Gas Prices Sore to Record Levels as Apple Unveils Revolutionary Computer Chips
Gas prices are soaring in the US and hitting record highs daily. Apple unveils a new line of products in its March event. China goes into lockdown over Covid-19. DeepMind’s new AI can help decipher ancient texts. Here are this week’s stories.
1. Gas Prices Sore to Record Levels
Gas prices are soaring in the US and hitting record highs daily. The national average for a gallon of gas stands at $4.32 and has been stable for a couple of days, but it could rise. This breaks the previous record, which was $4.10 a gallon in 2008, just before the financial crisis. Several factors are driving this abnormally high price, impacting the pockets of millions of Americans. Firstly, Americans are driving more often than during the pandemic, increasing demand and cost. The lockdowns caused the price to rise from $1.94 in April to $2.82 in March 2021. Because of the lockdowns, production is lagging and is still recovering. The most significant factor currently is Russia’s war on Ukraine. The invasion prompted global sanctions against Russia, including on oil and gas. Even though the US imports less than 10% of its oil and gas from Russia, the sanctions have impacted the whole global oil market, causing price hikes everywhere. No one is sure when prices will go back down, but there are several things the federal government can do to lower prices. In order to prevent gas evaporation, refineries in the United States are mandated to convert to higher-grade summer gas blends during the summer months, but by removing this rule, customers might save up to 15 cents per gallon. The US Renewable Fuel Standard could also remove the ethanol mandate, which requires refiners to blend corn ethanol with gasoline. Ethanol is more expensive and less efficient than gas, so adding biofuel artificially drives up the cost at the pump. The government can also lower or remove federal taxes at the pump, saving Americans 18.4 cents per gallon.
2. Apple Unveils Revolutionary Computer Chips
Apple has just unveiled a new line of products in its March event. It first announced a new iPhone SE with the A15 Bionic chip, the same chip in the iPhone 13 and 5G, but with the same iPhone 8 body. It starts at $430, $30 more than before. Apple also upgraded the iPad Air by adding the powerful M1 chip and 5G, and it starts at $599. Lastly, Apple revealed a new revolutionary computer alongside a studio display. It debuted the Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra processor, Apple’s most powerful piece of silicon yet. Over the past couple of years, Apple has been transitioning from Intel chips to its own M1 chips, and this change has provided the Mac with the best performance and battery life in the industry. Apple has effectively built one perfect chip and is scaling it up without limit for better performance, allowing Apple to use the same chip for all its devices, which no other chip manufacturer has accomplished. With its new Mac Studio, Apple uses its M1 Ultra Chip, which allows the device to have extreme performance in a relatively small form factor. The device is meant for professionals who need performance for tasks like video editing. The company also unveiled a 27-inch 5K Retina display alongside it. The Mac Studio will start at $2000 and the Studio Display at $1600.
3. China Goes into Lockdown Over Covid-19
As cases continue to plunge in the US, Covid-19 cases are surging in China. According to the National Health Commission (NHC), the country has reported over a thousand cases for the fourth consecutive day, making it the worst outbreak in China since Wuhan in early 2020. The problem is that China has had a strict zero-Covid policy that aims to stop all outbreaks through any means, which often violates privacy and freedoms, leading to virtually zero immunity in the country. For a country as big and global as China, the spread of Covid-19 is inevitable. Australia tried a similar strategy, where they were basically in lockdown for over a year, which probably did more harm than good. Then the government could not control the spread of Omicron, so they just let Covid-19 spread because most of the population was vaccinated. Now, Australia is trying to live with Covid-19 like the Flu. Although this strategy was somewhat effective in Australia, it will not work in China. Australia had most of the population vaccinated, which protected them from severe infection; however, China’s vaccines are ineffective, so its population is not protected. Also, China has a vast and diverse population, and the spread of Covid-19 could lead to the emergence of new variants. Currently, China is going into lockdown in many regions, which will slow the spread but also cause some disruption to the tech supply chain.
4. DeepMind’s New AI Helps Decipher Ancient Texts
DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence, has collaborated with scholars and created an AI tool to help archaeologists better understand the past. The Alphabet-owned firm has created Ithaca, a software that can decipher ancient texts. It can restore missing text from inscriptions, suggest the year the text was made, and possible geographic origins. The software trained on nearly 80,000 ancient Greek inscriptions and has gotten pretty accurate. When recovering letters in damaged texts, it is 62% accurate. Ithaca can pinpoint an inscription’s geographic origins to one of 84 ancient global places with 71 %accuracy, and it can date a text to within 30 years of its actual year of composition. Ancient inscriptions provide a direct account of daily life in the past. Unfortunately, these texts are often heavily damaged. These texts are also usually inscribed on inorganic materials like stone or metal, making procedures such as radiocarbon dating impossible. These kinds of tools allow historians to better understand our past and make the most of the evidence we have left. Currently, Ithaca is only trained on ancient Greek inscriptions, but it can easily expand to other ancient scripts.
Above were my top stories for the week of March 14th, 2022. Thank you and see you next week!
