Volkswagen accidentally posted a press release on its website a month early on Monday announcing a new name for its U.S. operations, Voltswagen of America, emphasizing the German automaker's electric vehicle efforts. CNBC reports: The release called the change a "public declaration of the company's future-forward investment in e-mobility." It said Voltswagen will be placed as an exterior badge on all EV models with gas vehicles having the company's iconic VW emblem only. To "preserve elements of Volkswagen's heritage," the release said the company planned to retain the dark blue color of the VW logo for gas-powered vehicles and use light blue to differentiate "the new, EV-centric branding."

The release said Voltswagen of America would remain an operating unit of Volkswagen Group of America and a subsidiary of Volkswagen AG, with headquarters in Herndon, Virginia. Volts are the derived units for electric potential, also known as electromotive force, between two points. General Motors previously used Volt for a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle between 2010 and 2019. The VW press release was incomplete, citing the need for an additional quote and photography from the automaker's plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
UPDATE: VW later said the name change was an April Fool's Day prank which had leaked early.

It can't do back flips like Atlas the humanoid robot, nor can it dance or open doors for its friends, like Spot the robotic dog can. Instead, Boston Dynamics' new robot, named Stretch, is going straight to work in a warehouse. Wired: Rolling around on a wheeled base, it's basically a large robotic arm that grabs boxes using vacuum power, and it's designed for tasks like unloading trucks or stacking pallets. If Spot and Atlas are the show-offs in the family, Stretch is the straight-up workhorse. But while these machines all look and move in wildly different ways, they actually share a lot of DNA. Stretch may seem familiar to you, because it's a sort of descendant of another machine that debuted a few years back: Handle. That robot had a similar suction arm, but it balanced on two wheels, like a Segway scooter. Handle would grab a box, scoot backward, turn 90 degrees, and roll away to stack the box somewhere else. It looked neat on video, but in practice the robot needed a lot of room to operate. It could manage unloading boxes from a truck, sure. "But it took a long time," says Kevin Blankespoor, lead of warehouse robotics at Boston Dynamics. "The truck is a pretty confined space. And so for Handle, every time it grabbed the box, it would need to roll back into some space where it could rotate freely without collisions."

Which is all to say: If Handle were a human, it'd be let go. So Boston Dynamics pivoted (sorry) to a new form factor for Stretch that slapped a similar robotic vacuum arm on a base with four wheels. Each wheel can move independently, so the robot can shift side to side or forward and backward to orient itself in, say, the back of a truck. This new base granted Stretch two powers. For one thing, resting on four wheels is a whole lot more energy efficient than trying to constantly balance on two. The same is true for animals: A dog or cat is inherently more stable than a human. (Stretch will get 8 hours of battery life, and clients will have the option to upgrade to a double battery that holds 16 hours of charge.) The second advantage is that Stretch's arm can now pivot around its base, while Handle had to pivot its whole body to turn. Stretch can shift up to 800 boxes an hour.

"Fans of science fiction learned last week that the word 'robot' was first used in 1920 — a full three years earlier than originally thought," according to a blog post at Archive.org. They call it "a major SciFi discovery hiding in plain sight": The "massively important yet obvious" change in date was confirmed with a search of the Internet Archive, which has a digitized first edition of the Czech play, R.U.R. Rossum's Universal Robots, published in 1920. There on the title page, hiding in plain sight in an English-language subtitle to the work, is the earliest known use of the word "robot."

This important piece of information is one of many little-known facts captured in the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. The project was completed this year by historian Jesse Sheidlower, who credits two things that enabled him to publish this project, decades in the making. "One, we had a pandemic so I had a lot of enforced time at home that I could spend on it," explained Sheidlower. "The second was the existence of the Internet Archive. Because it turns out the Internet Archive has the Pulp Magazine collection that holds almost all the science fiction pulps from this core period...."

The comprehensive online dictionary includes not only definitions, but also how nearly 1,800 sci-fi terms were first used, and their context over time...

