a design that can "precisely control the strength of an electric current flowing across it, similar to the way ions flow between neurons." Existing designs that typically use non-crystalline solid or amorphous materials have difficulties controlling that flow of ions, which means they're not that successful in moving info from neuron to neuron. To solve that issue, the team created synap...