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.

I've only paid for a magazine subscription once in my life — to Jack Rickard's Boardwatch magazine, which through the late 1990s was the geekiest read in town.

You can still read 70 issues of the magazine from more than 25 years ago at Archive.org. But this week the small Southeast Missourian newspaper reported that the magazine's original editor/publisher Jack Rickard has died at age 65: Following his graduation in 1973, Jack enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He proudly served aboard the USS Midway as an aviation support equipment technician. Following a distinguished tour in the Navy, Jack enjoyed a career as a technical writer in the defense industry.

Jack was a Mensa member and an early adopter of new technologies. His keen intelligence helped him to see the value of the internet as early as the 1980s. He started Boardwatch... Supported by a strong team, Jack developed Boardwatch into a successful magazine, which he sold in 1998.

Following his initial professional success, Jack proudly returned to his hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. While in Cape Girardeau, Jack continued to pursue his interest in innovative technologies, including aviation and electric cars. In 2008, Jack established EVTV, an internet-based platform that taught individuals methods to convert gasoline-powered vehicles into electric-drive vehicles. As electric cars became popular, Jack expanded EVTV to focus on solar power storage.
Jack always felt like an old friend, even as his role in the tech community kept evolving. (Rickard's editorials at EVTV always featured a black-and-white sketch of the author — a tradition he'd continued through more than three decades of writing.)

Even Boardwatch "began as a publication for the online Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s and 1990s," explains Wikipedia, "and ultimately evolved into a trade magazine for the Internet service provider (ISP) industry in the late 1990s... Boardwatch spawned an ISP industry tradeshow, ISPcon, and published a yearly Directory of Internet Service Providers. In 1998, Rickard sold a majority interest in Boardwatch and its related products to an East Coast multimedia company, which was then acquired by Penton Media in 1999 and moved to other ventures...
This week fans left testimonals on his funeral home's web site. "What an inspiration to mankind," read one. "Always enjoyed his views on any subject. We could use more people in this world with his wit and knowledge."

And another just wrote "Jack you were the most insightful speaker on the topic of electric vehicles. I enjoyed every second of your wisdom and videos and will continue to watch them for years to come. Rest In Peace my YouTube friend."

"Arm has announced its first 64 bit, Linux-capable Cortex-R processor, designed for computational storage solutions," reports Electronics Weekly.

SiliconAngle calls it "a chip designed to enable a new generation of storage devices that will not only hold data but also help process it." Such devices are part of an emerging hardware category known as computational storage. The technology promises to provide a speed boost for latency-sensitive workloads such as machine learning and real-time analytics applications. Normally, the task of storing data and processing it is relegated to separate components inside a system. The disk or flash drive holds onto the information while a separate processor does the processing. Data has to travel from the storage drive to the processor and back every time an operation is carried out, which creates delays that can slow down performance.

The emerging computational storage devices Arm targets attempt to do away with these delays to speed up applications. Instead of sending information to a separate chip for processing, the storage drive processes it locally using its built-in controller. A controller is a tiny computing module inside flash and disk drives that normally performs only low-level tasks such as writing and reading data. Arm's new Cortex-R82 is designed to serve as the controller for computational storage devices. It's available as a chip design that hardware makers can license and customize based on their needs.
"The extra computing power allows the chip to run a full Linux distribution as well as applications, all directly inside a storage drive."

Facebook has "temporarily paused" sales of its Oculus Quest headsets to customers in Germany. "Reports suggest the move is in response to concerns from German regulators about the recently announced requirement that all Oculus users will need to use a Facebook account by 2023 to log in to the device," reports Ars Technica. From the report: "We have temporarily paused selling Oculus devices to consumers in Germany," Facebook writes in a brief message on the Oculus support site. "We will continue supporting users who already own an Oculus device and we're looking forward to resuming sales in Germany soon." Facebook declined an opportunity to provide additional comment to Ars Technica. But in a statement to German News site Heise Online (machine translation), the company said the move was due to "outstanding talks with German supervisory authorities... We were not obliged to take this measure, but proactively interrupted the sale."

In a statement provided to Heise Online, the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (HCDPFI) said, in part: "The obligation to create a Facebook account [to access an Oculus headset] is legally extremely questionable, at least for those who have already bought a headset. Whether this also applies to new customers is definitely open to discussion. That should largely depend on the design of the contract, which we do not have." The group goes on to cite the GDPR's so-called "coupling ban," which prohibits tying one side of a contract (say, the EULA needed to use an Oculus headset) to the sharing of specific personal data (say, the data included in a user's personal Facebook account).

