Natural gas "creates less carbon emissions than the coal it replaces, but we have to find ways to minimize the leakage of methane."

That's the opinion of Vaclav Smil, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, writing in IEEE's Spectrum (in an article shared by Slashdot reader schwit1): Natural gas is abundant, low-cost, convenient, and reliably transported, with low emissions and high combustion efficiency. Natural-gas-fired heating furnaces have maximum efficiencies of 95 to 97 percent, and combined-cycle gas turbines now achieve overall efficiency slightly in excess of 60 percent. Of course, burning gas generates carbon dioxide, but the ratio of energy to carbon is excellent: Burning a gigajoule of natural gas produces 56 kilograms of carbon dioxide, about 40 percent less than the 95 kg emitted by bituminous coal.

This makes gas the obvious replacement for coal. In the United States, this transition has been unfolding for two decades. Gas-fueled capacity increased by 192 gigawatts from 2000 to 2005 and by an additional 69 GW from 2006 through the end of 2020. Meanwhile, the 82 GW of coal-fired capacity that U.S. utilities removed from 2012 to 2020 is projected to be augmented by another 34 GW by 2030, totaling 116 GW — more than a third of the former peak rating.

So far, so green. But methane is itself a very potent greenhouse gas, packing from 84 to 87 times as much global warming potential as an equal quantity of carbon dioxide when measured over 20 years (and 28 to 36 times as much over 100 years). And some of it leaks out. In 2018, a study of the U.S. oil and natural-gas supply chain found that those emissions were about 60 percent higher than the Environmental Protection Agency had estimated. Such fugitive emissions, as they are called, are thought to be equivalent to 2.3 percent of gross U.S. gas production...

Without doubt, methane leakages during extraction, processing, and transportation do diminish the overall beneficial impact of using more natural gas, but they do not erase it, and they can be substantially reduced.

The South China Morning Post reports that China "has reached another milestone in its quest for a fusion reactor, with one of its 'artificial suns' sustaining extreme temperatures for several times longer that its previous benchmark, according to state media." State news agency Xinhua reported that the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak in a facility in the eastern city of Hefei registered a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds on Friday. It also maintained a temperature of 160 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds, the report said...

The facilities are part of China's quest for fusion reactors, which hold out hope of unlimited clean energy. But there are many challenges to overcome in what has already been a decades-long quest for the world's scientists. Similar endeavours are under way in the United States, Europe, Russia, South Korea. China is also among 35 countries involved in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) megaproject in France...

Despite the progress made, fusion reactors are still a long way from reality. Song Yuntao, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the latest results were a major achievement for physics and engineering in China. "The experiment's success lays the foundation for China to build its own nuclear fusion energy station," Song was quoted as saying.
NASA notes that the core of the Sun is only about 15 million degrees Celsius.

So for many seconds China's fusion reactor was more than 10 times hotter than the sun.

"Robots and artificial intelligence will replace workers on Australia's first fully automated farm," reports Australia's national public broadcaster ABC.

The total cost of the farm's upgrade? $20 million. Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga will create the "hands-free farm" on a 1,900-hectare property to demonstrate what robots and artificial intelligence can do without workers in the paddock... The farm will use robotic tractors, harvesters, survey equipment and drones, artificial intelligence that will handle sowing, dressing and harvesting, new sensors to measure plants, soils and animals and carbon management tools to minimise the carbon footprint.

The farm is already operated commercially and grows a range of broadacre crops, including wheat, canola, and barley, as well as a vineyard, cattle and sheep.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares Science magazine's look at efforts to transform zinc batteries "from small, throwaway cells often used in hearing aids into rechargeable behemoths that could be attached to the power grid, storing solar or wind power for nighttime or when the wind is calm." With startups proliferating and lab studies coming thick and fast, "Zinc batteries are a very hot field," says Chunsheng Wang, a battery expert at the University of Maryland, College Park. Lithium-ion batteries — giant versions of those found in electric vehicles — are the current front-runners for storing renewable energy, but their components can be expensive. Zinc batteries are easier on the wallet and the planet — and lab experiments are now pointing to ways around their primary drawback: They can't be recharged over and over for decades.

