The Pico has a particularly flexible PWM generator but to get the most out of it you need to understand how it works. This is an extract from our latest book all about the Pico in MicroPython.

How important a skill is typing for programmers? The keyboard is still the predominant way we interact with a computer. Voice input, touch screens, and even whole body gestural input, may be on the increase, but most of us still type, our commands.

We have had the map of the human genome for a while, but only now can we read it. Alphafold, DeepMind's most useful AI to date can work out what the DNA is actually saying and DeepFold source code has been released.

According to the JetBrains survey of over thirty thousand developers, JavaScript is still the most popular programming language and, thanks to the survey's extended geographical scope, we can see some interesting local variations. 

The latest version of the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code has been released with a faster way to configure project roots via a new Pylance quick fix, and new debugger features.

The researchers who introduced the Balanced Allocations framework, also known as the power of two choices paradigm, an elegant theoretical work that has had a widespread practical impact, are the latest winners of the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award.

Tableau has been updated with improvements including better augmented analytics and extensions to the 'ask data' feature.

The Perl Foundation (TPF) is looking pretty active lately, undertaking a number of initiatives which aim to advance Perl's ecosystem further.

An autonomously flying quadrotor has outperformed human pilots in a drone race.  This feat was achieved by a research group lead by Davide Scaramuzza at the University of Zurich using an approach which relies solely on onboard sensing and computation.

This year's World Emoji Day, celebrated this week, saw the syringe emoji winning the award for the 'Most 2021' emoji, narrowly beating the microbe emoji among voters on Twitter.

After several years leading the Open AI Robotics team, Wojciech Zaremba, one of Open AI's co-founders, has disbanded the team that had made significant advances with unsupervised learning, including solving a Rubik's Cube, and has moved on to other projects where more data is readily available.  

Microsoft has released .NET 6 Preview 6, the second to last preview before the RC period. The new preview has been tested for Visual Studio 2022, Preview 2, and has added improved pre-compilation handling of code.

Julia Computing has raised $24 Million in a Series A funds. It intends to use the funding to grow the Julia ecosystem and develop its JuliaHub cloud platform.