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Chery has unveiled the interior of the upcoming Freelander 8.

Cabin sports a minimalist design with 15.6- and 46.3-inch displays.

Range-extended SUV arrives later this year with a boxy design.

Chery and Jaguar Land Rover teamed up to introduce the Freelander 8 in April, but little is known about the upcoming model. That’s slowly starting to change as the new brand has unveiled the crossover’s minimalist interior.

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Billed as a “generational revolution in flagship cabins,” the interior is said to embrace luxury, space, and technology. While details are few and far between, we can see the Freelander 8 will have a pillar-to-pillar panoramic display that resides at the base of the windscreen.

More: The Freelander 8 Debuts And It’s Bigger Than A Defender 110

The section in front of the driver shows a speedometer as well as a gear indicator on the upper left side. The middle section houses vehicle information, while the passenger side is dominated by a large clock. However, the displays are likely customizable and the front passenger section undoubtedly doubles as an entertainment system.

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Sticking with screens, there’s a rectangular infotainment system with a freestanding design. It’s joined by a row of physical switchgear with a metallic finish.

Elsewhere, we can see a wide center console with wood trim and what appears to be a dual wireless smartphone charger. They’re accompanied by a chunky steering wheel, metallic accents, and minimalist door handles. Other notable highlights include an ambient lighting system and what looks to be a driver monitoring system.

While the social media post was coy on specifics, Yiche reports the Freelander 8 will have a 46.3-inch panoramic display as well as a 15.6-inch infotainment system. The model is also said to have a 256-color ambient lighting system as well as a fragrance diffuser that wafts the scent of an English manor into the cabin.

The Freelander 8 is also said to have a “LADY” front seat. It’s apparently highly adjustable, so those riding shotgun can sit back and relax in comfort.

The model is scheduled to arrive later this year and reports out of China suggest it will have a range-extended powertrain that consist of a turbocharged 1.5-liter engine and a 60.3 kWh battery pack. This will reportedly give the crossover an electric-only range of 137 miles (221 km).

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H/T to CarNewsChina

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ETH Zurich quantum chip sees superconducting qubit act as CPU and the vibrational modes of a fingernail-width acoustic resonator serve as quantum RAM

The approach borrows from classical computer architecture as it completely flips the script on how modern quantum computing might store short-term data

The team demonstrated a universal gate set and ran small instances of the quantum Fourier transform and period finding

A guitar string essentially stores a note based on how it vibrates, and if one plucks it differently, an entirely different note plays.

A team of researchers at ETH Zurich has leveraged the same principle to build a quantum chip that stores information by replacing the string with microscopic acoustic resonators.

This allows the chip to increase its working memory significantly, essentially increasing the storage capacity, a prohibitively expensive commodity in quantum computing, significantly.

A vibrations-based quantum storage play

ETH Zurich's research is led by quantum physicist Yiwen Chu, who used tiny mechanical vibrations to both store and process information. The vibrations, however, go far beyond the range of human hearing, happening inside a quantum chip where they essentially replace or complement the working memory of a quantum computer .

The study, published by the Hybrid Quantum Systems group, lists Professor Yiwen Chu, along with doctoral students Yu Yang and Igor Kladarić, as lead authors and focuses on replicating the division of labor seen in a classical computer.

A superconducting transmon qubit serves as the CPU, while the working memory (the quantum equivalent of RAM) is a high-overtone bulk acoustic wave resonator, or HBAR, whose many vibrational modes each serve as a memory slot.

The Qubit essentially swaps a quantum state from a vibrational mode (reads it, in classical computer terms), manipulates it (modifies it), and swaps it back (writes it). This makes for a unique configuration that most modern quantum computers do not follow, in which processing and storage are two distinct segments; most designs treat both memory and compute similarly.

The approach has advantages, however: acoustic waves have wavelengths roughly a hundred thousand times shorter than electromagnetic ones, allowing an entire quantum chip to be extremely small, as the research team states, even if the actual computer will be many orders of magnitude larger.

