An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: At the Black Hat security conference on Wednesday, [researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology] will present their findings, which suggest that high-wattage IoT botnets -- made up of power-guzzling devices like air conditioners, car chargers, and smart thermostats -- could be deployed strategically to increase demand at certain times in any of the nine private energy markets around the US. A savvy attacker, they say, would be able to stealthily force price fluctuations in the service of profit, chaos, or both. The researchers used real, publicly available data from the New York and California markets between May 2018 and May 2019 to study fluctuations in both the "day-ahead market" that forecasts demand and the "real-time market," in which buyers and sellers correct for forecasting errors and unpredictable events like natural disasters. By modeling how much power various hypothetical high-wattage IoT botnets could draw, and crunching the market data, the researchers devised two types of potential attacks that would alter energy pricing. They also figured out how far hackers would be able to push their attacks without the malicious activity raising red flags.

"Our basic assumption is that we have access to a high-wattage IoT botnet," says Tohid Shekari, a PhD candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology who contributed to the research, along with fellow PhD candidate Celine Irvine and professor Raheem Beyah. "In our scenarios, attacker one is a market player; he's basically trying to maximize his own profit. Attacker two is a nation-state actor who can cause financial damage to market players as part of a trade war or cold war. The basic part of either attack is to look at price-load sensitivity. If we change demand by 1 percent, how much is the price going to change as a result of that? You want to optimize the attack to maximize the gain or damage." An attacker could use their botnet's power to increase demand, for instance, when other entities are betting it will be low. Or they could bet that demand will go up at a certain time with certainty that they can make that happen. "The researchers caution that, based on their analysis, much smaller demand fluctuations than you might expect could affect pricing, and that it would take as few as 50,000 infected devices to pull off an impactful attack," the report adds.

"Consumers whose devices are unwittingly conscripted into a high-wattage botnet would also be unlikely to notice anything amiss; attackers could intentionally turn on devices to pull power late at night or while people are likely to be out of the house. [...] The researchers calculated that market manipulation campaigns would cause, at most, a 7 percent increase in consumers' home electric bills, likely low enough to go unnoticed."

The researchers say market manipulators could take home as much as $245 million a year, and cause as much as $350 million per year in economic damage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The next generation of Amazon's Scout bots -- the fully-electric autonomous delivery devices the company is hoping to deploy soon -- is currently being designed and built by a team of mechanical engineers in Seattle, and not in the most orthodox of settings. Instead of working in sleek labs, Amazon's engineers have effectively resorted to re-arranging their homes and garages to accommodate the development of the sophisticated piece of technology the Scout bot is promising to be.

The cooler-sized bot is already deployed in a handful of US cities where it is being tested, albeit always accompanied by a human. And to make sure that Scout bots ever reach the next stage of development, Amazon's team had to work their way around the new restrictions suddenly imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, engineers need a lot more than a decent internet connection to be able to work remotely. In early March, therefore, Seattle-based Amazon mechanical engineer Jeff Gorges transformed his garage into an R&D lab of motors and wheels in anticipation of office closures. Since then, Gorges has been iterating the bot from his garage workbench, testing various new features by driving the device around his patio. The new Scout bot has now been assembled and debugged by Gorges, all from the comfort from his own home. Amazon's Canvas robotics team, which works on small autonomous carts that use spatial AI to move items through the company's fulfillment centers, moved their testing and manufacturing equipment from their office and lab space to several team members' homes.

"With the new tools set up in their apartment living rooms, hardware engineers were able to build and assemble the sub-components for the carts, and then to pass the prototypes onto an R&D technician's home, who set up test and safety systems from his garage," reports ZDNet. "The robots were then sent to a computer vision scientist who worked on calibrating the devices' cameras by reconstructing the carts' future surroundings in the fulfillment center in 3D. All in all, six robots circulated through seven team members home, with precautions taken to disinfect the devices on each transition."

Audi's CEO "willingly admits that Tesla is two years ahead of the industry in some critical areas of building electric vehicles," reports Electrek. But where will that lead?

"Earlier this week, Musk made a subtle comment on Twitter that could majorly upend the auto industry," reports Inc. magazine: In response to an article in Teslarati highlighting German automakers' attempts to bridge the gap between Tesla's technology and their own, Musk tweeted the following: "Tesla is open to licensing software and supplying powertrains & batteries," tweeted Musk. "We're just trying to accelerate sustainable energy, not crush competitors!"

