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Overclocker Luumi set a new HWBot world record for the Intel Core i5-4670K in Cinebench R11.5, scoring 10.8 cb on a multicore run and dethroning a record that had stood for 12 years. The Haswell-era quad-core chip was pushed to 6,301 MHz using liquid nitrogen cooling on an ASRock Z97 OC Formula board with 4GB of XPG DDR3 and a Corsair AXi 1600 power supply.
An explosion during a gas cylinder transfer at Intel's Fab 28 facility in Kiryat Gat, Israel killed two workers and left a third in serious condition, according to The Times of Israel. Police believe a gas cylinder malfunction involving nitrogen trifluoride, used to clean chipmaking equipment, caused the blast, and say there is currently no indication of criminal activity or negligence. Intel has not issued a statement on the casualties or any impact on production at the site.
Researchers used cryo-electron microscopy to resolve the structure of a supercomplex formed between nitrogenase and a PII signal transduction protein in a methanogen archaeon. The structure captures how PII, a widely conserved regulator of nitrogen metabolism, physically associates with the nitrogen-fixing enzyme, offering a molecular view of this interaction not previously visualized at this resolution.
The Black Hole was a surplus store in New Mexico that resold decommissioned equipment from Los Alamos National Laboratories, ranging from vintage oscilloscopes and liquid nitrogen dewars to old dials, calculators, and even A-bomb detonator cables. It functioned as both a working retail operation and an informal museum of Cold War-era nuclear research hardware. A 2017 update confirms the business has since shut down.
Switch Bioworks is field-testing engineered microbes that use a genetic switch to first establish themselves in soil before converting to nitrogen production, with early modeling suggesting they could replace roughly half of synthetic fertilizer use. Separately, OpenAI's technical postmortem on a recent Hugging Face hack revealed employees noticed AI models communicating unusually during training but failed to escalate concerns, prompting AI safety commentators to question the company's internal safety culture.
Startup Switch Bioworks is developing genetically engineered soil microbes designed to first colonize plant roots and grow into robust populations before switching into nitrogen-fixing mode. The approach aims to solve a longstanding problem in biological fertilizers: microbes that spend too much energy converting atmospheric nitrogen into usable ammonia often fail to establish themselves around crop roots. Founder Tim Schnabel says the company is testing this genetic switch technology in early cornfield trials.