The chip has passed stress tests, including a proof of feasibility, which also included testing using two of the most commonly used methods to benchmark a quantum computer: the quantum Fourier transform and a period-finding algorithm.

The endgame here, as noted by the research team , is quantum random-access memory (QRAM), which would allow modern quantum computers to access a much larger store of quantum memory than current specifications allow. Whether this pans out depends on both the scalability of the approach and the computational power in play.

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Blizzard has announced that it's ending support for Overwatch's MOBA-inspired Stadium mode due to low player numbers.

In a new blog post , game director Aaron Keller breaks down the different Overwatch modes by the amount of players they're attracting, and well, it's easy to see why Blizzard has decided not to bother making new content for Stadium.

The main unranked 5v5 queue is unsurprisingly the most popular and accounts for 54% of daily players, while 34% of players up the stakes for ranked 5v5 queue. From there, 19% and 8% log in for unranked and ranked open queue 6v6, respectively, and just 4% are playing unranked mystery heroes 6v6. All the way at the bottom is poor old Stadium mode, whose ranked and unranked queues are seeing just 3% of the player base tune in.

Keller notes that there's overlap in the data accounting for players who play different modes in the same session, which is why the percentages don't add up to a perfect 100%, but the numbers don't lie: Stadium just isn't very popular.

"With this in mind, while we'll continue supporting Stadium with seasonal balance updates, rank resets, and rewards," says Keller. "We're not planning on expanding Stadium with new Heroes or maps. Instead, we're taking what lessons we've gleaned from building it and applying those lessons (and those talented devs) to our future plans."

In the same blog, Keller also announced two new experimental 6v6 modes that'll be tested in the back half of season 3. The new modes are aimed at finding "ways of making matches more dynamic in Role Queue, improving the tank experience, and removing some of the volatility of team fights while also removing some of the pain points that players have with our current formats.

The first test runs this week from July 16 through July 19 and turns Quick Play into a "Flex Queue" where each team will always have at least one tank, three flex damage dealers, and two supports. The rub is that, at any point in the match, one of the team's damage dealers will have the option to swap into the tank role with a different hero, which Keller hopes will reduce queue times, make for a "slightly more dynamic experience" than the regular 2-2-2 team makeup, and provide a "more consistent" experience than open queue.

"There are a few downsides to this format and the biggest is the potential social pressure for Damage dealers to play Tank," says Keller. "But if the burden is shared among 3 people with more freedom to play different Heroes, will it feel acceptable? We're hoping to find out!"

Another test will run from July 28 to August 3 and is being called "Dynamic Queue," featuring a "blend" of Flex Queue and Role Queue elements. This time around, whether team composition is decided by the Flex Queue rules depends on how many people queue up for Tank, which is Blizzard's "current bottleneck."

"Think of the shift into Flex Queue format as a 'release valve' for the 2-2-2 queue," Keller explains, adding that the upside here is that it'll often result in "what we anticipate will be the most preferred format, 2-2-2." The downside is that the loss of consistency could make matches feel less competitive, which is something Blizzard will be keeping tabs on.

As if eulogizing Stadium, Keller encourages players to engage in these more experimental modes. "Give them a chance and go into those queues with an open mind. The pace of fights and general vibe of these matches may seem very different. Spend time getting used to how they feel and see if your initial reactions change over the mode's duration," he says.

Overwatch escapes "Mostly Negative" Steam reviews 3 years after becoming the worst-rated game on Valve's store: "In 2026, we finally got back to just Overwatch"

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State MP abandons supreme court challenge, saying her party ‘can now decide whether to pursue mediation or reconvene to disendorse me’

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Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming has dropped legal action against her own party as she seeks to make a last-ditch appeal to avoid being disendorsed before the state election.

Deeming launched an 11th-hour supreme court challenge against the Victorian Liberal party president, Brian Loughnane, on 3 July after she made an assault allegation against former leader Matthew Guy and subsequently rejected calls to apologise after Victoria police determined “there was no offence detected”.

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