Consider for just a moment the brilliant potential of Musk's statement. In addition to leading its rivals in electric vehicle production (and the larger style batteries needed to support these), Tesla is also at the forefront of utilizing modern technology in its vehicles. In fact, many have described Tesla as "a tech company that happens to make cars." In contrast, though, Musk has repeatedly spoken on the challenges of actually manufacturing cars at consistent quality, as well as delivering them. At one point, he described Tesla's journey as going from "production hell to delivery logistics hell...." [L]egacy automakers excel where Tesla is weak: namely, manufacturing and delivery. Since they've been making cars so long, they've developed huge factories, along with consistent and refined processes.

But what if Tesla could reach a deal with automakers to license its strength — software and battery technology? Then everyone benefits...

If you're surprised by Musk's tweet, you shouldn't be. In fact, for years Musk has insisted that his primary goal is not to compete with larger automakers but rather to win them over.... If the legacy automakers are smart, they'll jump at the opportunity to negotiate a licensing deal.
The article cites a 2014 blog post in which Musk promised Tesla wouldn't initiate patent lawsuits against companies who wanted to use its technology, "in the spirit of the open-source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology..."

"Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world's factories every day."

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: Arm Ltd., the chip designer owned by SoftBank Group Corp., accused the ousted head of its China joint venture of hurting its business there, escalating a dispute that's becoming a test of Beijing's willingness to protect foreign investment in the world's second-largest economy.

The U.K. chip giant in June announced it was firing Allen Wu, the head of its Chinese unit, over undisclosed breaches of conduct, but the executive has refused to step down and remains in control of the strategically important operation. Rather than the peaceful, rapid resolution that both sides have said they want, the situation has deteriorated. Wu has hired his own security and won't let representatives of Arm Ltd. or his board on the premises, said a person familiar with the situation. He's refused to hold a planned event to connect Chinese chipmakers with Arm Ltd. and avoided negotiations despite public statements to the contrary, said the person, who asked not to be named...

Resolving the conflict will be crucial to SoftBank's reported plans to sell Arm, a lynchpin in the global smartphone and computing industry that the Japanese firm bought for $32 billion in 2016.

An anonymous reader quotes The Los Angeles Times: On Dec. 9, 1968, the then-small world of computer engineering was shaken to its core by a presentation of new technologies projected onto a screen in a San Francisco hall. The attendees at the historic event saw demonstrations of video conferencing, the first public use of a computer mouse, hyperlinking in which clicking a word in a document transported the user to an entirely new document — and more. The man who was the star of the hands-on show seen in the hall was Douglas Engelbart, whose team at the research center SRI in Menlo Park, California, had been developing them for years.

But the man who had designed what is known now as "The Mother of All Demos" and was working behind the scenes to make sure they all worked was William K. English, who died Sunday at the age of 91. Bill English played an indispensable role in more than Engelbart's demo... In 1965 the lab received a NASA grant to invent a technology for moving a cursor and selecting an item on a display screen; Engelbart developed the concept, but it was English who designed the first prototype &mdash the mouse...

English essentially choreographed Engelbart's presentation. Just as important, he made sure there were no technical glitches. That was a challenge, since Engelbart would be in San Francisco demonstrating a system that was being operated 30 miles away in Menlo Park, the two sites connected via a microwave relay. The event went off virtually without a hitch, and a new world was born. "Doug wasn't doing it," recalls Roberta, who had worked as Engelbart's secretary. "It was all Bill." Engelbart died in 2013.
English also participated in an early research project "into the psychological effects of LSD," according to the article.

But a few years after the legendary demo, English was recruited for Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center, "where he helped midwife PARC's invention of the personal computer and other innovations... He subsequently left Xerox to join Sun Microsystems and later the pioneering electronic game console maker 3DO."

Qualcomm's Q3 earnings report might indicate a delay for Apple's upcoming 5G iPhones, with the company highlighting a "partial impact from the delay of a global 5G flagship phone launch" for its fourth quarter projections (which covers July, August, and September earnings). The Verge reports: Looking at the calendar of upcoming phone releases, it's hard to imagine that Qualcomm is talking about any device other than the upcoming 5G iPhones, which are expected to arrive this fall. Typically, Apple releases its new iPhone in September, and it's one of the few upcoming devices that would sell in large enough numbers that Qualcomm might need to disclose the material impact on an earnings call. There are already rumors circulating of delays for Apple's 5G lineup due to production slowdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In an interview with Reuters, chief financial officer Akash Palkhiwala indicated that the delay likely wouldn't be too long for the unnamed phone, describing it as "a slight delay that pushes some of the units out from the September quarter to the December quarter for us." (Qualcomm's December quarter covers the months of October, November, and December, so if the phone was slated for September, it might only be delayed into the following month.)

