As countries affected by the coronavirus pandemic expect to run out of ventilators and other equipment, makers are desperately trying to fill the gap with proposals for open-source, do-it-yourself devices. From a report: Most cases of COVID-19 -- the disease caused by the novel coronavirus -- do not require hospitalization. But for people hospitalized with severe infections, coronavirus damages their lungs and makes it hard to breathe in and circulate the amount of oxygen that their bodies need. Ventilators, machines that provide the lungs with oxygen, are proving to be key to treating these people, who seem to comprise around 10 percent of cases. Governments are already preparing for what a shortage of ventilators could do to their health care systems.

In a call to U.S. governors on Monday that was shared with The New York Times, President Donald Trump told states not to rely fully on the federal government for equipment. "Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment -- try getting it yourselves," he said, according to The Times. "We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself." Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CNN that the U.S. has stockpiled 12,700 ventilators, but in a worst-case scenario that number might not be enough. In Italy, he added, physicians are having to make "very tough decisions" about whom to treat.

MojoKid writes: Though Ryzen 4000 Series laptop processors aren't available just yet, some of AMD's partners are going to begin taking pre-orders for notebooks soon. As such, AMD is lifting the veil on additional details and the architectural enhancements that make Ryzen 4000 Series AMD's strongest mobile processor line-up to date. AMD Ryzen 4000 series CPUs are based on the Zen 2 architecture, similar to the current Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors. AMD is touting an approximate 25% IPC increase versus Zen 1-based mobile parts, but there are additional benefits that boost performance and efficiency throughout the chips as well. These are monolithic SoCs, with up to 8-cores / 16-threads, that are manufactured on TSMC's 7nm node. AMD is claiming 20% lower SoC power, 2X the perf-per-watt, 5X faster state switching, and an approximate 3.4X improvement in relative power efficiency, in comparison to its mobile platform from 2015. AMD is claiming superior single-thread CPU performance versus current-generation Intel mobile processors and significantly better multi-threaded and graphics performance versus Intel, thanks to the increased core / thread counts and integrated Vega-based GPU of its Ryzen 4000 series. Battery life performance is claimed be strong as well, due to architectural enhancements for power optimization throughout the Ryzen 4000 design. AMD Ryzen 4000 Series laptops should be shipping in market sometime in the next month or so.

Apple's A14 processor that's expected to debut this fall in Apple's iPhone 12 models is rumored to have a frequency reaching 3.1GHz. "This would be 400MHz higher than Apple's current A13 Bionic chip with a frequency of 2.7GHz," reports MacRumors. From the report: At such a frequency, the chip's Geekbench 5 running points have surged. The report mentions that the A14's single-core performance shows a score of 1658 (up 25% from the A13), and a multi-core score of 4612 points (up 33% from the A13). The extra processing power will be helpful in running simultaneous workflows, navigating through apps, and more. Apple chipmaker TSMC is expected to ramp up production of Apple's 5nm-based A14 chipsets in as early as April of this year. Also, according to 9to5Mac, Apple is reportedly planning to launch a new 5.5-inch entry-level iPhone with a solid state home button, Touch ID, and support for Apple Pay's Express Transit feature.

The 5.5-inch iPhone is expected to be priced $100 more than the 4.7-inch model that will start at $399, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. It's slated to launch at the end of March, but it's possible the launch will be delayed due to the coronavirus.

Volkswagen's chief strategist Michael Jost predicts their vehicle-to-grid electric car batteries could open up a new business opportunity: selling their electricity back to the power grid during peak demand. Reuters reports: "By 2025 we will have 350 gigawatt hours worth of energy storage at our disposal through our electric car fleet. Between 2025 and 2030 this will grow to 1 terawatt hours worth of storage," Jost told journalists in Berlin. "That's more energy than is currently generated by all the hydroelectric power stations in the world. We can guarantee that energy will be used and stored and this will be a new area of business."