For power storage, "Lithium-ion is the 800-pound gorilla," says Michael Burz, CEO of EnZinc, a zinc battery startup. But lithium, a relatively rare metal that's only mined in a handful of countries, is too scarce and expensive to back up the world's utility grids. (It's also in demand from automakers for electric vehicles.) Lithium-ion batteries also typically use a flammable liquid electrolyte. That means megawatt-scale batteries must have pricey cooling and fire-suppression technology. "We need an alternative to lithium," says Debra Rolison, who heads advanced electrochemical materials research at the Naval Research Laboratory. Enter zinc, a silvery, nontoxic, cheap, abundant metal. Nonrechargeable zinc batteries have been on the market for decades. More recently, some zinc rechargeables have also been commercialized, but they tend to have limited energy storage capacity. Another technology — zinc flow cell batteries — is also making strides. But it requires more complex valves, pumps, and tanks to operate. So, researchers are now working to improve another variety, zinc-air cells...

Advances are injecting new hope that rechargeable zinc-air batteries will one day be able to take on lithium. Because of the low cost of their materials, grid-scale zinc-air batteries could cost $100 per kilowatt-hour, less than half the cost of today's cheapest lithium-ion versions. "There is a lot of promise here," Burz says. But researchers still need to scale up their production from small button cells and cellphone-size pouches to shipping container-size systems, all while maintaining their performance, a process that will likely take years.

Despite Apple offering the M1 iPad Pro in configurations with 8GB and 16GB of RAM, developers are now indicating that apps are limited to just 5GB of RAM usage, regardless of the configuration the app is running on. MacRumors reports: The M1 iPad Pro comes in two memory configurations; the 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB models feature 8GB of RAM, while the 1TB and 2TB variants offer 16GB of memory, the highest ever in an iPad. Even with the unprecedented amount of RAM on the iPad, developers are reportedly severely limited in the amount they can actually use. Posted by the developer behind the graphic and design app Artstudio Pro on the Procreate Forum, apps can only use 5GB of RAM on the new M1 iPad Pros. According to the developer, attempting to use anymore will cause the app to crash: "There is a big problem with M1 iPad Pro. After making stress test and other tests on new M1 iPad Pro with 16GB or RAM, it turned out that app can use ONLY 5GB or RAM! If we allocate more, app crashes. It is only 0.5GB more that in old iPads with 6GB of RAM! I suppose it isn't better on iPad with 8GB." Following the release of its M1-optimized app, Procreate also noted on Twitter that with either 8GB or 16GB of available RAM, the app is limited by the amount of RAM it can use.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The wearables category of consumer devices -- which includes smartwatches, fitness trackers, and augmented reality glasses -- shipped more than 100 million units in the first quarter for the first time, according to research firm IDC. Q2 2021 saw a 34.4 percent increase in sales over the same quarter in 2020. To be clear: wearables have sold that many (and more) units in a quarter before, but never in the first quarter, which tends to be a slow period following a spree of holiday-related buying in Q4.

According to IDC's data, Apple leads the market by a significant margin, presumably thanks to the Apple Watch. In Q1 2021, Apple had a market share of 28.8 percent. Samsung sat in a distant second at 11.3 percent, followed by Xiaomi at 9.7 percent and Huawei at 8.2. From there, it's a steep drop to the smaller players -- like BoAt, which has a market share of just 2.9 percent. However, analysts say upstarts or smaller companies like BoAt are driving the significant year-over-year growth for wearables. IDC's report says that the fastest growth comes from form factors besides smartwatches, such as digitally connected rings, audio glasses, and wearable patches. This grab-bag subcategory within wearables, which the IDC simply classifies as "other," actually grew 55 percent year-over-year.

AmiMoJo writes: The USB-C standard will let you plug in power-hungry devices like gaming laptops, docking stations, 4K monitors and printers with an upgrade that accommodates up to 240 watts starting this year. The jump in maximum power is more than double today's 100-watt top capacity. The USB Implementers Forum, the industry group that develops the technology, revealed the new power levels in the version 2.1 update to its USB Type-C specification on Tuesday. The new 240-watt option is called Extended Power Range, or EPR. "We expect devices supporting higher wattages in the second half of 2021," USB-IF said in a statement.

USB began as a useful but limited port for plugging keyboards, mice and printers into PCs. It later swept aside Firewire and other ports as faster speeds let it tackle more demanding tasks. It proved useful for charging phones as the mobile revolution began, paving the way for its use delivering power, not just data. The 240W Extended Power Range option means USB likely will expand its turf yet again. Cables supporting 240 watts will have additional requirements to accommodate the new levels. And USB-IF will require the cables to bear specific icons "so that end users will be able to confirm visually that the cable supports up to...240W," USB-IF said in the specification document.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Offshore wind is headed west. The Biden administration announced today that it will open up parts of the Pacific coast to commercial-scale offshore renewable energy development for the first time. The geography of the West Coast poses huge technical challenges for wind energy. But rising to meet those challenges is a big opportunity for both President Joe Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom to meet their clean energy goals. There are two areas now slotted for development off the coast of Central and Northern California -- one at Morro Bay and another near Humboldt County. Together, these areas could generate up to 4.6GW of energy, enough power for 1.6 million homes over the next decade, according to a White House fact sheet.

