"I heard the 'pop!' from my living room as a brand-new pack of Amazon batteries spontaneously exploded on the kitchen counter, oozing a gritty black substance in fits and spurts," reports the staff writer for Medium's new tech site, OneZero. But that was just the beginning of a larger mystery, according to their article (shared by Slashdot reader peterthegreat321): The small, unassuming item is one of Amazon's most popular "in-house" products sold under the AmazonBasics label. With nearly 20,000 customer reviews, its popularity dwarfs that of most other AmazonBasics items, which include electronics, homewares, and random odds and ends. The batteries are also highly rated -- had I received a defective set? I scoured the comments page for the alkaline battery for reviews containing the word "explode," revealing dozens of experiences like mine. One person said the batteries had burst in their wife's breast pump. Others had toys and appliances ruined by leaky fluid. Some customers blamed this on alleged Chinese manufacturing, but Amazon vaguely claims in the product's description that they are "made in Indonesia using Japanese technology."

Over the past month, I have tried to uncover the hidden life cycle of this simple AmazonBasics battery. Amazon is fiercely secretive about its corporate footprint and masks its operations through a discreet network of outsourcing, making its supply chain hard to unravel. Its AA battery is no different. The product is indeed made in Indonesia, but not by Amazon, I learned. The company buys the batteries from a supplier and reskins them as its own, much like Trader Joe's and its eponymous food brand. Amazon has never voluntarily divulged the sources of AmazonBasics items, but it confirmed OneZero's reporting on where its AA batteries come from.

Though I discovered where the batteries were made, I was unable to locate the source of their materials, for example. The difficulty in understanding the supply chain of even a simple component shows how Amazon's operations are deliberately designed to be a black box. This secrecy allows the commercial titan to be ruthlessly competitive, delivering cheaper items faster than rival stores. But it also makes it harder for consumers who wonder whether their purchases are ethically or sustainably sourced to even begin finding answers. Beyond obscuring why merchandise might be defective -- or explosive, in my case -- it hinders those of us who just want to know: Where does it all begin?
The article eventually determines that Tokyo-based Fujitsu is a "covert supplier" for AmazonBasics, operating out of "a plain white building in West Java, Indonesia." Medium's reporter also notes that Fujitsu's sustainability report "shows that its Indonesian operations are among the dirtiest, ranking the highest on waste production..."

But unfortunately, "I never discovered why my AmazonBasics batteries exploded."

Thelasko shared Sandia's report: Ducted fuel injection, developed by Chuck Mueller at Sandia's Combustion Research Facility, is able to fine-tune the amount of diesel used in an engine to the point of eliminating between 50 and 100% of the soot... [H]e and his team, Christopher Nilsen, Drummond Biles and Nathan Harry, began experiments that have now resulted in an assembly of four to six small tubes, or ducts, directing fuel mixture from the injector right to the points of ignition. Chuck said that injectors in a traditional diesel engine create local mixtures containing 3-10 times more fuel than is needed for complete combustion. "When you have that much excess fuel at high temperature, you tend to produce a lot of soot," he said...

"Soot is second only to carbon dioxide in climate change, and it's toxic, so its emissions should be minimized," Chuck said. "In the past, there's always been this problem called the soot/nitrogen oxides trade-off. That is: when you do something to lower soot, emissions of nitrogen oxides -- or NOx -- go up, and vice versa... Now that we've got soot out of the way, there's no more soot/NOx trade-off," he said. "So we can add dilution -- taking some of the engine exhaust and routing it back to the intake -- to get rid of NOx without soot emissions becoming a problem. It's like a two-for-one deal on reducing pollutants... This gives us a path to much lower emissions for diesel engines, solving a long-standing problem for this highly efficient technology," he said.
The article also notes that two major diesel engine manufacturers, Ford and Caterpillar, "recently signed a cooperative research and development agreement with Sandia to help advance the technology."

