After being teased and promoted for four years, Porsche has officially revealed their first electric car called the Taycan. The Verge's Sean O'Kane shares his first impressions of the $150,900 supercar: The fuller picture Porsche painted about the Taycan on Wednesday is one of an electric sports car that will hang with the fastest vehicles on the market, all without sacrificing practicality. It's an EV imbued with characteristics that were forged in the automaker's storied motorsports program, and a vehicle that marks the beginning of a new era in the company's long history. The Taycan feels like a car that can inspire people to switch to electric propulsion in a way that only Tesla has really achieved so far. It's got the kind of verve that the Audi E-Tron, Mercedes-Benz EQC, and Jaguar I-Pace completely lack.

The thing Porsche wants people to focus on more than the 2.6-second 0-60mph time (3.0 seconds for the base Taycan Turbo) is the car's ability to repeat that performance without overheating the battery pack or restricting the power output. That will likely be an advantage the Taycan holds onto for a few years, and for people who care about putting this car through the ringer, it's going to make the price tag a bit more palatable. [...] The Taycan follows in the footsteps of Tesla, which has helped inspire automakers to just design beautiful cars that happen to be electric. It has all the beautiful curves and details one expects from a modern Porsche, with a few -- like the vegan interior option -- that are less typical. One thing that surprised me about the Taycan is the interior: it felt less obnoxious than it looked in the photos Porsche released a few weeks ago. Granted, the optional passenger side screen is a bit much. But the two main screens that come standard on the car are big and clear enough to offer a lot of information at once, and they blend into the car well. The center screen especially feels well-integrated; since it's not surrounded by gauche plastic buttons, you have to hunt for the seams where it disappears into the dashboard.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Trump administration announced new rules on Wednesday to roll back requirements for energy-saving light bulbs, a move that could contribute to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. The Energy Department's filing in the Federal Register will prevent new efficiency standards from going into effect on Jan. 1 under a law passed in 2007. The changes are likely to be challenged in court. "We will explore all options, including litigation, to stop this completely misguided and unlawful action," said Noah Horowitz, director of the Center for Energy Efficiency Standards at the Natural Resources Defense Council, last week in anticipation of the move. "One part of the new standards would have required the adding of four kinds of incandescent and halogen light bulbs to the energy-efficient group: three-way, the candle-shaped bulbs used in chandeliers; the globe-shaped bulbs found in bathroom lighting; reflector bulbs used in recessed fixtures; and track lighting," the report adds. "A rule that will be published Thursday in the Federal Register will eliminate the requirement for those four categories of bulbs."

"The Department of Energy was also supposed to begin a broader upgrade concerning energy efficiency in pear-shaped bulbs, scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2020. The department is proposing a new rule that would eliminate that requirement, subject to a 60-day comment period."

Independent Scottish developer Muirhall Energy announced on Monday that construction has begun at the Crossdykes Wind Farm, an important step in the company's effort to deliver Scotland's first subsidy-free onshore wind project. CleanTechnica reports: The 46 megawatt (MW) Crossdykes Wind Farm, being developed at Dumfries and Galloway, in the western Southern Uplands of Scotland, is expected to produce first power in September 2020. Muirhall Energy and its partners WWS Renewables reached financial close on the project in August -- believed to be the first subsidy-free development to be project-financed, thanks to funding from Close Brothers Leasing and wind turbines to be supplied by Nordex. Muirhall has also offered the local Dumfries and Galloway community the opportunity to buy up to 10% of the project via a community share offer. "We are delighted to be starting construction on what will be one of the first subsidy-free developments to come online in the UK," said Chris Walker, Managing Director of Muirhall Energy. "That is testament to the work we have done as a company, but also the flexibility shown by all our partners as we finalized our plans for the project."

"We are now very much focused on working to our tight construction timeline and progressing a number of the other projects in our portfolio which we believe can be made to work on a similar model. With more than 300 MW to begin construction over the next three years, this an exciting time for Muirhall Energy."

Full stack developer and teacher, Nick Janetakis, says the Amazon Basics keyboard is one of his favorite general purpose/programming keyboards. "It hits all the major points that make a keyboard good and it also happens to be only $14," he writes. From his blog post: Quiet as Possible: I have one freelance client (ahem Ryan!) who has really loud mechanical key switches. Every time we hop on a screen sharing session that involves typing I can't tell if he's lighting off fireworks in his office or writing code. [...] I tried a bunch of keyboards and [the Amazon Basics keyboard] is really very quiet while having tactile feeling keys. (You can listen to this YouTube video to hear what the keyboard sounds like.)

