Apple on Tuesday announced it would no longer be including USB power adapters with Apple Watch devices as part of an effort to reduce its environmental impact. From a report: Removing the power adapter means new Apple Watch customers won't have access to the device that plugs into the wall, but they should still receive Apple's custom Apple Watch cable that recharges the device wirelessly. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, this move won't be restricted to Apple Watch devices; it will also include upcoming iPhones.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Seems everything charges a monthly fee, these days. It also seems that every Apple event brings another way to fork over $10 a month to the company. This time out, it was the addition of Fitness+, which brings metric-focused video workouts to an Apple TV near you. To keep things simple (and to keep you subscribing), the company is offering up a trio of new Apple One bundles. It's not quite mix and match yet, but there are three pricing tiers. Individual offers Apple Music, TV+, Arcade and iCloud for $15 a month. The Family version will get you those four services for $20 a month. For the hardcore, there's the $30 a month Premier tier, which bundles iCloud, Music, TV+, Arcade, News+ and Fitness+.

On Tuesday, Apple will hold its annual September event called "Time Flies." Unlike in previous years, the company is not expected to announce new iPhones as they have reportedly been delayed "a few weeks" due to the pandemic. Macworld reports on what we can expect to see announced instead: Apple's invitation was light on details, as always, but it's hard to look at its "Time Flies" tagline and think that this won't mean showing off new models of the Apple Watch. Presumably that means a Series 6, but rumors have also circulated around an additional lower cost model to replace the aging Series 3. [...] While the iPad Pro received a minor update this past spring, the midrange iPad Air has remained unchanged since March 2019. Eighteen months is about the refresh cycle for iPads these days, so a revamped Air seems like a pretty good bet for this week's event. [...] There also remains the question of the iPad mini, last updated at the same time as the Air. It could very well see a similar update to stay in step with the Air, but given that Apple has often let the smaller tablet lie unchanged for years at a time -- which it seems to do with many products with the "mini" moniker -- it's hardly a sure thing.

With new hardware naturally comes new software. The release of a new Apple Watch will certainly require watchOS 7, which in turn will need iOS 14. Likewise, new iPads are unlikely to ship without iPadOS 14. That gibes with a recent Bloomberg report that iOS 14 would be released in mid-September, following the usual schedule for Apple's mobile operating system updates. And given our brave new world where Apple events are not subject to the typical restrictions of time and scheduling, that might be all we have to look forward to this time around. That said, there are plenty of other things that Apple could talk about at this event, assuming they're ready to go -- everything from over-the-head AirPods to Apple silicon-powered Macs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat, written by Emil Protalinski: Founded in 1992, Boston Dynamics is arguably the best-known robot company around, in part because its demonstration videos tend to go viral. Now it is attempting to transform from an R&D company to a robotics business, with an eye on profitability for the first time. When we interviewed Boston Dynamics founder and former CEO Marc Raibert in November 2019, we discussed the company's customers, potential applications, AI, simulation, and those viral videos. But it turns out Raibert was transitioning out of the CEO role at the time -- current CEO Robert Playter told us in an interview this month that he took the helm in November. We sat down to discuss Playter's first year as CEO; profitability; Spot, Pick, Handle, and Atlas; and the company's broader roadmap, including which robots are next.
[...]
In June, Boston Dynamics started selling its quadruped robot Spot in the U.S. for $74,500. Last week, the company expanded Spot sales to Canada, the EU, and the U.K. at the same price point. Playter says Boston Dynamics has sold or leased about 250 robots to date and business is accelerating. [...] Compared to big manufacturing robotic companies, 250 robots is not a lot. But Playter points out it's a big achievement "for a novel robot like Spot." Other robotic startups would love to get that sort of market validation. "We're penetrating, we're establishing a market, and people are starting to see value. We're adapting Spot to be a solution for some of the industries we're targeting," Playter said.