Facebook's requirement that "the use of the headset should be linked to the establishment of a Facebook account" would seem to violate this coupling ban, HCDPFI said. "For those users who already have a headset and do not log in with a Facebook account after 2023, there is also no immediately suitable alternative to continuing to use the headset. The compulsion to use Facebook is therefore exerted on both old and new customers."

Today, Lenovo has released a ThinkPad with Red Hat's community Linux, Fedora. ZDNet reports: First in this new Linux-friendly lineup is the X1 Carbon Gen 8. It will be followed by forthcoming versions of the ThinkPad P1 Gen2 and ThinkPad P53. While ThinkPads are usually meant for business users, Lenovo will be happy to sell the Fedora-powered X1 Carbon to home users as well. The new X1 Carbon runs Fedora Workstation 32. This cutting-edge Linux distribution uses the Linux Kernel 5.6. It includes WireGuard virtual private network (VPN) support and USB4 support. This Fedora version uses the new GNOME 3.36 for its default desktop.

The system itself comes standard with a 10th Generation Intel Core 1.6Ghz i5-10210U CPU, with up to 4.20 GHz with Turbo Boost. This processor boasts 4 Cores, 8 Threads, and a 6 MB cache. It also comes with 8MBs of LPDDR3 RAM. Unfortunately, its memory is soldered in. While that reduces the manufacturing costs, Linux users tend to like to optimize their hardware and this restricts their ability to add RAM. You can upgrade it to 16MBs, of course, when you buy it for an additional $149. For storage, the X1 defaults to a 256GB SSD. You can push it up to a 1TB SSD. That upgrade will cost you $536.

The X1 Carbon Gen 8 has a 14.0" Full High Definition (FHD) (1920 x 1080) screen. For practical purposes, this is as high-a-resolution as you want on a laptop. I've used laptops with Ultra High Definition (UHD), aka 4K, with 3840x2160 resolution, and I've found the text to be painfully small. This display is powered by an integrated Intel HD Graphics chipset. For networking, the X1 uses an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 802.11AX with vPro (2 x 2) & Bluetooth 5.0 chipset. I've used other laptops with this wireless networking hardware and it tends to work extremely well. The entire default package has a base price of $2,145. For now, it's available for $1,287. If you want to order one, be ready for a wait. You can expect to wait three weeks before Lenovo ships it to you.

EmagGeek writes: A camera slowly stalks a woman walking to her SUV in a desolate, empty parking garage. "If question 1 passes in Massachusetts, anyone could access the most personal data stored in your vehicle," a narrator says. "Domestic violence advocates say a sexual predator could use the data to stalk their victims. Pinpoint exactly where you are. Whether you are alone ..." The woman's keys jingle as she approaches her car. The camera gets closer. The woman whips her head around. The stalker has found her. The screen flashes to black. "Vote NO on 1," the narrator says. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents nearly every major auto manufacturer in the United States, is funding this and a series of other TV ads like it to scare Massachusetts residents into voting against a ballot measure that would expand the state's already existing right to repair law to ensure that you can continue to get your car fixed by anyone you want. The ads heavily imply -- and at times state outright -- that the legislation would somehow lead women to be stalked and sexually assaulted, a charge that cybersecurity experts say has no grounding in reality. Instead, the auto industry wants to ensure that when your car breaks, you have to take it to a manufacturer "authorized" mechanic or the dealer itself.

The legislation is an update to an already-existing law passed by Massachusetts voters in 2012 that has become a national standard for auto repair and a model piece of legislation for other right to repair bills that would make it easier to fix all sorts of electronics. The 2012 law enshrines the ability for independent mechanics (meaning, anyone who is not a car dealer) to repair the vast majority of cars, because it requires manufacturers to use a nonproprietary diagnostic interface to diagnose problems. This means that anyone can buy an OBD reader (called a "scanner," a "dongle," a "computer"), hook it up to a port beneath their steering wheel, and determine what's wrong with their car. The law also makes repair information available to independent repair professionals. Question 1 seeks to close a loophole in that earlier law, which exempted cars that transmitted this data wirelessly. As cars become even more computerized, independent repair shops are worried that manufacturers will do away with the OBD port and will store this data wirelessly, exempting them from the earlier law. The new initiative simply guarantees that car owners and independent repair companies can access this data wirelessly without "authorization by the manufacturer," and requires car manufacturers to store this data in a secure, "standardized, open-access platform."