The project began nearly twenty years ago at Oxford English Dictionary as the Science Fiction Citations Project.

Solar is becoming the cheapest option for new electricity in the world, but there's still room to improve. According to a new cost-reduction target announced today, the U.S. Department of Energy aims to cut utility-scale solar power plant costs by 60% by 2030. CleanTechnica reports: So, how does the DOE intend to help cut solar power costs so much by 2030? First of all, the U.S. DOE's Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) sees two materials used in solar cells as critical to this brighter solar future perovskites and cadmium telluride (CdTe). The department is [spending] $63 million to try to help with these solar cell innovation goals. In the DOE's own words:

- $40 million for perovskite R&D: Perovskites are a family of emerging solar materials that have potential to make highly efficient thin-film solar cells with very low production costs. DOE is awarding $40 million to 22 projects that will advance perovskite PV device and manufacturing research and developmentâ"as well as performance through the formation of a new $14 million testing center to provide neutral, independent validation of the performance of new perovskite devices.
- $3 million Perovskite Startup Prize: This new prize competition will speed entrepreneurs' path to commercializing perovskite technologies by providing seed capital for their newly formed companies.
- $20 million for CdTe thin films: The National Renewable Energy Laboratory will set up a consortium to advance cheaper CdTe thin-film solar technologies, which were developed in the United States and make up 20% of the modules installed in this country. This consortium will advance low-cost manufacturing techniques and domestic research capabilities, increasing opportunities for U.S. workers and entrepreneurs to capture a larger portion of the $60 billion global solar manufacturing sector.

"Today's announcement also supports several concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) projects," the department notes. Here are details from the DOE:

- $33 million for CSP advances: The new funding opportunity also includes funding for improvements to the reliability and performance of CSP plants, which can dispatch solar energy whenever it is needed; identifies new solar applications for industrial processes, which contribute 20% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions; and advances long-duration thermal-energy storage devices. Long-duration energy storage is critical to decarbonizing the electricity sector and couples well with CSP plants, but the cost must fall by a factor of two to unlock deployment.
- $25 million to demonstrate a next-generation CSP power plant: Sandia National Laboratories will receive funding to build a facility where researchers, developers, and manufacturers can test next-generation CSP components and systems and advance toward DOE's 2030 cost target of 5 cents/kWh for CSP plants.

Apple is considering launching an Apple Watch with a rugged casing aimed at athletes, hikers and others who use the device in more extreme environments, according to people familiar with the matter. Bloomberg reports: The Cupertino, California-based technology giant has internally discussed introducing such a Watch variation later in 2021 or 2022 at the earliest, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. If Apple goes ahead this time, the rugged version would be an additional model similar to how Apple offers a lower-cost option called the Apple Watch SE and special editions co-branded with Nike and Hermes International. Sometimes dubbed the "Explorer Edition" inside Apple, the product would have the same functionality as a standard Apple Watch but with extra impact-resistance and protection in the vein of Casio's G-Shock watches.

Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes: A project to create a working example of [english mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage's] original "steampunk computer," referred to by Babbage as the "Analytical Engine 30," is continuing. The update comes via a "Spring 2021 report" to the Computer Conservation Society.

The main news is that a new series of plans, dating from about 1857 have been found and are being examined for incorporation into the final design. "One remarkable feature is the extension of the Store to 1000 registers, and most intriguingly various methods of mechanically addressing the store contents," reads the update. This would compare well with electronic processor design... not that anyone is expecting this machine, when built, to be blisteringly fast.

Could a steam-powered Analytical Engine support backup DNS services in a post-apocalyptic world? Is this Cloudflare's ultimate plan?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Australian households with rooftop solar panels could be charged for exporting electricity into the power grid at times when it is not needed under proposed changes to the national electricity market. The recommendation is included in a draft deliberation by the Australian Energy Market Commission that is designed to prevent "traffic jams" of electricity at sunny times that could destabilize the network.

