On Monday, Apple expanded its DIY repair program to include MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops equipped with M1 chips (including the Pro and Max). At least, in theory. The repairability experts at iFixit, who regularly dissect Apple's gadgets, have taken a look at the new program, and their outlook is...mixed. iFixit's Sam Goldheart writes that the new MacBook Pro guides "threw us for a loop." The issue: the documentation "makes MacBook Pros seem less repairable" than they have been in the past. From a report: The repair manual for replacing the 14-inch MacBook Pro's battery, for example, is a whole 162 pages long. (One of the first steps, of course, is "Read the entire manual first.") The reason the guide is so long, it turns out, is that replacing these batteries isn't just a matter of popping the battery out. A user needs to replace the entire top case and keyboard in order to replace the battery. Needless to say, it is unusual for a laptop battery replacement to require a full-computer teardown.

And then, as Goldheart points out, there's the matter of the money. The "top case with battery" part that you'll need to purchase for the 2020 and 2021 MacBook Pro models is not cheap -- after rooting around Apple's store, Verge editor Sean Hollister found that you can expect to pay well upwards of $400 for the top case with battery after the repair credit. "Apple is presenting DIY repairers with a excruciating gauntlet of hurdles: read 162 pages of documentation without getting intimidated and decide to do the repair anyway, pay an exorbitant amount of money for an overkill replacement part, decide whether you want to drop another 50 bucks on the tools they recommend, and do the repair yourself within 14 days, including completing the System Configuration to pair your part with your device," Goldheart writes in summary. "Which makes us wonder, does Apple even want better repairability?"

Samsung has unveiled its latest lineup of NVMe solid state drives, the 990 Pro series. The company claims the SSD will reach almost the highest speeds that are theoretically possible from the PCIe 4.0 interface (PCI 5.0 SSDs will be much faster). Samsung hopes to deliver better performance for PC and console games, 4K and 8K content and other heavy data use cases. From a report: The 990 Pro boasts sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s. The 980 Pro offers up to 7,000 MB/s and 5,100 MB/s read and write speeds. The 990 Pro's random read and write speeds are up to 1,400K and 1,550K input/output operations per second, according to Samsung. The company says that marks up to a 55 percent improvement over the 980 Pro's performance. Moreover, the company says the 990 Pro will be more power efficient than the previous lineup by up to 50 percent. The new SSD will go on sale in October at a starting price of $179 for the 1TB model.

"An aviation company at the cutting edge of electrified air travel has taken a significant step forward, completing a first-of-a-kind test flight using a retrofitted seaplane," reports New Atlas: Harbour Air's De Havilland Beaver completed a short hop from the Canadian mainland to Vancouver Island using its all-electric drivetrain, demonstrating the viability of its cleaner approach to short-haul flights.

Harbour Air is the largest seaplane airline in North America and claims to transport around half a million passengers across 30,000 commercial flights each year. In 2019, it pledged to become the world's first all-electric airline, a bold vision that involves retrofitting its fleet of existing six-seater seaplanes with electric propulsion systems. These systems come via a partnership with electric motor company MagniX, which is making important advances with its high-power electric motors and has partnered with other ambitious companies in the aviation space.

In December of 2019, the modified De Havilland Beaver took off to complete the first successful flight of an all-electric commercial aircraft, a brief jaunt above the Fraser River at Harbour Air's terminal in Richmond, British Columbia. The company has since continued this testing program with an eye to certifying and approving the aircraft with the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Transport Canada.
"The historic De Havilland Beaver has been completely retrofitted in 2019 to operate using 100% electricity flew 45 miles in 24 minutes," the company said in a statement. They're calling the flight "a major milestone in the advancement of all-electric commercial flights." More data from the ePlane's web site: Our ePlane project will ultimately turn our 40+ fleet of seaplanes from carbon-neutral to carbon-zero!

We know that the electrification of our fleet is the next necessary step to truly make a difference in our environmental and economic goals. It is better for the communities we serve and it also to gives our passengers a better way to travel. It's a bold step in making a big difference for our planet.