iFixit's teardown of Apple's latest AirPods reveals just how difficult it will be to fix them if they break. "The organization awarded the noise-canceling buds a big fat zero repairability score, noting that their 'non-modular, glued-together design and lack of replacement parts makes repair both impractical and uneconomical,'" reports The Verge. "That's the same score as both versions of the original AirPods." From the report: The teardown does reveal a couple of interesting details about the design of the earbuds. First is the fact that they're a whole third heavier than the original AirPods, thanks to new features like active noise-cancellation, and an inward-facing microphone. The teardown also notes that the one user-replaceable part of the earbuds, the silicone ear-tip, uses a custom design that makes them incompatible with third-party models. That said, the popularity of the AirPods all but guarantees other companies will be making third-party tips soon. Most intriguing is the discovery of a watch-style battery inside each earbud. iFixit notes that it's a similar battery to what it found in Samsung's Galaxy Buds which could be replaced. However, the same is not true of the AirPods Pro, whose battery is tethered by a soldered cable. TL;DR: If your $249 AirPods Pro die you'll have to send them back to Apple for recycling, or take part in Apple's "battery service" program at a cost of $49-per-earbud out of warranty.

ted_pikul writes: Penn State University researchers report in the journal Joule that they've designed an electric battery that can charge an EV for 200 miles in about 10 minutes. The key to their approach is quickly heating the nickel foil-covered battery to a high temperature and more slowly cooling it to ambient temperatures. The researchers report that in addition to the fast charging time, this approach mitigated performance-draining "battery plaque" that can build up on batteries.

MojoKid writes: As the "S" in its name implies, the new Intel Core i9-9900KS that launched today is something akin to a Special Edition version of the company's existing Core i9-9900K 8-core CPU. The processors are built from the same slab of silicon -- an 8-core, Coffee Lake-refresh based die and packaged up for Intel's LGA1151 socket. What makes the Core i9-9900KS different from its predecessor are its base and turbo boost clocks, which are rated for 4GHz and 5GHz across all-cores, respectively, with enhanced binning of the chips to meet its performance criteria. The Core i9-9900KS is arguably the fastest processor available right now for single and lightly-threaded workloads, and offers the highest performance in gaming and graphics tests. In more heavily-threaded workloads that can leverage all of the additional processing resources available in a 12-core CPU like the Ryzen 9-3900X, however, the 8-core Intel Core i9-9900KS doesn't fare as well. It did catch AMD's 12-core Threadripper 2920X, which is based on the previous-gen Zen+ architecture, on a couple of occasions, however. Intel's new Core i9-9900KS desktop processor is available starting today at $513 MSRP.

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA is expanding its GeForce GTX family of GPUs today with a pair of new Turing-based graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 1660 Super and GeForce GTX 1650 Super. As their mode numbers suggest, these new cards reside above their "non-Super" branded counterparts in NVIDIA's line-up, but a notch below GeForce GTX Ti variants. The GeForce GTX 1660 Super is somewhat of a cross between standard GTX 1660 and a 1660 Ti. The GeForce GTX 1660 Super has a similar number of CUDA cores and texture units to the vanilla GTX 1660, but with faster 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory. The GeForce GTX 1660 Super has higher GPU and memory clocks than a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, however. In its price range, the GeForce GTX 1660 Super appears to be a solid value. Its gaming performance is strong, especially at 1080p resolution and generally faster than AMD's Radeon RX 590. The cards are also power-efficient, cool and quiet, and the GPUs are significantly overclockable as well. GeForce GTX 1660 Super cards should be available at retail today for around $230, with GTX 1650 Super on its way late next month.

Microsoft officials said the company's Azure Sphere microcontroller (MCU) and associated cloud security service will be generally available in February 2020. From a report: Microsoft also introduced new branding today for the ThreadX RTOS technology it acquired when it bought Express Logic in April 2019. Going forward, this product will be known as Azure RTOS. ThreadX is one of the most-deployed real-time operating systems in the world. Today, Microsoft said that Renesesas, a major microcontroller manufacturer, announced that Azure RTOS will be be broadly available across its products, including the Synergy and RA MCU families. Microsoft has been working for at least a couple of years to secure low-cost Internet-connected devices. Microsoft Research's "Project Sopris" was all about creating a highly secure microcontroller. That project morphed into Azure Sphere, which Microsoft announced in April 2018. The first Azure Sphere chip was the MediaTek MT3620, which included an onboard security subsystem MIcrosoft christened "Pluton." The Azure Sphere OS included a Microsoft-developed custom Linux kernel, plus secured application containers.