Intel took the wraps off its not-so-secret central processing units (CPUs) code-named Tiger Lake, built with a 10-nanometer manufacturing process. It may has well been called Tiger Leak. From a report: The 11th Generation Intel Core Processor models include the Intel Core i7-1185G7 chip, with a base 3GHz frequency that can be boosted to 4.8GHz. The Santa Clara, California-based company has dual-core and quad-core variants in the new family, which will be used in high-powered laptops coming this fall. Intel is also unveiling the Intel Xe 12th Gen integrated graphics processing unit (GPU), which replaces the Iris Plus integrated GPU. It has improved AI performance, Thunderbolt 4 input-output, and software optimizations. Intel said it has 20% better CPU performance and two times the graphics performance than the previous generation. With the integrated GPU, Intel said it can deliver frame rates in games that are two times faster than previous models. All told, there are nine new Tiger Lake chips. The chips are the top of the line for now as Intel faces severe competition from rival Advanced Micro Devices, which uses external producers such as TSMC to make its chips and is making historic market share gains. Intel normally makes its own chips, and it is rumored to be talking to TSMC for contract manufacturing, but that deal won't come in time for Tiger Lake. "We're leading the ecosystem forward to deliver new PC experiences," said Gregory Bryant, executive vice president of client computing at Intel, in a briefing.

A team at Clemson University has come up with a new design that overcomes some of the problems with incorporating silicon into lithium-ion batteries, "enabling them to demonstrate a lightweight and multipurpose device that could be used to power satellites and spacesuits," reports New Atlas. From the report: Scientists have been investigating the potential of silicon in lithium-ion batteries for a long time, and with good reason. Using the material for the anode component instead of the graphite used today could increase the storage capacity of these devices by as much as 10 times, but there are a few kinks to iron out first. Silicon doesn't exhibit the same durability as graphite in these scenarios, tending to expand, contract and break apart into small pieces as the battery is charged and discharged. This causes the deterioration of the anode and failure of the battery, but we have seen a number of potential solutions to this over the years, including fashioning the silicon into sponge-like nanofibers or tiny nanospheres before integrating them into the device.

The new research out of Clemson University looks to shore up the dependability of silicon with the help of carbon nanotube sheets called Buckypaper, which we've also seen used in the development of next-generation heat shields for aircraft. These sheets were paired with tiny, nanosized silicon particles in what the team says is an arrangement much like a deck of cards, with the silicon particles sandwiched in between each layer. "The freestanding sheets of carbon nanotubes keep the silicon nanoparticles electrically connected with each other," says Shailendra Chiluwal, first author on the study. "These nanotubes form a quasi-three-dimensional structure, hold silicon nanoparticles together even after 500 cycles, and mitigate electrical resistance arising from the breaking of nanoparticles." The beauty of this approach, according to the team, is that even if the charging and discharging of the battery causes the silicon particles to break apart, they remain locked inside the sandwich and able to perform their function. This means that, theoretically, this functioning but experimental battery has a much higher capacity, which means the energy can be stored in much lighter cells, reducing the overall weight of the device. As a bonus, the use of the nanotubes creates a buffer mechanism that enables the batteries to be charged at four times the speed of current iterations, according to the scientists. The research was published in the journal Applied Materials and Interfaces.

tomhath shares a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, the first small modular reactor received a design certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meaning that it meets safety requirements and could be chosen by future projects seeking licensing and approval. The design comes from NuScale, a company birthed from research at Oregon State University that has received some substantial Department of Energy funding. It's a 76-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide steel cylinder (23 meters by 5 meters) capable of producing 50 megawatts of electricity. (The company also has a 60-megawatt iteration teed up.) They envision a plant employing up to 12 of these reactors in a large pool like those used in current nuclear plants.

The basic design is conventional, using uranium fuel rods to heat water in an internal, pressurized loop. That water hands off its high temperature to an external steam loop through a heat exchange coil. Inside the plant, the resulting steam would run to a generating turbine, cool off, and circulate back to the reactors. The design also uses a passive cooling system, so no pumps or moving parts are required to keep the reactor operating safely. The pressurized internal loop is arranged so that it allows hot water to rise through the heat exchange coils and sink back down toward the fuel rods after it cools.

