Here's a recap of what made news in the world of science and technology this week.
WhatsApp has added the ability to share your screen during video calls. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced this new feature in a Facebook post on 8 August. WhatsApp beta testers got a first look at the feature in May but it is now rolling out to everyone. To use the screen-sharing feature during a video call, you need to tap the screen-sharing icon (a phone with an arrow on it) at the bottom. You then hit on confirm. The screen-sharing feature is the latest in a fresh line of additions to WhatsApp, including the ability to edit messages in your chats. Multiple reports suggest that the Meta-owned platform is also testing a Discord-like voice chat feature for groups.
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Scientists confirmed on 8 August that July 2023 was officially the hottest month on record. Data from the European Union-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) shows that July was the hottest month on record globally. A press release from C3S said that the month was 0.72 degree Celsius warmer than the 1991-2020 average for July and 0.33 degree Celsius warmer than the previous warmest month, July 2019. July 2023 is also estimated to have been around 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the average for 1850-1900. According to a Bloomberg report on the development, it’s the first time global July temperatures have exceeded the 1.5 degrees Celsius pre-industrial threshold set in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Read more on this here.
Chipmaker Nvidia unveiled a powerful new AI processor at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics exhibition in the US on 8 August. The next-generation GH200 Grace Hopper platform, the company said, is built for the era of accelerated computing and generative AI. Nvidia added that the superchip has been created to handle the world’s most complex generative AI workloads, spanning large language models, recommender systems, and will be available in a variety of configurations. According to a Bloomberg report, the Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper platform relies on high-bandwidth memory 3, or HBM3e, which is able to access information at a blazing 5 terabytes per second.
(With inputs from agencies)
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