General Motors confirmed it's making an all-electric version of the Chevy Silverado pickup truck with around 400 miles of range on a full charge. The Verge reports: The company did not immediately say when the electric Silverado will go on sale, but GM president Mark Reuss said at an event on Tuesday that the company will also make commercial fleet-focused versions of the truck. The electric Silverado will be made at "Factory Zero," the recently rebranded Detroit-Hamtramck plant dedicated to EVs and AVs that GM is currently retooling at a cost of more than $2 billion. It's the same plant where GM will build the all-electric Hummer SUV and Hummer pickup.

The Silverado EV will undoubtedly be a flagship vehicle of the custom electric vehicle platform GM announced last year, called Ultium. Designed to be modular, the Ultium platform is what will power most of GM's forthcoming electric vehicles. The company has promised the platform will be able to provide as much as 400 miles of range in the biggest configurations, and that the trucks built on Ultium will feature 800-volt architecture that allows for really fast charging.

MojoKid writes: Intel just officially launched its first server products built on its advanced 10nm manufacturing process node, the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable family of processors. 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are based on the 10nm Ice Lake-SP microarchitecture, which incorporates a number of new features and enhancements. Core counts have been significantly increased with this generation, and now offer up to 40 cores / 80 threads per socket versus 28 cores / 56 threads in Intel's previous-gen offerings. The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor platform also supports up to 8 channels of DDR4-3200 memory, up to 6 terabytes of total memory, and up to 64 lanes of PCIe Gen4 connectivity per socket, for more bandwidth, higher capacity, and copious IO.

New AI, security and cryptographic capabilities arrive with the platform as well. Across Cloud, HPC, 5G, IoT, and AI workloads, new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are claimed to offer significant uplifts across the board versus their previous-gen counterparts. And versus rival AMD's EPYC platform, Intel is also claiming many victories, specifically when AVX-512, new crypto instructions, or DL Boost are added to the equation. Core counts in the line-up range from 8 — 40 cores per processor and TDPs vary depending on the maximum base and boost frequencies and core count / configuration (up to a 270W TDP). Intel is currently shipping 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable CPUs to key customers now, with over 200K chips in Q1 this year and a steady ramp-up to follow.

To understand why the $450 billion semiconductor industry has lurched into crisis, a helpful place to start is a one-dollar part called a display driver. From a report: Hundreds of different kinds of chips make up the global silicon industry, with the flashiest ones from Qualcomm and Intel going for $100 apiece to more than $1,000. Those run powerful computers or the shiny smartphone in your pocket. A display driver chip is mundane by contrast: Its sole purpose is to convey basic instructions for illuminating the screen on your phone, monitor or navigation system. The trouble for the chip industry -- and increasingly companies beyond tech, like automakers -- is that there aren't enough display drivers to go around. Firms that make them can't keep up with surging demand so prices are spiking. That's contributing to short supplies and increasing costs for liquid crystal display panels, essential components for making televisions and laptops, as well as cars, airplanes and high-end refrigerators.

"It's not like you can just make do. If you have everything else, but you don't have a display driver, then you can't build your product," says Stacy Rasgon, who covers the semiconductor industry for Sanford C. Bernstein. Now the crunch in a handful of such seemingly insignificant parts -- power management chips are also in short supply, for example -- is cascading through the global economy. Automakers like Ford Motor, Nissan Motor and Volkswagen have already scaled back production, leading to estimates for more than $60 billion in lost revenue for the industry this year. The situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.

An inventive MacRumors forums member has successfully retrofitted a water-cooling system to their 15-inch Intel-based MacBook Pro, thereby eliminating fan noise and boosting performance. From the report: MacRumors forums member "theodric" explained that the noise of their MacBook Pro's fans had become disruptive during conference calls, so amid ordering an M1 MacBook Air, they decided to fit a water cooling system to their machine. theodric used inexpensive parts such as Bitcoin ASIC miner blocks from AliExpress, an Aquastream XT Ultra water pump, and a Zalman radiator and reservoir from 2005 to create the system.