Spot's success means the company is beating its own internal targets. "We are meeting -- actually exceeding -- some of our sales goals for Spot," Playter said. "We had ambitious goals this year, but we met our Q1 goal. We're meeting our Q2 goal. We have ambitious Q3 and Q4 goals. I think we're probably going to meet or exceed them this year. To become profitable, these products do have to become successful. They have to scale. But right now, I think we're beating plan." The company now has a roadmap to profitability. "I think we'll be profitable in about two and a half years," Playter said. "2023-2024 is when I'm projecting that we are cash positive." To hit that milestone, Boston Dynamics is simultaneously developing robots for logistics (think production, packaging, inventory, transportation, and warehousing)...

In late 2016, Nikola Motor Company founder Trevor Milton unveiled a prototype of the Nikola One truck, claiming it "fully functions and works, which is really incredible." A couple years later, in January 2018, the company showed the Nikola One truck moving rapidly along a two-lane desert highway. But last week, the short-selling investment firm Hindenburg Research published a bombshell report, accusing Nikola Motors of massive fraud, having no proprietary technology and vastly overstating the capabilities of their prototypes to investors.

Incredibly, "Hindenburg reported that the truck in the 'Nikola One in motion' video wasn't moving under its own power," reports Ars Technica. "Rather, Nikola had towed the truck to the top of a shallow hill and let it roll down. The company allegedly tilted the camera to make it look like the truck was traveling under its own power on a level roadway." From the report: On Monday morning, Nikola sent out a lengthy press release titled "Nikola Sets the Record Straight on False and Misleading Short Seller Report." While the statement nitpicks a number of claims in the Hindenburg report, it tacitly concedes Hindenburg's main claim about the Nikola One. Nikola now admits that the Nikola One prototype wasn't functional in December 2016 and still wasn't functional when the company released the "in motion" video 13 months later. Nikola claims that the gearbox, batteries, inverters, power steering, and some other components of the truck were functional at the time of the December 2016 show. But Nikola doesn't claim that the truck had a working hydrogen fuel cell or motors to drive the wheels -- the two key components Hindenburg stated were missing from the truck in December 2016.

And Nikola now admits that it never got the truck to fully function. "As Nikola pivoted to the next generation of trucks, it ultimately decided not to invest additional resources into completing the process to make the Nikola One drive on its own propulsion," Nikola wrote in its Monday statement. Instead, Nikola pivoted to working on its next vehicle, the Nikola Two. So what about that video of the Nikola One driving across the desert? "Nikola never stated its truck was driving under its own propulsion in the video," Nikola wrote. "Nikola described this third-party video on the Company's social media as 'In Motion.' It was never described as 'under its own propulsion' or 'powertrain driven.' Nikola investors who invested during this period, in which the Company was privately held, knew the technical capability of the Nikola One at the time of their investment."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Arm Holdings, the U.K. semiconductor company, made history for the second time today, becoming the country's biggest tech exit when Nvidia announced over the weekend that it would buy it from SoftBank for $40 billion in an all-stock deal. (Arm's first appearance in the record books? When SoftBank announced in 2016 that it would acquire the company for $32 billion.) But before you can say advanced reduced instruction set computing machine, the deal has hit a minor hitch. One of Arm's co-founders has started a campaign to get the U.K. to interfere in the deal, or else call it off and opt for a public listing backed by the government.

Hermann Hauser, who started the company in 1990 along with a host of others as a spin-out of Acorn Computers, has penned an open letter to the U.K.'s Prime Minister Boris Johnson in which he says that he is "extremely concerned" about the deal and how it will impact jobs in the country, Arm's business model and the future of the country's economic sovereignty independent of the U.S. and U.S. interests. Hauser has also created a site to gather public support -- savearm.co.uk -- and to that end has also started to collect signatures from business figures and others. He's calling on the government to intervene, or to at least create legally binding provisions, tied to passing the deal to guarantee jobs, create a way to enforce Nvidia not getting preferential treatment over other licensees and secure an exemption from CFIUS regulation "so that U.K. companies are guaranteed unfettered access to our own microprocessor technology." "This puts Britain in the invidious position that the decision about who ARM is allowed to sell to will be made in the White House and not in Downing Street," he writes. "Sovereignty used to be mainly a geographic issue, but now economic sovereignty is equally important. Surrendering UK's most powerful trade weapon to the US is making Britain a US vassal state."

Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang said: "This will drive innovation for customers of both companies," adding that Nvidia "will maintain Arm's open licensing model and customer neutrality... We love Arm's business model. In fact, we intend to expand Arm's licensing portfolio with access to Nvidia's technology. Both our ecosystems will be enriched by this combination." Hauser responded by saying: "Do not believe any statements which are not legally binding."

The coronavirus pandemic has the potential to permanently replace some humans with machines, according to a new study on Monday from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. From a report: Layoffs have been higher among workers in industries that can be automated, which increases the risk those jobs will become permanently obsolete, according to the study by economists Lei Ding and Julieth Saenz Molina. At the same time, the spread of Covid-19 has accelerated automation in industries that have been hit hard by the virus or that don't permit remote work. The longer the recession lasts, the deeper the impact of automation will be. "In case the COVID-19 crisis evolves into a prolonged economic crisis, many job losses in automatable occupations could become permanent in the post-pandemic economy, similar to what happened during the recovery from the Great Recession," Ding and Saenz Molina wrote. Industries that were already facing a high risk of automation lost 4.2 more jobs per 100 than jobs in sector facing fewer threats by technology, the study shows, which analyzes data through August.

Two years ago, Microsoft sank a data centre off the coast of Orkney in a wild experiment. That data centre has now been retrieved from the ocean floor, and Microsoft researchers are assessing how it has performed, and what they can learn from it about energy efficiency. From a report: Their first conclusion is that the cylinder packed with servers had a lower failure rate than a conventional data centre. When the container was hauled off the seabed around half a mile offshore after being placed there in May 2018, just eight out of the 855 servers on board had failed. That compares very well with a conventional data centre. "Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land," says Ben Cutler, who has led what Microsoft calls Project Natick. The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule.

The Sacramento Bee published a video showing dozens of oil tankers anchored off California's coast as the current demand for oil plummets. But looking toward the future, they've also published along with it a special warning from the director of the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute: California Resources Corporation, the state's largest oil and gas producer, is the latest oil producer to seek bankruptcy, aiming to wipe out more than $5 billion in debt and equity interests... This bankrupt company also faces more than $1 billion in costs to properly plug and abandon its 18,700 wells in the state. That problem goes far beyond CRC. A state-commissioned report found that cleaning up California's 107,000 oil and gas wells could cost a staggering $9.2 billion.

Saddling taxpayers with cleanup costs after pocketing the profits would be outrageous, yet many oil producers have done just that, walking away from millions of wells across the U.S. With more bankruptcies coming, the risk that oil companies weasel out of well cleanup keeps increasing... The risks aren't just financial. When wells sit idle, they corrode and leak. Experts point to nearly 75,000 wells in California that are "idle" or near-idle, producing little to no oil, or "orphaned," having no viable or responsible operator... [M]ethane frequently leaked by idle wells is a greenhouse gas that warms the planet 87 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Potentially tens of thousands of idle wells are leaking methane into the air, worsening climate change and increasing the risk and magnitude of heat waves and fires like those we're suffering now.

Yet Governor Newsom's administration keeps rewarding this polluting industry, including CRC. This year, state oil regulators have issued more than 1,600 permits for new wells. More than 300 went to CRC. This will only increase cleanup costs once wells stop producing or their owners go bust. Even if the state stopped issuing permits today, plugging and cleaning up existing wells at the current snail's pace will take decades. California can't just keep approving drilling, waiting for this tottering industry to collapse. We need a plan for a managed, just transition.

One solution gives Gov. Newsom a chance to tackle multiple problems at once: accelerating well remediation. By using the state's authority to speed well cleanup we can reduce the environmental and fiscal risk from these wells and create good jobs.

"SoftBank is set to sell the U.K.'s Arm Holdings to U.S. chip company Nvidia for more than $40 billion," writes Ars Technica, adding that the deal's imminent announcement was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal. The move comes just four years after Softbank bought ARM, promising it would become their company's linchpin: Multiple people with direct knowledge of the matter said a cash-and-stock takeover of Arm by Nvidia may be announced as soon as Monday, and that SoftBank will become the largest shareholder in the U.S. chip company.