The German carmaker is not alone in looking into this field. German utility E.ON has been working with Japanese carmaker Nissan to develop so-called vehicle-to-grid services.

"We don't often talk about power supplies, but Intel's new ATX12VO spec — that's an 'O' for 'Oscar,' not a zero — will start appearing soon in pre-built PCs from OEMs and system integrators, and it represents a major change in PSU design," reports PC World.

"The ATX12VO spec removes voltage rails from the power supply, all in a bid to improve efficiency standards on the PC and meet stringent government regulations. But while the spec essentially removes +3.3-volt, +5-volt and -12-volt and +5-volt standby power from the PSU, they aren't going away — they're just moving to the motherboard. That's the other big change..."

Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool explains: If those voltages are required, the motherboard is expected to supply it by converting 12V power. Removing those two rails will shrink the connector from 24 pin to 10 pin.

One of the main reasons is increased flexibility for future needs. That dependence on these separate rails has been reduced over time but current power supplies must dedicate a fixed amount to those rails. The example given is that a current 600W PS may only need 15% (90W) of total power dedicated to those rails but a decade ago may require 25% (150W). Switching to the MB supplying the power means more 12V power.

A benefit is power supplies will be cheaper to make and also more power efficient. With two fewer rails, there is fewer connectors and parts and power supply makers can focus on efficiency of just one rail.

After years of civil war, South Sudan is beginning to build the nation's electric sector from the ground up. "With only a handful of oil-fired power plants and crumbling poles and wires in place, the country is striving for a system that runs primarily on renewable energy and reaches more homes and businesses," reports IEEE Spectrum. From the report: Today, only about 1 percent of South Sudan's 12.5 million people can access the electric grid, according to the state-run utility. Many people use rooftop solar arrays or noisy, polluting diesel generators to keep the lights on; still many more are left in the dark. Those who can access the grid must pay some of the highest electricity rates in the world for a spotty and unreliable service. Recently, development banks and foreign companies have started backing projects to revitalize infrastructure and boost power generation amid a relatively tranquil time for the eight-year-old country. Most of the new investment has focused in and around Juba -- the nation's capital and largest city, with some 403,000 residents.

The work to restore South Sudan's electric sector began in earnest in late 2018, after South Sudan's President Salva Kiir reached a peace deal with rebel leader Riek Machar. (Earlier this year, Kiir appointed Machar as vice president.) Last November, South Sudan Electricity Corporation began operating the first section of Juba's rehabilitated distribution network. Power Construction Corporation of China strung up new 33-kilovolt lines, replacing the city's 11-kilovolt lines, a network that will eventually supply 20,000 additional customers in the capital city. The Chinese firm is also producing 13,450 prestressed concrete poles from a new facility in Juba. The African Development Bank has approved a US $14.6 million loan for the grid project. For now, however, most of Juba's residents are still using their own power supplies to run refrigerators or charge computers. The utility dismantled the old grid, and the upgraded system is proceeding slowly in phases.

A team of scientists led by Yi Cui, a materials scientist at Stanford, have created a new "fireproof" solid-state electrolyte for use in lithium-ion batteries. IEEE Spectrum reports: They used a flame-retardant material called decabromodiphenyl ethane, or DBDPE for short. To make their new solid-state electrolyte, the team first created a thin film by combining DBDPE with polyimide, a mechanical enforcer. Using polyimide has many advantages, says Wan. Apart from being "mechanically really strong," it boasts a high melting point (making it less likely that a short circuit will occur), a solutions-based manufacturing process (that's compatible with how batteries are made today), and it's inexpensive (3M even has film tapes made from it). The hitch, however, is that polyimide can't conduct ions. To get around this snag, Wan and his colleagues added two different polymers, polyethylene oxide (PEO) and lithium bistrifluoromethanesulfonylimide (LiTFSI), to the mix. "It's innovative -- they've smartly used co-polymers, which is a new way to solve the flammable polymer electrolyte battery problem," says Chunsheng Wang, a researcher who studies new battery technologies at the University of Maryland. The paper has been published in the journal Nano Letters.