Slashdot reader tedlistens writes that "Nuclear is booming again. And with a serious pile of private and public funding behind them—and physics (see the recent breakthrough at Livermore National Lab) — these companies say they're getting closer to fusion."

The companies were profiled in a Fast Company article titled "The frontrunners in the trillion-dollar race for limitless fusion power." Last year, investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos injected a record $3.4 billion into firms working on the technology, according to Pitchbook. One fusion firm, Seattle-based Helion, raised a record $500 million from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. ... The Fusion Industry Association says that at least 33 different companies were now pursuing nuclear fusion, and predicted that fusion would be connected to the energy grid sometime in the 2030s.... And you'd be forgiven for missing another milestone in July, when the Energy Dept. announced awards of between $50,000 and $500,000, to ten fusion companies working on projects with universities and national labs.

Here are a few of the awardees, who include some of the industry's leading companies, and whose projects offer a sampling of the opportunities — and hard problems — in fusion....

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building their first machine, SPARC, with a goal of producing power by 2025. "You'll push a button," CEO and cofounder Bob Mumgaard told the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit this summer, "and for the first time on earth you will make more power out than in from a fusion plasma. That's about 200 million degrees — you know, cooling towers will have a bunch of steam go out of them — and you let your finger off the button and it will stop, and you push the button again and it will go." With an explosion in funding from investors including Khosla, Bill Gates, George Soros, Emerson Collective and Google to name a few — they raised $1.8 billion last year alone — CFS hopes to start operating a prototype in 2025....

One morning last December, the company fired up its newest supermagnet — a 10-ton, 8-foot-tall device made of hundreds of tightly-twisted coils — and quietly pushed its magnetic field beyond a whopping 20 tesla, a record for a magnet of its size. (Most MRIs operate at a strength of about 1 tesla.) Eventually, 18 of these magnets will surround the SPARC's tokamak, which CFS says could produce as much as 11 times more energy than it consumes, and at prices cheaper than fossil fuels.
Other fusion-energy companies profiled in the article:

• Southern California-based TAE Technologies, which uses a unique non-radioactive reaction between hydrogen and boron. (Since its founding in 1998 TAE has raised $1.2 billion, with $250 million in its latest round led by Google and Chevron's venture capital arm). TAE "says it plans to start delivering power to grids by 2030, followed by 'broader commercialization' during the next decade."

• General Atomics, of San Diego, California, which built eight of the magnet modules for the ground-breaking IITER facility, "including its wild Central Solenoid — the world's most powerful magnet."

• Canada-based General Fusion (backed by Jeff Bezos and building on technology originally developed by the U.S. Navy), which hopes to generate the data need to build a commercial pilot plant.

• Princeton Fusion Systems of Plainsboro, New Jersey, uses radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to generate a plasma formation in a magnetic bottle — holding the record for the longest time such a reaction has been stably held.

• UK-based Tokamak Energy has reached the 100 million Celsius threshold for commercially viable nuclear fusion, the first to do so with a spherical, privately-funded device.

• Helicity Space, based in Pasadena, California, has 10 employees and over $4 million in funding to pursue its goal of "enabling humanity's access to the solar system, with a Helicity Drive-powered flight to Mars expected to take two months, without planetary alignment."

• Magneto-Intertial Fusion Technologies, of Tustin, California.

Slashdot reader atcclears quotes the Wall Street Journal: Hailed as the Saudi Arabia of lithium, this California-sized chunk of terrain [in Salar de Atacama, Chile] accounts for some 55% of the world's known deposits of the metal, a key component in electric-vehicle batteries. As the Chinese EV giant BYD Co. recently learned, tapping into that resource can be a challenge.

Earlier this year, after BYD won a government contract to mine lithium, indigenous residents took to the streets, demanding the tender be canceled over concerns about the impact on local water supplies. In June, the Chilean Supreme Court threw out the award, saying the government failed to consult with indigenous people first.... Similar setbacks are occurring around the so-called Lithium Triangle, which overlaps parts of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. Production has suffered at the hands of leftist governments angling for greater control over the mineral and a bigger share of profits, as well as from environmental concerns and greater activism by local Andean communities who fear being left out while outsiders get rich.