The commission, which makes the rules for the electricity system, said the change was necessary to allow more household solar systems and batteries to be connected to the grid and make the system fairer for all electricity users. Benn Barr, the commission's chief executive, said it was expected an average solar household with a system of between 4 and 6 kilowatts would still save about $900 a year on power bills after the change, about $70 less than currently. He said it would reduce bills for the 80% of households who do not have solar as they would no longer have to pay for solar export services they were not using.

Samsung has unveiled a new RAM module that shows the potential of DDR5 memory in terms of speed and capacity. Engadget reports: The 512GB DDR5 module is the first to use High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) tech, delivering 7,200 Mbps speeds -- over double that of DDR4, Samsung said. Right now, it's aimed at data-hungry supercomputing, AI and machine learning functions, but DDR5 will eventually find its way to regular PCs, boosting gaming and other applications. Developed by Intel, it uses hafnium instead of silicon, with metals replacing the normal polysilicon gate electrodes. All of that allows for higher chip densities, while reducing current leakage.

Each chip uses eight layers of 16Gb DRAM chips for a capacity of 128Gb, or 16GB. As such, Samsung would need 32 of those to make a 512GB RAM module. On top of the higher speeds and capacity, Samsung said that the chip uses 13 percent less power than non-HKMG modules -- ideal for data centers, but not so bad for regular PCs, either. With 7,200 Mbps speeds, Samsung's latest module would deliver around 57.6 GB/s transfer speeds on a single channel.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In a mind-bending development, a team of researchers in China have managed to treat brain tumors in mice by delivering drugs to the tissues using microscopic robots. The robots jumped from the mice's bloodstreams into their brains by being coated in E. coli, which tricked the rodents' immune systems into attacking them, absorbing the robots and the cancer-fighting drugs in the process. The team's research was published today in the journal Science Robotics. It comes on the heels of previous research by members of the same team, which saw liquid-coated nanorobots remotely propelled through the jelly-like fluid of the eye. Besides being an obvious recipe for an episode of "The Magic School Bus," the research had obvious applications for ophthalmological research and medical treatments.

The crafts are magnetic, and the researchers use a rotating magnetic field to pull them around remotely. On microscales -- we're talking incremental movements about 1% the width of a hair -- the researchers were able to make the hybrid bio-bots wend paths like in the video game Snake. They're dubbed "neutrobots" because they infiltrate the brain in the casing of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell. It ultimately took Wu's team eight years to actualize the microscopic robot swarms capable of bridging the gap between the rodent bloodstream in the animal's tail, where the bots were injected, and its brain, where gliomas -- tumors that emerge from the brain's glial cells -- resided. Part of the issue is that the mice's white blood cells didn't dig the flavor of the magnetic robots. To overcome that issue, Wu's team coated the bots in bits of E. coli membrane, which the white blood cells easily recognize as a unwelcome invader. That made the robots much more palatable, and the white blood cells enveloped them. From inside those cells, the robots were then able to roll the cells toward the brain; a Trojan horse for the 21st century (in this case, one that benefits the residents of Troy). The neutrobots made it into the brains and were able to deliver the drug directly to the targeted tumors.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel made several big announcements about its 7nm tech at this week's Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future event and divulged that it expects that the majority of its products in 2023 to still be produced in-house using its own manufacturing technology. But there's a caveat: Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said the company will also release "leadership CPU products" in 2023 with CPU cores that are fabricated with an unspecified process node from third-party foundry TSMC, and those CPUs will come to both the client and data center markets. This development comes on the heels of Intel's announcement last year that its 7nm process was delayed, possibly forcing it to do the unthinkable -- turn to external foundries to produce its core logic, like CPUs and GPUs, for the first time in the company's history.

