Tekla Perry shares an interesting story from the IEEE's "View from the Valley" blog: Arevo was aiming to get into the aircraft parts business when it started developing software and hardware to print 3D structures using a composite containing continuous carbon fibers. Its technology lays out the lines of the material in ways to maximize strength and minimize the amount of composite used.

Printing out a bike frame? That was just going to be a demo for investors. Now the company is in the e-bike manufacturing business, but thinks the ultimate application of its technology will be flying cars.
That's not a joke, the article explains: Bheda says the flying car market could turn out to be Arevo's sweet spot. "They will be manufactured in a larger volume than airplanes, the manufacturing technology being used for current aircraft won't scale to that, and they want to use thermoplastic. Our technology is at least three years ahead of any other thermoplastic technology, so we will be ready."
They're now marketing their in-house printing capabilities as a service, "keeping the manufacture of any products in house."

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: NASA is expanding its efforts to bring 3D printing to space. The agency has given Made In Space a $73.3 million contract to demonstrate the ability to 3D-print spacecraft parts in orbit using Archinaut One, a robotic manufacturing ship due to launch in 2022 or later. The vessel will fly aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket and 3D-print two 32-foot beams on each side, with each unfurling two solar arrays. The completed arrays could produce up to five times more power than the solar panels you normally find on spacecraft this size, NASA said...

If successful, it could alter how NASA and others approach building and fixing spacecraft. This could lead to building spacecraft (albeit smaller ones at this stage) in orbit, of course, but it could also let space agencies launch small satellites that receive large power collectors once they're floating above Earth. It could also lead to fewer spacewalks by having robots build items that would otherwise require human involvement.

"At its worst, it's a waste of precious space, an annoyance, a solution to a problem that doesn't exist any more," complains Daniel Colin James, a writer, developer, and product manager. In a recent Medium essay, he called the Caps Lock key "an unnecessary holdover from a time when typewriters were the bleeding edge of consumer technology" -- and even contacted the man who invented the Caps Lock key (Doug Kerr, who had been a Bell Labs telephone engineer in the 1960s): I reached out to Doug about his invention, and he responded that while he still uses Caps Lock regularly, "we don't often today have a reason to type addresses in all caps, which was the context in which the need for the key first manifested itself to me."

I would go a step further, and say that most of us don't often have a reason to type anything in all caps today... [A] toggle with the same functionality could easily be activated in a number of different ways for those who really want to write things in all capital letters. (Say, for example, double tapping the Shift key, like how it already works on your phone.) Caps Lock is one of the largest keys on a modern keyboard, and it's in one of the best spots -- right next to the home row. It's taking up prime real estate, and it's not paying its rent any more.

Have you ever been in the middle of typing something, and then you get the uneasy feeling thaT YOU FLEW TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN AND NOW YOU HAVE TO REWRITE YOUR WORDS? You're not alone. Accidentally activating Caps Lock is such a relatable mistake that it's the introductory example for a research paper about accessibility issues with modern computer interfaces. Caps Lock is so frequently engaged unintentionally that password fields in software have to include a "Caps Lock is on" warning.
I've heard of people re-mapping their keyboards so the Caps Lock key becomes "Esc" or "Ctrl." But maybe it comes down to consumers. If you were shopping for a computer and were told that it shipped without a Caps Lock key -- would you be more or less likely to buy it?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Is it time to get rid of the Caps Lock key?

Citing a report from Bloomberg, The Verge reports that Amazon is working on a mobile home robot and a high-end Echo to compete against the Apple HomePod and Google Home Max. From the report: We first heard about Amazon's plans to build a wheeled home robot in April last year. The project is reportedly codenamed "Vesta" (after the Roman goddess of the hearth), and rumors suggest it's a sort of "mobile Alexa" that's able to follow users around their homes. Today's report doesn't add significantly to this picture, but it seems Amazon is still keen to build the mobile device. It was apparently slated to launch this year but wasn't ready for mass-production. Engineers have reportedly been pulled from other projects to work on Vesta, and Gurman reports that prototypes are "waist-high and navigate with the help of an array of computer-vision cameras." They can also be summoned using voice commands.

Along with its mystery robot, Amazon is also reportedly working on a high-end Echo device that's due to be released next year. Bloomberg says the cylindrical speaker is wider than existing Echo products in order to fit in extra speaker components, and it could launch alongside a high-fidelity version of Amazon's music streaming service.