Europe and Russia have decided to push back the launch of their joint robotic rover to Mars until 2022, rather than launch this year as originally planned. More testing is needed on the vehicle's parachutes ahead of the launch, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), and there isn't enough time to get all of that work done before the launch window in July and August. The Verge reports: This is the second major delay for the rover, which is a critical piece of the ExoMars mission -- a partnership program between ESA and Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos aimed at figuring out if Mars ever hosted life. Originally, the rover, named after the famous chemist Rosalind Franklin, was meant to launch in 2018, but it was pushed until 2020 due to delays in delivering the scientific payloads. Now, the parachutes needed to land the vehicle on Mars are to blame. Last year, two high-altitude drop tests here on Earth damaged the parachutes, with some even tearing while they inflated. ESA wants to do two additional parachute tests ahead of the mission, but they won't occur in time to allow a summer launch to happen.

Additionally, some of the electronics inside the vehicle that carries the rover down to the surface need to be returned to their suppliers for troubleshooting. The final software for the mission is also delayed, and engineers don't have enough time to test it out before the summer. And if that wasn't enough, Jan Worner, the director general of ESA, admitted that the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic is playing a role in the delay. [...] Now, the earliest option to launch the Rosalind Franklin rover is 2022, thanks to how Earth and Mars orbit the Sun. The two planets only skim close by one another every 26 months, giving scientists a limited window to launch spacecraft to the Red Planet. With a launch window opening up this summer, multiple countries including the US, China, and the United Arab Emirates are launching spacecraft to Mars. But since ExoMars cannot make the deadline, the next opportunity to launch is between August and October 2022.

While ESA and Roscosmos wait for 2022, the rover will go into storage, and engineers will lubricate the vehicle over the next two years to maintain all of its components. In the meantime, the Russian Proton rocket that will launch the rover and the vehicle's European carrier spacecraft are all ready to go and have no issues. So the Rosalind Franklin rover should be ready to go by 2022 if the upcoming tests go well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Following D-Wave's announcement of Leap 2, a new version of its quantum cloud service for building and deploying quantum computing applications, VentureBeat had the opportunity to sit down with Murray Thom, D-Wave's VP of software and cloud services. We naturally talked about Leap 2, including the improvements the company hopes it will bring for businesses and developers. But we also discussed the business applications D-Wave has already seen to date. Thom explained that D-Wave has seen success particularly with optimization and machine learning use cases. And he has the data to back it up: D-Wave's customer applications are about 50% optimization, 20% AI and ML, 10% materials science, and 20% other. Thom believes quantum computing and machine learning are "extremely well matched. The features the technology has and the needs of the field are very close."

"It's something I think is going to be a very productive use of the technology in the future because there's so many aspects of what the quantum computers can do in terms of the probabilistic sampling," Thom continued. "For optimization, the probabilistic sampling is like 'oh, I can do robust optimization with that.' But for machine learning it's essential for what you need to do. It's very hard to reproduce that with a classical computer and you get it natively from the quantum computer. So those features can't be accidental. It's just that it's going to take time for the community to find the right methods for incorporating it and then for the technology to insert into that space productively."

Reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple will launch MacBook models with an all-new design in the second or third quarter of 2021, but did not indicate whether these will be Pro or Air models. As MacRumors points out, "The last significant redesign of the MacBook Pro occurred in October 2016, while the MacBook Air received a major redesign in October 2018." From the report: In a research note today, obtained by MacRumors, Kuo said Apple plans to launch MacBook models with its own custom processors in the fourth quarter of 2020 or the first quarter of 2021. Kuo did not indicate whether these will be MacBook Pro or MacBook Air models, or both, nor did he share any further details. Rumors have suggested that Apple is working on custom Arm-based processors that would allow it to transition away from its current MacBook processor supplier Intel, which has occasionally experienced delays with its chips. The company is also planning to launch new MacBooks with scissor keyboards in the second quarter of 2020.