The newest announcements mean that, in addition to the 7nm Meteor Lake desktop chips and Granite Rapids data center processors that Intel will produce with its own process technology in 2023, the company will also release other lines of CPUs in 2023 that will use CPU cores with an as-yet-unspecified process node from TSMC. Intel noted that the chips that utilize TSMC's third-party process tech will power Intel's "CPU leadership" products for both the client and data center markets, suggesting a split product stack. Intel says that the majority of its products in 2023 will come manufactured with its own process technology. Still, it's important to note that Intel hasn't specified that the majority of the newly-released 2023 products will come with its own 7nm process. Naturally, Intel will still have plenty of chip production volume centered on its 14nm and 10nm process tech in that timeframe, and even older nodes that still ship in large volumes. Further reading: Intel To Spend $20 Billion To Build Two New Chip Fabs In Arizona.

Samsung is reportedly working on a double-folding phone to add to its lineup, according to Nikkei Asia. From the report: According to the article, the phone would fold into three segments using two hinges and could be announced "as early as the end of this year." The phone would be a third option in Samsung's foldable lineup, joining the Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip, both of which are also expected to appear in new versions this year. According to the report, the design is still being finalized, but Nikkei's sources say its screen could have a more standard 16:9 or 18:9 aspect ratio, making it easier for app makers to design for than the 25:9 screen found on the Z Fold. [...] It's possible that Samsung is introducing the new type of foldable to ease its power users into a transition to the form factor. Samsung says it might be skipping a new Galaxy Note this year but wasn't exactly clear on why. There was talk of streamlining its phone offerings and of the global chip shortage, but this could be a test to see if Note users are ready for the fold. By giving customers three foldable options to choose from, Samsung could be trying to make it as likely as possible that people will find one that works for them.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The size of the Army is to be reduced to 72,500 soldiers by 2025 as part of a move towards drones and cyber warfare. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said "increased deployability and technological advantage" meant greater effect could be delivered by fewer people. He set out plans for new capabilities such as electronic warfare and drones in a command paper in the Commons. Labour has warned that "size matters" when it comes to defence.

Announcing a major overhaul of the armed forces, Mr Wallace said it marked a shift from "mass mobilization to information age speed," insisting they must be able to "seek out and understand" new threats to the country's security. A cut to the size of the Army had been anticipated -- with a reduction of 10,000 widely trailed. What Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced was a cut to the target for the number of fully trained people in the Army, from 82,040 today to 72,500 in 2025. The changes set out in the paper -- titled Defence in a Competitive Age -- include 3 billion pounds for new vehicles, long-range rocket systems, drones, electronic warfare and cyber capabilities. The UK is putting more resources into cyber warfare via the creation of the National Cyber Force based in the North West of England. It's also putting more resources ($6.6 billion for research and development) into space that may function similarly to the U.S. Space Force.

U.S. cloud services provide Box is exploring a sale amid pressure from hedge fund Starboard Value over its stock performance, Reuters citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Redwood City, California-based Box has discussed a potential deal with interested buyers, including other companies and private equity firms, the sources said, cautioning that no sale of the company is certain. Reuters reported last month that Starboard was preparing to launch a board challenge against Box unless it took steps to boost value for shareholders. It has privately expressed disappointment that the company has failed to capitalize on the work-from-home trend during the COVID-19 pandemic, as many of its cloud computing peers have done.

The New York Times reports: Not long ago Volkswagen was a global pariah after pleading guilty to the biggest emissions fraud in automotive history. Now it is the toast of the stock market, with its shares worth twice as much as they were a year ago.

What happened?

Ironically, Volkswagen's misdeeds helped pave the way for its reversal of fortune... The financial commitment Volkswagen made then, when sales of electric vehicles were minimal, is paying off now as the company rolls out a line of vehicles developed from the ground up to run on batteries, with more interior space and more appeal than adaptations of gasoline vehicles... Investors have noticed, lighting up online stock forums with chatter about Volkswagen and rewarding other established carmakers, like General Motors and Ford Motor, that are pivoting to electric propulsion. Shares of Tesla, on the other hand, have slipped. Tesla is still the most valuable car company in the world by a wide margin, but investors are no longer as certain that Tesla will have the fast-growing electric car market to itself...