Tactile Feeling Keys: The Amazon Basics keyboard fits in between with mid-height keys. They have a decent amount of resistance to them so you can definitely feel each key press, but it's not so much that it hurts your forearms after long hours of coding.

Easy to Clean / Avoids Stuck Keys: After a quick wipe down it looks pretty much as good as new -- even years later. The mid-height keys are excellent for avoiding dirt and stuck keys because it's almost impossible to get anything stuck under a key. Only dust particles get caught under there.

Scratch Resistant Key Cap Labels: After ~5 years of extensive use and abuse only 3 keys had minor chips in their label. I lost the upper part of the L's label, a third of the O's label and half of the ,'s label. Not too bad IMO. I've seen a lot worse with less usage. The labels look like very tightly pressed stickers that are flat to the touch. They almost look like maybe they were heat sealed onto the surface of the key. It's hard to say. Even if I take my nail and try to scrape off a label, it doesn't budge.

Useful Media / Extra Keys: Speaking of keys, it's a nice perk to have a keyboard that has extra keys that you can configure without bloating the size of the keyboard. Amazon has done a fantastic job here at maximizing the usable space of their keyboard. That's 9 distinct keys or 13 if you count the media combo keys. That's really useful. You can always remap any of them to other actions if you prefer. It's a dream come true if you plan to use something like i3wm on Linux which is heavily keyboard shortcut driven.

Compact Size but Sticks To Standards For Key Placement: Everything is where you expect it with this Amazon Basics keyboard and you get the full size backspace / backslash keys.

Caps Lock / Num Lock / Scroll Lock Have Lights on Their Key Switch: With this keyboard, each lock key has its own light which I animated below.

Robust Wire / USB Cable: I have to say the Amazon Basics keyboard is solid in this area. Even on my old keyboard from years ago, the wire has zero signs of wear and tear.

Solid Rubber Feet to Avoid Slipping: There's 4 pretty large rubber grips on the edges of each corner so there's really no reasonable chance of it ever slipping from pressure or normal usage.

dryriver writes: The Amiga was a remarkable machine at the time it was released -- 1985. It had a multitasking capable GUI-driven OS and a mouse. It had a number of cleverly designed custom chips that gave the Amiga amazing graphics and sound capabilities far beyond the typical IBM/DOS PCs of its time. The Amiga was the multimedia beast of its time -- you could create animated and still 2D or 3D graphics on it, compose sophisticated electronic music, develop 2D or 3D 16-Bit games, edit and process digital video (using Video Toaster), and of course, play some amazing games. And after the Amiga -- as well as the Atari ST, Archimedes and so on -- died, everybody pretty much had to migrate to either the PC or Mac platforms. If Commodore and the Amiga had survived and thrived, there might have been four major desktop platforms in use today: Windows, OSX, AmigaOS and Linux. And who knows what the custom chips (ASICs? FPGAs?) of an Amiga in 2019 might have been capable of -- Amiga could possibly have been the platform that makes nearly life-like games and VR/AR a reality, and given Nvidia and AMD's GPUs a run for their money.

What do you think the computing landscape in 2019 would have looked like if the Amiga and AmigaOS as a platform had survived? Would Macs be as popular with digital content creators as they are today? Would AAA games target Windows 7/8/10 by default or tilt more towards the Amiga? Could there have been an Amiga hardware-based game console? Might AmigaOS and Linux have had a symbiotic existence of sorts, with AmigOS co-existing with Linux on many enthusiast's Amigas, or even becoming compatible with each other over time?

The National Park Service has expanded the use of e-bikes to allow pedal assist models on the same roads and trails as conventional bicycles so long as they cut off assistance at 28MPH. Officials contend that the policy shift could make parks more accessible and "mitigate" environmental damage while ensuring uses similar to traditional bikes. Engadget reports: E-bikes make it easier to travel far, the NPS said. It could likewise enable park rides for people with limited mobility, particularly on hilly and otherwise challenging terrain. They might also lower emissions and improve air quality by reducing the use of cars and motorcycles. It's not certain how the service would enforce the rules.

