Amazon's cloud-computing unit announced updated versions of its in-house computer chips while also forging closer ties with Nvidia -- dual efforts designed to ensure it can get enough supplies of crucial data-center processors. From a report: New homegrown Graviton4 chips will have as much as 30% better performance than their predecessors, Amazon Web Services said at its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Computers using the processors will start coming online in the coming months.

The company also unveiled Trainium2, an updated version of a processor designed for artificial intelligence systems. It will begin powering new services starting next year, Amazon said. That chip provides an alternative to so-called AI accelerators sold by Nvidia -- processors that have been vital to the build-out of artificial intelligence services. But Amazon also touted "an expansion of its partnership" with Nvidia, whose chief executive officer, Jensen Huang, joined AWS counterpart Adam Selipsky on stage. AWS will be the first big user of an updated version of that company's Grace Hopper Superchip, and it will be one of the data-center companies hosting Nvidia's DGX Cloud service.

Barriers to entry in an industry dominated by TSMC and Nvidia are very high. From a report: In the drama that has just played out in Silicon Valley over the future of OpenAI, one side plot concerned an ambitious chip venture by its chief executive Sam Altman. Before he was ousted and reinstated to the helm of the company, Altman had sought to raise as much as $100bn from investors in the Middle East and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son to build a rival to compete with sector giants Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. This would be a vast undertaking. And one where $100bn may not go very far. Given that the US chip designer and Taiwanese chipmaker are critical to all things generative AI, Altman is unlikely to be the only one with hopes of taking them on. But the barriers to entry -- moats in Silicon Valley parlance -- are formidable.

Nvidia has about 95 per cent of the markets for GPU, or graphics processing units. These computer processors were originally designed for graphics but have become increasingly important in areas such as machine learning. TSMC has about 90 per cent of the world's advanced chip market. These businesses are lucrative. TSMC runs on gross margins of nearly 60 per cent, Nvidia at 74 per cent. TSMC makes $76bn in sales a year. The impressive figures make it seem as though there is plenty of room for more contenders. A global shortage of Nvidia's AI chips makes the prospect of vertical integration yet more attractive. As the number of GPUs required to develop and train advanced AI models grows rapidly, the key to profitability for AI companies lies in having stable access to GPUs.

[...] It is one thing for companies to design customised chips. But Nvidia's profitability comes not from making chips cost-efficient, but by providing a one-stop solution for a wide range of tasks and industries. For example, Nvidia's HGX H100 systems, which can go for about $300,000 each, are used to accelerate workloads for everything from financial applications to analytics. Coming up with a viable rival for the HGX H100 system, which is made up of 35,000 parts, would take much more than just designing a new chip. Nvidia has been developing GPUs for more than two decades. That head start, which includes hardware and related software libraries, is protected by thousands of patents. Even setting aside the challenges of designing a new AI chip, manufacturing is where the real challenge lies.

Simon Sharwood reports via The Register: Amazon Web Services has announced the WorkSpaces Thin Client -- a device dedicated to connecting to its WorkSpaces desktop-as-a service offering and based on Amazon's own "Fire Cube" smart TV box. The $195 machine has the same hardware as the Fire Cube: the eight-core Arm-powered Amlogic POP1-G SoC, plus 2GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 10/100 ethernet, and a single USB-A 2.0 port. Bluetooth is included to connect other peripherals. A second HDMI output can be added by acquiring an $85 hub that also offers four more USB ports. Like the Fire TV Cube, the Thin Client also runs a modified cut of Android.

But there the similarities end. AWS created custom firmware and ripped out anything remotely related to running a consumer device, replacing it with software designed solely to create a secure connection between the device and desktops running in the Amazonian cloud. Amazon Business -- the B2B version of Jeff Bezos's digital souk -- will ship the device to your door, and charge it to your AWS bill. At least if you are in the USA. Europe will get the Thin Client in early 2024, and it'll eventually migrate elsewhere.

AWS decided to base the box on the Fire Cube because, according to a corporate blog post, AWS customers expressed a desire for cheaper and easier-to-maintain client devices. As AWS execs searched for a well-priced box, they considered the Fire TV Cube, found it fit the bill and noted it was already being made at scale. Keeping things in-house made sense, too. And so we find ourselves with AWS taking on established thin client providers. The cloudy concern is also keen to have a crack at the thick wedge of the enterprise PC market: call centers, payment processing centers, and other environments with lots of users and high staff turnover due to factors like seasonal demand for workers.

