An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Last May, when Intel released a patch for a group of security vulnerabilities researchers had found in the company's computer processors, Intel implied that all the problems were solved. But that wasn't entirely true, according to Dutch researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who discovered the vulnerabilities and first reported them to the tech giant in September 2018. The software patch meant to fix the processor problem addressed only some of the issues the researchers had found. It would be another six months before a second patch, publicly disclosed by the company on Tuesday, would fix all of the vulnerabilities Intel indicated were fixed in May, the researchers said in a recent interview.

The public message from Intel was "everything is fixed," said Cristiano Giuffrida, a professor of computer science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and one of the researchers who reported the vulnerabilities. "And we knew that was not accurate." While many researchers give companies time to fix problems before the researchers disclose them publicly, the tech firms can be slow to patch the flaws and attempt to muzzle researchers who want to inform the public about the security issues. Researchers often agree to disclose vulnerabilities privately to tech companies and stay quiet about them until the company can release a patch. Typically, the researchers and companies coordinate on a public announcement of the fix. But the Dutch researchers say Intel has been abusing the process. Now the Dutch researchers claim Intel is doing the same thing again. They said the new patch issued on Tuesday still doesn't fix another flaw they provided Intel in May. The Intel flaws, like other high-profile vulnerabilities the computer security community has recently discovered in computer chips, allowed an attacker to extract passwords, encryption keys and other sensitive data from processors in desktop computers, laptops and cloud-computing servers. Intel says the patches "greatly reduce" the risk of attack, but don't completely fix everything the researchers submitted.

The company's spokeswoman Leigh Rosenwald said Intel was publishing a timeline with Tuesday's patch for the sake of transparency. "This is not something that is normal practice of ours, but we realized this is a complicated issue. We definitely want to be transparent about that," she said. "While we may not agree with some of the assertions made by the researchers, those disagreements aside, we value our relationship with them."

The Zombieload vulnerability disclosed earlier this year in May has a second variant that also works against more recent Intel processors, not just older ones, including Cascade Lake, Intel's latest line of high-end CPUs -- initially thought to have been unaffected. From a report: Intel is releasing microcode (CPU firmware) updates today to address this new Zombieload attack variant, as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday -- known as the Intel Platform Update (IPU) process. Back in May, two teams of academics disclosed a new batch of vulnerabilities that impacted Intel CPUs. Collectively known as MDS attacks, these are security flaws in the same class as Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow. The attacks rely on taking advantage of the speculative execution process, which is an optimization technique that Intel added to its CPUs to improve data processing speeds and performance. Vulnerabilities like Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow, showed that the speculative execution process was riddled with security holes. Disclosed in May, MDS attacks were just the latest line of vulnerabilities impacting speculative execution. They were different from the original Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow bugs disclosed in 2018 because they attacked different areas of a CPU's speculative execution process. Further reading: Flaw in Intel PMx driver gives 'near-omnipotent control over a victim device'.

Adidas plans to close high-tech "robot" factories in Germany and the United States that it launched to bring production closer to customers, saying Monday that deploying some of the technology in Asia would be "more economic and flexible." Reuters: The Adidas factories were part of a drive to meet demand for faster delivery of new styles to its major markets and to counter rising wages in Asia and higher shipping costs. It originally planned a global network of similar factories. The German sportswear company did not give details on why it was closing the facilities, which have proved expensive and where the technology has been difficult to extend to different products. Martin Shankland, Adidas' head of global operations, said the factories had helped the company improve its expertise in innovative manufacturing, but it aimed to apply what it had learned with its suppliers.

Socguy writes: In late October, at Honda's "Electric Vision" event in Amsterdam, the company said it was "electrifying" its entire product line, which mostly means hybrids. "We will bring further battery-electric products to the market," they said. At the same time it would seem, diesel and hydrogen are on the way out. Katsushi Inoue, Honda Europe's president, said: "Maybe hydrogen fuel cell cars will come, but that's a technology for the next era. Our focus is on hybrid and electric vehicles now." Diesel is also on the way out as in September, Honda said it would phase out all diesel cars by 2021. In addition to the all-electric Honda E, which is launching in Europe next year, the company will introduce a second EV that's expected to be revealed by 2022.