Volkswagen also benefited from a report issued this month by analysts at UBS, the Swiss bank, which rated it as the traditional carmaker best positioned to compete with Tesla because it already has the ability to mass-produce electric cars economically... With 665,000 employees and sales of 9.3 million vehicles last year, Volkswagen is the second-largest carmaker in the world after Toyota. It can spread the cost of developing new technologies over millions of vehicles and undercut Tesla on price. By 2025, Volkswagen will be able to produce electric vehicles for less than it costs to build a gasoline or diesel car, UBS analysts wrote in this month's report.

They cautioned that Tesla retains a significant lead in battery technology and autonomous driving software.
Sales of electric VW cars tripled last year, to 230,000 vehicles, the article points out — noting that that's just the beginning. This week VW also announced plans to employ 10,000 software engineers to work on new technologies including autonomous driving, becoming the second-biggest software company in all of Europe.

"The diesel scandal remains a financial burden. The company disclosed in its annual report this week that potential liabilities from lawsuits, such as one by shareholders claiming the company misled them, could cost 4.2 billion euros, or $5 billion. That is in addition to the tens of billions of euros Volkswagen has already paid in fines and settlements since 2017 after admitting that it programmed diesel cars to produce lower emissions in testing conditions than in normal use."

But "Investors this week were focusing on Volkswagen's future rather than its past..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Newshub: Victoria University of Wellington has accidentally deleted all files stored on its desktop computers affecting a "significant" number of staff members -- as well as some students. A spokesperson for the University confirmed to Newshub on Thursday that an unexpected issue wiped all files saved on the desktops. "The University's Digital Solutions team continues to work with all affected staff and students to recover access to files and in many cases the issues have been resolved," they said. "There are however, some affected staff and students who have not been able to recover access to files."

The aim of the data wipe was to clear inactive users' data by getting rid of profiles of students who no longer studied, reports student magazine Critic. Critic spoke to one Masters student who had heard of PHD students losing an entire year's worth of data. The university spokesperson said they apologized for the inconvenience caused and is investigating the issue to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Distribution systems within the U.S. electrical grid are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack, a government watchdog said in a report released Thursday. The Hill reports: In the report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted that the Department of Energy's cybersecurity strategy has predominantly focused on generation and transmission systems. The watchdog recommended further attention to risks facing distribution systems, those parts of the grid that actually carry power directly to customers. Those aspects of the grid, the report states, "are becoming more vulnerable to cyberattacks, in part due of the introduction of and reliance on monitoring and control technologies." "However, the scale of potential impacts from such attacks is not well understood," it states.

Distribution systems' vulnerability is increasing due to their industrial control systems, which have increasingly been incorporating remote access. As a result, they can give bad actors access to them. The systems the report analyzed generally are not covered by federal cybersecurity standards but have in some cases taken independent action on them. Energy Department officials told GAO investigators they were unaware of any assessments underway analyzing how a cyberattack would affect distribution systems, saying the impact would likely be less significant than on generation and transmission. However, the report notes, depending on which distribution was affected it could have nationwide effects.

Following reports that a recent update to Windows 10 was causing blue screens as well as problems with printing, Microsoft issued a new series of updates to address the issues. But it seems that the problems caused by this month's Patch Tuesday updates are actually worse than first thought. BetaNews reports: Users with certain brands of printer experienced APC_INDEX_MISMATCH errors and blue screens, but now Microsoft has issued a warning that there may be additional problems with elements missing from print outs, or even entirely blank pages being output. The problematic updates are KB5000802, KB5000808, KB5000809 and KB5000822. In the support documentation for these four updates, Microsoft acknowledges the APC_INDEX_MISMATCH error problems and BSoDs, and directs people to install the relevant patches for their system. But the company now also acknowledges that there are more problems with the original updates than first appeared to be the case.