The announcement of the deal hinged on SoftBank ending a messy dispute between Arm and the head of its China joint venture, Allen Wu, who earlier rebuffed an attempt to remove him and claimed legal control of the unit. Several people close to SoftBank said the matter was now "resolved," though one person close to Mr Wu said he "remains the chairman of Arm China." A spokesperson for Mr Wu declined to comment.

The takeover values Arm above the $32 billion price that SoftBank paid for the business in 2016, a deal that was struck weeks after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union and prompted critics including Arm's founder to accuse the country of selling off the crown jewel of its tech sector. While Nvidia is paying more for the asset than SoftBank did, the price also reflects the scale of Arm's underperformance under the Japanese group's ownership. Nvidia had a market valuation of roughly similar to that of Arm's at the time of the 2016 deal, but now trades with a market value of $300 billion, or roughly 10 times the amount SoftBank paid in cash for Arm. By paying for a large portion of the deals with its own shares, it is also passing part of the risk of the transaction to SoftBank. For Nvidia, which recently overtook Intel to become the world's most valuable chipmaker, the deal will further consolidate the US company's position at the centre of the semiconductor industry...

One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make commitments to the UK government over Arm's future in Britain, where opposition politicians have recently insisted that any potential deal must safeguard British jobs.

"Scientists have known for nearly 200 years that certain materials can convert heat to electricity..." reports Science, describing research into an intriguing new approach: Refrigerators, boilers, and even lightbulbs continually dump heat into their surroundings. This "waste heat" could — in theory — be turned into electricity, as it is sometimes done with power plants, automobile engines, and other high-heat sources. The problem: These "low-grade" sources give off too little heat for current technology to do the conversion well.

Now, researchers have created a device that uses liquids to efficiently convert low-grade heat to electricity. The advance might one day power energy-scavenging devices that can light up sensors and lights and even charge batteries... Thermocells are good at converting small temperature differences into electricity, but they typically produce only tiny currents... This thermocell generated five times more power for the same electrode area than previous versions, materials physicist Jun Zhou and his colleagues at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology report this week in Science.

It also more than doubled the efficiency needed to make a viable commercial device. A paperback book-size module of 20 thermocells could run LED lights, power a fan, and charge a mobile phone, the team found.

"Security researchers from Amsterdam have publicly detailed 'BlindSide' as a new speculative execution attack vector for both Intel and AMD processors," reports Phoronix: BlindSide is self-described as being able to "mount BROP-style attacks in the speculative execution domain to repeatedly probe and derandomize the kernel address space, craft arbitrary memory read gadgets, and enable reliable exploitation. This works even in face of strong randomization schemes, e.g., the recent FGKASLR or fine-grained schemes based on execute-only memory, and state-of-the-art mitigations against Spectre and other transient execution attacks."

From a single buffer overflow in the kernel, researchers claim three BlindSide exploits in being able to break KASLR (Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization), break arbitrary randomization schemes, and even break fine-grained randomization.
There's more information on the researcher's web site, and they've also created an informational video.

And here's a crucial excerpt from their paper shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm: In addition to the Intel Whiskey Lake CPU in our evaluation, we confirmed similar results on Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5, XeonE3-1270 v6 and Core i9-9900K CPUs, based on the Skylake, KabyLake and Coffee Lake microarchitectures, respectively, as well as on AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 3700X CPUs, which are based on the Zen+ and Zen2 microarchitectures.

Overall, our results confirm speculative probing is effective on a modern Linux system on different microarchitectures, hardened with the latest mitigations.

Senators Dick Durbin and Marco Rubio are criticizing Sandvine Inc., the U.S. company whose technology helped Belarus block much of the internet during a disputed presidental election last month. Bloomberg reports: The private-equity-backed technology firm demonstrated its equipment to a government security team in Belarus in May, two people with knowledge of the matter said, and its marketing materials boast of the blacklisting capabilities, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. The Sandvine equipment is also used to manage and secure networks, and its website blocking feature can prohibit users from accessing content deemed illicit, such as terrorist propaganda or child pornography, according to the documents. For several days in August, however, Sandvine's "deep packet inspection" equipment played a central role in censoring social media, news and messaging platforms used by protesters rallying against President Alexander Lukashenko's re-election, Bloomberg reported last month. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called the Aug. 9 election "fraudulent."