High-transmissivity thermal pads were added between the case shell and various motherboard components to conduct heat away from the MacBook Pro and into the water cooling system. The thermal shielding from the bottom of the case was also removed, as well as the feet, to ensure full contact with the new cooling plates. The pump, which requires Windows software to operate, was run via a virtual machine, and a Raspberry Pi was used for monitoring. theodric says that they have "hardly heard the fan since I started using it" and have seen benchmark scores significantly improve under the system. See theodric's full post for more information about the ambitious project.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It sounds like this custom Google SoC-powered Pixel is really going to happen. Echoing reports from about a year ago, 9to5Google is reporting that the Pixel 6 is expected to ship with Google's custom "Whitechapel" SoC instead of a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. The report says "Google refers to this chip as 'GS101,' with 'GS' potentially being short for 'Google Silicon.'" It also notes that chip will be shared across the two Google phones that are currently in development, the Pixel 6 and something like a "Pixel 5a 5G." 9to5 says it has viewed documentation that points to Samsung's SLSI division (Team Exynos) being involved, which lines up with the earlier report from Axios saying the chip is "designed in cooperation with Samsung" and should be built on Samsung's 5nm foundry lines. 9to5Google says the chip "will have some commonalities with Samsung Exynos, including software components."

XDA Developers says it can corroborate the report, saying, "According to our source, it seems the SoC will feature a 3 cluster setup with a TPU (Tensor Processing Unit). Google also refers to its next Pixel devices as 'dauntless-equipped phones,' which we believe refers to them having an integrated Titan M security chip (code-named 'Citadel')." A "3 cluster setup" would be something like how the Snapdragon 888 works, which has three CPU core sizes: a single large ARM X1 core for big single-threaded workloads, three medium Cortex A78 cores for multicore work, and four Cortex A55 cores for background work. The Pixel 6 should be out sometime in Q4 2021, and Pixel phones always heavily, heavily leak before they launch. So I'm sure we'll see more of this thing soon. "I think the biggest benefit we'll see from a Google SoC is an expanded update timeline," writes Ron Amadeo. "Android updates go a lot smoother when you get support from the SoC manufacturer, but Qualcomm abandons all its chips after the three-year mark for major updates. This lack of support makes updates significantly harder than they need to be, and today that's where Google draws the line at updates."

"Beyond easier updates, I don't know that we can expect much from Whitechapel," adds Amadeo, noting that lots of Android manufacturers have made their own chips but none of them have been able to significantly beat Qualcomm. "It's hard to be bullish on Google's SoC future when the company doesn't seem to be making the big-money acquisitions and licensing deals that Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung are making. But at least it's a start."

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) wants to build a personal network-attached storage solution, maybe using a multiple-disk array (e.g., a RAID). But unfortunately, "My hardware pool is very shallow." I eBay'd a desktop chassis, whose motherboard claims (I discovered, on arrival) RAID capabilities. There, I have a significant choice — to use the on-board RAID, or do it entirely in software (e.g. OpenMediaVault)?

I'm domestic — a handful of terabytes — but I expect the answer to change as one goes through the petabytes into the exabytes. What do the dotters of the slash think?
Share your own thoughts in the comments. Is a hardware RAID better than a software RAID?

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes a classic article from IEEE Spectrum: A study by a team of Japanese researchers shows that, in certain situations, children are actually horrible little brats^W^W^W may not be as empathetic towards robots as we'd previously thought, with gangs of unsupervised tykes repeatedly punching, kicking, and shaking a robot in a Japanese mall...

The Japanese group didn't just document the bullying behavior, though; they wanted to find clever ways of helping the robot avoid the abusive situations. They started by developing a computer simulation and statistical model of the children's abuse towards the robot, showing that it happens primarily when the kids are in groups and no adults are nearby. Next, they designed an abuse-evading algorithm to help the robot avoid situations where tiny humans might gang up on it. Literally tiny humans: the robot is programmed to run away from people who are below a certain height and escape in the direction of taller people.

When it encounters a human, the system calculates the probability of abuse based on interaction time, pedestrian density, and the presence of people above or below 1.4 meters (4 feet 6 inches) in height. If the robot is statistically in danger, it changes its course towards a more crowded area or a taller person. This ensures that an adult is there to intervene when one of the little brats decides to pound the robot's head with a bottle (which only happened a couple times).

Reuters reports: A Volkswagen joint venture in China has agreed to buy green car credits from Tesla to help meet local environmental rules
The deal, the first of its kind to be reported between the two companies in China, highlights the scale of the task Volkswagen faces in transforming its huge petrol carmaking business into a leader in electric vehicles to rival Tesla. Shares in Volkswagen, the world's second-biggest automaker, have soared this year as investors warm to its plans to go electric. But in China, and elsewhere, the German company is still heavily reliant on traditional combustion-engine vehicles.