Compared to the East Coast, waters off the West Coast get deeper much faster. That has stymied offshore wind development. So the White House says it's looking into deploying pretty futuristic technology there: floating wind farms. Until now, technical constraints have generally prevented companies from installing turbines that are fixed to the seafloor in waters more than 60 meters deep. That's left nearly 60 percent of offshore wind resources out of reach, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). With the development of new technologies that could let wind turbines float in deeper waters, it looks like those resources might finally be within reach.

The Department of Energy says that it has funneled more than $100 million into moving floating offshore wind technology forward. There are only a handful of floating turbines in operation today, and no commercial-scale wind farms yet anywhere in the world. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management still needs to officially designate the areas off the California coast as Wind Energy Areas for development and complete an environmental analysis. The plan is to auction off leases for the area to developers in mid-2022. It's also working with the Department of Defense to make sure the projects don't interfere with its ongoing "testing, training, and operations" off California's coast.

A new Bitcoin Mining Council has been created to improve the crypto-currency's sustainability, following a meeting of "leading" Bitcoin miners and Elon Musk. The BBC reports: It's hoped the council will "promote energy usage transparency" and encourage miners to use renewable sources. According to a tweet by MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, who convened the meeting of the group and Elon Musk, the council includes "the leading Bitcoin miners in North America." But research from a group of universities suggested that China accounted for more than 75% of Bitcoin mining as of April 2020. The authors estimated that 40% of China's Bitcoin mines were powered by coal.

[T]he group needs to do more than "disclosing and promoting the use of renewables," Alex de Vries of the website Digiconomist told the BBC. "Even if we had disclosure, that doesn't change the natural incentive of these miners to search out the cheapest and most constant sources of power - which typically comes down to (obsolete) fossil fuels," he said. "Kentucky even came up with a tax break for Bitcoin miners to come and use their obsolete coalfields. So, I'm not seeing this trend towards more renewables." However council member Peter Wall, Chief Executive of Argo, argued that increasingly US Bitcoin miners were choosing renewable power. He felt the council could encourage change."It's early days, it's embryonic. There will be lots of discussions moving forward about the best way to promote sustainable Bitcoin mining and to do it not just in North America," he said.

MojoKid writes: Mountain View, CA silicon design tools heavyweight Synopsys is claiming a breakthrough in chip design automation that it claims will usher in a new level of semiconductor innovation that will take the industry above and beyond the limits of Moore's Law (Gordon Moore's observation that the number of transistors in chips double roughly every two years), which is now considered by many to be plateauing. Synopsys' tool called DSO.ai is the world's first autonomous AI tool set for chip design. Synopsys claims its DSO.ai tool can dramatically accelerate, enhance, and reduce the costs involved with something called place-and-route. Just as it sounds, place-and-route (sometimes called floor planning) referrers to the placement of logic and IP blocks, and the routing of the traces and various interconnects in a chip designed to join them all together. Synopsys' DSO.ai optimizes and streamlines this process using the iterative nature of artificial intelligence and machine learning, such that what used to take dozens of engineers weeks or potentially months, now will take a junior engineer just days to complete. DSO.ai iterates on the floorplan and layout of a chip, and learns from each iteration, fine tuning and optimizing the chip within its design parameters and targets along the way. The old semiconductor paradigms are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Today, it's about the best transistors, architectures, and accelerators for the job, and the human-constrained physical design engineering effort no longer has to be a gating factor.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: According to a tweet from Executable Fix, a well-known leaker, AMD will finally move away from PGA to LGA with the shift to AM5, the new socket set to replace AM4. They say the new socket design will be LGA-1718 -- the number representing the number of pins required for the package. They also note that a coming generation of AMD chip will support DDR5 and PCIe 4.0 with a 600-series chipset.

When we talk about PGA, we're most often discussing processors with pins sticking out the underside of a chip that slot into a motherboard with a compatible socket. An LGA design will instead see a flat array of connection points on the processor, which will align with pins within the motherboard's socket. Either way you look at it, you're getting some very bendable, if not breakable, pins. But in my opinion it's much easier to bend those pins on the CPU. While a shift to LGA may seem somewhat trivial, the change will mark a major shakeup in AMD's desktop lineup.