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: This month, officials in Los Angeles, California, are expected to approve a deal that would make solar power cheaper than ever while also addressing its chief flaw: It works only when the sun shines. The deal calls for a huge solar farm backed up by one of the world's largest batteries. It would provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery. That's cheaper than any power generated with fossil fuel. The new solar plus storage effort will be built in Kern County in California by 8minute Solar Energy. The project is expected to create a 400-megawatt solar array, generating roughly 876,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity annually, enough to power more than 65,000 homes during daylight hours. Its 800-MWh battery will store electricity for after the sun sets, reducing the need for natural gas-fired generators.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: South Korea has warned that an escalating trade dispute with Japan could hurt the global tech industry. President Moon Jae-in said Wednesday that Japan's decision to restrict exports to South Korea of materials used in memory chips are a "blow to the economy" and threaten to disrupt global supplies. Japan announced earlier this month that companies would need a government license to export three materials to South Korea. The materials -- fluorinated polyamides, photoresists and hydrogen fluoride -- are used to make memory chips and smartphones.

The export controls are a massive headache for South Korean firms Samsung and SK Hynix, who between them control over 63% of the global memory chip market, according to the latest figures from the Korea International Trade Association. South Korean firms sourced 94% of fluorinated polyamides, 92% of photoresists and about 44% of hydrogen fluoride from Japan In the first quarter of this year, data from the association showed. Samsung, the world's biggest seller of smartphones, said in a statement to CNN Business that it was "assessing the current situation and reviewing a number of measures to minimize the impact on our production."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Driven: Owning an electric car in Australia could become much more than just driving from A to B with a reduced carbon footprint, according to Nissan Australia which launched the new version of the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle in Melbourne on Wednesday. Nissan confirmed at the launch that the new Leaf, with a 40kWh battery, will be a V2H (vehicle-to-home) energy asset -- meaning that, unlike other electric vehicles, it will have the capability to charge your home (subject to further testing with Australia's network owners and operators). Called bidirectional charging, the 40kWh Leaf (and for that matter the 62kWh version which is not yet slated for an Australian release) essentially has the capability to become your personal, massive, mobile battery. This means it will be able to not only store energy by plugging into your home, workplace or other destinations such as shopping centers with free charging, or from DC fast-chargers -- it will be able to serve that energy back to your home. And it could be available to use in Australia within six months. Nissan's global head of electric vehicles, Nic Thomas, says that installations such as the grid connected Tesla big battery at Hornsdale in South Australia is a waste, despite the fact that its performance -- both for the grid and financially -- has been widely admired.

"It's a complete waste of resources because what we can do is have cars that are also batteries and those cars are parked most of the time," Thomas said.

Samsung has been one of the only large smartphone manufacturers to insist on keeping the headphone jack in its flagship phones. But that is about to come to an end with the Galaxy Note 10. According to photos published by the FCC, showing both the bottom and top of the phone, there's no headphone jack in sight. The Verge reports: The FCC seems to have briefly shared these images by mistake. Samsung followed the usual protocols in requesting confidentiality for external photos of the Note 10 test device, and yet here we are. Whoops. There are two different models at the FCC, but neither includes 5G. So as with the S10 series, Samsung will likely produce a standalone 5G model. Aside from the headphone jack being a goner -- renders of the phone had already suggested this was coming -- we get a look at the triple-camera system on the back. There's another sensor positioned under the flash, which could be the same 3D time-of-flight depth sensor that Samsung included in the Galaxy S10 5G. The Note is usually where the company throws in everything it can, so it makes sense for it to carry over everything from the top-tier S10 model. The center-aligned front camera cutout is also faintly visible in one shot. Samsung is expected to formally announce the Note 7 at an August 7th Unpacked event in Brooklyn, New York.

AmiMoJo writes: Panasonic will adopt a plant-derived plastic for refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and other home appliances within a few years. The Japanese electronics maker has developed a plastic that is comprised of 55% cellulose fibers and is durable enough to be used for its products. Cellulose is an insoluble substance obtained from the bark, wood or leaves of plants, or from other plant-based material. Panasonic says resin material with more than 50% of plant content is rarely used for commercial purposes. Because plant fibers are soft, molding the material into appliance parts had been a challenge. Panasonic tapped its expertise in battery development to increase plant content without compromising its strength.

Programmer and engineer David Fifield has unveiled a brand-new Zip bomb that explodes a 46-megabyte file to 4.5 petabytes of data. Fifield's new type of "Zip bomb" or "compression bomb" is particularly novel because he "figured out how to 'overlap' files inside of a Zip archive, allowing for compression rates far beyond those of a traditional archive," reports Motherboard. From the report: In an email interview, Fifield noted that, while 42.zip (which has a 106 billion-to-one compression ratio and has been hosted on the same single-serving website for at least 15 years) gets much of the attention, he finds later attempts more technically interesting. "eI find 42.zip inspiring on an aesthetic level -- not so much the file itself but the circumstances around it," Fifield said. "It's like folklore. There must have been many examples of the same basic idea, but for whatever reason 42.zip is the one that had staying power."