"If you've gone shopping for a new laptop lately, you may notice something missing in all newer models regardless of make," writes Slashdot reader ikhider.

There's no removable battery. Whether mainstream or obscure manufacturer, the fact that pretty much all of them are made in the same area denote a similar approach to soldering batteries in. While battery technology may have improved, it is not to the extent that they no longer need to be replaced. Premium retention of charges generally tend to deplete in about a year or so. This impacts the device mobility and necessitates replacement. Also, the practical use of having a backup battery if you need one cannot even be applied.

While some high-end models may have better quality batteries, it does not replace popping in a fresh, new one. This leads to one conclusion, planned obsolescence.If you want your laptop to still be mobile when the battery fizzles out, forget about it. Buy new instead. Pick your manufacturer, even those famed for building 'tank' laptops that last forever, all you need is a fresh battery, upgrade the RAM, and a new HD or SSD and away you go. While the second hand market still has good models with replaceable batteries, it is only a matter of time before that too fizzles away. If you had a limited budget, you could still get a good, second-hand machine [in the past], but now you are stuck with the low end.

Consumers need to make their case to manufacturers, for their own best interest to leverage the life of a machine on their own terms, not the manufacturers. Bring back the removable laptop battery.

ZDNet reports: In the never ending war between the chip giants, AMD has released a salvo by unveiling what are the world's most powerful desktop processors -- the new 24-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X... These 3rd-generation Ryzen Threadripper Processors are built using AMD's 7-nanometer "Zen 2" core architecture, and both chips feature 88 PCIe 4.0 lanes with extraordinary power efficiency.

On the performanced front, AMD claims that the new 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 3970X offers up to 90 percent faster performance over the competition... This performance doesn't mean the chips are power-hungry either, with AMD claiming they deliver up to 66 percent better power efficiency compared to previous generation processors. The new chips do, however, need a new socket. The new socket is called sTRX4, which offers expansion for serious multi-GPU and NVMe arrays, quad channel DDR4, ECC support, and unlocked overclocking.... [T]hey both will be available starting Tuesday, November 19.
Engadget reports: After getting some wins against Intel in the desktop enthusiast processor race, AMD is trying to run up the score with its latest model, the Ryzen 9 3950X. It has 16 cores/32 threads, a 3.5 Ghz base clock with up to 4.7 GHz boost (on two cores) and 105 watt power consumption (TDP), and costs $749, compared to $1,199 for Intel's 12-core i9-9920X. At the same time, AMD claims it outperforms the i9-9920X in gaming and even more so for content creation, where those extra cores can be best exploited.

According to the company, it'll do some Adobe Premiere tasks up to 26 percent quicker than an i9-9920X, and 42 percent faster than an 8-core i9-9900K. Better still, the Ryzen 9 3950X delivers 2.34 times more performance per watt than its Intel counterpart, and consumes 173W of absolute wall power compared to 304W for the i9-9920X. The power figures alone could be decisive for creators who run multiple workstations for 3D animation and rendering...

If $749 is $700 too much, AMD has another option -- the Athlon 3000G. The dual-core processor runs at 3.5Ghz, but AMD said it's "the only unlocked option in its segment," meaning you can push it to around 3.9Ghz. That'll boost its performance ahead of Intel's $73 Pentium G5400, AMD said. The Athlon 3000G will arrive November 19th for $49.

Slashdot reader dryriver writes: Using a compressed disk drive or hard drive has been possible for decades now. But when you do this in software or the operating system, the CPU does the compressing and decompressing. Are there any hard drives or SSDs that can work compressed using their own built in hardware for this?

I'm not talking about realtime video compression using a hardware CODEC chip -- this does exist and is used -- but rather a storage medium that compresses every possible type of file using its own compression and decompression realtime hardware without a significant speed hit.
Leave your best thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Are there storage devices with hardware compressiong built in?