Gartner research has announced 10 "strategic technology trends that will drive significant disruption and opportunity over the next 5 to 10 years." And the trends include "hyperautomation" -- applying advanced technologies like AI and machine learning to tasks "that once required humans," combining robotic process automation with intelligent business management software to provide "real-time, continuous intelligence about the organization...with a goal of increasingly AI-driven decision making."

They also predict "autonomous things," including drones, appliances, robots, and even ships, sometimes working in collaborative swarms, that "exploit AI to perform tasks usually done by humans." Trend #6 is "the empowered edge," where IoT devices become the foundation for "smart spaces" that move services and applications closer to where they're actually used, creating a world of smart buildings and city spaces. Plus, they're also predicting a movement from centralized public clouds to distributed public clouds which allow data centers to be located anywhere. ("This solves both technical issues like latency and also regulatory challenges like data sovereignty.")

Trend #10 looks at the possibility of AI-enhanced security solutions -- and AI-powered security threats -- as well as the need to provide security for our new AI-powered systems. But they also envision a trend that "replaces technology-literate people with people-literate technology" providing sophisticated "multiexperiences" though "multisensory and multitouchpoint interfaces like wearables and advanced computer sensors." They even predict "fully-scalable" blockchain by 2023, while also predicting its impact on the economy will be felt through integrations with "complementary technologies" like AI and IoT. ("For example, a car would be able to negotiate insurance prices directly with the insurance company based on data gathered by its sensors.")

Trend #3 is "Democratization of technology" (or "citizen access"), a prediction which includes "AI-driven development" of data science models for automated testing. And interestingly, trend #5 is transparency and traceability: The evolution of technology is creating a trust crisis. As consumers become more aware of how their data is being collected and used, organizations are also recognizing the increasing liability of storing and gathering the data. Additionally, AI and ML are increasingly used to make decisions in place of humans, evolving the trust crisis and driving the need for ideas like explainable AI and AI governance.

This trend requires a focus on six key elements of trust: Ethics, integrity, openness, accountability, competence and consistency.
Trend #4 even predicts humans will merge with technology. "[W]hat if scientists could augment the brain to increase memory storage, or implant a chip to decode neural patterns? What if exoskeletons became a standard uniform for autoworkers, enabling them to lift superhuman weights? What if doctors could implant sensors to track how drugs travel inside a body...?"

"First the first time, hundreds of watts of power were wirelessly transmitted hundreds of meters [video], with an integrated system that ensured the safety of operators and bystanders," writes an anonymous Slashdot reader -- sharing a new press release from the U.S. Naval Research Lab. "This could be the first step towards drones that never have to land..."

According to the Navy, the power transmitted came from "an electrical outlet in the building": On one end of the of the testing facility -- one of the largest test facilities for model ships in the world -- the receiver was converting the laser energy to DC power, which an inverter was turning into AC power to run lights, several laptops, and a coffeemaker that the organizers were using to make coffee for the attendees, or 'laser lattes'...

At NRL, Paul Jaffe, an electronics engineer with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has been conducting space-based solar energy research for more than a decade... According to Jaffe, power beaming could also make possible the transmission of power from solar-energy-collecting satellites in space to the ground, wherever it's needed... Imagine using it to send power to locations that are remote, hard to reach or lack infrastructure, he suggested.

Today the Ocean Cleanup unveiled its new "Interceptor" solar-powered robot to collect waste plastic from rivers before it can enter the ocean, Fast Company reports: The system was designed by the nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup, which spent the past four years secretly developing and testing the technology while it continued to work on its main project -- a device that can capture plastic trash once it's already in the ocean. The nonprofit unveiled the Interceptor at an event in Rotterdam today.

The ocean's plastic trash problem often starts in rivers: Every year, as much as 2.4 million metric tons of plastic flows from rivers to the sea, the nonprofit estimates. Most of that trash comes from rivers in Asia, in cities where recycling infrastructure is often inadequate. Around 1% of the world's rivers, or 1,000 rivers in total, are responsible for the majority of the trash entering the ocean...

