Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever observed in nature. The post How Does Life Happen When There’s Barely Any Light? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

It's not just about rents - it's also about the rooms friends and family can't afford to share

Physical media fans need not panic yet—you’ll still be able to buy new Blu-Ray movies for your collection. But for those who like to save copies of their own data onto the discs, the remaining options just became more limited: Sony announced last week that it’s ending all production of several recordable media formats—including Blu-Ray discs, MiniDiscs, and MiniDV cassettes—with no successor models. “Considering the market environment and future growth potential of the market, we have decided to discontinue production,” a representative of Sony said in a brief statement to IEEE Spectrum. Though availability is dwindling, most Blu-Ray discs are unaffected. The discs being discontinued are currently only available to consumers in Japan and some professional markets elsewhere, according to Sony. Many consumers in Japan use blank Blu-Ray discs to save TV programs, Sony separately told Gizmodo. Sony, which prototyped the first Blu-Ray discs in 2000, has been selling commercial Blu-Ray products since 2006. Development of Blu-Ray was started by Philips and Sony in 1995, shortly after Toshiba’s DVD was crowned the winner of the battle to replace the VCR, notes engineer Kees Immink, whose coding was instrumental in developing optical formats such as CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs. “Philips [and] Sony were so frustrated by that loss that they started a new disc format, using a blue laser,” Immink says. Blu-Ray’s Short-Lived Media Dominance The development took longer than expected, but when it was finally introduced a decade later, Blu-Ray was on its way to becoming the medium for distributing video, as DVD discs and VHS tapes had done in their heydays. In 2008, Spectrum covered the moment when Blu-Ray’s major competitor, HD-DVD, surrendered. But the timing was unfortunate, as the rise of streaming made it an empty victory. Still, Blu-Rays continue to have value as collector’s items for many film buffs who want high-quality recordings not subject to compression artifacts that can arise with streaming, not to mention those wary of losing access to movies due to the vagaries of streaming services’ licensing deals. Sony’s recent announcement does, however, cement the death of the MiniDV cassette and MiniDisc. MiniDV, magnetic cassettes meant to replace VHS tapes at one-fifth the size, were once a popular format of digital video cassettes. The MiniDisc, an erasable magneto-optical disc that can hold up to 80 minutes of digitized audio, still has a small following. The 64-millimeter (2.5-inch) discs, held in a plastic cartridge similar to a floppy disk, were developed in the mid-1980s as a replacement for analog cassette tapes. Sony finally released the product in 1992, and it was popular in Japan into the 2000s. To record data onto optical storage like CDs and Blu-Rays, lasers etch microscopic pits into the surface of the disc to represent ones and zeros. Lasers are also used to record data onto MiniDiscs, but instead of making indentations, they’re used to change the polarization of the material; the lasers heat up one side of the disc, making the material susceptible to a magnetic field, which can then alter the polarity of the heated area. Then in playback, the polarization of reflected light translates to a one or zero. When the technology behind media storage formats like the MiniDisc and Blu-Ray was first being developed, the engineers involved believed the technology would be used well into the future, says optics engineer Joseph Braat. His research at Philips with Immink served as the basis of the MiniDisc. Despite that optimism, “the density of information in optical storage was limited from the very beginning,” Braat says. Despite using the compact wavelengths of blue light, Blu-Ray soon hit a limit of how much data could be stored. Even dual-layer Blu-Ray discs can only hold 50 gigabytes per side; that amount of data will give you 50 hours of standard definition streaming on Netflix, or about seven hours of 4K video content. MiniDiscs still have a small, dedicated niche of enthusiasts, with active social media communities and in-person disc swaps. But since Sony stopped production of MiniDisc devices in 2013, the retro format has effectively been on technological hospice care, with the company only offering blank discs and repair services. Now, it seems, it’s officially over.

AGI Is Coming Sooner Due to o3, DeepSeek, and Other Cutting-Edge AI Developments

On January 20th a Chinese tech company released the free version of their chatbot called DeepSeek. The AI chatbot, by all accounts, is about on par with existing widely available chatbots, like ChatGPT. It does not represent any new abilities or breakthrough in quality. And yet the release shocked the industry causing the tech-heavy stock […] The post The Skinny on DeepSeek first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.