Hyundai is one of several automakers working to make hydrogen-powered electric vehicles a thing, and a good first step is making sure they’re not ugly. I think the designers hit the target with the “Art of Steel” design language used in the Initium concept SUV revealed this week at an event in Korea. It seems to borrow some of the fearlessly angular and retro-inspired looks it’s teased over the years on other vehicles like the N Vision 74 concept and the Seven (which will eventually become the Ioniq 9).
According to Hyundai’s estimates, the Initium can drive more than 400 miles (650km) on a single refuel — about 30 miles further than its production Nexo fuel cell SUV. Hyundai says the Initium is a “preview” of an upcoming fuel cell EV it will reveal in the first half of next year.
Not too shabby for an anti-greenhouse gas machine.Image: Hyundai
Earlier this year, Hyundai claimed hydrogen vehicles will “play a prominent role” in the company’s goal of going carbon neutral by 2050. It plans to use hydrogen in cars, commercial trucks, buses, generators, and other applications. Hyundai is building it all under its “HTWO” hydrogen business brand.
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Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the world, and vehicles that use it release water vapor instead of tailpipe emissions. However, it’s not easy to package and distribute, and its infrastructure is still in its infancy (despite development lasting decades) compared to how far EV charging networks have come in just over one decade.
Thanksgiving is just around the corner, meaning airports everywhere are about to get slammed. Thankfully, if you plan on flying out of town this holiday season, Apple’s AirTags can help you speed through the baggage claim with some extra piece of mind. A four-pack normally goes for $99, but right now, you can buy them for just under $74 at Walmart and Best Buy — a mere $1 shy of their best price to date.
If you own an iPhone, Apple’s AirTags are the best Bluetooth trackers you can buy. They offer impressively precise tracking thanks to Apple’s ultra wideband chip and their ability to tap into Apple’s vast Find My system, which lets them cover a broader range than Bluetooth alone. You can also share them with up to five people — assuming your phone is running iOS 17 or 18 — allowing everybody to keep tabs on valuables if you’re traveling with a family or group. The water-resistant trackers even have user-replaceable batteries, so you don’t need to get a new one whenever a battery dies. Now, if only Apple outfitted them with a lanyard hole or some way to attach them to your bag…
Artificial intelligence is driving unprecedented demand in data centers, as the need for processing vast amounts of data continues to surge.
As tech giants race to expand their infrastructures to accommodate AI workloads, they are faced with the growing challenge of how to sustainably and affordably power these operations – and this has even led companies like Oracle and Microsoft to explore nuclear energy as a potential solution.
Another critical issue is managing the heat generated by powerful AI hardware. Liquid cooling has emerged as a promising way to maintain optimal system performance while handling rising energy demands. In October 2024 alone, several tech firms announced liquid cooled solutions, highlighting a clear industry shift in that direction.
Liquid-cooled SuperClusters
At its recent Lenovo Tech World event, the company showcased its next-gen Neptune liquid cooling solution for servers.
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The sixth generation of Neptune, which uses open-loop, direct warm-water cooling, is now being deployed across the company’s partner ecosystem, enabling organizations to build and run accelerated computing for generative AI while reducing data center power consumption by up to 40%, the company says.
At OCP Global Summit 2024, Giga Computing, a subsidiary of Gigabyte, presented a direct liquid cooling (DLC) server designed for Nvidia HGX H200 systems. In addition to the DLC server, Giga also revealed the G593-SD1, which features a dedicated air cooling chamber for the Nvidia H200 Tensor Core GPU, aimed at those data centers not yet ready to fully embrace liquid cooling.
Dell‘s new Integrated Rack 7000 (IR7000) is a scalable system designed specifically with liquid cooling in mind. It’s capable of managing future deployments of up to 480KW, while capturing nearly 100% of the generated heat.
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“Today’s data centers can’t keep up with the demands of AI, requiring high-density compute and liquid cooling innovations with modular, flexible and efficient designs,” said Arthur Lewis, president of Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group. “These new systems deliver the performance needed for organizations to remain competitive in the fast-evolving AI landscape.”