The new technology is designed to anchor to a riverbed, out of the path of passing boats. Like the system that the nonprofit designed for the ocean, which uses a large barrier that blocks part of the river to collect plastic as it floats by, the Interceptor has a floating barrier that directs trash into the system. The device is positioned where the greatest amount of plastic flows, and another device can be placed farther down the river to catch trash that might escape the first Interceptor. A conveyor belt pulls the trash out of the water, and an autonomous system distributes it into dumpsters on a separate barge, sending an alert to local operators when the system is full and ready to be taken to a recycler. The system runs on solar power. In a typical day, it might extract as much as 50,000 kilograms of trash; depending on the currents, tides, and how much plastic is in a given river, The Ocean Cleanup estimates it could theoretically collect as much as 100,000 kilograms [220,462 pounds]...

Since it runs autonomously, it needs little human interaction and also doesn't require humans to sort through potentially dangerous debris collected from the water. It's designed to be mass-produced. The nonprofit aims to deploy it into all of the most polluting rivers in the next five years... "We project that we can remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040, and to truly rid the world's oceans of plastic we must do two things: cleanup legacy plastic and stop it from entering the ocean," they wrote in a press release. "Both are necessary to achieve this mission..."

"Whereas the fossil fuel industry employs about 900,000 people in the U.S., green economy jobs -- those associated with non-oil energy -- number about 9.5 million," writes long-time Slashdot reader DavidHumus, citing a new study by two researchers at University College London.

On Ars Technica the study's authors shared their analysis of America's emerging green economy: According to new data, by 2016 it was generating more than $1.3 trillion in annual revenue and employed approximately 9.5 million people -- making it the largest green market in the world. It has been growing rapidly, too -- between 2013 and 2016, both the industry's value and employment figures grew by 20%... Our study estimates that revenue in the global green economy was $7.87 trillion in 2016. At $1.3 trillion, the U.S. made up 16.5% of the global market -- the largest in the world.

Our analysis also suggests that in the U.S., nearly ten times more people were employed in the green economy and its supply chains (9.5 million) than employed directly in the fossil fuel industry (roughly 1 million) -- that is, miners, electricity grid workers, infrastructure manufacturers, and construction workers. This wide gap comes despite the U.S. fossil fuel industry receiving huge subsidies, estimated at $649 billion in 2015 alone.

The New Hampshire State House rejected the Digital Fair Repair Act earlier this week in part thanks to a representative who seems to think that cell phones are literally garbage that no one should bother repairing. From a report: The bill would have forced manufacturers such as Apple to share repair manuals and parts with independent repair stores. House members didn't kill the bill, but sent it back to committee for a year of interim study, citing security concerns and, in the words of Rep. John Potucek (R-Derry) the ubiquity, cheapness, and -- in his opinion -- disposability of new smart phones. "In the near future, cellphones are throwaways," Potucek said, according to New Hampshire Business Review. "Everyone will just get a new one."

That is, of course, the problem that right to repair is trying to solve. The new iPhone 11 costs between $699 and $1,349. And it can be hard to find one at the moment. Google's Pixel 4 costs between $799 and $999. Manufacturers seal smartphones to make it difficult to replace the battery and do basic repairs. Often, getting repairs through the company is so expensive that people simply purchase a new phone. Apple's repair monopoly is so dominant that it's the center of an investigation by the United States House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Google launches its Stadia streaming service on November 19 (for some pre-orderers, at least), it will only include titles that are also available on standard PCs and consoles. Going forward, though, the company says it's going to focus on first-party exclusives "that wouldn't be possible on any other platform." That's how Google head of Stadia Games and Entertainment Jade Raymond (well-known as one of the creators of Assassin's Creed) summarized the company's plans in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Google announced today that its first first-party game development studio would be located in Montreal, and Raymond told GI that studio will be focused on trying things that other dedicated game platforms can't do.