The ability to boot from an external drive on an Apple Silicon Mac may not be an option for much longer, with the creation and use of the drives apparently being phased out by Apple, according to developers of backup tools. Apple Insider reports: Mike Bombich, the founder of Bombich Software behind Carbon Copy Cloner, wrote in a May 19 blog post that the company will continue to make bootable backups for both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, and will "continue to support that functionality as long as macOS supports it." However, with changes in the way a Mac functions with the introduction of Apple Silicon, the ability to use external booting could be limited, in part due to Apple's design decisions.

The first problem is with macOS Big Sur, as Apple made it so macOS resides on a "cryptographically sealed Signed System Volume," which could only be copied by Apple Software Restore. While CCC has experience with ASR, the tool was deemed to be imperfect, with it failing "with no explanation" and operating in a "very one-dimensional" way. The second snag was Apple Fabric, a storage system that uses per-file encryption keys. However, ASR didn't work for months until the release of macOS 11.3 restored it, but even then kernel panics ensued when cloning back to the original internal storage.

In December, Bombich spoke to Apple about ASR's reliability and was informed that Apple was working to resolve the problem. During the call, Apple's engineers also said that copying macOS system files was "not something that would be supportable in the future." "Many of us in the Mac community could see that this was the direction Apple was moving, and now we finally have confirmation," writes Bombich. "Especially since the introduction of APFS, Apple has been moving towards a lockdown of macOS system files, sacrificing some convenience for increased security." [...] While CCC won't drop the ability to copy the System folder, the tool is "going to continue to offer it with a best effort' approach." Meanwhile, for non-bootable data restoration, CCC's backups do still work with the macOS Migration Assistant, available when booting up a new Mac for the first time.

In late 2019, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8c and 7c, a pair of affordable chips for always-on Windows 10 PCs and Chromebooks. Today, the company is updating the latter of those two SoCs to improve performance. Engadget: The Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 features a Kyro CPU that can achieve clock speeds of up to 2.55GHz. The company claims it delivers 10 percent faster performance than "most competing platforms." Qualcomm likely has processors from Intel's Gemini Lake family in mind here. The company also claims the 7c Gen 2 can deliver up to two times the battery life of its competitors. Outside of the faster CPU, the 7c Gen 2 is more or less the same chip Qualcomm announced in 2019. It features an Adreno 618 GPU and Snapdragon X15 LTE modem. The latter allows the 7c Gen 2 to hit theoretical download speeds of 800 Mbps. As with its predecessor, the chip is designed for education and price-conscious customers. According to Qualcomm, we can expect the first Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 laptops to arrive this summer, with the first models coming from Lenovo.

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: In the 1940s, IBM tried to market a typewriter capable of handling all 5,400 Chinese characters. The catch was that using it required memorizing a 4-digit code for each character. But a young woman named Lois Lew tackled the challenge and demoed the typewriter for the company in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai.

More than 70 years later, Lew, now in her 90s, told her remarkable story to Thomas S. Mullaney for Fast Company.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes Ars Technica: Texas Governor Greg Abbott's office knew of looming natural gas shortages on February 10, days before a deep freeze plunged much of the state into blackouts, according to documents obtained by E&E News and reviewed by Ars.

Abbott's office first learned of the likely shortfall in a phone call from then-chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas DeAnne Walker. In the days leading up to the power outages that began on February 15, Walker and the governor's office spoke 31 more times.

Walker also spoke with regulators, politicians, and utilities dozens of times about the gas curtailments that threatened the state's electrical grid. The PUC chair's diary for the days before the outage shows her schedule dominated by concerns over gas curtailments and the impact they would have on electricity generation. Before and during the disaster, she was on more than 100 phone calls with various agencies and utilities regarding gas shortages.

After the blackouts began, Abbott appeared on Fox News to falsely assert that wind turbines were the driving force behind the outages.

Slashdot reader PolygamousRanchKid quotes The Hill: California is requiring ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft to transition from gasoline to electric vehicles (EVs) in their networks by the end of this decade.

The state's clean-air regulator on Thursday unanimously approved the Clean Miles Standard mandating that EVs account for 90 percent of ride-hailing vehicle miles traveled in California by 2030. The ride-share companies will have to begin the electrification of their fleets in 2023. The move by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) is part of California's effort to phase out gas-powered vehicles and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and become carbon neutral by 2045. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) last year signed an executive order requiring all new cars and passenger trucks sold in the state of nearly 40 million residents be zero-emission by 2035. "The transportation sector is responsible for nearly half of California's greenhouse gas emissions, the vast majority of which come from light-duty vehicles," CARB Chair Liane M. Randolph said in a statement...