Supermicro has also revealed liquid-cooled SuperClusters designed for AI workloads, powered by the Nvidia Blackwell platform. Supermicro’s liquid-cooling solutions, supported by the Nvidia GB200 NVL72 platform for exascale computing, have begun sampling to select customers, with full-scale production expected in late Q4.
“We’re driving the future of sustainable AI computing, and our liquid-cooled AI solutions are rapidly being adopted by some of the most ambitious AI infrastructure projects in the world with over 2,000 liquid-cooled racks shipped since June 2024,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro.
The liquid-cooled SuperClusters feature advanced in-rack or in-row coolant distribution units (CDUs) and custom cold plates for housing two Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips in a 1U form factor.
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It seems clear that liquid cooling is going to be at the heart of data center operations as workloads continue to grow. This technology will be critical for managing the heat and energy demands of the next generation of AI computing, and I think we’re only just starting to see potential impact it will have on efficiency, scalability, and sustainability in the years to come.
Did you know that Amazon Prime Video launched a series almost a decade ago with a killer cast that was met with solid reviews but was canceled? Mad Dogs didn’t get the due it deserved. That show counts among three underrated shows on Amazon Prime Video you need to watch in November.
The other two shows are likely ones you have heard of before but never took the time to watch. They received mixed reviews but played a significant role in their respective genres. Without one, for example, we might not have seen shows like The Great, and without the other, NCIS would never have graced the small screen.
Set in 16th-century England, this British Canadian historical fiction series fits right in with others of the same ilk, like The Gilded Age, The Great, and Bridgerton. If you like any (or all) of those shows, you’ll appreciate The Tudors, which is based on the reign of King Henry VIII, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Also featuring Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones), Henry Cavill (The Witcher), and Annabelle Wallis (Peaky Blinders), you’ll notice a lot of familiar faces among the main and guest starring cast.
From King Henry VIII’s challenges in the political sphere to a mysterious illness that takes over England, multiple marriages, ghosts, and betrayal, The Tudors covers all the juicy details of the former king’s life in its dramatized retelling. The series received mixed reviews from critics but was largely beloved by fans. Of the first season, Hollywood Reporter’s Barry Garron calls The Tudors a “solid and historically grounded drama that is dependably entertaining with performances often more riveting than the stories from which they arise.”
While fans have JAG to thank for the launch of NCIS, which serves as its spinoff, this legal drama doesn’t get the credit it deserves. In fact, JAG was canceled by NBC after its first season due to low ratings but picked up by CBS where it finally took off and continued on for nine more seasons. Taking place within the Department of the Navy’s Office of the Judge Advocate General in Washington, D.C., the series centers around judge advocates (aka lawyers) who handle criminal cases within the sphere of military justice.
JAG provided a unique angle in an oversaturated primetime procedural space by having many episodes featuring stories inspired by real-life events, like the USS Cole bombing and the Kelly Flinn incident. Despite its intriguing focus, talented cast, and the fact that JAG spawned what has become one of the longest-running scripted live-action primetime series in U.S. history, the series has become overshadowed by others, and it’s ripe for rediscovery.
Inspired by the British series of the same name, Mad Dogs only lasted a single season, but it’s still an entertaining watch. The comedy thriller centers around four underachieving 40-something-year-old men, old high school friends, who decide to travel to Belize to visit their old friend who, unlike them, is a successful businessman living a lavish life. While there, they try to let loose and live in the moment, but it turns into a vacation from hell.
The cast is impressive, including Ben Chaplin (The Truth About Cats & Dogs), Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos, The White Lotus), Romany Malco (Weeds), Steve Zahn (The White Lotus), and Billy Zane (Titanic). It’s a wonder with a cast like that why Mad Dogs didn’t get more attention or a renewal.
Co-showrunner Shawn Ryan, who also created The Shield and the Netflix smash hit series The Night Agent, told The Hollywood Reporter that someone leaked the ratings of the show to him and purports that it was the third-highest-rated show behind only Man in the High Castle and Bosch at the time of launch. He claims the high viewership and good reviews weren’t expected and “they already had made a business decision to move on.” As far as underrated shows that deserve to be brought back go, Mad Dogs makes the cut.