Part of that promise, Raymond says, is the ability to use Google's distributed data center hardware to perform real-time calculations that can't be done on even the most powerful home hardware. "A fully physics-simulated game is one of the Holy Grails of game creation since Trespasser was being imagined 20-something years ago, and now we finally have a platform where we'll be able to deliver some of those experiences," Raymond said, making reference to the overly ambitious failure of 1998's Jurassic Park: Trespasser. That distributed server technology could also aid in the performance and scale of MMOs, Raymond said, because "everyone [on Stadia] is essentially playing in one big LAN party as far as the tech is concerned. There is no difference or constraints from an architecture perspective of how far the users are, or worrying about replication and all the other things that typically limit the number of people you can have in a game." Raymond went on to say that she foresees story-based Stadia games with characters that have "believable human interactions" rather than canned lines of repeated language. "She also talked up the potential to watch a YouTube documentary that includes footage of a classic game, then jump into a Stadia-powered gameplay session with that game directly," reports Ars Technica.

Reddit users have discovered that the Pixel 4's 90Hz refresh rate drops to 60Hz when the display brightness falls below 75 percent. This means that you're only getting the full 90Hz display rate when the brightness level is high. The Verge reports: It's not clear why Google has chosen the 75 percent mark, but droidlife has discovered you can head into the developer settings and force the 90Hz setting to always be enabled regardless of brightness levels. This will likely impact the battery life, which is something you'll want to consider before forcing the 90Hz display to always-on. Other 90Hz OLED Android phones like the OnePlus 7T keep the display running at its max 90Hz all of the time, but Google has stated it will automatically switch the display refresh rate on the Pixel 4 "for some content." Google issued a statement explaining its decision to limit the refresh rate, adding that it will issue an update in the coming weeks that will allow 90Hz in more brightness conditions.

Here's the full statement: "We designed Smooth Display so that users could enjoy the benefits of 90Hz for improved UI interactions and content consumption, while also preserving battery when higher refresh rates are not critical by lowering back down to 60Hz. In some conditions or situations, however, we set the refresh rate to 60Hz. Some of these situations include: when the user turns on battery saver, certain content such as video (as it's largely shot at 24 or 30fps), and even various brightness or ambient conditions. We constantly assess whether these parameters lead to the best overall user experience. We have previously planned updates that we'll roll out in the coming weeks that include enabling 90hz in more brightness conditions."

As for whether or not 90Hz has a serious impact on battery life, YouTube Tech Reviewer Matthew Moniz reports only a marginal difference.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Microsoft's contracts with European Union institutions do not fully protect data in line with EU law, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) said in initial findings published on Monday. The EDPS, the EU's data watchdog, opened an investigation in April to assess whether contracts between Microsoft and EU institutions such as the European Commission fully complied with the bloc's data protection rules. "Though the investigation is still ongoing, preliminary results reveal serious concerns over compliance of the relevant contractual terms with data protection rules and the role of Microsoft as a processor for EU institutions using its products and services," the EDPS says in a statement. "We are committed to helping our customers comply with GDPR, Regulation 2018/1725 and other applicable laws," a Microsoft spokesman said. "We are in discussions with our customers in the EU institutions and will soon announce contractual changes that will address concerns such as those raised by the EDPS."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Information: There are a lot of ways companies can rack up high bills for using cloud services, sometimes unexpectedly. One particularly stiff expense is the cost of shifting data from one cloud provider's servers to another provider, or to a company's own data center. The Information has learned just how much some companies have had to pay for these "data transfer" costs, as they're called. The chart above shows how much 10 of the top customers of Amazon Web Services -- the dominant cloud provider -- paid for data transfer services in 2017 and 2018. The chart, which is based on internal AWS sales figures obtained by The Information, show that data transfer charges for one customer, Apple, approached $50 million in 2017. That represented about 6.5% of Apple's total AWS bill of $775 million for that year, the sales figures show. Seven of the 10 companies saw increases of at least 50% in their AWS data transfer bills last year compared to the year before. The reason for the high bills could "stem from growth in the number of users on a company's web service, longer-than-average usage sessions and the addition of data-intensive features such as video," the report says.

mpol writes: Phoronix published an interview with former Purism CTO Zlatan Todoric who left Purism in September 2018. The story hints quite strongly at chaotic situations over at Purism. He started at the company in 2015, when it was a small outfit, and steered it into the bigger company that it is now. To him the smartphone development for the Librem 5 was a mistake and way too early. He has high hopes for the Pinephone, who according to him are doing things right. The first "Aspen" batch of the Purism Librem 5 are supposed to be shipping, though seemingly only people related to Purism are showing off their devices.