The documents and product demonstration, as recounted by the people familiar with the company's affairs, lend added insight into Sandvine's work in Belarus, showing that company representatives met directly with officials in Belarus and later shipped the equipment, via a contractor, to be installed at data centers in Minsk. Sandvine declined to comment. A company spokesman had previously directed a Bloomberg reporter to its corporate ethics policy, which says that a committee reviews sales to determine the risk of its products being used in a manner "detrimental to human rights."

During a Sandvine conference call on Thursday, which sought to address employee concerns about its work in Belarus, executives said they had been working with a government organization in the country for more than a year. Sandvine had provided Belarus with technology that is filtering about 40% of all internet traffic moving in and out of the country, the executives said. They said the work didn't violate U.S. sanctions. A recording of the call was shared with Bloomberg. Alexander Havang, Sandvine's chief technology officer, acknowledged during the call that Belarus may be using the company's equipment to block websites and messaging apps, but he said that Sandvine had concluded that the internet, and access to specific material on websites, wasn't "a part of human rights."

On Wednesday, Acer and Walmart announced they were reviving the Gateway brand to sell affordable Windows 10 notebooks and laptop convertibles from $179 and up. PCMag reports: Gateway was once a major PC vendor in the US, especially during the 1990s when it famously sold computers packaged in cow spotted boxes. However, the company's fortunes began to falter in the 2000s, resulting in Taiwanese PC vendor Acer later buying it up. Acer has now decided to bring back Gateway, calling it a "beloved" brand in the US. And to market the products, the company has resurrected the cow spotted box logo.

According to Acer, the products are designed for everyday consumers, students and "creators," who pump out content or graphic designs. The hardware will also feature processors from either Intel or AMD, and come fitted with 1080p screens. In total, the Gateway PCs span nine different notebook models. At the low-end is the "11.6-inch Ultra Slim" laptop, which retails for $179, and contains 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. At the high-end, you can buy the "Gateway Creator Series 15.6-inch Performance Notebook," which has an Intel 10th Gen Core i5-10300H processor, an NVIDIA 2060 RTX graphics card, 256GB of SSD storage and 8GB of RAM.

schwit1 shares a report from TechRadar: Huawei has announced a series of layoffs in the UK as the company is forced to alter its corporate strategy in the face of further bans and restrictions. The Chinese giant is set to pull sales all of its Enterprise hardware lines, including all servers, storage and networking switches from the UK. The news means severe job cuts across Huawei's Enterprise hardware divisions in the UK as the company faces yet more challenges, despite pledges to remain in the country. The Register [which broke the story] said it had initially been told of Huawei's move by several channel partners, and that 20 of the 50 roles in the Enterprise team would be affected. The European arm of the Enterprise division is not thought to be affected by the news. "Our Enterprise Business is to focus its operations in the UK to deliver fewer products in a better way. Unfortunately this means a number of roles are no longer required, however, we hope to reposition colleagues who are affected elsewhere within the businesses," a Huawei spokesperson told The Register in a statement.

"Ultimately, the business has done a review and decided to focus on a number of product lines," the spokesperson added, noting that Huawei will, "continue to provide full service and maintenance to existing customers for the life-cycle of our products."

An anonymous reader quotes a report: IEEE Spectrum got an exclusive look at General Motors' wireless battery management system. It's a first in any EV anywhere (not even Tesla has one). The wireless technology, created with Analog Devices, Inc., will be standard on a full range of GM EVs, with the company aiming for at least 1 million global sales by mid-decade. Those vehicles will be powered by GM's proprietary Ultium batteries, produced at a new US $2.3 billion plant in Ohio, in partnership with South Korea's LG Chem. Unlike today's battery modules, which link up to an on-board management system through a tangle of orange wiring, GM's system features RF antennas integrated on circuit boards. The antennas allow the transfer of data via a 2.4-gigahertz wireless protocol similar to Bluetooth but with lower power. Slave modules report back to an onboard master, sending measurements of cell voltages and other data. That onboard master can also talk through the cloud to GM.