At a time of exploding demand that has sent lithium prices up 750% since the start of 2021, industry analysts worry that South America could become a major bottleneck for growth in electric vehicles. "All the major car makers are completely on board with electric vehicles now," said Brian Jaskula, a lithium expert at the U.S. Geological Survey. "But the lithium may just not be enough."
Meanwhile, a chemical engineering professor at Indiana's Purdue University has spent years looking for an alternative to lithium batteries, and their researchers are now testing sodium carbonate and the possibility of sodium ion batteries.

Here's an interesting story from the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here...) When the Green Bay Packers walked onto the practice field this week, they were greeted by an unusual new teammate: a robot. In videos on Twitter, a 6-foot tall white robotic machine simulates a punter, kicking balls at a rapid pace to players downfield. The robot, which holds six balls in a revolving cartridge, could also imitate a quarterback's style including the speed, arc and timing of a throw.

The Seeker is a robotic quarterback, kicker and punter rolled into one. It's a modern day version of a piece of football equipment, called a JUGS machine, that's been used to simulate throws and kicks to football players for decades. The Seeker, company officials say however, is a more accurate thrower and runs software to let players practice more advanced gameplay scenarios. he robot, created by Dallas-based Monarc Sport, is starting to gain adoption. Top college football programs, such as Louisiana State University, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Iowa, all count the Seeker as part of their training strategy. The Green Bay Packers are the first team in the National Football League to try the technology.

The Seeker's software allows players to customize how they practice with it. Athletes can catch balls from close to the machine to improve hand-eye coordination. They can also program the robot to throw a ball to a spot on the field, or simulate more-lifelike conditions by over or underthrowing a ball. Players wear a pager-like tag which allows the robot to track their location on the field, and throw a ball accurately within inches. "It gives so much opportunity for our guys to get reps without the need of having a quarterback there," said Ben Hansen, the director of football administration at Iowa, where the technology was first tested. "That's a huge plus...."

One of the most helpful parts of the technology, he said, is being able to program it to throw passes that simulate game day conditions. Unlike the JUGS machine, he said, which doesn't have software to pass in random patterns, the Seeker can purposefully throw passes that aren't perfect.... A case study published in April by Microsoft, which provides the software ecosystem for the robot, noted that West Virginia University's dropped passes rate fell to four percent in 2021, down from 53 percent the past season after introducing the robot into training.

The university's senior athletic director said the robot deserved a "share of the credit" for that outcome.

"Even if all nuclear power plants were shut down today, there's a mountain of radioactive waste waiting to be disposed of," reports Ars Technica. "Yet only Finland has an approved solution for nuclear waste disposal, while projects in the US, UK, and Germany have failed for decades, and progress is also slow in other countries."

So how did Finland construct a safe nuclear waste repository? Ars Technica asked Antti Mustonen, who's a research manager with Posiva, the organization in charge of the Finnish repository: Finland has a lot of hard crystalline bedrock and many places that are potentially suitable for a repository. The country eventually chose an island on the Baltic coast for its Onkalo repository, and it hopes to seal off the first tunnel of nuclear waste sometime around 2025....

Even after it has cooled in ponds for decades, spent nuclear fuel gives out heat by radioactive decay, raising the temperature near the waste canisters. This heat could potentially corrode the canisters, compromise the bentonite, or even crack the rock face. Therefore, the Finnish and Swedish designs separate individual waste canisters in their own disposal shafts to avoid excessive heat buildup.... Posiva is currently conducting a long-term, full-sized demonstration using heaters in dummy canisters surrounded by bentonite and temperature probes. After three years, the temperature at the canister boundary is about 70Â C, Mustonen said. A similar test in Switzerland lasted 18 years and found that bentonite "remains suitable as a sealing material" up to at least 100 degrees C....