According to 9to5Google, Google is working on a native Chrome OS app for printing and scanning documents. From the report: While there are many ways to start printing on Chrome OS, there's no real way to see what you've currently got queued to print, when not using Cloud Print [which is shutting down at the end of the year]. This is particularly frustrating if you've accidentally printed a long document as there's no way to cancel. [...] Late last month, work began on a new "Print Management app," starting with a Chrome OS specific flag in chrome://flags. Print Management is still in the early stages of development but we know that, like many Chrome OS apps, it'll be a web-based System Web App (SWA), which you can launch from the printers section of the main Settings app. Inside, you'll see a list of your recent printing attempts, including useful information like the job's name, what time it started, whether it succeeded, and which printer it was sent to.

And then, of course, on the flip side of working with paper documents is scanning, which is by no means easy to do on Chrome OS. Thankfully, Print Management will also include a UI for scanning documents and photos. The Chromium team is already working on this behind yet another flag.

According to research published in the journal Physical Review Letters, permanent magnets akin to those used on refrigerators could speed the development of fusion energy. Phys.Org reports: In principle, such magnets can greatly simplify the design and production of twisty fusion facilities called stellarators, according to scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. PPPL founder Lyman Spitzer Jr. invented the stellarator in the early 1950s. Most stellarators use a set of complex twisted coils that spiral like stripes on a candy cane to produce magnetic fields that shape and control the plasma that fuels fusion reactions. Refrigerator-like permanent magnets could produce the hard part of these essential fields, the researchers say, allowing simple, non-twisted coils to produce the remaining part in place of the complex coils.

Rare earth magnets have surprising and useful properties. They generate quite powerful fields for the magnets' small size, and these are "hard" fields that are almost unaffected by other fields nearby. These magnets could thus provide what physicists call the "poloidal" part of a spiraling stellarator field, while simple round coils could provide the "toroidal" part that makes up the rest of the field. Permanent magnets are always "on" in sharp contrast to the standard electromagnetic coils that stellarators and tokamaks use. Such coils create magnetic fields when an electric current runs through them -- current that requires power supplies that permanent magnets do not need. Other advantages of the use of permanent magnets to simplify stellarator coils include: Lower cost than hand-crafted electromagnets; Creation of ample space between the simplified coils to facilitate maintenance; Ability to reposition the magnets to create a variety of shapes for the magnetic fields; and Reduced engineering and manufacturing risks. Permanent magnets have disadvantages, too. "You can't turn them off," physicist Per Helander said, which means they can pull in anything they can attract within range. They also produce limited maximum field strength, he said. Nonetheless, such magnets "can be great for creating experiments on the way to a reactor," he added, "and stronger permanent magnets may become available."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: More than two years after winning an electricity bet, Elon Musk's resulting Australian solar and wind farm is an almost total success. The facility powers rural South Australia, whose population density falls between Wyoming and Alaska, the two least dense U.S. states. In 2016, South Australia experienced a near total blackout after "an apocalyptic storm -- involving 80,000 lightning strikes and at least two tornadoes," Vox explains. In the aftermath, a Conservative politician blamed the push for renewable energy for the extent of the blackouts. For those even passingly familiar with Musk and Tesla's online presence, the rest won't be surprising. The head of batteries at Tesla said he was sure the company could do better, an Australian billionaire asked if he was serious, and Musk jumped in to promise his team was. The rest is history. Musk reached his goal 40 days early, and the Australian billionaire funded the project as promised. We can argue about whether or not private citizens should have to rely on a billionaire angel investor to get a steady supply of power or make the shift to renewable energy, but in this case, the bet benefited a shortchanged rural population beginning almost immediately.
[...]
Just 1.7 million people live in South Australia, which is a nice size to consider a test market for technology like this. Rural grids tend to be left behind, because the ratio of required hardware and infrastructure is still so high per consumer -- much more-so than in a big city, where the same short length of wiring could power thousands of homes. And building a facility that acts as a battery can help smooth out the natural ebbs and flows that come both from renewable energy technology and from the spread out, failure-prone nature of more rural grid sections. This smoothing has saved South Australians a ton of money, already much more than the $50 million cost that Tesla passed on to its Australian investor. The battery facility "reduced network costs by about $76 million in 2019," Bloomberg explains, "savings [Garth] Heron, [Neoen's head of development in Australia] said would be passed on to businesses and households in the state. The battery's introduction also slashed the cost to regulate South Australia's grid by 91 [percent], bringing it in line with other regions in the nation."