While the NPS' arguments appear to hold up, USA Today also highlighted concerns that e-bikes could cause more harm than good. Safety may be more of an issue than it is for conventional two-wheelers. E-bikes may also wear down trails in a less sustainable way. And then there's the simple matter of noise. People often go to parks for peace and quiet, and that may be harder if they have to contend with the hum of e-bike motors. This isn't to say that e-bikes will prove calamitous -- it's just that the NPS is letting more of them in without evidence that it considered the potential drawbacks.

PatentlyApple has spotted several patents that suggest Apple is playing with the idea of making the Apple Watch's band identify users via their wrist's skin texture and arm hair. TechCrunch reports: The first patent describes a sensor built into the Watch or the watch's band that could use infrared to build a thermal image of your wrist and its identifying traits (like skin texture/arm hair) to identify who is wearing it -- sort of like a fingerprint, but from your wrist. Unlike most of Apple's other devices, the Apple Watch doesn't currently have any sort of built-in biometrics for unlocking -- there's no thumbprint sensor for Touch ID, or camera for Face ID. Unlocking your Apple Watch means poking at the screen to punch in a PIN (or, if you've configured it to unlock when you unlock your phone, doing that). A sensor setup like this could make the unlocking process automatic without the need to unlock your phone.

The second granted patent describes a Watch band that can adjust itself on the fly -- think Nike's self-tightening shoes, but on your wrist. If the Watch detects that it's sliding while you're running (or if the aforementioned thermal sensors need a closer look at your wrist skin) tensioners in the device could tighten or loosen the band on command. Finally, a third granted patent tinkers with the idea of a Watch band with built-in light-up indicators -- like, say, a notification light for incoming texts, or a meter that fills up to tell you at-a-glance how much distance you've got left on your run, or a stripe that glows yellow when you've got something on your calendar in the next hour. All of this can already be done on the Watch's screen, of course -- this would just allow for it without having to power up the entire display.

Ryan Bigg: I recently upgraded from a 2015 MacBook Pro to a 2018 MacBook Pro. So I've been using this computer as a work computer for almost 3 months now and, my god, the keyboard drives me mental. Even writing this blog post now on the train and there's:
duplicated "o's" that I've had to go back and fix, or missing ones -- guess how fun it is to write a book about a Toy Robot with this particular problem
double spaces -- or no spaces
a Command key that registers 9 out of every 10 times
words like "times" that inexplicably get spelled like "timies", or "about" that gets spelled like "abouot"

Apple is all about the thinness of their laptops. I do not particularly care about the thinness of this device. For the most part, it sits on one of two desks that I use or it sits on my lap on the train. Maybe I use it on the couch from time-to-time. I do not care about the thinness of this device while I am using it. I only care about it when I store it away, in my backpack. This keyboard has a key travel distance that, I am sure, is measured in microns or perhaps nanometers. It feels like I am typing on a concrete slab. Key presses inexplicably duplicate. Or don't register at all. All for thinness. This keyboard is a catastrophic engineering failure, designed by a company that should know better. A company with more money in the bank than several countries combined. This keyboard would be, by far, the part of the MacBook Pro that is used the most by everybody who owns one, and it is so poorly engineered for the pursuit of thinness. The author is a junior engineering program lead at Culture Amp, an analytics platform that specializes in staff surveying and analytics.

Windows Central reports: AMD surpassed NVIDIA when it comes to total GPU shipments according to new data from Jon Peddie Research (via Tom's Hardware). This is the first time that AMD ranked above NVIDIA in total GPU shipments since Q3 of 2014. AMD now has a 17.2 percent market share compared to NVIDIA's 16 percent according to the most recent data. John Peddie Research also reports that "AMD's overall unit shipments increased 9.85% quarter-to-quarter."

AMD gained 2.4 percent market share over the last year while NVIDIA lost 1 percent. Much of AMD's growth came in the last quarter, in which AMD saw a difference of 1.5 percent compared to NVIDIA's 0.1 percent.
The Motley Fool points out that "NVIDIA doesn't sell CPUs, so this comparison isn't apples-to-apples."