China, the world's biggest auto market where over 25 million vehicles were sold last year, runs a credit system that encourages automakers to work towards a cleaner future by, for example, improving fuel efficiency or making more electric cars. Manufacturers are awarded green credits that can be offset against negative credits for producing more polluting vehicles.
The VW-venture's gas-powered SUVs and sedans "have so far proved far more popular in China than their electric vehicles," Reuters notes.

MarketWatch adds that "A deal to buy credits from Tesla at a premium represents Volkswagen buoying the margins of one of its fiercest rivals in the electric-vehicle space." According to Swiss bank UBS, Tesla and Volkswagen will be the two global leaders in electric-vehicle sales within the next two years. The analysts expect that Volkswagen will catch up with Tesla in terms of total volume of cars sold as soon as next year, when the two companies could deliver around 1.2 million cars each.

"AMD and Intel have both proposed better ways of doing interrupt and exception handling the last few months," reports LinuxReviews.org.

Then they share this analysis Linus Torvalds posted on the Real World Technologies forum: "The AMD version is essentially "Fix known bugs in the exception handling definition".

The Intel version is basically "Yeah, the protected mode 80286 exception handling was bad, then 386 made it odder with the 32-bit extensions, and then syscall/sysenter made everything worse, and then the x86-64 extensions introduced even more problems. So let's add a mode bit where all the crap goes away".

In contrast, the AMD one is basically a minimal effort to fix actual fundamental problems with all that legacy-induced crap that are nasty to work around and that have caused issues...

Both are valid on their own, and they are actually fairly independent. Honestly, the AMD paper looks like a quick "we haven't even finished thinking all the details through, but we know these parts were broken, so we might as well release this".

I don't know how long it has been brewing, but judging by the "TBD" things in that paper, I think it's a "early rough draft"."
In the article (shared by long-time Slashdot reader xiando), LinuxReviews.org summarizes the state of the conversation today: Torvalds went on to say that while AMD's proposed "quick fix" would be easier to implement for him and others operating system vendors, it's not ideal in the long run. Intel's proposal throws the entire existing interrupt descriptor table (IDT) delivery system under the bus so it can be replaced with what they call a new "FRED event delivery" system. Torvalds believes this is a better long-term solution...

While the pros and cons of Intel and AMD's respective proposals for interrupt and event handling in future processors are worthy of discussion, it's in reality mostly up to Intel. They are the bigger and more powerful corporation. It is more likely than not that future processors from Intel will use their proposed Flexible Return and Event Delivery system. Their next generation processors won't, it will take years not months before consumer CPUs have the FRED technology. Remember, the above-mentioned technical document was published earlier this month [in March]. Things do not magically go from the drawing-board to store-shelves overnight.

Intel isn't going to just hand the FRED technology over to AMD and help them implement it. We will likely see both move forward with their own proposals. Intel will have FRED and AMD will have Supervisor Entry Extensions until AMD, inevitably, adopts FRED or some form of it years down the line.
They also note that Torvalds took issue with a poster arguing that microkernels are more secure than monolithic kernels like Linux. "Bah, you're just parroting the usual party line that had absolutely no basis in reality and when you look into the details, doesn't actually hold up.

It's all theory and handwaving and just repeating the same old FUD that was never actually really relevant."

The Washington Post explains exactly how the new infrastructure plan of U.S President Joe Biden would "turbocharge" America's transition away from fossil fuels: The linchpin of Biden's plan, which he detailed in a speech Wednesday in Pittsburgh, is the creation of a national standard requiring utilities to use a specific amount of solar, wind and other renewable energy to power American homes, businesses and factories... [Including hydropower and nuclear energy.] Biden has said he wants a carbon-free electricity grid by 2035, so the proposed standard will probably be large...

He also plans to ask Congress to provide $174 billion to boost the U.S. market share of electric vehicles and their supply chains, from raw materials to retooled factories. He reiterated that he wants to establish 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2030 and electrify 20 percent of the nation's yellow school buses.

Biden also requested $10 billion for a new Civilian Climate Corps, a name designed to echo President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps. Biden's version would hire an army of young people to work on projects that conserve and restore public lands and waters, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration through agriculture, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation, and build resilience to climate change...

Biden is also asking for $16 billion to put "hundreds of thousands" of people to work plugging hundreds of thousands of "orphan" oil and natural gas wells that were largely abandoned after their useful life but which now leak methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
The plan also calls for tax credits for solar panels -- and for companies researching carbon-capture technologies -- as well as new funding tools for power transmission lines. But it also seeks $35 billion to pursue a breakthrough technology (as well as $15 billion for climate-related demonstration projects.