According to leaks, the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip will power the entire Galaxy S25 series. It seems that Samsung couldn’t fix the low yield rates of its 3nm wafers in time, so it had to scrap the Exynos 2500 chip. This is great news for fans of the lineup, as the new Qualcomm SoC sees major improvements in power. That said, it seems that the Galaxy S25 series chip presents a potential heating issue during graphical stress benchmarks.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite shows a potential heating issue during GPU tests
The leaked benchmarks of the Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered devices have shown impressive results. The new Oryon custom cores inherited from the Snapdragon X chips are the main highlight. However, it seems that one particular situation causes special stress on the SoC.
Android Authority and Digital Trends ran GPU-focused benchmarks on the Realme GT7 Pro, an upcoming Android flagship phone. The device boasts of using Qualcomm’s most powerful chip. During GPU benchmarks, sources claimed that the phone got noticeably hot. The heating levels even triggered warnings about the temperature of the device. At that point, the Realme flagship disabled all functions except for calls for a few minutes.
The high temperatures during the GPU benchmark even prevented the Realme GT7 Pro from completing the 3DMark stress test. This test pushes the capabilities of the device’s GPU to the max, so it’s normal for the temperature to rise. However, it’s not so normal for the app to crash before returning results. Regarding temperatures, the Realme GT7 Pro reached 46°C at its highest point.
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The chip performs well outside of GPU benchmarks, even in heavy gaming
It’s quite possible that the problems described above are more related to the stress tests than to an actual heating problem on the chip. According to the same sources who ran the stress tests, the Realme GT7 Pro performed much better in every other situation. The device ran normally even during heavy gameplay, with no crashes or high temperature notifications.
The Xiaomi 15 Pro, another Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered device, was also put through heavy gaming tests under demanding conditions. The device ran titles like Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Honor of Kings at maximum graphical settings. The result was high performance with controlled temperatures in all cases. So, it doesn’t seem like Qualcomm’s latest SoC has a problem handling demanding tasks. If anything, it might not perform at its best in the 3DMark stress tests.
Basically, if you’re worried about a potential heating issue with the Galaxy S25 lineup’s Snapdragon chip, you can rest easy.
Apple has determined that “a very small percentage” of iPhone 14 Plus models are having rear camera issues, and it has launched a service program to repair them for free. If your phone isn’t showing a preview when you use its rear camera, then you may be eligible to get your phone fixed at no cost — you can also contact Apple to get a refund if you’d already paid for a repair. The affected devices were manufactured between April 10, 2023 and April 28, 2024, around half a year after the model started shipping in 2022.
You can check your device’s serial number on the official repair program page to know if your device is included. To get it fixed, you can bring your phone to an Apple Authorized Service Provider or to an Apple retail store after making an appointment. You can also contact Apple Support if you want to mail your device to a repair center. The program covers repairs for all eligible phones for three years after the original date of purchase, so you may want to keep it in mind in case your unit starts exhibiting the issue in the future. Apple says it may “restrict or limit repair” to the unit’s original region of purchase, though, so you’ll have to check with the company if you bought your iPhone while traveling outside your country.
Levellr has raised $1.75 million for its community management and insights tools used by companies to manage Discord communities.
The money comes from from a group of video games and media industry investors including Mitch Lasky, Fuel Ventures, Colopl Next and LFG Holdings (headed by SuperAwesome founder Dylan Collins) as well as senior executives from Krafton, Riot Games, Amazon, EA and SuperAwesome.
Levellr also announced that Collins, the serial entrepreneur behind companies including SuperAwesome, Jolt and Demonware, is joining the company as chairman. In an email to GamesBeat, Collins said the Discord tools are already used by more than 60 game studios and tech companies including Scopely, Hutch, Pathea, the NFL, Google and YouTube.
Discord has become one of the largest messaging platforms in the world, with over 200 million monthly active users. It has become one of the most popular new digital engagement spaces for Gen Z and Gen Alpha players.