Google One, Google's subscription program for buying additional storage and live support, is getting an update today that will bring free phone backups for Android and iOS devices to anybody who installs the app -- even if they don't have a paid membership. From a report: The catch: While the feature is free, the backups count against your free Google storage allowance of 15GB. If you need more you need -- you guessed it -- a Google One membership to buy more storage or delete data you no longer need. Paid memberships start at $1.99/month for 100GB. Last year, paid members already got access to this feature on Android, which stores your texts, contacts, apps, photos and videos in Google's cloud. The "free" backups are now available to Android users. iOS users will get access to it once the Google One app rolls out on iOS in the near future.

Microsoft announced Monday that hydrogen fuel cells powered a row of its datacenter servers for 48 consecutive hours, bringing the company one step closer toward its goal of becoming "carbon negative" by 2030. Engadget reports: The idea to explore hydrogen fuel cells originated in 2018, when researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO used a proton exchange membrane (PEM) hydrogen fuel cell to power a rack of computers. Mark Monroe, a principal infrastructure engineer on Microsoft's team for datacenter advanced development, said his team watched a demonstration and was intrigued with the technology. Monroe's team developed a 250-kilowatt fuel cell system, enough to power a full row of data center servers, and in September 2019 installed it at an Azure datacenter near Salt Lake City, Utah. In June, the system passed a 48-hour test. The team plans to test a 3-megawatt fuel system next, which matches the size of current diesel-powered backup generators.

It's possible that an Azure data center could be equipped and run entirely on fuel cells, a hydrogen storage tank and an electrolyzer that converts water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, Monroe said. These systems could integrate with the electric power grid to provide load balancing services. Further, hydrogen-powered long-haul vehicles could come to datacenters to refuel. By continuing to develop hydrogen fuel technology, Microsoft could eventually serve as a model for use of hydrogen fuel cells elsewhere.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica: Once renewable sources of electricity meet or beat the costs of fossil fuel generation, everything changes. With the immediate financial benefit just as clear as the long-term environmental benefit, utilities turn their attention to how to make it work rather than debating whether it's worth the investment. Solar and onshore wind technologies have hit this point in recent years, but the unique challenges presented by offshore wind have required different solutions that have taken time to mature. Governments have provided some subsidies to encourage that progress, and global capacity grew to 28 gigawatts last year. But those subsidies make it trickier to calculate how close to cost-competitive offshore wind has become. A team led by Imperial College London's Malte Jansen worked to compare 41 offshore wind projects in Europe going back to 2005. The researchers' analysis suggests offshore wind, at least in Europe, is on the cusp of dropping below the price of more traditional generating plants.

Bids to provide electricity in these auctions have ranged from 0 euros to 150 euros per megawatt-hour, with that value setting the minimum guaranteed price. The 0-euro bids came in recent auctions in Germany and the Netherlands, and they represent utilities that were confident in their unsubsidized revenue selling at wholesale market prices. The researchers' estimates for actual revenue at these wind farms came in at 50-150 euros per megawatt-hour. But the interesting thing is the downward trend over time -- dropping about 6 percent per year over the whole time period, and more like 12 percent per year if you start with 2015. For wind farms that won't start operating until after this year, the range drops to 50-70 euros per megawatt-hour. And 50 euros, the researchers say, is at the "lower end of [cost] estimates for fossil fuel generators." That means subsidies have also been declining over time. In fact, the average is on track to hit zero by 2025. And if electricity prices rise at all in the coming years, a few wind farms that have already been bid will turn out to be subsidy-free in the final accounting. The researchers paint this as a success story. The researchers report their findings in the journal Nature Energy.

Thelasko writes: The world's biggest nuclear fusion project has entered its five-year assembly phase. After this is finished, the facility will be able to start generating the super-hot "plasma" required for fusion power. The $23.5 billion facility has been under construction in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, southern France. Advocates say fusion could be a source of clean, unlimited power that would help tackle the climate crisis. Iter is a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. All members share in the cost of construction. Current nuclear energy relies on fission, where a heavy chemical element is split to produce lighter ones. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, works by combining two light elements to make a heavier one. This releases vast amounts of energy with very little radioactivity. Iter will confine hot plasma within a structure called a tokamak in order to control fusion reactions. The project will aim to help demonstrate whether fusion can be commercially viable. France's President Emmanuel Macron said the effort would unite countries around a common good.