This offers a way to commercialize and scale up today's already-existing innovations for clean energy, an official at the Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy told the Post. He suggested the government's purchasing power could ultimately be crucial in lowering the cost of clean technologies like carbon capture and sustainable aviation fuel, and even the cost of producing hydrogen fuel by splitting water molecules.

Slashdot reader DanDrollette also adds this note from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: The Biden administration announced what the Washington Post calls "an ambitious plan to expand wind farms along the East Coast and jump-start the country's nascent offshore wind industry," with enough windmills to be built that they could power more than 10 million US homes, and cut 78 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions...

The Biden administration said it will invest in associated research and development, provide $3 billion in low-interest loans to the offshore wind industry, and fund $230 million in changes to US ports to accommodate the expected influx of shipping and construction... While offshore wind is probably one of the fastest-growing sectors in renewable energy, the United States is still far behind Europe, where windmills are a common sight off the coast and the technology is widely accepted...

A group of scientists from MIT have equipped a robot with a wrist-mounted camera and an RF reader to help it find hidden objects. "As long an item has an RF tag on it, the robot can find it, even if it's hidden behind things like wrapping paper," reports Engadget. From the report: The team told MIT News the most challenging aspect of developing RF Grasp was integrating both sight and RF vision into its decision-making process. They compare the current system to how you might react to a sound in the distance by turning your head to pinpoint its source. RF Grasp will initially use its RF reader to find tagged objects, but the closer it gets to something, the more it depends on the information it collects through its camera to make a decision. Compared to a robot with only a visual system, RF Grasp can locate and pick up an object in about half as many total movements. It also has the unique ability to clean up and declutter its working space as it goes about its tasks.

The team sees RF Grasp helping companies like Amazon further automate and streamline their warehouses. "Perception and picking are two roadblocks in the industry today," said Associate Professor Alberto Rodriguez, one of the researchers who worked on the project.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More details have emerged about the climate and energy priorities of President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan, and they include support for nuclear power and carbon capture with sequestration (CCS). In a press conference yesterday with reporters, White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy said the administration would seek to implement a clean energy standard that would encourage utilities to use greener power sources. She added that both nuclear and CCS would be included in the administration's desired portfolio. The clean energy standard adds a climate dimension to the Biden administration's recently announced infrastructure plan, seeking to put the US on a path to eliminating carbon pollution.

"We think a CES is appropriate and advisable, and we think the industry itself sees it as one of the most flexible and most effective tools," McCarthy told reporters. "The CES is going to be fairly robust and it is going to be inclusive." McCarthy did not provide details about how far a CES would go in supporting nuclear power. It's possible that the policy may only cover plants that are currently operating, but it may also extend to include new plants. The former is more likely than the latter, though, given the challenges and costs involved in building new nuclear capacity. CCS is another technology mentioned, which involves capturing carbon dioxide from power plant exhaust streams and sequestering it underground. "The technology has been condemned for prolonging reliance on fossil fuels, and no commercial power plant in the US currently uses CCS," notes Ars.

McCarthy added that they aren't ruling out a carbon tax or fee to get to net-zero.

A potential class-action lawsuit will go forward for Apple's fragile 2016 MacBook Pro display cables. Judge Edward Davila ruled that "Apple should have known that they would fail and yet kept selling them anyhow," reports The Verge. It follows a recently-certified class action lawsuit for the MacBook Pro's infamous butterfly keyboards. From the report: "The court finds that the allegations of pre-release testing in combination with the allegations of substantial customer complaints are sufficient to show that Apple had exclusive knowledge of the alleged defect," the judge wrote. [The issue is] sometimes called the "stage light" issue because of how the cable damage would produce those dark spots.

