Foxconn says it will meet all manufacturing obligations following the outbreak of the coronavirus in China, Reuters reports, even after the most recent Apple results point out uncertainty due to the disease.

“We do not comment on our specific production practices, but we can confirm that we have measures in place to ensure that we can continue to meet all global manufacturing obligations,” a Foxconn statement reads.

A team of IBM researchers manage to observe an "elusive gravitational effect" on Earth-- a phenomenon previously thought possible only "hundreds of light years away," and one that could lead to improvements in the energy-conversion process in electronic devices.

But what does an elusive gravitational effect involve? It is, essentially, an unusual quantum effect scientists theorised could take place within quark-gluon plasma (GDP), the strange, soupy substance that made the universe back when it was little more than a few microseconds old. The quantum effect involved in the IBM experiments is known as the axial-gravitational anomaly, and breaks the conservation laws of classic physics such as charge, energy and momentum.

To observe the axial-gravitational anomaly here on Earth, the scientists used Weyl semimetal, a material similar to 3D graphene, inside a cryolab at the University of Hamburg using high magnetic fields. Weyl semimetal has two kinds of electrons, but when placed inside the cryolab mimicking the conditions of the early universe the electrons change from one type to the other.

by Jay McBain, Principal Analyst, Global Channels, Forrester

The global IT channel have proven to be remarkable change-agents, both in front of their customers and inside their own businesses. Thinking about the amount of churn over the past 35 years can be downright dizzying.

Starting from the first disconnected PC's to last week's WannaCry ransomware attack, channel partners have transitioned their skills to dozens of new technology opportunities. At the same time, they have transformed their business models from resell, break-fix, installation, maintenance, to solution providing and recurring managed services, among others.

The one thing that has stayed relatively constant over these decades is how customers decide and procure technology. Led by CIOs and IT departments, channel partners and vendors have fine-tuned their product and messaging mix to capitalize on this customer buying journey. Over the past couple of years, driven by cloud and the growing acceptance of SaaS business ecosystems, this journey just took a hard right turn.

MP3, the much loved audio compression algorithm, is dead-- or so its creator, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, insists as it terminates licencing for a number of related patents.

Instead, the institute suggests, customers should switch to Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which it describes as a "de facto standard for music download and videos on mobile phones." AAC is definitely superior to MP3, since it allows for streaming TV and radio broadcasting with higher-quality audio at lower bitrates.

The story of the MP3 format started in the late 1980s, when Fraunhofer and the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg joined forces to work on a means to send audio over telephone lines. The eventual result was the MP3, a technology the Fraunhofer failed to capitalise on due to a combination of industrial sabotage, piracy and, at one unfortunate point, the German government refusing to give a patent for a music streaming service due to its being technologically absurd at the time.