A tiny piece of Martian basalt the size of a 10p coin will be launched on board a U.S. robot probe on Thursday and propelled towards the red planet on a seven-month journey to its home world. The Guardian reports: This extraordinary odyssey, the interplanetary equivalent of sending coals to Newcastle, will form a key part of Nasa's forthcoming Mars 2020 expedition. Space engineers say the rock -- which has been donated by the Natural History Museum in London -- will be used to calibrate detectors on board the robot rover Perseverance after it lands and begins its search for signs of past life on the planet. "When you turn on instruments and begin to tune them up before using them for research, you calibrate them on materials that are going to be like the unknown substances you are about to study. So what better for studying rocks on Mars than a lump that originated there?" said Professor Caroline Smith, the Natural History Museum's principal curator of meteorites.

Scientists were confident that the rock they were returning to Mars originated on the planet, added Smith, who is also a member of the Mars 2020 science team. "Tiny bubbles of gas trapped inside that meteorite have exactly the same composition as the atmosphere of Mars, so we know our rock came from there." It is thought that the Martian meteorite was created when an asteroid or comet plunged into the planet about 600,000 to 700,000 years ago, spraying debris into space. One of those pieces of rubble swept across the solar system and eventually crashed on to Earth. That meteorite -- now known as SAU 008 -- was discovered in Oman in 1999 and has been in the care of the Natural History Museum since then.

Among the instruments fitted to the Perseverance rover is a high-precision laser called Sherloc, which will be used to decipher the chemical composition of rocks and determine if they might contain organic materials that indicate life once existed -- or still exists -- on Mars. The inclusion of a piece of SAU 008 is intended to ensure this is done with maximum accuracy. Once Perseverance has selected the most promising rocks it can find, it will dump them in caches on the Martian surface. These will then be retrieved by subsequent robot missions and blasted into space towards Earth for analysis.

ljw1004 writes: Helmand Province in Afghanistan produces two thirds of the world's opium. Its opium production has more than doubled in the past eight years, due mostly to solar power. "Solar is by far the most significant technological change" in the region for decades, says Dr. Mansfield, author of the report (PDF). The first solar panels were introduced there in 2013. More recently, solar panel installations have doubled every year, and now stand at 67,000. In Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand Province, solar panels are stacked in the market in great piles three stories high. For an up-front cost of $5,000, farmers can buy panels and a pump to irrigate their fields, and then there are virtually no running costs. "All this water is making the desert bloom," says Richard Brittan, a former British soldier whose company, Alcis, specializes in satellite analysis of what he calls "complex environments."

$5,000 is a lot of money -- the average dowry is $7,000 -- but the panels pay for themselves within two years. Farmers used to rely on diesel, which was more costly, unreliable and adulterated, which led to frequent machinery breakdowns. This "is perhaps the purest example of capitalism on the planet. There are no subsidies here. Nobody is thinking about climate change -- or any other ethical consideration, for that matter. This is about small-scale entrepreneurs trying to make a profit. It is the story of how Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power, and significantly increased the world supply of heroin. What does this tell us about solar power? That is simple. The story of the revolution in Afghan heroin production shows us just how transformative solar power can be. Don't imagine this is some kind of benign 'green' technology. "Solar is getting so cheap that it is capable of changing the way we do things in fundamental ways and with consequences that can affect the entire world," reports the BBC. (Those consequences: far more opium in the world; water table dropping by 3m a year; and a major crisis brewing in 10-15 years when the water runs out, the land returns to desert, and 1.5 million people are forced to migrate.)

FallOutBoyTonto shares a report from AnandTech: Coming in the wake of last week's disclosure that their 7nm yields are roughly a full year behind schedule, Intel this afternoon has announced that they are reorganizing the technology side of the company. Key to this change is that Intel is breaking up its monolithic Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group (TSCG) into several smaller groups, all of which will report directly to CEO Bob Swan. Meanwhile Intel's chief engineering officer, Dr. Murthy Renduchintala, who had been leading the TSCG, will be departing the company at the end of next week. The reorganization is effective immediately.

As a result of this reorganization, TSCG is being broken up into five groups focusing on manufacturing and architecture. These are:

- Technology Development: Focused on developing next-generation process nodes. Led by Dr. Ann Kelleher.
- Manufacturing and Operations: Focused on ramping current process nodes and building out new fab capacity. Led by Keyvan Esfarjani.
- Design Engineering: A recently-created group responsible for Intel's technology manufacturing and platform engineering. Led on an interim basis by Josh Walden while Intel searches for a permanent leader.
- Architecture, Software and Graphics: Developing Intel's architectures and associated software stacks. Led by Raja Koduri (continuing).
- Supply Chain: Handling Intel's supply chain and relationships with important suppliers. Led by Dr. Randhir Thakur (continuing).