Fifield noted that part of what makes his process possible was by coming up with ways to handle cyclic redundancy checks, or CRCs, a basic error-correction functionality baked into Zip, PNG, Ethernet, and numerous other technical standards. Messing around with CRC -- 32 checksums, as they're called, was where Fifield said he learned the most. Fifield, who will present his findings at the USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT) conference next month, noted that while the work itself adds to a history of research and likely will be superseded in the future, its benefit from an awareness standpoint is important.

Using a record of solar radiation measurements around China going back to the late 1950s, researchers from ETH Zurich found that China's coal-driven air pollution is significantly reducing the output of solar panels by dimming the Sun. Ars Technica reports: The researchers found that, over the entire record between about 1960 and 2015, the average potential solar generation declined by about 13%. Expressed in terms of capacity factor -- the fraction of a solar panel's maximum output that is actually produced on average -- the drop from the start to the lowest point in 2008 was 0.162 to 0.142. The change wasn't the same everywhere, though, as air pollution and local conditions varied. The five worst provinces actually saw potential generation drops of fully 20-28%. These included industrial centers in the east but also some clearer high-elevation areas in the west where a small amount of air pollution can have a big impact.

If China could go back to its 1950s air quality, its existing solar installations in 2016 would have produced an additional 14 terawatt-hours of electricity for free. As more solar panels are built, that number would only grow. By 2030, cleaner air could net an additional 70 terawatt-hours of electricity each year -- about 1% of total projected electricity generation at that point. To put some dollar signs on these numbers, the researchers used the current feed-in tariff of $0.14 per kilowatt-hour and a projected drop to $0.09 per kilowatt-hour in 2030. In 2016, this would mean cleaner air would have brought $1.9 billion worth of electricity. In 2030, the extra 13% or so of solar potential could be worth over $6 billion per year. The study has been published in the journal Nature Energy.

Scientists from the University Hospital of Dresden Technical University in Germany have successfully bio-printed skin and bone samples upside down to help determine if the method could be used in a low-gravity environment. CNET reports: The skin sample was printed using human blood plasma as a "bio ink." The researchers added plant and algae-based materials to increase the viscosity so it wouldn't just fly everywhere in low gravity. "Producing the bone sample involved printing human stem cells with a similar bio-ink composition, with the addition of a calcium phosphate bone cement as a structure-supporting material, which is subsequently absorbed during the growth phase," said Nieves Cubo, a bioprinting specialist at the university. These samples are just the first steps for the ESA's ambitious 3D bio-printing project, which is investigating what it would take to equip astronauts with medical and surgical facilities to help them survive and treat injuries on long spaceflights and on Mars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Raspberry Pi 4 was announced two weeks ago as a major new upgrade to the line of cheap single-board hobbyist computers. The Pi 4 featured a faster CPU, options for up to 4GB of RAM, and a new, modern USB-C port for power delivery. The Pi 4 was the Raspberry Pi Foundation's first ever USB-C device, and, well, they screwed it up. As detailed by Tyler Ward, the Raspberry Pi 4 has a non-compliant USB-C charging port and doesn't work with as many chargers as it should. Thanks to the open nature of Raspberry Pi (even the schematics are online!), Ward was able to discover that Raspberry Pi just didn't design its USB-C port correctly. Two "CC" pins on a USB-C port are supposed to each get their own 5.1K ohms resistor, but Raspberry Pi came up with its own circuit design that allows them to share a single resistor. This is not a compliant design and breaks compatibility with some of the more powerful USB-C chargers out there.

Whether your USB-C charger works with the Pi 4 has to do with whether it uses an "e-marked" cable. E-marked cables are fully featured USB-C cables with chips inside that negotiate power management, accessory modes, data rates, and other communication specs. Since the Pi 4 USB-C port is wired incorrectly, these smart cables will detect the Pi 4 as an "Audio Adaptor Accessory" and refuse to charge them. Usually, e-marked cables are more expensive and come with larger, higher-powered items, like a USB-C laptop. After reports started popping up on the Internet, Raspberry Pi cofounder Eben Upton admitted to TechRepublic that "A smart charger with an e-marked cable will incorrectly identify the Raspberry Pi 4 as an audio adapter accessory and refuse to provide power." Upton went on to say, "I expect this will be fixed in a future board revision, but for now users will need to apply one of the suggested workarounds. It's surprising this didn't show up in our (quite extensive) field testing program."