Google Drive users are reporting files mysteriously disappearing from the service, with some posters on the company's support forums claiming six or more months of work have unceremoniously vanished. From a report: The issue has been rumbling for a few days, with one user logging into Google Drive and finding things as they were in May 2023. According to the poster, almost everything saved since then has gone, and attempts at recovery failed. Others chimed in with similar experiences, and one claimed that six months of business data had gone AWOL. There is little information regarding what has happened; some users reported that synchronization had simply stopped working, so the cloud storage was out of date.

Others could get some of their information back by fiddling with cached files, although the limited advice on offer for the affected was to leave things well alone until engineers come up with a solution. A message purporting to be from Google support also advised not to make changes to the root/data folder while engineers investigate the issue. Some users speculated that it might be related to accounts being spontaneously dropped. We've asked Google for its thoughts and will update should the search giant respond.

"On a typical day 1,300 planes take off and land at Heathrow Airport, and keeping that going requires around 20 million litres of jet fuel every day," reports the BBC. "That's the equivalent of filling up your car around 400,000 times.

"But, when it comes to fuel, airports around the world are having to have a major rethink..." To be of any use to the aviation industry, hydrogen needs to be in its liquid form, which involves chilling it to minus 253C. Handling a liquid at that kind of temperature is immensely challenging. Given the chance, liquid hydrogen will "boil-off" and escape as a gas — potentially becoming a hazard. So tanks, pipes and hoses all have to be extra-insulated to keep the liquid cold.

France's Air Liquide has a lot of experience in this area. For around 50 years it has been supplying cryogenic hydrogen to the Ariane rockets of the European Space Agency (ESA)... Over the past three years, in partnership with Airbus and France's biggest airport operator, Group ADP, Air Liquide has been investigating the potential of hydrogen in the aviation business. It is also part of the H2Fly consortium which this summer successfully flew an aircraft using liquid hydrogen. For Air Liquide, it was an opportunity to test systems for fuelling a hydrogen aircraft...

However, installing the equipment needed to store and distribute hydrogen at airports will not be cheap. The consultancy Bain & Company estimates it could cost as much as a billion dollars per airport. One start-up, Universal Hydrogen, says it has a solution... The company has developed special tanks to hold liquid hydrogen (UH calls them modules), which can then be trucked to the airport. The modules are designed to slot straight into the aircraft, where they can be plugged into the propulsion system. No need for pipes, hoses and pumps.

The modules are extremely well insulated and can keep the hydrogen in its liquid form for four days. Two modules would hold 360kg of hydrogen and would be able to fly an aircraft 500 miles, plus an extra 45 minutes of flight time in reserve.

America's long-standing Advanced Research Projects Agency (or ARPA) developed the foundational technologies for the internet.

This week its energy division announced $42 million for projects enabling a "more secure and reliable" energy grid, "allowing it to utilize more solar, wind, and other clean energy." But specifically, they funded 15 projects across 11 states to improve the reliability, resiliency, and flexibility of the grid "through the next-generation semiconductor technologies." Streamlining the coordinated operation of electricity supply and demand will improve operational efficiency, prevent unforeseen outages, allow faster recovery, minimize the impacts of natural disasters and climate-change fueled extreme weather events, and redcude grid operating costs and carbon intensity.
Some highlights:

• The Georgia Institute of Technology will develop a novel semiconductor switching device to improve grid control, resilience, and reliability.
• Michigan's Great Lakes Crystal Technologies (will develop a diamond semiconductor transistor to support the control infrastructure needed for an energy grid with more distributed generation sources and more variable loads
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will develop an optically-controlled semiconductor transistor to enable future grid control systems to accommodate higher voltage and current than state-of-the-art devices.
• California's Opcondys will develop a light-controlled grid protection device to suppress destructive, sudden transient surges on the grid caused by lightning or electromagnetic pulses.
• Albuquerque's Sandia National Laboratories will develop novel a solid-state surge arrester protecting the grid from very fast electromagnetic pulses that threaten grid reliability and performance.

America's Secretary of Energy said the new investment "will support project teams across the country as they develop the innovative technologies we need to strengthen our grid security and bring reliable clean electricity to more families and businesses — all while combatting the climate crisis."