Both Uber and Lyft have already committed to converting their fleets entirely to EVs by 2030 and have made efforts to help drivers make the shift.

The companies have said, however, California needs to spend more money to help drivers afford the zero emissions vehicles, according to Reuters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Seagate has been working on dual-actuator hard drives -- drives with two independently controlled sets of read/write heads -- for several years. Its first production dual-actuator drive, the Mach.2, is now "available to select customers," meaning that enterprises can buy it directly from Seagate, but end-users are out of luck for now. Seagate lists the sustained, sequential transfer rate of the Mach.2 as up to 524MBps -- easily double that of a fast "normal" rust disk and edging into SATA SSD territory. The performance gains extend into random I/O territory as well, with 304 IOPS read / 384 IOPS write and only 4.16 ms average latency. (Normal hard drives tend to be 100/150 IOPS and about the same average latency.)

The added performance requires additional power; Mach.2 drives are rated for 7.2 W idle, while Seagate's standard Ironwolf line is rated at 5 W idle. It gets more difficult to compare loaded power consumption because Seagate specs the Mach.2 differently than the Ironwolf. The Mach.2's power consumption is explicitly rated for several random I/O scenarios, while the Ironwolf line is rated for an unhelpful "average operating power," which isn't defined in the data sheet. Still, if we assume -- probably not unreasonably -- a similar expansion of power consumption while under load, the Mach.2 represents an excellent choice for power efficiency since it offers roughly 200% of the performance of competing traditional drives at roughly 144% of the power budget. Particularly power-conscious users can also use Seagate's PowerBalance mode -- although that feature decreases sequential performance by 50% and random performance by 10%.

Israeli company ElectReon Wireless is building a kilometer-long stretch of electric vehicle-charging highway between Milan and Brescia in Italy. It's the first trial of its kind involving a highway and will help determine if the technology is ready for widespread adoption. Innovation Origins reports: In a nutshell, Electreon is building the infrastructure by installing copper coils under the asphalt. Energy is transferred directly and wirelessly to the vehicle's batteries while driving by means of magnetic induction. The system includes a control unit located on the side of the lane of the electrified road. A receiver is installed in the chassis of each electric vehicle that is participating in the trial.

ElectReon is working with more than ten Italian partners to carry out the test. The most important of these is Brebemi, who operate the toll road. The goal of the pilot is to see how the technology will fare on toll roads. Brebemi is footing the bill for the pilot project while ElectReon will supply the wireless electric road system. "Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer," as the technology is called, will be tested on different types of electric vehicles in both stationary and dynamic environments.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Taiwan News: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), National Taiwan University (NTU), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have made a significant breakthrough in the development of 1-nanometer chips, reports said Tuesday (May 18). The joint announcement has trumped IBM's statement earlier in the month about the development of a 2nm semiconductor, British website Verdict reported. While at present the most advanced chips are 5nm, TSMC's find was likely to lead to power-saving and higher speeds for future electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and other new technologies.

The discovery was first made by the MIT team, with elements optimized by TSMC and improved by NTU's Department of Electrical Engineering and Optometrics, according to a report in Nature Magazine. The key element of the research outcome was that using the semi-metal bismuth as the contract electrode of a two-dimensional material to replace silicon can cut resistance and increase the current, Verdict reported. Energy efficiency would thus increase to the highest possible level for semiconductors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet's urban innovation organization, has announced the launch of Pebble, a vehicle sensor that's designed to help manage parking in cities by providing real-time parking and curb availability data. Here's how it works: Small spherical sensors are stuck to the ground on parking spaces to note the absence or presence of a vehicle. Then solar-powered gateway hardware, which can be strapped easily to street poles, uses IoT to connect the sensor to the cloud through the cellular network. The data is then viewed and analyzed by real estate developers, parking operators or municipal agencies via a dashboard. Pebble doesn't use cameras or collect identifying information about a person or vehicle, and is touting a "privacy preserving" approach.

Between 9% and 56% of traffic, and all the pollution that comes with it, is caused by people who are cruising for parking. Pebble says its real-time parking availability can be integrated into navigation apps, like Google Maps, through an API to help users spend less time circling the block. "Real-time parking information can also alert would-be drivers when spaces are limited before they even leave home, leading them to use alternative travel modes, such as park-and-ride transit or ferries," wrote Sidewalk Labs' senior creative technologist, Nick Jonas, in a blog post announcing the launch. "For example, a smart parking program at a BART park-and-ride station reduced driving by a monthly average of nearly 10 miles per person -- and even shortened commutes."