The upshot is cradle-to-grave monitoring of battery health and operation, including real-time data from drivers in wildly different climates or usage cases. That all-seeing capability includes vast inventories of batteries -- even before workers install them in cars on assembly lines. GM can essentially plug-and-play battery modules for a vast range of EVs, including heavy-duty trucks and sleek performance cars, without having to redesign wiring harnesses or communications systems for each. That can help the company speed models to market and ensure the profitability that has eluded most EV makers. GM engineers and executives said they've driven the cost of Ultium batteries, with their nickel-cobalt-manganese-aluminum chemistry, below the $100 per kilowatt-hour mark -- long a Holy Grail for battery development. And GM has vowed that it will turn a profit on every Ultium-powered car it makes. The system features end-to-end encryption and the software and battery nodes can be reprogrammed over-the-air.

"Repurposing partially spent batteries also gets easier because there's no need to overhaul the management system or fiddle with hard-to-recycle wiring," the report adds. "Wireless packs can go straight into their new roles, typically as load-balancing workhorses for the grid."

FallOutBoyTonto shares a report from Ars Technica: Part of the problem with liquid cooling solutions is that they're limited by having to get the heat out of the chip and into the water in the first place. That's led some researchers to consider running the liquid through the chip itself. Now, some researchers from Switzerland have designed the chip and cooling system as a single unit, with on-chip liquid channels placed next to the hottest parts of the chip. The results are an impressive boost in heat-limited performance.

There have been a number of demonstrations of on-chip liquid cooling. These typically involve a system where a device with a set of liquid channels is fused onto a chip, and a system pumps fluid through it. This can get heat off the chip, and initial implementations have found that there's a bit of a trade-off: it takes more power to pump the water through these channels than you extract from the processor. That power isn't used at the site where heat is an issue, so it doesn't get in the way of the heat dissipation, but it does cut into the energy efficiency of the system. The new research builds upon these ideas to boost the efficiency of on-chip cooling systems. And the researchers involved demonstrate that it works using a power-converting chip that otherwise would see the performance reduced by the heat. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

A major focus of any smartphone release is the camera. For a while, all eyes were on the camera's hardware -- megapixels, sensors, lenses, and so on. But since Google's Pixel was introduced, there's been a lot more interest in the camera's software and how it takes advantage of the computer it's attached to. Marc Levoy, former distinguished engineer at Google, led the team that developed computational photography technologies for the Pixel phones, including HDR+, Portrait Mode, and Night Sight, and he's responsible for a lot of that newfound focus on camera processing. An excerpt from the wide-ranging interview: Nilay Patel: When you look across the sweep of smartphone hardware, is there a particular device or style of device that you're most interested in expanding these techniques to? Is it the 96-megapixel sensors we see in some Chinese phones? Is it whatever Apple has in the next iPhone? Is there a place where you think there's yet more to be gotten?
Marc Levoy: Because of the diminishing returns due to the laws of physics, I don't know that the basic sensors are that much of a draw. I don't know that going to 96 megapixels is a good idea. The signal-to-noise ratio will depend on the size of the sensor. It is more or less a question of how big a sensor can you stuff into the form factor of a mobile camera. Before, the iPhone smartphones were thicker. If we could go back to that, if that would be acceptable, then we could put larger sensors in there. Nokia experimented with that, wasn't commercially successful.
Other than that, I think it's going to be hard to innovate a lot in that space. I think it will depend more on the accelerators, how much computation you can do during video or right after photographic capture. I think that's going to be a battleground.

Nilay Patel:When you say 96 is a bad idea -- much like we had megahertz wars for a while, we did have a megapixel war for a minute. Then there was, I think, much more excitingly, an ISO war, where low-light photography and DSLRs got way better, and then soon, that came to smartphones. But we appear to be in some sort of megapixel count war again, especially on the Android side. When you say it's not a good idea, what makes it specifically not a good idea?
Marc Levoy: As I said, the signal to noise ratio is basically a matter of the total sensor size. If you want to put 96 megapixels and you can't squeeze a larger sensor physically into the form factor of the phone, then you have to make the pixels smaller, and you end up close to the diffraction limit and those pixels end up worse. They are noisier. It's just not clear how much advantage you get. There might be a little bit more headroom there. Maybe you can do a better job of de-mosaicing -- meaning computing the red, green, blue in each pixel -- if you have more pixels, but there isn't going to be that much headroom there. Maybe the spec on the box attracts some consumers. But I think, eventually, like the megapixel war on SLRs, it will tone down, and people will realize that's not really an advantage.