"The cornerstone of the open-source philosophy is that the recipients of technology should have access to all its building blocks..." writes the European Organization for Nuclear Research, "in order to study it, modify it and redistribute it to others." This includes mechanical designs, schematics for electronics, and software code. Ever since releasing the World Wide Web software under an open-source model in 1994, CERN has continuously been a pioneer in this field, supporting open-source hardware (with the CERN Open Hardware Licence), open access (with the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics — SCOAP3) and open data (with the Open Data Portal for the LHC experiments).

The CERN Open Data portal is a testimony to CERN's policy of Open Access and Open Data. The portal allows the LHC experiments to share their data with a double focus: for the scientific community, including researchers outside the CERN experimental teams, as well as citizen scientists, and for the purposes of training and education through specially curated resources. The first papers based on data from the CERN Open Data portal have been published. Several CERN technologies are being developed with open access in mind. Invenio is an open-source library management package, now benefiting from international contributions from collaborating institutes, typically used for digital libraries. Indico is another open-source tool developed at CERN for conference and event management and used by more than 200 sites worldwide, including the United Nations. INSPIRE, the High Energy Physics information system, is another example of open source software developed by CERN together with DESY, Fermilab and SLAC.
And on Wednesday the European Organization for Nuclear Research launches its new Open Source Program Office "to help you with all issues relating to the release of your software and hardware designs." Sharing your work with collaborators in research and industry has many advantages, but it may also present some questions and challenges... The OSPO will support you, whether you are a member of the personnel or a user, to find the best solution by giving you access to a set of best practices, tools and recommendations. With representatives from all sectors at CERN, it brings together a broad range of expertise on open source practices... As well as supporting the CERN internal community, the OSPO will engage with external partners to strengthen CERN's role as a promoter of open source.

Open source is a key pillar of open science. By promoting open source practices, the OSPO thus seeks to address one of CERN's core ambitions: sharing our knowledge with the world. Ultimately, the aim is to increase the reach of open source projects from CERN to maximise their benefits for the scientific community, industry and society at large.
For Wednesday's launch event "We will host distinguished open source experts and advocates from Nvidia, the World Health Organization and the Open Source Hardware Association to discuss the impact and future of open source." There will be a live webcast of the event.

There's yet another technological revolution happening, reports the Los Angeles Times. Bowling alleys across America "are ditching traditional pinsetters — the machines that sweep away and reset pins — in favor of contraptions that employ string.

"Think of the pins as marionettes with nylon cords attached to their heads. Those that fall are lifted out of the way, as if by levitation, then lowered back into place after each frame... European bowling alleys have used string pinsetters for decades because they require less energy and maintenance.

"All you need is someone at the front counter to run back when the strings tangle." String pinsetters mean big savings, maybe salvation, for an industry losing customers to video games and other newfangled entertainment. That is why the U.S. Bowling Congress recently certified them for tournaments and league play. But there is delicate science at play here. Radius of gyration, coefficient of restitution and other obscure forces cause tethered pins to fly around differently than their free-fall counterparts. They don't even make the same noise. Faced with growing pushback, the bowling congress published new research this month claiming the disparity isn't nearly as great as people think.
Using a giant mechanical arm, powered by hydraulics and air pressure, they rolled "thousands of test balls from every angle, with various speeds and spins, on string-equipped lanes," according to the article: They found a configuration that resulted in 7.1% fewer strikes and about 10 pins fewer per game as compared to bowling with traditional pinsetters... Officials subsequently enlisted 500 human bowlers for more testing and, this time, reported finding "no statistically significant difference." But hundreds of test participants commented that bowling on strings felt "off." The pins seemed less active, they said. There were occasional spares whereby one pin toppled another without making contact, simply by crossing strings.

Nothing could be done about the muted sound. It's like hearing a drum roll — the ball charging down the lane — with no crashing cymbal at the end.
Still, one Northern California bowling alley spent $1 million to install the technology, and believes it will save them money — partly by cutting their electric bill in half. "We had a full-time mechanic and were spending up to $3,000 a month on parts."

The article also remembers that once upon a time, bowling alleys reset their pins using pinboys, "actual humans — mostly teenagers... scrambling around behind the lanes, gathering and resetting by hand," before they were replaced by machines after World War II.