For each of these four updates Microsoft issues the same warning: "After installing updates released March 9, 2021 or March 15, 2021, you might get unexpected results when printing from some apps..." There is currently no fix, and Microsoft is not even able to offer a workaround right now. Instead, the company simply says: "We are working on a resolution and estimate a solution will be available in the coming days."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SlashGear: Nissan has found a second-life for old LEAF batteries inside mobile machines that help workers at Nissan factories worldwide. The old batteries are being used in automated guided vehicles or AGVs used for various tasks inside the manufacturing facilities, including delivering parts to workers on the assembly line.

AGVs are used as robotic mail carriers operating on magnetic tracks taking mail and parts exactly where they're needed on the assembly line. The idea is to use the AGV to deliver parts so the worker doesn't waste time searching for a component and can stay focused on installing parts. Nissan and other automotive manufacturers have found that AGVs are indispensable when it comes to saving time and increasing productivity on the assembly line. Nissan currently operates more than 4000 AGVs around the world at its various manufacturing facilities. The factories have a system that includes 30-second automatic quick charging to keep battery packs on the electric vehicles topped off and working correctly. AGVs also have sensors that keep them operating on a set route and allow them to stop when needed. They also have wireless communications capabilities that enable them to communicate with each other to avoid collisions.

Nissan says that it has been exploring ways to reuse old LEAF batteries since 2010. The first-generation LEAF used a 24-kilowatt hour battery pack made by combining 48 modules. Nissan said eight years ago, its engineers discovered a way to take three of those modules and repackage them to fit inside the AGV. Last year, the engineers began to repurpose used battery modules instead of using new ones to power the AGVs. The team also found the repurposed LEAF batteries last a lot longer thanks to their lithium-ion design compared to the lead-acid batteries used previously.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Qualcomm has wrapped up its $1.4 billion acquisition of silicon design firm Nuvia, a move that will lead to in-house Qualcomm CPU designs. The acquisition should allow Qualcomm to compete with Apple's silicon division and focus on pushing bigger, better ARM chips into the laptop market. The deal was announced in January 2021. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of Nuvia; the company was only founded in 2019 and has never made a product. Nuvia was focused on building server chips, but Qualcomm seems mainly interested in the engineering pedigree here, since the company was founded by three high-ranking engineers from Apple's silicon division. Nuvia's CEO, Gerard Williams, formerly Apple's chief CPU architect for nearly a decade, is now Qualcomm's SVP of engineering.

Apple is famously in the process of dumping x86 Intel CPUs in order to roll out in-house ARM architecture designs across the company's entire laptop and desktop lines. Qualcomm wants to be here to sell chips to all the PC vendors that want to follow suit. Qualcomm's press release immediately aimed its new design resource at the market Apple is upending, saying, "The first Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms to feature Qualcomm Technologies' new internally designed CPUs are expected to sample in the second half of 2022 and will be designed for high-performance ultraportable laptops." The call-out that this acquisition will lead to "internally designed CPUs" is a big deal, since currently, Qualcomm only ships lightly customized, off-the-shelf ARM CPUs.

A two-armed robot is helping to prepare soba noodles at an eatery at JR Kaihimmakuhari Station in this Chiba city's Mihama Ward (in Japan), capably boiling the noodles in a strainer, rinsing them and then dipping them in iced water. From a report: The Sobaichi Perie Kaihimmakuhari eatery implemented a collaborative cooking system, with the robot cooking the food and employees adding the dipping sauce or soup and toppings. It is apparently the first time for the cooking robot to be introduced in an actual restaurant setting. Soba stands at railway stations usually have to deal with a constant stream of customers and work under time pressure, resulting in a chronic shortage of human resources. [...] The robot fetches soba noodles from a box with one arm, and places it in a strainer. Then with the other arm, it picks up the strainer and boils the noodles for a minute and 40 seconds, rinses off the viscous film on the surface and then dips the noodles in iced water to bring out their firmness. The robot can cook 150 servings in an hour, substituting the work of about one employee.