In the case of a problem, the reactor is similarly designed to manage its heat automatically. The control rods -- which can encase the fuel rods, blocking neutrons and halting the fission chain reaction -- are actively held in place above the fuel rods by a motor. In the event of a power outage or kill switch, it will drop down on the fuel rods due to gravity. Valves inside also allow the pressurized water loop to vent into the vacuum within the reactor's thermos-like double-wall design, dumping heat through the steel exterior, which is submerged in the cooling pool. One advantage of the small modular design is that each unit holds a smaller amount of radioactive fuel, and so it has a smaller amount of heat to get rid of in a situation like this.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're going to spend $1,000 on a phone, you might as well spend $2,000. And honestly, if you're going to spend $2,000, why not just go for it and spend $3,300? That seems to be a chief guiding principle behind the Samsung Galaxy Fold Z 2 Thom Browne edition -- a handset for those who want the priciest mobile device you can buy -- and then some. Samsung has been partnering with the high-end American fashion designer for a couple of devices now. The Z Fold 2 edition follows the release of the Thom Browne Galaxy Z Flip, which also cost an additional $1,100 over the price of the standard foldable. Further justifying the device's cost is the inclusion of a Galaxy Watch 3 and the Galaxy Buds Live -- neither of which ship with the standard Fold Z 2. And perhaps even more importantly, it's something you can lord over the heads of your slightly more frugal friends who only shelled out for the regular Fold.

Lenovo announced the new premium Yoga 7i and Yoga 6 two-in-ones earlier in the month and now it's pulled the wraps off the top-of-the-line Yoga 9i. The Yoga 9i two-in-one and Yoga 9i Slim laptop (called the IdeaPad 9i Slim in North America) replace the Yoga C940 and Yoga S940 (IdeaPad S940). From a report: Being the most premium of the premium Yoga lineup, the Yoga 9i -- available in 14- and 15.6-inch versions -- gets all the fun extras and is made from the nicest materials. For 2020's 14-inch model that includes an optional lid upgrade with black leather bonded to its aluminum chassis. It "begs to be touched," Lenovo panted. It'll also have an edge-to-edge glass palm rest with an encased touchpad that uses haptic feedback, allowing for a much larger touchpad area. There's also a new ultrasonic fingerprint reader that'll work even if your finger is slightly wet, such as after you wash your hands -- which we're all doing a lot more of these days, right?

The Yoga 9i will also have a new keyboard with "soft-landing dome-design keypads" that promises a more comfortable, bouncier typing experience, which is saying something since the C940's keyboard was already more comfortable than most. Its updated soundbar hinge will have improved audio, which, like the keyboard, was already pretty great. You can also expect enhancements to everything from screen options to ports (Thunderbolt 4!) to improved cooling to the tip of its included active pen for a better feel when writing on the screen. Most of these features, including the leather cover, carry over to the Lenovo IdeaPad 9i Slim laptop. The IdeaPad also gets a sensor that automatically adjusts its keyboard's backlight for your room's lighting conditions as well as a kill switch for its webcam. (The Yoga 9i has a physical privacy shutter for its webcam.) [...] The 14-inch Yoga 9i with the metal lid will start at $1,399 or $1,699 for the leather lid. The 15-inch Yoga 9i will start at $1,799. All three are expected in October. The IdeaPad 9i Slim is expected in November starting at $1,599.

An anonymous reader writes: The fact that Apple is moving away from Intel to ARM has been making a lot of headlines recently — but that's not the only new place where ARM CPUs have been making a splash.

ARM has also been turning heads in High Performance Computing (HPC), and an ARM-based system is now the world's most powerful supercomputer (Fugaku). AWS recently made their 2nd generation ARM Graviton chips available which allows everyone to test HPC workloads on ARM silicon. A company called The Numerical Algorithms Group recently published a small benchmark study that compared weather simulations on Intel, AMD and ARM instances on AWS and reported that although the ARM silicon is slowest, it is also the cheapest for this benchmark.
The benchmark test concludes the ARM processor provides "a very cost-efficient solution...and performance is competitive to other, more traditional HPC processors."

"The blast was over 3,000 times bigger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima," reports Smithsonian magazine: Hydrogen bombs are so destructive, their impact has been described as unthinkable throughout history. Recently declassified Russian footage of the 1961 Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb test shows why. The 40-minute documentary, which was posted on YouTube on August 20, shows footage of the largest bomb ever detonated on Earth, Thomas Nilsen reports for the Barents Observer.