Part of the flexgate controversy is around how Apple addressed the issue when it first got publicity in late 2018 -- first by silently swapping a new, slightly longer cable into newer MacBooks, and only opening up one of its typical free repair programs months after 15,000 users signed a petition and it was called out in the press. The company's been a lot more responsive with issues ever since, such as with this free battery replacement program for a small number of those 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro laptops that won't charge anymore. Unlike the butterfly keyboard suit, the flexgate one doesn't appear to be a certified class-action lawsuit yet -- but there are now nine different plaintiffs lined up in this single case, and the judge is inviting them to submit a new amended complaint.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tesla is known to be working on designing new battery modules that also work as structural elements, but the California automaker is fashioning those structural modules out of traditional cylindrical cells. There's a more elegant approach to the idea, though, and a group at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden led by professor Leif Asp has just made a bit of a breakthrough in that regard, making each component of the battery out of materials that work structurally as well as electrically. The structural battery combines a carbon-fiber anode and a lithium-iron phosphate-coated aluminum foil cathode, which are separated by a glass fiber separator in a structural battery electrolyte matrix material. The anode does triple duty, hosting the lithium ions, conducting electrons, and reinforcing everything at the same time. The electrolyte and cathode similarly support structural loads and do their jobs in moving ions.

The researchers tested a couple different types of glass fiber -- both resulting in cells with a nominal voltage of 2.8 V -- and achieved better results in terms of battery performance with thinner, plain weave. The cells using this construction had a specific capacity of 8.55 Ah/kg, an energy density of 23.6 Wh/kg (at 0.05 C), a specific power of 9.56 W/kg (at 3 C), and a thickness of 0.27 mm. To put at least one of those numbers in context, the 4680 cells that Tesla is moving to have an energy density of 380 Wh/kg. However, that energy density figure for the cylindrical cells does not include the mass of the structural matrix that surrounds them (when used as structural panels). Speaking of structural loads, the greatest stiffness was also achieved with plain glass fiber weave, at 25.5 GPa. Again, to put that number into context, it's roughly similar to glass fiber-reinforced plastic, whereas carbon fiber-reinforced plastic will be around 10 times greater, depending on whether it's resin transfer molding or woven sheets pre-impregnated with resin (known as pre-preg). Professor Asp's group is now working to see if swapping the cathode's aluminum foil for carbon fiber will increase both stiffness (which it should) and electrical performance. The group is also testing even thinner separators. He hopes to reach 75 Wh/kg and 75 GPa, which would result in a cell that is slightly stiffer than aluminum (GPa: 68) but obviously much lighter.

A robot armed with virus-killing ultraviolet light is being tested on Swiss airplanes, yet another idea aiming to restore passenger confidence and spare the travel industry more pandemic pain. Reuters reports: UVeya, a Swiss start-up, is conducting the trials of the robots with Dubai-based airport services company Dnata inside Embraer jets from Helvetic Airways, a charter airline owned by Swiss billionaire Martin Ebner. Aircraft makers still must certify the devices and are studying the impact their UV light may have on interior upholstery, which could fade after many disinfections, UVeya co-founder Jodoc Elmiger said. Still, he's hopeful robot cleaners could reduce people's fear of flying, even as COVID-19 circulates.

Elmiger's team has built three prototypes so far, one of which he demonstrated inside a Helvetic jet at the Zurich Airport, where traffic plunged 75% last year. The robot's lights, mounted on a crucifix-shaped frame, cast everything in a soft-blue glow as it slowly moved up the Embraer's aisle. One robot can disinfect a single-aisled plane in 13 minutes, start to finish, though larger planes take longer. Dnata executives hope airplane makers will sign off on the robots -- Elmiger estimates they'll sell for $15,930 or so -- as governments require new measures to ensure air travelers don't get sick.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) is asking clients to accept higher prices as it ramps up investment to deal with a "structural and fundamental increase" in chip demand. Nikkei Asia reports: C.C. Wei, TSMC's CEO, told clients in a letter seen by Nikkei Asia that the world's biggest contract chipmaker plans to invest $100 billion over the three years through 2023 in advanced semiconductor technologies, according to the letter. TSMC this year announced record high capital expenditure of up to $28 billion for this year alone. "We are seeing a structural and fundamental increase in underlying demand driven by key long-term growth megatrends including 5G and high-performance computing," Wei said in the letter. The Covid-19 pandemic has also transformed the global economy, changing how people work, learn and live, the CEO added.

Wei told clients that TSMC will also "suspend wafer price reductions starting December 31" this year, for four quarters. "We believe that this modest action is the least disruptive option to supply chains so that TSMC can deliver our mission of providing leading semiconductor technologies and manufacturing capability to you in a sustainable manner," Wei said. "The increased capacity will improve supply certainty and help protect complex global supply chains that rely on semiconductors," he said. "We ask for your patience as we expedite the building of new fabs and capacity."