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The value of Discord communities is increasingly being realized across gaming organizations, with multiple teams tapping into the value provided by Levellr’s software, including professional community managers, marketing, partnerships and licensing, customer support, engineering and commercial teams.
Levellr’s Discord tools are used across hundreds of communities by major gaming and consumer brands to provide detailed analytics, sentiment tracking, in-community engagement, content scheduling, monetization features and key enterprise functionality.
Tom Gayner, CEO of Levellr, said in a statement, “As community and superfan engagement has become increasingly important for revenue growth, we’re incredibly pleased to raise capital from angel investors who see and deal with some of these challenges daily. Rising UA costs and the excess of opportunity for players and consumers is creating astonishing bottlenecks around customer acquisition, which has woken the industry up to the importance of community platforms. Discord is an incredible space for community engagement and we’re excited to be contributing towards that ecosystem”
Founded by Tom Gayner and Ben Barbersmith in 2021, Levellr’s team is distributed across North America and Europe with customers globally. The company has 22 people, starting in London and New York. They have remote employees as well.
The founders have been building communities for the last decade, Gayner in gaming, consumer and entertainment brands from his time at Interpublic Group agencies, and Barbersmith from his time at YouTube.
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“When we launched Levellr over three years ago, we noticed a growing shift with traditional social media platforms moving from spaces where we engage in the conversation, to becoming broadcast media platforms at their core, with the platforms encouraging short-form algorithmic content,” the founders said in an email to GamesBeat. “This shift was pushing community driven businesses in gaming, consumer and entertainment to move conversations onto platforms like Discord and Reddit, where they could bring together their players and users into one space to give engaged users a microphone and make them part of the conversation in a way that traditional social was no longer providing.”
They added, “But what publishers, developers and brands couldn’t articulate, was what the value of a community on Discord was providing. How much game time are you driving from those users? Are you re-engaging lapsed users? What is the dollar value of a user on Discord? How do you increase that dollar value? How do you sift through the thousands of messages sent by your players on a daily basis and turn that into nuggets of insights that can drive decision making across the business?”
And they said, “We took those challenges & learnings from our early customers to build our software solutions to ultimately help them power unmatched insights, drive meaningful engagement & turn communities into revenue generating platforms. Today our tools plug into Discord and Telegram, but Reddit is on the roadmap for 2025 and we’ll continue to be layering on additional community platforms to give our customers a one source of truth for what is a fragmented community landscape.
Prior to this round, Levellr has been largely bootstrapped, raising just over $1 million. Although breakeven in Q2 this year, the company felt it was time to respond to customer demand and raise some capital to move faster.
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“We wanted money which was experienced and connected in the gaming industry, so we’re pleased that the majority of investors are experienced founders and operators from the industry,” the founders said.
As for what the company does, they said they are seeing community and superfan engagement become increasingly important for revenue growth, driven by rising user-acquisition costs and the excess of opportunity for players and consumers creating astonishing bottlenecks around customer acquisition, which has woken the industry up to the importance of community platforms.
But community building comes with challenges, they said.
“None of our customers could concretely explain internally or externally what the value of their community was before working with us. It was evident they had highly engaged communities based on the number of users and daily messages sent, but how do they actually turn that engagement into business insights and value?” they said.
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“Our software, which plugs into our customers communities, provides them with access to unparalleled insights via our AI driven social listening tools which they can access through our dashboards and API’s, whilst driving engagement within communities via our unique gamification tools which we can connect directly to gameplay across multiple platforms to turn communities from a separate island for conversation into a truly connected ecosystem with our customers products and games,” they said.
They added, “In September alone, we crunched over three billion data points for customers who are receiving millions of messages in communities per month. This provides a literal goldmine of information to publishers, studios and brands who are using the insights we are driving to fuel change across developer, data and analytics, publishing, player insights, marketing, licensing and community teams.”
And customers are seeing the value, they said. Levellr’s software has been able to prove with existing customers that on average, a Discord user is six times more valuable than a non-Discord user through spend on and off platform, which the company can surface via integrations into e-commerce platforms and customer CRM’s.
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