But meanwhile, TechSpot reports: German hardware retailer Mindfactory has published their CPU sales and revenue figures, and they show that for the past year AMD had sold slightly more units than Intel -- until Ryzen 3000 arrived. When the new hardware launched in July, AMD's sales volume doubled and their revenue tripled, going from 68% to 79% volume market share and 52% to 75% revenue share -- this is for a single major PC hardware retailer in Germany -- but the breakdown is very interesting to watch nonetheless...

Full disclaimer: German markets have historically been more biased towards Ryzen than American ones, and AMD's sales will fall a bit before stabilizing, while Intel's appear to have already plateaued.

"Seen in the wild, robots often appear cute and nonthreatening. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be hostile," argues a new article in Wired, reporting on what appears to be a pre-meditated kicking of a Knightscope K5 patrol robot in a parking lot in California: K5's siblings, it turns out, don't fare much better. In 2017 a drunk man attacked a K5 in a Mountain View parking lot. A few months later a group of angry protestors in San Francisco covered another one in a tarp, pushed it to the ground, and smeared barbecue sauce on it. Stacey Stephens, Knightscope's executive vice president, wouldn't say how many have been seriously damaged. "I don't want to challenge people," he says, afraid any number will inspire -- perhaps compel -- more miscreants to seek out K5s. (Stephens did specify that Knightscope prosecutes "to the fullest extent of the law," often pursuing felony charges for damaged K5s.)

Hard numbers or not, the assaults will continue -- that's not the question... The question is: Do we care...? [A]s an otherwise law-abiding citizen...all I could think as I watch and rewatch the security video from August 3 is: Way to go, dude. Because K5 is not a friendly robot, even if the cutesy blue lights are meant to telegraph that it is. It's not there to comfort senior citizens or teach autistic children. It exists to collect data -- data about people's daily habits and routines. While Knightscope owns the robots and leases them to clients, the clients own the data K5 collects. They can store it as long as they want and analyze it however they want. K5 is an unregulated security camera on wheels, a 21st-century panopticon.

The true power of K5 isn't to watch you -- it's to make you police yourself. It's designed to be at eye level, to catch your attention. Stephens likens it to a police car sitting on the side of the road: It makes everyone hyperaware of their surroundings. Even if you aren't speeding, you break, turn down the radio, and put your hands at 10 and 2. The debate over the proper treatment of robots can sometimes sound like the debate over violent videogames. Perhaps acting on violent impulses without hurting real-life humans is healthy, cathartic. Or it might be turning us into a race of psychopaths. Unlike the characters in videogames, though, robots don't exist virtually. In the case of K5 bots, they intrude, without permission, into the most mundane of activities: walking down the sidewalk, parking your car...

It is a sham, an ersatz impression of power that should be pushed to its limits -- right down onto the hard parking lot floor.

As a new generation grows up surrounded by AI, researchers find education as early as preschool can help avoid confusion about robots' role. From a report: Today's small children, aka Generation Alpha, are the first to grow up with robots as peers. Those winsome talking devices spawned by a booming education-tech industry can speed children's learning, but they also can be confusing to them, research shows. Many children think robots are smarter than humans or imbue them with magical powers. The long-term consequences of growing up surrounded by AI-driven devices won't be clear for a while. But an expanding body of research is lending new impetus to efforts to expand technology education beyond learning to code, to understanding how AI works. Children need help drawing boundaries between themselves and the technology, and gaining confidence in their own ability to control and master it, researchers say.

AI is already causing plenty of jitters among adults, says Craig Le Clair, a principal analyst with Forrester and author of a new book on workforce automation. Many workers are worried about programming AI-driven equipment on the job, or fear AI will eliminate their positions altogether. "Machinists are having nervous breakdowns," he says. "We need to teach children the attitude that, 'I can collaborate and work with machines. I'm not threatened by them,'" he says. "And that education has to begin in preschool." Preschoolers can understand more about AI than you think. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are finding some surprising successes teaching AI to children as young as age 4, helping them program robots to learn from patterns or features in data.