Apple said Wednesday that it will build a battery-based renewable energy storage facility in Central California near a solar energy installation that already provides energy for all of its facilities in the state. From a report: Apple said the project will store 240 megawatt-hours of energy, or enough to power more than 7,000 homes for one day. It is located next to the California Flats solar installation in southeastern Monterey County, about 100 miles southeast of Apple's Cupertino, California headquarters. The site sends 130-megawatts of electricity directly to Apple's California facilities during daylight hours but does not provide power during dark hours. Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, told Reuters in an interview the company intends to develop what it believes will be one of the largest battery-based storage systems in the United States.

"The challenge with clean energy -- solar and wind -- is that it's by definition intermittent," Jackson told Reuters. "If we can do it, and we can show that it works for us, it takes away the concerns about intermittency and it helps the grid in terms of stabilization. It's something that can be imitated or built upon by other companies."

ArsTechnica: Today marks the start of retail availability for Intel's 2021 gaming CPU lineup, codenamed Rocket Lake-S. Rocket Lake-S is still stuck on Intel's venerable 14 nm process -- we've long since lost count of how many pluses to tack onto the end -- with features backported from newer 10 nm designs. Clock speed on Rocket Lake-S remains high, but thread counts have decreased on the high end. Overall, most benchmarks show Rocket Lake-S underperforming last year's Comet Lake -- let alone its real competition, coming from AMD Ryzen CPUs. Our hands-on test results did not seem to match up with Intel's marketing claims of up to 19 percent gen-on-gen IPC (Instructions Per Clock cycle) improvement over its 10th-generation parts. It shouldn't come as an enormous surprise that Core i9-11900K underperforms last year's Core i9-10900K in many multithreaded tests -- this year's model only offers eight cores to last year's 10. On the plus side, Intel's claims of 19% gen-on-gen IPC are largely borne out here, mostly balancing the loss out in Passmark and Geekbench. This year's Core i5 makes a much better showing than its Core i9 big sibling. In Cinebench R20, Core i5-11600K almost catches up with Ryzen 5 5600X, and it easily dominates last year's Comet Lake i5 equivalent. It doesn't catch up to its Ryzen competitor in Passmark or Geekbench multithreaded tests, but it outpaces last year's model all the way around.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: In a world-first, a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a small, 3D-printed rectifying antenna that can harvest electromagnetic energy from 5G signals and use it to power devices, in a way turning 5G networks into "a wireless power grid," according to a press release by the university. As explained in the Jan.12 issue of the journal Scientific Reports, the flexible Rotman lens-based rectifying antenna, in other words, rectenna, system can perform millimeter-wave harvesting in the 28-GHz band. Commonly used in radar surveillance systems to see multiple directions without moving the antenna system, the Rotman lens is especially important for beamforming networks. However, larger antennas, which unfortunately have a narrowing field of view, are needed to harvest enough power to supply devices, and this limits the usage.

The researchers solved this problem by using a system that has a wide angle of coverage. The Rotman lens provides 6 levels of view at the same time in a pattern shaped like a spider. By enabling this structure to map a set of selected radiation directions to an associated set of beam-ports, the lens is used as an intermediate component between the antennas and the rectifiers. This way, the electromagnetic energy collected by the antenna arrays from one direction is combined and fed into a single rectifier. This maximizes efficiency, enabling a system with both high gain and large beamwidth. The system achieved a 21-fold increase in harvested power compared with a referenced counterpart in demonstrations. It was also able to maintain identical angular coverage.

The Apple Watch can accurately determine a user's "frailty," according to the findings of a recently-published study from Stanford University. MacRumors reports: Frailty can be determined using a six-minute walking test (6MWT), and the metric is a general standard used to evaluate the functional mobility and exercise capacity of a patient. Higher scores indicate "healthier cardiac, respiratory, circulatory, and neuromuscular function," according to Apple. Conducted by Stanford University researchers and funded by Apple, the study provided 110 Veterans Affairs patients with cardiovascular disease with an iPhone 7 and Apple Watch Series 3. Patients conducted regular at-home six-minute walking tests, which were then compared to their standard in-clinic 6MWT performance.

The study found that an Apple Watch was able to accurately assess frailty with a sensitivity of 90 percent and specificity of 85 percent when supervised in a clinical setting. When assessed in an unsupervised setting at home, the Apple Watch was able to accurately assess frailty with a sensitivity of 83 percent and specificity of 60 percent. The findings indicate that passive activity data gathered by the Apple Watch is an accurate predictor of in-clinic 6MWT performance.