Elon Musk announced on Twitter that Tesla has produced one million electric cars. The Verge reports: Musk made the announcement by sharing a picture of the car, a red Model Y, and congratulated the Tesla team on hitting the milestone. It's a significant moment for an automaker that was only founded in 2003. Tesla released its first consumer car, the Roadster, back in 2008, meaning it's taken a little over twelve years to hit this million-car milestone. However, it could end up hitting the two million mark a lot sooner based on current targets.

In its January earnings report, the company said it hopes to ship over 500,000 cars worldwide in 2020. Established automakers like Toyota or the Volkswagen Group each produce over ten million vehicles a year. Nevertheless, Tesla's milestone is a tremendous accomplishment for an automotive startup that only produces electric vehicles.

News outlet 9to5Mac, which tracks Apple news, has gotten hold of an iOS 14 build that uncovers a range of hardware details and software features that Apple intends to reveal later this year. The devices are: 1. An upcoming iPad Pro will include three cameras -- like the iPhone Pro -- plus an additional time-of-flight sensor for help with AR.
2. An iPhone with Touch ID is in the works. This is presumably the lower-end iPhone 9 or iPhone SE 2.
3. A new Apple TV box is in the works along with a new Apple TV remote.
4. AirTags, Apple's rumored Tile-like item tracker, will have user-replaceable batteries. Software features: 1. The iOS home screen will get a new list view, letting you more easily find and filter through your apps. It's not clear exactly where this screen will appear, but it'd offer a major change from the grid.
2. A new AR app will let you point your phone's camera at objects in the real world and have the phone display more information about what you're seeing. At an Apple store, for instance, it could display pricing information and product features. Apple is reportedly working with Starbucks to support the feature, too.
3. Third-party apps will be able to integrate wallpapers into the wallpapers section of the Settings app. This should make it easier to switch wallpapers and could finally open dynamic wallpapers up to outside developers.
4. HomeKit will be able to change the color temperature of lights throughout a day to match the sunlight.
5. An accessibility feature will let phones identify sounds like alarms and doorbells for people with hearing loss.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: AMD processors manufactured between 2011 and 2019 (the time of testing) are vulnerable to two new attacks, research published this week has revealed (PDF). The two new attacks impact the security of the data processed inside the CPU and allow the theft of sensitive information or the downgrade of security features. The research team said it notified AMD of the two issues in August 2019, however, the company has not released microcode (CPU firmware) updates, claiming these "are not new speculation-based attacks," a statement that the research team disagrees with.

The two new attacks target a feature of AMD CPUs known as the L1D cache way predictor. Introduced in AMD processors in 2011 with the Bulldozer microarchitecture, the L1D cache way predictor is a performance-centric feature that reduces power consumption by improving the way the CPU handles cached data inside its memory. A high-level explanation is available below: "The predictor computes a uTag using an undocumented hash function on the virtual address. This uTag is used to look up the L1D cache way in a prediction table. Hence, the CPU has to compare the cache tag in only oneway instead of all possible ways, reducing the power consumption." The two new attacks were discovered after a team of six academics [...] reverse-engineered this "undocumented hashing function" that AMD processors were using to handle uTag entries inside the L1D cache way predictor mechanism. Knowing these functions, allowed the researchers to recreate a map of what was going on inside the L1D cache way predictor and probe if the mechanism was leaking data or clues about what that data may be. While the attacks can be patched, AMD denies that these two new attacks are a concern, claiming they "are not new speculation-based attacks" and that they should be mitigated through previous patches for speculative execution side channel vulnerabilities.