But to project how the rock and groundwater will affect humans living near the site in future millennia, the scientists must model that numerically using the tests and data as the starting point. "We have modeled to that million years... with different scenarios and what the likely releases [are], and it seems that the releases are acceptable," Mustonen told me.... Scientists then project what will happen to the waste over the next million years, assuming everything works as planned. They also model for several "what if" scenarios. This projection includes looking at the stresses and groundwater pressures caused by possibilities like being buried deep under a future ice sheet and then having that ice sheet melt away, sea level changes, changes in groundwater chemistry, and failures of canisters. At Onkalo, even in the worst case, scientists calculate that the maximum dose released to humans would be one-tenth of the regulatory limit, which itself is about a hundredth of the normal dose that Finns receive every year.
But the article also asks what Finland's experience can teach other countries. One person who worked on America's unsuccessful Yucca Mountain project was Dr. Jane Long, former associate director for energy and environment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Long tells the site that "They should have set requirements for an inherently safe site and then investigated whether the site met the requirements instead of choosing the site for political reasons and then trying to show the site was suitable."

And they seem to agree in Finland: "More than the geology, I think it's socio-economic aspects" that determine if a project can go ahead, Mustonen told me. A key lesson is that the top-down designation of sites for nuclear waste disposal has generally failed. The UK failed in 1987, 1997, and 2013. In the US, politicians campaigned against the Yucca Mountain project, characterizing its authorization as the "Screw Nevada Bill...."

Yucca Mountain's wasted $15 billion pales in comparison to the roughly $50 billion in damages that American taxpayers have had to pay to nuclear utilities because the government was unable to honor its commitment to receive nuclear waste by 1998. Meanwhile, more waste is piling up.
Thanks to Slashdot reader atcclears for submitting the story.

Senior White House officials say even more action is coming on climate change. They're telling the New York Times that U.S. President Joe Biden plans "a series of executive actions to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help keep the planet from warming to dangerous temperatures."

Biden is on track to deploy a series of measures, including new regulations on emissions from vehicle tailpipes, power plants and oil and gas wells, the officials said.

In pushing more executive action, Mr. Biden is trying to make up for the compromises his party made on climate measures to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes the largest single American investment to slow global warming. Democrats had to scale back some of their loftiest ambitions, including by agreeing to fossil fuel and drilling provisions, as concessions to Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, a holdout from a conservative state that is heavily dependent on coal and gas. Gina McCarthy, the White House climate adviser, said that regulatory moves, combined with the new legislation and action from states, could help Mr. Biden meet his promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent, compared to 2005 levels, by the end of the decade. The climate bill, she said, was "a starting point."

"The president has not chosen to just look at Congress, he's chosen to recognize that he has presidential authorities and responsibilities under the law to keep moving this forward," she said. "And he's going to continue to use those." [...] Ms. McCarthy noted the E.P.A. still has "broad authority" to regulate emissions from electricity generation. She also said the government is forging ahead with new regulations on soot and other traditional air pollutants, which will have the side benefit of cutting carbon emissions.... Mr. Biden has the executive authority to issue regulations through federal agencies, and under the Clean Air Act of 1970 can establish rules to address air pollution.

IoT Times brings an update on "the race to create a new set of encryption standards." Last month, it was announced that a specialized security algorithm co-authored by security experts of NXP, IBM, and Arm had been selected by the U.S. Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to become part of an industry global standard designed to counter quantum threats.
IoT Times interviews the cryptography expert who co-created the Crystals-Kyber lattice-based algorithm selected by NIST — Joppe W. Bos, a senior principal cryptographer at the Competence Center for Cryptography and Security at NXP Semiconductors.

And what worries his colleagues at the semiconductor company isn't the "imminent threat of quantum computers," Bos says, but an even closer and more practical deadline: "the timeline for these post-quantum crypto standards." "Two weeks ago, NIST announced the winners of these new public standards, the post-quantum crypto standards, and their timeline is that in 2024, so in roughly two years, the winners will be converted into standards. And as soon as the standards are released, our customers will expect NXP Semiconductors, as one of the leaders in crypto and security, to already have support for these standards, because we are, of course, at the start of the chain for many end products. Our secure elements, our secure platforms, SOCs, are one of the first things that need to be integrated into larger platforms that go into end products. Think about industrial IoT. Think about automotive applications. So, our customers already expect us to support post-quantum crypto standards in 2024, and not only support but, for many companies, being able to compute the functional requirements of the standard.