Japanese hotel chain HIS Group has apologized for ignoring warnings that its in-room robots were hackable to allow pervs to remotely view video footage from the devices. The Register reports: The Henn na Hotel is staffed by robots: guests can be checked in by humanoid or dinosaur reception bots before proceeding to their room. Facial recognition tech will let customers into their room and then a bedside robot will assist with other requirements. However several weeks ago a security researcher revealed on Twitter that he had warned HIS Group in July about the bed-bots being easily accessible, noting they sported "unsigned code" allowing a user to tap an NFC tag to the back of robot's head and allow access via the streaming app of their choice.

Having heard nothing, the researcher made the hack public on October 13. The vulnerability allows guests to gain access to cameras and microphones in the robot remotely so they could watch and listen to anyone in the room in the future. The hotel is one of a chain of 10 in Japan which use a variety of robots instead of meat-based staff. So far the reference is only to Tapia robots at one hotel, although it is not clear if the rest of the chain uses different devices. The HIS Group tweeted: "We apologize for any uneasiness caused," according to the Tokyo Reporter. The paper was told that the company had decided the risks of unauthorized access were low, however, the robots have now been updated.

A British engineering and manufacturing firm called Geomiq has put out a call for people interested in being the face of a new "state-of-the-art humanoid" it's developing with an unnamed company. The lucky winner with the "kind and friendly" face that the company is looking for will receive $130,000. CNET reports: "The company is searching for a 'kind and friendly' face to be the literal face of the robot once it goes into production," Geomiq says in a blog post about the project. "This will entail the selected person's face being reproduced on potentially thousands of versions of the robots worldwide." The robot line has been in the works for five years, Geomiq says, and will result in a companion for seniors.

The blog post doesn't share age or gender parameters, only asking people who want to license their face to submit a photo via email for the chance at about $130,000. Candidates who make it to the "next phase" will apparently get full details on the project. The secrecy, Geomiq says, is due to a non-disclosure agreement it's signed with the robot's designer and investors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechncia: UK engineer and former Royal Navy officer Trevor Jackson began experimenting with aluminum air batteries at his workshop in the Cornish town of Callington in 2001. At that time, the electrolyte used was extremely caustic and poisonous. After years of experimentation, Jackson devised a new electrolyte -- whose composition is a closely guarded secret -- he says make it possible for his invention to power an electric car for up to 1,500 miles. What happens when it runs out of juice? You replace it with a new one while the old one gets recycled. At the beginning of the electric car era when charging infrastructure was nonexistent, the idea of swapping spent batteries for fully charged new ones was considered feasible. Jackson says such a thing could be the future, with his batteries/fuel cells sold at grocery stores and retail outlets. He says the process of disconnecting the old one and connecting the new one will take about 90 seconds.

[A]n independent evaluation by the UK Trade and Investment agency in 2017 said Jackson's invention was a "very attractive battery" based on "well established'" technology, and that it produced much more energy per kilogram than standard electric vehicle types, according to a report in the Daily Mail. A Tesla Model S can drive up to 370 miles on a single charge. Jackson says if you drove the same car with an aluminum-air cell that weighed the same as the Tesla's lithium-ion battery, it would have a range of 2,700 miles. Aluminum-air cells also take up less space. If that same Tesla were fitted with an aluminum-air fuel cell the same size as its current battery, it could run non-stop for 1,500 miles. The report goes on to say that Jackson just signed a multi-million dollar deal with Austin Electric, which will begin putting thousands of the batteries into electric vehicles next year.

"Austin Electric has three targets for the new batteries -- the three-wheeled tuk-tuks used for transportation in many countries such as Pakistan, electric bicycles with far more range than current models, and a program that will convert front wheel drive cars with internal combustion engines into hybrids by fitting aluminum-air batteries and motors to drive the rear wheels," reports CleanTechnica. "Jackson expects the conversion operation to start next year. He says the cost of each conversion will be [...] about $4,000."