Geekly Update - 23 January 2025

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

No, not that Stargate. President Donald Trump has announced a new AI initiative called Stargate, which will be a $500 billion collaboration between OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle. The project aims to maintain U.S. leaderership in artificial intelligence.

And this just in from the What-Could-Possibly-Go-Wrong Desk: Oracle founder Larry Ellison said Stargate will help fuel the development of a cancer vaccine. He hopes artificial intelligence can be leveraged to use blood test results to detect cancers and design a personalized mRNA vaccine in about 48 hours.

Popular social app TikTok was briefly banned in the U.S. on Sunday, but is back online after President Trump's executive order to restore access, albeit with some caveats. TikTok is still unavailable on the Google and Apple app stores, and Chinese parent company ByteDance must sell the app within 75 days or the ban will be reinstated.

In its latest earnings report, Netflix announced it is “adjusting prices across most plans”. You don't have to guess in which direction the adjustment will go. The Standard plan, which debuted at $7.99 per month in 2013, will go from $15.49 to $17.99 per month. The Premium tier pricing will "adjust" from $22.99 to $24.99 per month. The streaming provider still offers an ad-supported plan which will increase from $6.99 to $7.99 per month.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit used his engineering skills to fashion a homemade star tracker that enables him to take amazing photos from the International Space Station. His device rotates a camera to compensate for the ISS's movement to keep the stars from becoming streaks in the image.

Cryonics, the sketchy science of freezing patients after death with the hope of possibly bringing them back to life in the distant future, has been around for almost 50 years. But the folks at Tomorrow.Bio think they have found a better way "cryopreserve" the dearly departed who are willing to part with $200,000. Baseball legend Ted Williams is among a list of people who have been cryogenically frozen.

“Drop and give me fifty!” EngineAI’s SE01 humanoid robot is turning heads with its exceptional ability to mimic natural human motion. It can walk with fluid, graceful strides, and perform complex movements such as squats, push-ups.

Parents, students, teachers, and administrators throughout North America are reeling from a huge data breach that hit PowerSchool, a cloud-based service that stores data for millions of clients in 16,000 schools. The company revealed that the “unauthorized exportation of personal information” included individuals’ names, contact information, dates of birth, medical alert information, Social Security numbers, and “other related information.”

Logitech has expanded its DIY (do-it-yourself) repair program, offering repair guides and replacement parts for more than 20 Logitech devices, including keyboards, headsets, and mice.

And finally, this week's Just Here For the Headline item: Microplastics Are Choking Our Waters. Could A Sponge Made Of Squid Bones Help Remove Them?.

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