"It took over ten years to settle down on the best methods for RSA and ECC, and now we have a much shorter timeline to get ready for post-quantum crypto."
"When you ask the experts, it ranges from one to five decades until we can see quantum computers big enough to break our current crypto," Bos says in the interview. So he stresses that they're not driven by a few of quantum computers. "The right question to ask, at least for us at NXP is, when is this new post-quantum crypto standard available? Because then, our customers will ask for post-quantum support, and we need to be ready.

"The standard really drives our development and defines our roadmap."

But speaking of the standard's "functional requirements", in the original story submission Slashdot reader dkatana raised an interesting point. There's already billions of low-powered IoT devices in the world.

Will they all have the memory and processing power to use this new lattice-based encryption?

Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications updated cybersecurity laws this week to mandate Big Tech and telecoms companies store user data locally, and control that data with local entities. The Register reports: The data affected goes beyond the basics of name, email, credit card information, phone number and IP address, and extends into social elements -- including groups of which users are members, or the friends with whom they digitally interact. "Data of all internet users ranging from financial records and biometric data to information on people's ethnicity and political views, or any data created by users while surfing the internet must be to stored domestically," read the decree (PDF) issued Wednesday, as translated by Reuters. The decree applies to a wide swath of businesses including those providing telecom services, storing and sharing data in cyberspace, providing national or international domain names for users in Vietnam, e-commerce, online payments, payment intermediaries, transport connection services operating in cyberspace, social media, online video games, messaging services, and voice or video calls.

According to Article 26 of the government's Decree 53, the new rules go into effect October 1, 2022 -- around seven weeks from the date of its announcement. However, foreign companies have an entire 12 months in which to comply -- beginning when they receive instructions from the Minister of Public Security. The companies are then required to store the data in Vietnam for a minimum of 24 months. System logs will need to be stored for 12 months. After this grace period, authorities reserve the right to make sure affected companies are following the law through investigations and data collection requests, as well as content removal orders. Further reading: Vietnam To Make Apple Watch, MacBook For First Time Ever

Lenovo has taken issue with the design of the Framework Laptop and one of its power buttons. The Verge reports: In a tweet, the startup claims to have been contacted by Lenovo's legal team, who say the circular design of the power button on one of Framework's designs is too similar to the stylized "O" Lenovo uses in the wordmark for its "Legion" brand of gaming laptops. "Consumers could believe that Framework's Broken O Case or the motherboards they cover are produced by, sponsored, endorsed, licensed, or otherwise affiliated with Lenovo, when that is not the case," a screenshot of the legal letter from Lenovo posted by Framework reads.

The offending power button design doesn't appear on any of Framework's laptops. Instead, the circle can be found in the 3D printer case schematics that Framework released back in April, which allow customers to build their own Raspberry Pi-style miniature PCs using just the laptop's motherboard (these can be bought separately, as well as harvested from a Framework laptop). This YouTube video gives a nice overview of how the 3D-printed enclosure is supposed to work (the power button gets pressed at the 9:35 minute mark). [...] Framework doesn't physically sell anything with the offending power button design on it, so fixing the problem is theoretically as simple as uploading a replacement set of CAD files to GitHub. So, rather than fighting Lenovo, Framework is holding a competition for its users to submit new designs for its power button. Entries are open until August 25th, and the winner gets a free i5-1135G7 Mainboard.

Klaxton shares a report from Electrek: Last year, Tesla launched a VPP pilot program in California, where Powerwall owners would join in voluntarily without compensation to let the VPP pull power from their battery packs when the grid needed it. Following the pilot program, Tesla and PG&E, the electric utility covering Northern California, launched the first official virtual power plant through the Tesla app in June. This new version of the Tesla Virtual Power Plant actually compensates Powerwall owners $2 per kWh that they contribute to the grid during emergency load reduction events. Homeowners are expected to get between $10 and $60 per event. Earlier this week, Tesla's California VPP expanded to Southern California Edison (SCE) to now cover most of the state. Just days later, the Tesla VPP had its first emergency response event.