An anonymous reader shares a post: This week something happened that many may not have seen. Intel published a set of benchmarks showing advantage of a dual Intel Xeon Platinum 9282 system versus the AMD EPYC 7742. Vendors present benchmarks to show that their products are good from time-to-time. There is one difference in this case: we checked Intel's work and found that they presented a number to intentionally mislead would-be buyers as to the company's relative performance versus AMD.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A study published today in JAMA Pediatrics warns that kids' literacy and language skills suffer with screen use, and MRI scans of their brains appear to back up the findings. Forty-seven 3- to 5-year-olds took a test to measure their cognitive abilities, and their parents were asked to answer a detailed survey about screen time habits. Questions included: How frequently do they use that screen? What type of content are they viewing? And is there an adult sitting with the child talking about what they're watching? The answers were scored against a set of screen time guidelines put out by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The kids also had their brains scanned in an MRI machine.

The scans revealed that kids who spent more time in front of screens had what the authors call lower "white matter integrity." White matter can be roughly thought of as the brain's internal communications network -- its long nerve fibers are sheathed in fatty insulation that allows electrical signals to move from one area of the brain to another without interruption. The integrity of that structure -- how well organized the nerve fibers are, and how well developed the myelin sheath is -- is associated with cognitive function, and it develops as kids learn language. Lead author John Hutton of Cincinnati Children's Hospital told MIT Technology Review there's a clear link between higher screen use and lower white matter integrity in the children his team studied. That structural change appears to be reflected in the results of the cognitive test the kids took as well, which showed high screen time associated with lower levels of language and literacy skills. Signe Lauren Bray, a researcher at the University of Calgary who was not involved in the study, downplays the findings by pointing out that it's a small and preliminary study. "It's absolutely not clear that screen time causes differences in brain development and there are many factors that could explain the association found here," she says.

Regardless, "Caution is warranted," Hutton says. "Children are not small grown-ups, and their needs change with development."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg have figured out how to harness the energy and keep it in reserve so it can be released on demand in the form of heat -- even decades after it was captured. The innovations include an energy-trapping molecule, a storage system that promises to outperform traditional batteries, at least when it comes to heating, and an energy-storing laminate coating that can be applied to windows and textiles. The breakthroughs, from a team led by researcher Kasper Moth-Poulsen, have garnered praise within the scientific community. Now comes the real test: whether Moth-Poulsen can get investors to back his technology and take it to market.

The system starts with a liquid molecule made up of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. When hit by sunlight, the molecule draws in the sun's energy and holds it until a catalyst triggers its release as heat. The researchers spent almost a decade and $2.5 million to create a specialized storage unit, which Moth-Poulsen, a 40-year-old professor in the department of chemistry and chemical engineering, says has the stability to outlast the 5-to 10-year life span of typical lithium-ion batteries on the market today. The most advanced potential commercial use the team developed is a transparent coating that can be applied to home windows, a moving vehicle, or even clothing. The coating collects solar energy and releases heat, reducing electricity required for heating spaces and curbing carbon emissions. Moth-Poulsen is coating an entire building on campus to showcase the technology. The ideal use in the early going, he says, is in relatively small spaces. "This could be heating of electrical vehicles or in houses." Moth-Poulsen believes there's potential for the system to produce electricity, but his team is focused for now on heating.

"Moth-Poulsen plans to spin off a company that would advance the technology and says he's in talks with venture capital investors," adds Bloomberg. "The storage unit could be commercially available in as little as six years and the coating in three, pending the $5 million of additional funding he estimates will be needed to bring the coating to market."