A robot pilot is learning to fly -- and it has just passed its pilot's test and flown its first plane. But it has also had its first mishap too. From a report: Unlike a traditional autopilot, the ROBOpilot Unmanned Aircraft Conversion System literally takes the controls, pressing on foot pedals and handling the yoke using robotic arms. It reads the dials and meters with a computer vision system. The robot can take off, follow a flight plan and land without human intervention. ROBOpilot is a drop-in system meaning that the pilot's seat is removed and replaced with the robot. ROBOpilot has passed the Federal Aviation Administration's Practical Test for piloting light aircraft and carried out its first flight on August 9 in Utah. A few weeks later it also had its first incident where the robot was damaged, although the extent of the damage is not known.

Apple said on Thursday it will start offering independent repair shops parts, tools and guides to help fix broken iPhones. From a report: The new repair program allows big and small repair outfits to sign up and get access to parts for common out-of-warranty repairs, something that was previously restricted to Apple's network of authorized service providers. The move represents an about face for Apple, which typically encourages any repairs to be made by its authorized service providers and makes it difficult for users to replace aging or broken parts themselves. Additionally, the company has fought California's proposed right-to-repair bill, which would require companies like Apple to make repair information and parts available to both device owners and independent repair shops. Apple said the new program is free to join but that shops will be required to have an Apple-certified technician who has taken a preparatory course provided by the company.

Qantas airlines is now restricting MacBook Pro laptops from checked-in luggage on concern that batteries could catch fire. All 15-inch versions of Apple's MacBook Pro must be carried in the cabin and switched off, Qantas said in a statement Wednesday. The rule went into effect Tuesday morning. "Rival Virgin Australia went further on Aug. 26, banning all Apple laptops from checked-in luggage," adds Bloomberg. From the report: Australia's two biggest airlines join a growing list of carriers and jurisdictions across the world cracking down on the portable computers out of concern some could self-combust. The models in question are some 15-inch MacBook Pros sold from September 2015 to February 2017. Apple issued the recall in June, saying "in a limited number of older generation 15-inch MacBook Pro units, the battery may overheat and pose a fire safety risk." Singapore Airlines Ltd. and Thai Airways International PCL have already stopped passengers from taking any of the affected models on their aircraft.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Now, researchers have used carbon nanotubes to make a general purpose, RISC-V-compliant processor that handles 32-bit instructions and does 16-bit memory addressing. Performance is nothing to write home about, but the processor successfully executed a variation of the traditional programming demo, "Hello world!" It's an impressive bit of work, but not all of the researchers' solutions are likely to lead to high-performance processors. The new processor was made by a collaboration between MIT researchers and scientists at Analog Devices, Inc., who figured out a way to work around all the issue with carbon nanotubes.

The key insight by the researchers behind the new chip was that certain logical functions are less sensitive to metallic nanotubes than others. So they modified an open source RISC design tool to take this information into account. The result was a chip design that had none of the gates that were most sensitive to metallic carbon nanotubes. The resulting chip, which the team is calling the RV16X-NANO, was designed to handle the 32-bit-long instructions of the RISC-V architecture. Memory addressing was limited to 16-bits, and the functional units include instruction fetching, decoding, registers, execution units, and write back to memory. Overall, over 14,000 individual transistors were used for the RV16X-NANO, and the manipulations of the carbon nanotubes to make them resulted in a 100% yield. In other words, every single one of those 14,000 gates worked. It was also what's considered a 3D chip, in that the metal contacts below the nanotube layer were used for routing signals among the different transistors, while a separate layer of metal contacts layered above the nanotubes was used to supply power within the chip. The report has been published in the journal Nature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The UHD Alliance, a collection of companies who work together to define display standards, has announced Filmmaker Mode, a new TV setting that's designed to show films as they were originally mastered, with as little post-processing as possible. Although the mode will affect multiple settings like frame rate, aspect ratio, overscanning, and noise reduction, its most important element is that it turns off motion smoothing, which creates that horrible "soap opera effect" that makes even the most expensive films look cheap. LG, Vizio, and Panasonic have all expressed an interest in including the new mode in their TVs.

Of course, it's always been possible to turn off this setting (we've got a guide on how to do so right here) but TV manufacturers have an annoying habit of referring to the same setting by different names, confusing the process. LG calls it "TruMotion," Vizio calls it "Smooth Motion Effect," and Panasonic calls it "Intelligent Frame Creation," for example. The difference with Filmmaker Mode is that it will have the same name across every TV manufacturer, and the UHD Alliance also says that it wants the setting to be enabled automatically when cinematic content is detected, or otherwise easily accessible via a button on the TV remote. Over a dozen high profile directors have expressed support for the new mode, including Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and JJ Abrams.