Tesla reached out to Powerwall owners who opted in the program through its app yesterday to warn them of the event and give them the option to opt-out if they needed all the power from their Powerwalls today. It looks like 2,342 Powerwall owners participated in the event on the PG&E network and 268 homes on the SCE grid. For PG&E, Tesla's VPP was outputting as much as 16 MW of power at one point during the event -- acting as a small distributed power plant.

Europe is seriously considering developing space-based solar power to increase its energy independence and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the leader of the European Space Agency said this week. Ars Technica reports: "It will be up to Europe, ESA and its Member States to push the envelope of technology to solve one of the most pressing problems for people on Earth of this generation," said Josef Aschbacher, director general of the space agency, an intergovernmental organization of 22 member states. Previously the space agency commissioned studies from consulting groups based in the United Kingdom and Germany to assess the costs and benefits of developing space-based solar power. ESA published those studies this week in order to provide technical and programmatic information to policymakers in Europe. Aschbacher has been working to build support within Europe for solar energy from space as a key to energy de-carbonization and will present his Solaris Program to the ESA Council in November. This council sets priorities and funding for ESA. Under Aschbacher's plans, development of the solar power system would begin in 2025.

In concept, space-based solar power is fairly straightforward. Satellites orbiting well above Earth's atmosphere collect solar energy and convert it into current; this energy is then beamed back to Earth via microwaves, where they are captured by photovoltaic cells or antennas and converted into electricity for residential or industrial use. The primary benefits of gathering solar power from space, rather than on the ground, is that there is no night or clouds to interfere with collection; and the solar incidence is much higher than at the northern latitudes of the European continent.

The two consulting reports discuss development of the technologies and funding needed to start to bring a space-based power system online. Europe presently consumes about 3,000 TWh of electricity on an annual basis, and the reports describe massive facilities in geostationary orbit that could meet about one-quarter to one-third of that demand. Development and deployment of these systems would cost hundreds of billions of euros. Why so much? Because facilitating space-based solar power would require a constellation of dozens of huge, sunlight-gathering satellites located 36,000 km from Earth. Each of these satellites would have a mass 10 times larger, or more, than that of the International Space Station, which is 450 metric tons and required more than a decade to assemble in low Earth orbit. Launching the components of these satellites would ultimately require hundreds or, more likely, thousands of launches by heavy lift rockets. "Using projected near-term space lift capability, such as SpaceX's Starship, and current launch constraints, delivering one satellite into orbit would take between 4 and 6 years," a report by British firm Frazer-Nash states. "Providing the number of satellites to satisfy the maximum contribution that SBSP could make to the energy mix in 2050 would require a 200-fold increase over current space-lift capacity." Critics of the concept include Elon Musk and physicist Casey Handmer, among others, which take issue with the poor photon to electron to photon conversion efficiency and prohibitively expensive transmission losses, thermal losses, and logistics costs.

After just four months, Snapchat is sunsetting future development on its easy-to-use "Pixy" drone, "seemingly in part of a broader effort to cut costs after the company's second-quarter earnings," reports Input Mag. The Wall Street Journal was first to break the news. From the report: Snap isn't alone in suffering under the current economic downturn -- or the long-term effect Apple's App Tracking Transparency has had on the mobile advertising business -- but its struggles with hardware are somewhat unique. Whether it's the Spectacles camera glasses or now the Pixy, Snap's experimental hardware hasn't really caught on in the same way other new hardware has. [Snap CEO Evan Spiegel] was the first to tease possible future Pixys (Pixies?) in an interview with The Verge, noting that Snap even underestimated how many people would want to buy the first version. "Maybe we would make more with version two if people love the original product," Spiegel explained. After the relative failure of the Spectacles from a sales perspective, the Pixy seemed like a corrective product people would be more interested in. "After a couple versions of camera glasses, it just becomes very clear that the market for camera glasses is actually very small and constrained to people who want that first person POV," Spiegel told The Verge. "I think the market for Pixy is bigger."