David Ruddock of AndroidPolice technology blog tries to make sense of last week's $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit by Google. He argues that Fitbit's offerings -- hardware, software, engineering talent, or even patent wall -- can't save Google's wearable operating system Wear OS. From his column: Hardware is what Google is after, with a blog post cleatly stating its acquisition of Fitbit is about future Wear OS devices, meaning you can probably kiss Fitbit's unloved smartwatch OS goodbye. So, that means we can count on Google leveraging Fitbit's renowned hardware to finally give Wear OS the horsepower and capabilities it needs to compete with Apple, right? Well, no. Fitbit's smartwatches have been most lauded for their long battery life, which has historically been enabled by extremely slow but highly power-efficient processors. The Versa 2 allegedly comes with significant performance improvements, but as a smartwatch, it just isn't very... smart. Michael Fisher points out in his review that the Versa 2's near week-long life on a single charge is only impressive when looked at in a very generous light. The Versa 2 doesn't have GPS, the battery only lasts that long when not using the always-on display (with AoD, it's closer to 3 days), the watch itself doesn't work for almost anything but fitness tracking on its own, and most of your interactions with it end up happening on your smartphone anyway. I can also tell you from experience that the Apple Watch Series 5 lasts about two days on a charge with the always-on display enabled (and Samsung's watches last even longer), so Fitbit managing a day more which a much less useful watch isn't exactly game-changing technology.

In short, Fitbit's products are not ones Google should be excited about buying. The hardware is nothing special, and the software is clearly going in the dumpster. What has Google bought, then? The sad, very practical truth is probably patents and engineers. Fitbit does develop at least some of its hardware in-house, and likely has a decent number of patents related to fitness tracking and basic wearable technology, including those stemming from its acquisition of Pebble. Its product engineers would receive resources and tools at Google that Fitbit may not have afforded them. In short: Google's purchase is almost certainly a speculative one. Google is hoping that Fitbit's technology portfolio and its engineering talent can create a better, faster, stronger Wear OS watch. That isn't the kind of acquisition that screams "our product is successful," it's one that looks far more like a Hail Mary from a company that is rapidly losing any hope of remaining relevant in the wearables space. A more cynical view of Google's acquisition might argue that this is more about Fitbit's brand and users than anything else. If Google simply markets its in-house smartwatches as Fitbits running Wear OS, it would be more able to tap into Fitbit's existing customer base and retail relationships. Customer base is something Wear OS is sorely missing at the moment, and Fitbit is a brand that many consumers recognize, albeit mostly for the company's "dumb" fitness trackers, not its smartwatches. Speaking of, given Google's focus on Wear OS as part of this acquisition, my guess is that those more popular but very basic trackers will be discontinued.

Microsoft has teamed up with Warner Bros. to text. The collaboration, which was unveiled at Microsoft's Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida Monday, is a first test case for a new storage technology that could eventually help safeguard Hollywood's movies and TV shows, as well as many other forms of data, for centuries to come. From a report: "Glass has a very, very long lifetime," said Microsoft Research principal researcher Ant Rowstron in a recent conversation with Variety. "Thousands of years." The piece of silica glass storing the 1978 "Superman" movie, measures 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm x 2 mm. The glass contains 75.6 GB of data plus error redundancy codes. Microsoft began to investigate glass as a storage medium in 2016 in partnership with the University of Southampton Optoelectonics Research Centre. The goal of these efforts, dubbed "Project Silica," is to find a new storage medium optimized for what industry insiders like to call cold data -- the type of data you likely won't need to access for months, years, or even decades. It's data that doesn't need to sit on a server, ready to be used 24/7, but that is kept in a vault, away from anything that could corrupt it.

Turns out that Warner Bros. has quite a bit of this kind of cold data. Founded in the 1920s, the studio has been safekeeping original celluloid film reels, audio from 1940s radio shows and much more, for decades. Think classics like "Casablanca," "The Wizard of Oz" or "Looney Tunes" cartoons. "Our mission is to preserve those original assets in perpetuity," said Brad Collar, who is leading these efforts at Warner Bros. as the studio's senior vice president of global archives and media engineering. And while the studio is deeply invested in these classics, it also keeps adding an ever-increasing number of modern assets to its archives, ranging from digitally-shot films and television episodes to newer forms of entertainment, including video games. To date, the Warner Bros. archive contains some 20 million assets, with tens of thousands of new items being added every year. Each of them is being stored in multiple locations, explained Collar. "We want to have more than one copy."