Slashdot reader volvox_voxel shares an excerpt from the latest blog post from software engineer Ken Shirriff, who is well known for his work on restoring some of the rarest computing hardware to its working condition: We've been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer1. Now that we have the world's only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it. Trying to mine Bitcoin on this 1960s computer seemed both pointless and anachronistic, so I had to give it a shot. Implementing the Bitcoin hash algorithm in assembly code on this 15-bit computer was challenging, but I got it to work. Unfortunately, the computer is so slow that it would take about a billion times the age of the universe to successfully mine a Bitcoin block. He wasn't kidding about how long it would take to successfully mine a Bitcoin block. "The Apollo Guidance Computer took 5.15 seconds for one SHA-256 hash," writes Shirriff. "Since Bitcoin uses a double-hash, this results in a hash rate of 10.3 seconds per Bitcoin hash. Currently, the Bitcoin network is performing about 65 EH/s (65 quintillion hashes per second). At this difficulty, it would take the AGC 4x10^23 seconds on average to find a block. Since the universe is only 4.3x10^17 seconds old, it would take the AGC about a billion times the age of the universe to successfully mine a block."

"AMD is unleashing an arsenal of products today," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid.

Hot Hardware writes: The Zen 2-based AMD Ryzen 3000 series is easily one of the most anticipated product launches in the PC space in recent memory. AMD has essentially promised to address virtually all of the perceived shortcomings of the original Zen-based Ryzen processors, with the Ryzen 3000 series, while continuing to aggressively challenge Intel on multiple fronts -- performance, power, price, you name it.
MojoKid summarizes their analysis: In the benchmarks, performance has been improved across the board. The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X offered superior single and multi-thread performance versus their second-gen counterparts, and better latency characteristics, that allowed them to occasionally overtake processors with more cores / threads in a few multi-threaded tests. On a couple of occasions, the 12-core / 24-thread Ryzen 9 3900X even outpaced the 16-core / 32-thread Threadripper 2950X. Performance versus Intel is more of a mixed bag, but the Ryzen 3000 series still looks strong. Single-thread performance is roughly on-par with Intel's Coffee Lake based Core i9-9900K, depending on the workload. Multi-threaded scaling is a dogfight strictly in terms of absolute performance, but because AMD offers more cores per dollar, the Ryzen 3000 series is the clear winner here.

Meanwhile, AMD's Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT Navi-powered graphics cards are set to take on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX offerings in the midrange
There's more details in the original submission, and PC World writes that AMD's Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards "represent a fresh start and a bright future for AMD, brimming with technologies that have never been seen in GPUs before." But they're not the only site offering a detailed analysis.

Forbes tested the chips on five high-workload games (including World of Tanks and Shadow of the Tomb Raider) and shared their results: As usual, things are very title and resolution dependent, but in general, [AMD's] RX 5700 XT proved to be a slightly better option at 1080p with the RTX 2060 Super mostly matching it above this... However, the 2060 Super was cooler-running and much quieter than its AMD counterpart, plus I'd argue it's better-looking too... You also get the option of Ray Tracing and DLSS, but even discounting those, the Nvidia card is a slightly better buy overall.
But CNET argues that AMD's new graphics cards "are very quiet. They are bigger and do require more power than the RTX 2060...but the 2060 Super has increased power requirements as well."

TL:DR: There's a chip war going on.

"Life's information-storage system is being adapted to handle massive amounts of information," reports Scientific American, reports Scientific American, calling it "an alternative to hard drives" and noting that DNA "is already routinely sequenced (read), synthesized (written to) and accurately copied with ease.

"DNA is also incredibly stable, as has been demonstrated by the complete genome sequencing of a fossil horse that lived more than 500,000 years ago. And storing it does not require much energy." But it is the storage capacity that shines. DNA can accurately stow massive amounts of data at a density far exceeding that of electronic devices. The simple bacterium Escherichia coli, for instance, has a storage density of about 10**19 bits per cubic centimeter, according to calculations published in 2016 in Nature Materials by George Church of Harvard University and his colleagues. At that density, all the world's current storage needs for a year could be well met by a cube of DNA measuring about one meter on a side.