Snap software continuing to succeed while its hardware struggles puts the company in an odd position. Learning through making hardware, and ideally selling that hardware for a profit, is a big part of its push for an augmented reality future. But if no one's buying it, or it's too expensive to develop in the first place, that's kind of a problem. Snap thinks of itself as a camera company. That might have seemed premature when it was only developing an app, but it's since backed that up with experimental toys, and plenty of exciting acquisitions. It's ironic then, that it maybe got it right the first time. If Google's proved anything with its Pixel phones, it's that the most important camera you own is the software that processes your photos, not the physical hardware itself. For the immediate future, software is working for Snap, and it seems like that's what it's going to be selling.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [Swedish car publication Vi Bilagare] tested 11 new cars alongside a 2005 Volvo C70, timing how long it took to perform a list of tasks in each car. These included turning on the seat heater, increasing the cabin temperature, turning on the defroster, adjusting the radio, resetting the trip computer, turning off the screen, and dimming the instruments. The old Volvo was the clear winner. "The four tasks is handled within ten seconds flat, during which the car is driven 306 meters at 110 km/h [1,004 feet at 68 mph]," VB found. Most of the other cars required twice as long, or more, to complete the same tasks. VB says that "one important aspect of this test is that the drivers had time to get to know the cars and their infotainment systems before the test started." VB lays the blame for the shift from buttons to screens with designers who "want a 'clean' interior with minimal switchgear."

Even with touchscreens, though, we can see in the spread of scores VB gave to different all-touch cars that design matters. You'll find almost no buttons in a Tesla Model 3, and we called out the lack of buttons in the Subaru Outback in our review, but both performed quite well in VB's tests. And VW's use of capacitive touch (versus physical) for the controls on the center stack appears to be exactly the wrong decision in terms of usability, with the ID.3 right at the bottom of the pack in VB's scores. I'm not surprised that the BMW iX scored well; although it has a touchscreen, you're not obligated to use it. BMW's rotary iDrive controller falls naturally to hand, and there are permanent controls arrayed around it under a sliver of wood that both looks and feels interesting. It's an early implementation of what the company calls shy tech, and it's a design trend I am very much looking forward to seeing evolve in the future.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It sounds like something out of an urban legend: Some Windows XP-era laptops using 5400 RPM spinning hard drives can allegedly be forced to crash when exposed to Janet Jackson's 1989 hit "Rhythm Nation." But Microsoft Software Engineer Raymond Chen stands by the story in a blog post published earlier this week, and the vulnerability has been issued an official CVE ID by The Mitre Corporation, lending it more credibility. According to Chen, CVE-2022-38392 was originally discovered by "a major computer manufacturer," and it can affect not just the laptop playing the song but adjacent laptops from other PC companies as well.

The specific hard drive model at issue -- again from an unnamed manufacturer -- would crash because "Rhythm Nation" used some of the same "natural resonant frequencies" that the drives used, interfering with their operation. Anyone trying to independently recreate this problem will face several obstacles, including the age of the laptops involved and a total lack of specificity about the hard drives or computer models. The CVE entry mentions "a certain 5400 RPM OEM hard drive, as shipped with laptop PCs in approximately 2005" and links back to Chen's post as a primary source. And while some Windows XP-era laptop hard drives may still be kicking out there somewhere, after almost two decades, it's more likely that most of them have died of natural causes. The PC manufacturer was able to partially resolve the issue "by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playbanck," says Chen. However, these HDDs would still crash if they were exposed to another device that was playing the song.

Qualcomm is taking another run at the market for server processors, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with its plans, betting it can tap a fast-growing industry and decrease its reliance on smartphones. From a report: The company is seeking customers for a product stemming from last year's purchase of chip startup Nuvia, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. Amazon.com AWS business, one of the biggest server chip buyers, has agreed to take a look at Qualcomm's offerings, they said. Chief Executive Officer Cristiano Amon is trying to turn Qualcomm into a broader provider of semiconductors, rather than just the top maker of smartphone chips. But an earlier push into the server market was abandoned four years ago under his predecessor. At the time, the company was trying to cut costs and placate investors after fending off a hostile takeover by Broadcom.