"California's electricity system is failing," argues Vox, in an article shared by Slashdot reader nickwinlund77. But they're proposing a way "to make California's electricity system cleaner, more reliable, and more resilient." In a nutshell, it is accelerating the evolution from a centralized, top-down, long-distance, one-way energy system to a more decentralized, bottom-up, local, networked system. In the energy world, this is summed up as a more distributed energy system. It puts more power, both electrical and political, in local hands. Though it is still in early days, and only hints of what's to come are yet visible, the evolution to a more distributed system is inevitable...

Solar+storage+smart inverter systems work better and more seamlessly [than diesel generators] during a blackout. What's more, when they are connected together into a microgrid, their collective generation and consumption can be balanced out, maximizing backup power... The knock on microgrids has traditionally been that they're expensive, but they are already reaching cost parity with California grid power in some places. And while it is true that, on an upfront-capital basis, they are more expensive than diesel generators, they are not more expensive on a lifetime basis because clean distributed-energy resources, unlike diesel generators, can provide useful services even when there's no blackout... As Public Safety Power Shutoff events continue, emergency-backup benefits will be enough to kick-start a decent microgrid market. It's already happening, especially around Tier 1 loads. And customers are herding to solar+storage systems, as Tesla and other companies eye big growth...

The core problem with California's electricity system is that its millions of customers are overwhelmingly dependent on power generated by large, remote power plants and carried over long distances on overhead power lines, often through hilly, mountainous, and/or forested territory becoming dryer and more fire-prone by the year... [U]tilities are still operating with a 20th-century hangover, a model that forces them to prefer big investments in big grid infrastructure.
The article also notes "vehicle-to-grid" technology which will offer electric cars bidirectional energy-storage and demand-shifting capabilities, and argues that a network of distributed-energy resources can ultimately be installed quickly and will lower the need for long-distance power transmission lines.

But it argues the transition won't happen until the state's government makes a more ambitious push.

"Local politics are a bigger problem for renewable energy growth than competition from fossil fuels," warns a Bloomberg columnist: It's getting harder to get permission to erect the turbine towers. Local regulations are getting stricter. Bavaria decided back in 2014 that the distance between a wind turbine and the nearest housing must be 10 times the height of the mast, which, given the density of dwellings, makes it hard to find a spot anywhere. Wind energy development is practically stalled in the state now. Brandenburg, the state surrounding Berlin, passed a law this year demanding that wind-farm operators pay 10,000 euros ($11,100) per turbine each year to communities within 3 kilometers of the windmills. Wind projects are also often rejected or stalled because they're deemed to interfere with military communications, air traffic control or broadcast radio stations.

Besides, local opponents of the wind farms often go to court to stall new developments or even have existing towers dismantled. According to the wind-industry lobby BWE, 325 turbine installations with a total capacity of more than 1 gigawatt (some 2% of the country's total installed capacity) are tied up in litigation. The irony is that the litigants are often just as "green" as the wind-energy proponents -- one is the large conservation organization NABU, which says it's not against wind energy as such but merely demands that installations are planned with preserving nature in mind. Almost half of the complaints are meant to protect various bird and bat species; others claim the turbines make too much noise or emit too much low-frequency infrasound. Regardless of the validity of such claims, projects get tied up in the courts even after jumping through the many hoops necessary to get a permit.

Another reason for local resistance to the wind farms is a form of Nimbyism: People hate the way the wind towers change landscapes. There's even a German word for it, Verspargelung, roughly translated as pollution with giant asparagus sticks... This nasty political and regulatory climate creates too much uncertainty for investors, just as the German government prepares to phase out wind-energy subsidies...

Without technological breakthroughs -- for example, in energy storage, which would make fewer new turbines necessary -- Germany, and then other countries that try to build up renewable energy generation as it has done, will be hard put to push production to the level required to reach climate goals.

"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.