Video footage shows the blast from several angles, sometimes struggling to show the entire mushroom cloud in the frame. Later, the documentary compares the ice-covered archipelago before the blast to the scorched, red and brown landscape left behind afterward. The Soviet Union tested the 50-million-ton hydrogen bomb, officially named RDS-220 and nicknamed Tsar Bomba, in late October 1961, Matthew Gault reports for Vice. This test occured during the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States competed to build the largest and most destructive nuclear weapons.

"There was a megatonnage race — who was going to have a bigger bomb," atomic age historian Robert S. Norris tells the New York Times' William Broad. "And the Soviets won...." It was three times as large as the biggest bomb ever detonated by the U.S., dubbed Castle Bravo.
schwit1 shares more information from Popular Mechanics: It's difficult to truly get across how powerful RDS-220 was. The mushroom cloud reached an altitude of 210,000 feet, and people observed the flash through bad weather at 621 miles. An observer felt heat from the explosion at a distance of 168 miles, and the bomb was capable of inflicting third-degree burns at 62 miles.

Tesla, Ford, Honda, Daimler, and Intel have asked America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to fight a recent court ruling in favour of Qualcomm, reports the BBC: Qualcomm has a practice of requiring customers to sign patent licence agreements before selling them chips. Such practices have drawn accusations the firm is stifling competition... According to Glyn Moody, a journalist specialising in tech policy, the car industry is bothered by Qualcomm's patent practices because "cars are essentially becoming computers on wheels", as the industry continues to develop more advanced connected cars. In the future, it is hoped that connected cars will use 5G processors to connect them to the internet. Carmakers have seen this battle over 4G and are worried it will cement the firm's position as the battle for dominance over 5G technology advances.

"This is a completely different world than the one [carmakers] are used to, so they're suddenly faced with dealing with computer standards and computer patents, which is a big problem for them as they don't have any. So if they have to start licensing this stuff, it's going to get expensive for them," Mr. Moody told the BBC...

Prof Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School is director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology. He has been following Qualcomm's various court cases for several years. "Qualcomm made a commitment that it would licence its chips on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, because they wanted their chips to be included in the industry standards, and then they created a structure to avoid doing this," he said.

"I think they are in fact violating the antitrust laws."

Heart44 writes: There is a lot of C-14 radioactive waste from graphite rods that is expensive to store. This graphite can be converted to C-14 diamonds covered in C-12 diamonds. C-14 has a half-life of 5,700 years, so such batteries would last a long time and are supposedly safe. Sounds like an April fool but...
New Atlas considers the possibilities: ...what you get is a tiny miniature power generator in the shape of a battery that never needs charging — and that NDB says will be cost-competitive with, and sometimes significantly less expensive than — current lithium batteries. That equation is helped along by the fact that some of the suppliers of the original nuclear waste will pay NDB to take it off their hands. Radiation levels from a cell, NDB tells us, will be less than the radiation levels produced by the human body itself, making it totally safe for use in a variety of applications... The company claims to have completed a proof of concept, and is ready to begin building its commercial prototype once its labs reopen after COVID shutdown. A low-powered commercial version is expected to hit the market in less than two years, and the high-powered version is projected for five years' time...

NDB speaks of low- and high-power versions of the cell in development, but until we see some output figures the claims are still hazy, and until we see some proof, they're just claims, and we're still waiting to hear back from the company. We'll keep you updated.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Solar cells can now be made so thin, light and flexible that they can rest on a soap bubble. The new cells, which efficiently capture energy from light, could offer an alternative way to power novel electronic devices, such as medical skin patches, where conventional energy sources are unsuitable. Until now, ultrathin organic solar cells were typically made by spin-coating or thermal evaporation, which are not scalable and which limit device geometry. This technique involved using a transparent and conductive, but brittle and inflexible, material called indium tin oxide (ITO) as an electrode. To overcome these limitations, the team applied inkjet printing. "We formulated functional inks for each the layer of the solar cell architecture," says Daniel Corzo, a Ph.D. student in Baran's team.

Instead of ITO, the team printed a transparent, flexible, conductive polymer called PEDOT:PSS, or poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate. The electrode layers sandwiched a light-capturing organic photovoltaic material. The whole device could be sealed within parylene, a flexible, waterproof, biocompatible protective coating. [...] After optimizing the ink composition for each layer of the device, the solar cells were printed onto glass to test their performance. They achieved a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 4.73 percent, beating the previous record of 4.1 percent for a fully printed cell. For the first time, the team also showed that they could print a cell onto an ultrathin flexible substrate, reaching a PCE of 3.6 percent. The research has been published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.