The prospect of DNA data storage is not merely theoretical. In 2017, for instance, Church's group at Harvard adopted CRISPR DNA-editing technology to record images of a human hand into the genome of E. coli, which were read out with higher than 90 percent accuracy. And researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research have developed a fully automated system for writing, storing and reading data encoded in DNA. A number of companies, including Microsoft and Twist Bioscience, are working to advance DNA-storage technology... DNA bar coding is now being used to dramatically accelerate the pace of research in fields such as chemical engineering, materials science and nanotechnology.

"Last month, Rob McGinnis fired up a new machine that runs combustion in reverse, using electricity to weld carbon dioxide and water into liquid fuels," writes Slashdot reader sciencehabit: McGinnis, a chemical engineer and entrepreneur, has launched a new start-up called Prometheus, in hopes that he will be able to synthesize fuels more cheaply than energy giants can drill for oil, ship it and refine it. If powered by solar, wind, or other renewable power sources, McGinnis' machine will churn out carbon neutral fuels, eliminating the fossil from fossil fuels. At the heart of McGinnis' machine is proprietary carbon nanotube-based filter that separates fuel molecules from water without the large energy input normally required for this job. Can a former Yale University theater major remake the $2 trillion liquid fuels industry?
The article adds that the startup signed its first deal last month, "to begin to sell carbon-neutral fuel to Boom Supersonic, a Denver company building a supersonic commercial airliner."

Nuclear power plant manufacturers, such as Westinghouse and Framatome, are developing safer nuclear reactors that use so-called accident-tolerant fuels that are less likely to overheat -- and if they do, will produce very little or no hydrogen. As Scientific American reports, commercial reactors use small pellets of uranium dioxide stacked inside long cylindrical rods made of zirconium alloy, which "allows the neutrons generated from fission in the pellets to readily pass among the many rods submerged in water inside a reactor core, supporting a self-sustaining, heat-producing nuclear reaction." The problem is that if the zirconium overheats, it can react with water and produce hydrogen, which can explode. From the report: In some of the variations, the zirconium cladding is coated to minimize reactions. In others, zirconium and even the uranium dioxide are replaced with different materials. The new configurations could be slipped into existing reactors with little modification, so they could be phased in during the 2020s. Thorough in-core testing, which has begun, would have to prove successful, and regulators would have to be satisfied. In a bonus, the new fuels could help plants run more efficiently, making nuclear power more cost-competitive -- a significant motivation for manufacturers and electric utilities because natural gas, solar and wind energy are less expensive.

Russia is also deploying other safety measures; recent installations at home and abroad by the state-run company Rosatom have newer "passive" safety systems that can squelch overheating even if electrical power at the plant is lost and coolant cannot be actively circulated. Westinghouse and other companies have incorporated passive safety features into their updated designs as well. Manufacturers are also experimenting with "fourth generation" models that use liquid sodium or molten salt instead of water to transfer heat from fission, removing the possibility of dangerous hydrogen production. China reportedly intends to connect a demonstration helium-cooled reactor to its grid this year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Toyota is testing a new and improved version of the solar power cells it previously launched on the Japan-exclusive Prius PHV, in a pilot along with partners Sharp and Japanese national research organization NEDO. This demo car's prototype cells can convert solar energy at 34% and up, which is much better than the existing commercial version's 22.5%. And, unlike its predecessor, it also can charge the car's driving battery while the car is actually moving, recouping significant range while the vehicle is in use. The new system will provide up to 44.5 km (27.7 miles) of additional range per day while parked and soaking up sun, and can add up to 56.3 km (35 miles) of power to both the driving system and the auxiliary power battery on board, which runs the AC, navigation and more.

Using a redesigned solar battery cell film that measures only 0.03 mm (that's 0.001 inches), the vehicle's engineers could put the film over a much broader surface area of the vehicle compared to the existing production version, with solar cells that wrap around covered body components, the rear door and the hood with relative ease. And as mentioned, the system can now work while the car is actually driving, thanks to changes in how generated power is fed to the system, which is a huge step up from the last generation, which could only push power to that auxiliary battery to run the radio, etc. when in motion. This new test vehicle will hit the road in Japan in late July, and perform trials across a range of different regions to test its abilities in different weather and driving conditions.

Ford and Volkswagen have reached an outline agreement to share electric and autonomous car tech, extending their alliance beyond a cooperation on commercial vehicles. Reuters reports: VW will share its MEB electric vehicle platform [a part bin and toolkit for building electric vehicles] with Ford, the source said. Volkswagen's supervisory board is due to discuss deepening the alliance at a meeting on July 11, 2019, a second source told Reuters. A Ford spokeswoman said, "Our talks with Volkswagen continue. Discussions have been productive across a number of areas. We'll share updates as details become more firm."