This time around, Qualcomm has Nuvia, staffed with chip designers from companies such as Apple. Amon, who acquired the business for about $1.4 billion in 2021, has said that its work will help revitalize Qualcomm's high-end offerings for smartphones. But Nuvia was founded as a provider of technology for the server industry. The market for cloud computing infrastructure -- the kind of equipment that Amazon, Google and Microsoft use to whisk data around the world -- generated $73.9 billion last year, according to research firm IDC. That was up 8.8% from 2020. The owners of giant cloud data centers have long relied on Intel's chip technology for their servers. But they're increasingly embracing processors that use designs from Arm, a key partner in phone chips for San Diego-based Qualcomm.

Mezli isn't the first automated restaurant to roll out in San Francisco, but, at least according to its three co-founders, it's the first to remove humans entirely from the on-site operation equation. Eater SF reports: About two years and a few million dollars later, Mezli co-founders Alex Kolchinski, Alex Gruebele, and Max Perham are days away from firing up the touch screens at what they believe to be the world's first fully robotic restaurant. To be clear, Mezli isn't a restaurant in the traditional sense. As in, you won't be able to pull up a seat and have a friendly server -- human, robot, or otherwise -- take your order and deliver your food. Instead, Mezli works more like if a vending machine and a restaurant had a robot baby, Kolchinski describes. It's a way to get fresh food to a lot of people, really fast (the box can pump out about 75 meals an hour), and, importantly, at a lower price; the cheapest Mezli bowl starts at $6.99.

On its face, the concept actually sounds pretty simple. The co-founders built what's essentially a big, refrigerated shipping container and stuffed it with machines capable of portioning out ingredients, putting those ingredients into bowls, heating the food up, and then moving it to a place where diners can get to it. But in a technical sense, the co-founders say it was quite difficult to work out. Most automated restaurants still require humans in some capacity; maybe people take orders while robots make the food or, vice versa, with automated ordering and humans prepping food behind the scenes. But Mezli can run on its own, serving hundreds of meals without any human staff.

The food does get prepped and pre-cooked off-site by good old-fashioned carbon-based beings. Mezli founding chef Eric Minnich, who previously worked at Traci Des Jardins's the Commissary and at Michelin-starred Madera at Rosewood Sand Hill hotel, says he and a lean team of just two other people can handle all the chopping, mixing, cooking, and portioning at a commissary kitchen. Then, once a day, they load all the menu components into the big blue-and-white Mezli box. Inside the box, there's an oven that either brings the ingredients up to temp or finishes up the last of the cooking. Cutting down on labor marks a key cost-saving measure in the Mezli business model; with just a fraction of the staff, as in less than a half dozen workers, Mezli can serve hundreds of meals. "The fully robot-run restaurant begins taking orders and sliding out Mediterranean grain bowls by the end of this week with plans to celebrate a grand opening on August 28 at Spark Social," notes Eater.

Klaxton shares a report from Electrek: Clean energy accounted for more than two-thirds of the new US electrical generating capacity added during the first six months of 2022, according to data recently released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Wind (5,722 megawatts) and solar (3,895 MW) provided 67.01% of the 14,352 MW in utility-scale (that is, greater than 1 MW) capacity that came online during the first half of 2022. Additional capacity was provided by geothermal (26 MW), hydropower (7 MW), and biomass (2 MW). The balance came from natural gas (4,695 MW) and oil (5 MW). No new capacity was reported for 2022 from either nuclear power or coal. This brings clean energy's share of total US available installed generating capacity up to 26.74%. To put that in perspective, five years ago, clean energy's share was 19.7%. Ten years ago, it was 14.76%.

Germany plans to keep its remaining nuclear power plants open for longer in a major U-turn as it scrambles to keep the lights on this winter with less Russian gas. The Telegraph reports: Officials have concluded the plants are needed due to gas shortages and they can be kept open without safety concerns, the Wall Street Journal reported. Germany pledged to phase out nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, which hardened opposition to the technology. Berlin has been under pressure to change course since the invasion of Ukraine to limit the impact of the gas crisis on manufacturers and households. Germany has three plants left, operated by E.ON, EnBW and RWE, supplying about 6pc of the country's electricity. They are currently due to close at the end of the year. Any extension has yet to be officially adopted and details remain under discussion, the Wall Street Journal added. It came as Norway warned it could not do more to help Germany avoid a gas crisis this winter as Russia restricts supplies.