An anonymous reader writes: For years, Microsoft used its patents as a way to profit from open-source products. The poster-child for Microsoft's intellectual property aggression were the File Allocation Table (FAT) patents. But the Microsoft of then is not the Microsoft of now. First, Microsoft open-sourced its entire patent portfolio and now Microsoft is explicitly making its last remaining FAT intellectual property, the exFAT patents, available to Linux and open source via the Open Invention Network (OIN). Microsoft announced that it now loves Linux and "we say that a lot, and we mean it! Today we're pleased to announce that Microsoft is supporting the addition of Microsoft's exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) technology to the Linux kernel." ExFAT is based on FAT, one of the first floppy disk file systems. Over time, FAT became Microsoft's files ystem of choice for MS-DOS and Windows. It would become the default file system for many applications. Microsoft extended FAT to flash memory storage devices such as USB drives and SD cards in 2006 with exFAT. While FAT isn't commonly used today, exFAT is used in hundreds of millions of storage device. Indeed, exFAT is the official file system for SD Card Association's standard large capacity SD cards.

Now, Microsoft states: "It's important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft's technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate the development of conformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network's Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN's 3040+ members and licensees." Specifically, according to a Microsoft representative, "Microsoft is supporting the addition of the exFAT file system to the Linux kernel and the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network's Linux System Definition."

Microsoft announced it will be holding a Surface hardware event in New York City on October 2nd, which could be where the company unveils its dual-screen Surface laptop / tablet hybrid that's been in development for more than two years. As The Verge reports, the new dual-screen device, codenamed "Centaurus," is "designed to be the hero device for a wave of new dual-screen tablet / laptop hybrids that we're expecting to see throughout 2020." From the report: Microsoft demonstrated this new device during an internal meeting earlier this year, signaling that work on the prototype has progressed to the point where it's nearing release. Still, it's not certain that Microsoft will show off this new hardware in October or even launch it. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella famously killed off the Surface Mini just weeks before its scheduled unveiling. If Microsoft does plan to show this dual-screen Surface device, then it won't be ready to ship immediately. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the company is currently targeting a 2020 release date for its dual-screen Surface.

Alongside Centaurus, Microsoft will likely refresh other Surface devices. The Surface Book is long overdue an update, and Microsoft's Surface Laptop and Surface Pro hardware could finally see the addition of USB-C ports this year. Even Microsoft's Surface Go tablet is more than a year old now and could see a minor refresh.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo is having trouble finding a monitor that's good for writing code: The 16:10 aspect ratio, which allows for some extra vertical space that is extremely handy when viewing source code, is basically dead as far as I can tell. Dell still sell a few older models but there no 4k+ monitors with this aspect ratio.

Speaking of 4k, at 27" it's about the same PPI (pixels per inch) as my 2012 laptop with a 15" 1080p display, only bigger (around 160 PPI). It feels a bit awkward, not quite high enough to hide the pixels or render "perfect" looking fonts. 5k would be better (200 PPI), but every 5k monitor seems to have been discontinued except for one Iiyama model that seems to have quality problems.

Everyone seems to be obsessing over gaming and photography monitors now. Is there anything left for developers who don't care about 240Hz and calibrated colour, but do care about aspect ratio and text rendering quality?
Leave your suggestions in the comments. What's the best monitor for development work?

An anonymous reader shared this article about the Akademik Lomonosov "powership" -- Russia's new 459-foot (140-meter) floating nuclear power station (with two 35-megawatt nuclear reactors).

It's begun a three-week, 2,650-mile voyage to the Arctic port town of Pevek -- where it will be replacing another plant that's being decommissioned. The Russian project is the first floating nuclear power plant since the U.S. MH-1A, a much smaller reactor that supplied the Panama Canal with power from 1968 to 1975. Environmentalists have criticized the project as inherently dangerous and a threat to the pristine Arctic region. Russia's state nuclear corporation Rosatom has dismissed those concerns, insisting that the floating nuclear plant is safe to operate. Rosatom director, Alexei Likhachev, said his corporation hopes to sell floating reactors to foreign markets.

Russian officials have previously mentioned Indonesia and Sudan among potential export customers.