Scientists are conducting preliminary tests of COVID-19 drugs using 3D printed human organs, eliminating the need to perform tests on animals, or, of course, humans. The Week reports: For example, Anthony Atala, the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and his team are using 3-D printers to create tiny replicas of human organs, including miniature lungs and colons, which are particularly affected by the coronavirus. They send them overnight for testing at a biosafety lab at George Mason University. The idea predated the coronavirus -- Atala said he never thought "we'd be considering this for a pandemic" -- but it could come in handy and help expedite the experimental drug process, especially since Atala said his Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based lab can churn out thousands of printed organs per hour. "The 3-D models can circumvent animal testing and make the pathway stronger from the lab to the clinic," said Akhilesh Gaharwar, who directs a lab in the biomedical engineering at Texas A&M University. Further reading: The New York Times

"DNA is millions of times more efficient at storing data than your laptop's magnetic hard drive," reports Popular Mechanics.

"Since DNA can store data far more densely than silicon, you could squeeze all of the data in the world inside just a few grams of it." In a new paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ilya Finkelstein, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin and company detail their new error correction method... They were able to store the entirety of The Wizard of Oz, translated into Esperanto, with more accuracy than prior DNA storage methods ever could have. We're on the yellow brick road toward the future of data storage.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are certainly not the first to have encoded a work of art onto strands of DNA... [A] team of researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington fit 200 megabytes of data onto lengths of DNA, including the entirety of War and Peace. In March 2019, they even came up with the first automated system for storing and retrieving data in the manufactured genetic material. Today, other major technology firms are also working in the space, including both IBM and Google. The ultra-secretive U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity — the government's version of DARPA, but for spies — is even invested in the work. These researchers envision a future where some of the most precious, but rarely accessed data, can be stored in vials of DNA, only pulled down from the cool, dark storage of the lab, as needed....

Because there are four building blocks in DNA, rather than the binary 1s and 0s in magnetic hard drives, the genetic storage method is far more dense, explains John Hawkins, another co-author of the new paper. "A teaspoon of DNA contains so much data it would require about 10 Walmart Supercenter-sized data centers to store using current technology," he tells Popular Mechanics. "Or, as some people like to put it, you could fit the entire internet in a shoe box." Not only that, but DNA is future-proof. Hawkins recalls when CDs were the dominant storage method, back in the 1990s, and they held the promise that their storage could last forever, because plastic does (but scratches can be devastating). Data stored on DNA, on the other hand, can last for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, there is a whole field of science called archaeogenetics that explores the longevity of DNA to understand the ancient past... DNA storage doesn't require any energy, either — just a cool, dark place to hang out until someone decides to access it. But the greatest advantage, Hawkins says, is that our ability to read and write DNA will never become obsolete....

But like all data storage methods, DNA has a few shortcomings as well. The most significant upfront hurdle is cost. Hawkins says that current methods are similar to the cost for an Apple Hard Disk 20 back in 1980. Back then, about 20 megabytes of storage — or the amount of data you'd need to use to download a 15-minute video — went for about $1,500.

"The U.S. wants to build nuclear power plants that will work on the moon and Mars, and on Friday put out a request for ideas from the private sector on how to do that," reports Time magazine: The U.S. Department of Energy put out the formal request to build what it calls a fission surface power system that could allow humans to live for long periods in harsh space environments.

The Idaho National Laboratory, a nuclear research facility in eastern Idaho, the Energy Department and NASA will evaluate the ideas for developing the reactor. The lab has been leading the way in the U.S. on advanced reactors, some of them micro reactors and others that can operate without water for cooling. Water-cooled nuclear reactors are the vast majority of reactors on Earth. "Small nuclear reactors can provide the power capability necessary for space exploration missions of interest to the Federal government," the Energy Department wrote in the notice published Friday...

The goal is to have a reactor, flight system and lander ready to go by the end of 2026... Officials say operating a nuclear reactor on the moon would be a first step to building a modified version to operate in the different conditions found on Mars.

