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.

Earlier today, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink's brain link device working in a pig named Gertrude. While the science and the device itself were front-and-center at the presentation, the surgical robot the company debuted is equally as important because it's designed to handle the full surgical installation process. "That includes opening up the scalp, removing a portion of the skull, inserting the hundreds of 'thread' electrodes 6mm deep along with the accompanying chip, then closing the incision," reports CNET. TechCrunch takes a closer look at the robot: The rounded polycarbonate sci-fi design of the brain surgeon bot looks like something out of the Portal franchise, but it's actually the creation of Vancouver-based industrial design firm Woke Studio. To be clear, Musk's engineers and scientists have created the underlying technology, but Woke built the robot's look and user experience, as well as the behind-the-ear communication end piece that Neuralink has shown in prior presentations. Neuralink's bot features clean white (required for ensuring sterility, per Woke), arcing lines and smooth surfaces for a look that at once flags its advanced technical capabilities, but also contains some soothing and more approachable elements, which is wise considering what the machine is intended to do.

Woke says the Neuralink surgical robot can be separated into three main parts: The head, the body and base. The head of the robot is that helmet-like piece, which actually holds the head of the patient. It also includes a guide for the surgical needle, as well as embedded cameras and sensors to map the patent's brain. The intent of the design of this piece, which includes a mint-colored interior, is to give the robot "an anthroprmorphic characteristic" that helps distract from the invasive nature of the procedure. There are also single-use disposable bags that line the interior of the helmet for sterile operation. The Neuralink robot also has a "body," that humped rear assembly, which includes all the parts responsible for the motion of the robot as it sets up from the procedure. The third element is the base, which basically keeps the whole thing from tipping over, and apparently also contains the computing brains of the brain-bot itself.

With a pig named Gertrude, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink's technology to build a digital link between brains and computers. A wireless link from the Neuralink device showed the pig's activity activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage Friday night. CNET reports: The demonstration shows the the technology to be significantly closer to delivering on Musk's radical ambitions than during a 2019 product debut, when Neuralink only showed photos of a rat with a Neuralink connected via a USB-C port. It's still far from reality, but Musk said the US Food and Drug Administration in July granted approval for "breakthrough device" testing. Musk also showed a second-generation device that's more compact and that fits into a small cavity hollowed out of a hole in a skull. "It's like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires," Musk said of the device. It communicates with brain cells with 1,024 thin electrodes that penetrate within brain cell.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last year, repair guide site iFixit tore down the Fairphone 3 and gave the modular-designed phone a rare perfect 10/10 repairability score. Today, Fairphone demonstrated just how far its philosophy of modular phone design can take its users by offering the massively upgraded cameras from its newly released Fairphone 3+ model to owners of the earlier Fairphone 3. Fairphone designs are noticeably bulkier than typical smartphone designs -- but they have a reason to be. Its components have been split into seven replaceable modules in order to extend the service life of each Fairphone. Battery getting weak? It's replaceable. Dropped your phone and broke the screen? Not only replaceable, but guaranteed replaceable -- and for reasonably technical end users, user-replaceable -- with easily purchased parts from the factory. The original Fairphone 3 launched with a 12 megapixel rear camera and an 8 megapixel front camera. The newly released Fairphone 3+ is essentially the same phone, but it offers a refresh on the camera modules, bringing the rear camera to 48 megapixels and the front to 16 megapixels. Owners of the original Fairphone 3 can upgrade by simply purchasing replacement modules from the Fairphone store and replacing them.

A nuclear energy venture founded by Bill Gates said Thursday it hopes to build small advanced nuclear power stations that can store electricity to supplement grids increasingly supplied by intermittent sources like solar and wind power. Reuters reports: The effort is part of the billionaire philanthropist's push to help fight climate change, and is targeted at helping utilities slash their emissions of planet-warming gases without undermining grid reliability. TerraPower LLC, which Gates founded 14 years ago, and its partner GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, plan to commercialize stations called Natrium in the United States later this decade, TerraPower's President and Chief Executive Chris Levesque said.

Levesque said the companies are seeking additional funding from private partners and the U.S. Energy Department, and that the project has the support of PacifiCorp, owned by billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, along with Energy Northwest and Duke Energy. If successful, the plan is to build the plants in the United States and abroad, Levesque said. By 2050 "we would see hundreds of these reactors around the world, solving multiple different energy needs," Levesque said. The 345-megawatt plants would be cooled by liquid sodium and cost about $1 billion each.

The new plants [...] are designed to complement a renewable power because they will store the reactor power in tanks of molten salt during days when the grid is well supplied. The nuclear power could be used later when solar and wind power are low due to weather conditions. Molten salt power storage has been used at thermal solar plants in the past, but leaks have plagued some of the projects. Levesque said the Natrium design would provide more consistent temperatures than a solar plant, resulting in less wear and tear.

Elon Musk has said that his secretive neurotech firm Neuralink will demonstrate a working "device," presumably a brain-machine interface, at 6PM ET on Friday. The Verge reports: Musk has spoken repeatedly about his belief that BMI devices are needed to help humans keep up with AI by supplementing our brainpower, but right now, his goal is much simpler: to create an implantable device that lets people control phones or computers with their mind. Musk initially announced the August 28th "progress update" back in July, and has now offered more details on what will be shown. He says the update will include the unveiling of a second-generation robot designed to attach the company's technology to the brain, and a demo of neurons "firing in real-time," though it's not clear exactly what is meant by this.

Even compared to Musk's other ventures like Tesla and SpaceX, Neuralink is ambitious. The company wants to connect to the brain using flexible electrodes thinner than a human hair that it calls "threads." Current BMI devices use stiff electrodes for this job, which can cause damage. But inserting flexible electrodes is a much more delicate and challenging task, hence the company's focus on building a "sewing machine" like robot to do the job. Eventually, Neuralink hopes to make the installation process for BMIs as non-invasive as Lasik eye surgery, even removing the need to use general anesthetic. Musk has previously spoken about the need for an automated Lasik-like process for BMIs to overcome the constraints and costs involved with needing to use highly trained neural surgeons. But this isn't ready to be shown off yet, according to Musk. "Still far from LASIK, but could get pretty close in a few years," Musk tweeted in response to a followup question about the event. Keep your eyes on the company's YouTube channel, where Neuralink will likely stream Friday's event.