A reader shares some news from Sweden's Linköping University: The Earth receives many times more energy from the sun than we humans can use. This energy is absorbed by solar energy facilities, but one of the challenges of solar energy is to store it efficiently, such that the energy is available when the sun is not shining. This led scientists at Linköping University to investigate the possibility of capturing and storing solar energy in a new molecule.

"Our molecule can take on two different forms: a parent form that can absorb energy from sunlight, and an alternative form in which the structure of the parent form has been changed and become much more energy-rich, while remaining stable. This makes it possible to store the energy in sunlight in the molecule efficiently", says Bo Durbeej, professor of computational physics in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology at LinkÃping University, and leader of the study...

It's common in research that experiments are done first and theoretical work subsequently confirms the experimental results, but in this case the procedure was reversed. Bo Durbeej and his group work in theoretical chemistry, and conduct calculations and simulations of chemical reactions. This involves advanced computer simulations, which are performed on supercomputers at the National Supercomputer Centre, NSC, in Linköping. The calculations showed that the molecule the researchers had developed would undergo the chemical reaction they required, and that it would take place extremely fast, within 200 femtoseconds. Their colleagues at the Research Centre for Natural Sciences in Hungary were then able to build the molecule, and perform experiments that confirmed the theoretical prediction...

"Most chemical reactions start in a condition where a molecule has high energy and subsequently passes to one with a low energy. Here, we do the opposite — a molecule that has low energy becomes one with high energy. We would expect this to be difficult, but we have shown that it is possible for such a reaction to take place both rapidly and efficiently", says Bo Durbeej.

The researchers will now examine how the stored energy can be released from the energy-rich form of the molecule in the best way...

Car and Driver magazine explores what gives Tesla's vehicles their comparatively long range. And apparently one factor is just "big batteries. This may be obvious, but a battery that holds more energy should translate to more range, and Tesla has the largest battery packs out there... What isn't always obvious is how much of a battery pack's energy is usable versus its maximum theoretical or gross capacity... Based on the limited data we have, it seems that Tesla allows its cars to use more of a pack's capacity than other manufacturers do. We suspect that's partially because the company puts some of the responsibility on the driver to choose how high to charge the battery, noting that anything above a 90 percent charge should be reserved only for trips, not everyday use.

Tesla's largest battery pack carries the energy equivalent of just 2.9 gallons of gas when fully charged. The key to extending EPA range is to use less electricity to propel the vehicle and to recapture as much energy as possible using the electric motors to slow the vehicle whenever the driver lifts off the accelerator during the EPA cycles' many slowdowns. Tesla's aggressive regenerative braking alone nets it a 13 percent gain in range versus the Porsche Taycan, which waits until the driver presses the brake pedal before initiating meaningful regen. This is one piece of Tesla's holistic approach to efficiency that also includes its vehicles' ability to roll down the road with less friction than their competitors.
Tesla also obtained more efficiency through the engineering of its all-wheel-drive. But there's also another interesting wrinkle: [T]he EPA allows automakers the option to run three additional drive cycles and use those results to earn a more favorable adjustment factor. Currently, only Tesla and Audi employ this strategy for their EVs, and Tesla scores the most advantageous results, with adjustments that range from 29.5 percent on the Model 3 Standard Range Plus to 24.4 percent on the Model Y Performance. If Tesla had used the standard adjustment factor of 30 percent, the Model Y Performance's window-sticker range would drop to 292 miles. But because Tesla takes advantage of the EPA's alternate methodology, the company can instead claim a 315-mile range. This is all within the regulatory rules. Among EV makers, Tesla has been at this game longer than most, so it's not surprising that it has figured out the tricks to maximizing its EPA numbers.
And the magazine shares this tip for prospective Tesla customers. "Based on the road-load data it has submitted to the EPA, opting for 21-inch wheels on a Model S Long Range Plus will cut the range by nearly 80 miles.