The research team says AMD's response is "rather misleading," and that the attacks still work on fully-updated operating systems, firmware, and software even today.

According to a report Green Car Reports, Honda said it discontinued the company's Clarity Electric and has no plans for the model to return. CNET reports: The battery-electric version of the Clarity rounded out a diverse lineup of alternative-fuel options housed in the nameplate. Honda still sells a plug-in hybrid version of the Clarity and introduced modest updates to the Clarity Fuel Cell for 2020. Honda only offered the EV version in Oregon and California, however. Ditto for the fuel cell version as well. The Clarity Plug-In Hybrid was originally offered in numerous states, though low demand drove the car out of the Northeast last summer. At the time, Honda told Roadshow California will be the PHEV's main focus, though the car remains available to order at any Honda dealer nationwide.

"At its Financial Analyst Day, AMD disclosed additional details regarding its next generation CPU and GPU architectures," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid: - While the company isn't ready to disclose concrete details yet, AMD is promising that Navi 2X will arrive this year and deliver "enthusiast-class" performance, excellent power efficiency, and "top-of-stack" GPUs with "uncompromising 4K gaming".

- While AMD has RDNA for its gaming-centric consumer GPUs, the company is shifting to a new GPU compute architecture, dubbed CDNA, for its High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Machine Learning (ML) accelerators. CDNA has been designed from the ground-up for ML/HPC applications, and will leverage what AMD calls its second-generation Infinity Architecture interconnects.

- AMD also reiterated that its first Zen 3-based products will be rolling out later this year. On the server side, this means EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors, but the company also revealed that Zen 3 client processors would also arrive by the end of 2020.

"A nonprofit startup is offering an open-source nuclear plant plan," reports Popular Mechanics: A mechanical engineer-turned-tech entrepreneur has plans to, well, empower people around the world to build their own 100-megawatt nuclear power reactors. That's much larger than some of the modular reactors designed by nuclear startups, but still much smaller than operating nuclear power plants in the U.S.

The Energy Impact Center (EIC) is an energy nonprofit that engineer Bret Kugelmass founded in 2017. The organization's goals are similar to other groups working toward carbon neutrality or negativity, except Kugelmass has decided "cheap nuclear" is the only avenue he wants to pursue. By doing that, he's essentially operating a startup model, and for his technology to take hold, a new paradigm for nuclear power plants will have to be installed.

"Today, we offer reference plant schematics and a platform to compile ongoing design work. With the help of our partners and the National Labs, these drawings will evolve into a fully detailed, ready-to-build blueprint," the project website says. It seems like EIC exists to feed new technology into the nuclear startup development pipeline... Kugelmass writes that "It is detailed enough for any utility to begin early site studies with +/- 20 [percent] cost predictability. It is abstract enough to allow for site-specific engineering details to be added, with a $50 million budget allocated per plant for such efforts."

A year ago, we started to see the first wave of foldable devices and they were ... disappointing. But companies are not backing down. TCL is already looking ahead with a pair of foldable and rollable prototypes that imagines what the future of phones could look like. From a report: One is a trifold variant with two hinges, while the other is even crazier -- it is rollable! Yes, TCL has designed a phone that gets larger by utilizing a flexible display that rolls and unrolls -- it looks to be quite genius, actually. "At just 9mm in thickness, this portable concept re-imagines the standard smartphone design, with a rollable AMOLED display that uses internal motors to extend the 6.75-inch screen to a 7.8-inch display size with the press of a button. This allows for an entirely new device user experience that includes split screen and multi-tasking UI enhancements customized by TCL. Thanks to a larger axis and rolled display, the device has no wrinkles or creases which are commonly found with foldable AMOLEDs. When not in use, a motor-driven sliding panel utilizes advanced mechanics to conceal the flexible display," says TCL.