Steven Levy from Wired remembers the Power Mac G4 Cube, which debuted July 19, 2000. From the report: I was reminded of this last week, as I listened to a cassette tape recorded 20 years prior, almost to the day. It documented a two-hour session with Jobs in Cupertino, California, shortly before the launch. The main reason he had summoned me to Apple's headquarters was sitting under the over of a dark sheet of fabric on the long table in the boardroom of One Infinite Loop. "We have made the coolest computer ever," he told me. "I guess I'll just show it to you." He yanked off the fabric, exposing an 8-inch stump of transparent plastic with a block of electronics suspended inside. It looked less like a computer than a toaster born from an immaculate conception between Philip K. Dick and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. (But the fingerprints were, of course, Jony Ive's.) Alongside it were two speakers encased in Christmas-ornament-sized, glasslike spheres.

"The Cube," Jobs said, in a stage whisper, hardly containing his excitement. He began by emphasizing that while the Cube was powerful, it was air-cooled. (Jobs hated fans. Hated them.) He demonstrated how it didn't have a power switch, but could sense a wave of your hand to turn on the juice. He showed me how Apple had eliminated the tray that held CDs -- with the Cube, you just hovered the disk over the slot and the machine inhaled it. And then he got to the plastics. It was as if Jobs had taken to heart that guy in The Graduate who gave career advice to Benjamin Braddock. "We are doing more with plastics than anyone else in the world," he told me. "These are all specially formulated, and it's all proprietary, just us. It took us six months just to formulate these plastics. They make bulletproof vests out of it! And it's incredibly sturdy, and it's just beautiful! There's never been anything like that. How do you make something like that? Nobody ever made anything like that! Isn't that beautiful? I think it's stunning!"

For one thing, the price was prohibitive -- by the time you bought the display, it was almost three times the price of an iMac and even more than some PowerMacs. By and large, people don't spend their art budget on computers. That wasn't the only issue with the G4 Cube. Those plastics were hard to manufacture, and people reported flaws. The air cooling had problems. If you left a sheet of paper on top of the device, it would shut down to prevent overheating. And because it had no On button, a stray wave of your hand would send the machine into action, like it or not. In any case, the G4 Cube failed to push buttons on the computer-buying public. Jobs told me it would sell millions. But Apple sold fewer than 150,000 units.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: China has launched its first rover mission to Mars. The six-wheeled robot, encapsulated in a protective probe, was lifted off Earth by a Long March 5 rocket from the Wenchang spaceport on Hainan Island at 12:40 local time (04:40 GMT). It should arrive in orbit around the Red Planet in February. Called Tianwen-1, or "Questions to Heaven," the rover won't actually try to land on the surface for a further two to three months. This wait-and-see strategy was used successfully by the American Viking landers in the 1970s. It will allow engineers to assess the atmospheric conditions on Mars before attempting what will be a hazardous descent. Tianwen-1 is one of three missions setting off to Mars in the space of 11 days. On Monday, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched its Hope satellite towards the Red Planet. And in a week from now, the U.S. space agency (Nasa) aims to despatch its next-generation rover, Perseverance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Japan Times: Renewable power for the first time contributed a bigger share in the European generation mix than fossil fuels as the fallout from the pandemic cut energy demand. About 40 percent of the electricity in the first half in the 27 EU countries came from renewable sources, compared with 34 percent from plants burning fossil fuels, according to environmental group Ember in London. As a result, carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector fell 23 percent. While power demand slumped, output from wind and solar farms increased because more plants came online in breezy and sunny weather. At the same time, wet conditions boosted hydro power in Iberia and the Nordic markets.

Electricity demand in the EU fell 7 percent overall. Fossil-fuel power generation plunged 18 percent in the first half compared with a year earlier. Renewable generation grew by 11 percent, according to Ember. Coal was by far the biggest loser in 2020. It's one of the most-polluting sources of power and its share is slumping in Europe as the price of carbon increases and governments move to cut emissions. Power from coal fell 32 percent across the EU.

KFC announced that it will test chicken nuggets made with 3D bioprinting technology in Moscow, Russia, this fall. Business Insider reports: The chicken chain has partnered with 3D Bioprinting Solutions to create a chicken nugget made in a lab with chicken and plant cells using bioprinting. Bioprinting, which uses 3D-printing techniques to combine biological material, is used in medicine to create tissue and even organs. The 3D-printed chicken nuggets will closely mimic the taste and appearance of KFC's original chicken nuggets, according to the press release. KFC expects the production of 3D-printed nuggets to be more environmentally friendly than the production process of its traditional chicken nuggets. The fall release will mark the first debut of a lab-grown chicken nugget at a global fast-food chain like KFC.