America passed a climate bill in August of 2022 with incentives to build wind and solar energy in regions that historically relied on fossil fuels. And sure enough, since then "a disproportionate amount of wind, solar, battery and manufacturing investment is going to areas that used to host fossil fuel plants," reports the Washington Post.

They cite a new analysis of investment trends from independent research firm Rhodium Group and MIT's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research: In Carbon County, Wyo. — a county named for its coal deposits — a power company is building hundreds of wind turbines. In Mingo County, W.Va., where many small towns were once coal towns, the Adams Fork Energy plant will sit on a former coal mining site and produce low-carbon ammonia... While communities that once hosted coal, oil or gas infrastructure make up only 18.6 percent of the population, they received 36.8 percent of the clean energy investment in the year after the Inflation Reduction Act's passage. "We're talking about in total $100 billion in investment in these categories," said Trevor Houser, a partner at Rhodium Group. "So $37 billion investment in a year for energy communities — that's a lot of money...."

Most significantly, 56.6 percent of investment in U.S. wind power in the past year has gone to energy communities, as well as 45.5 percent of the storage and battery investment... The analysis also found that significant amounts of clean energy investment were going to disadvantaged communities, defined as communities with environmental or climate burdens, and low-income communities. Many of the states benefiting are solidly Republican...

Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the center-left think tank Third Way, is not sure whether the clean energy investments will make a difference for next year's election. But in the long term, he argues, rural Republican areas will become more dependent on clean energy — potentially shifting party alliances and shifting the position of the Republican Party itself. "It's going to change these fossil fuel communities," he said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (an entity blacklisted in the U.S.) launched its new supercomputer based on the enhanced China-designed Sunway SW26010 Pro processors with 384 cores. Sunway's SW26010 Pro CPU not only packs more cores than its non-Pro SW26010 predecessor, but it more than quadrupled FP64 compute throughput due to microarchitectural and system architecture improvements, according to Chips and Cheese. However, while the manycore CPU is good on paper, it has several performance bottlenecks.

The first details of the manycore Sunway SW26010 Pro CPU and supercomputers that use it emerged back in 2021. Now, the company has showcased actual processors and disclosed more details about their architecture and design, which represent a significant leap in performance, recently at SC23. The new CPU is expected to enable China to build high-performance supercomputers based entirely on domestically developed processors. Each Sunway SW26010 Pro has a maximum FP64 throughput of 13.8 TFLOPS, which is massive. For comparison, AMD's 96-core EPYC 9654 has a peak FP64 performance of around 5.4 TFLOPS.

The SW26010 Pro is an evolution of the original SW26010, so it maintains the foundational architecture of its predecessor but introduces several key enhancements. The new SW26010 Pro processor is based on an all-new proprietary 64-bit RISC architecture and packs six core groups (CG) and a protocol processing unit (PPU). Each CG integrates 64 2-wide compute processing elements (CPEs) featuring a 512-bit vector engine as well as 256 KB of fast local store (scratchpad cache) for data and 16 KB for instructions; one management processing element (MPE), which is a superscalar out-of-order core with a vector engine, 32 KB/32 KB L1 instruction/data cache, 256 KB L2 cache; and a 128-bit DDR4-3200 memory interface.

The founder of Chipotle is opening a new endeavor called Kernel, a vegetarian fast-casual restaurant that will be operated mostly by robots. Steve Ells is opening at least 15 locations of Kernel, the first by early 2024; the remainder are on track for NYC in the next two years, a spokesperson confirms. From a report: Kernel will serve vegetarian sandwiches, salads, and sides, made in a space that's around 1,000 square-feet or smaller. Each location would employ three workers, the Wall Street Journal reported, "rather than the dozen that many fast-casual eateries have working." The menu pricing will be on par with Chipotle's, and, Ells says, the company will pay more and offer better benefits for actual humans working than other chains.

As you'd expect from the former CEO of Chipotle -- which had at least five foodborne illness outbreaks between 2015 and 2018, costing the company $25 million per the Justice Department -- "the new system's design helps better ensure food safety," Ells told the Journal. It has taken $10 million in his personal funds to start Kernel, along with $36 million from investors. The company suggests customers may not want much interaction with other people -- and neither do CEOs. "We've taken a lot of human interaction out of the process and left just enough," he told the Journal. Yet in a 2022 study on the future of dining out conducted by commerce site, PYMNTS, of 2,500 people surveyed, 63 percent of diners believe restaurants are becoming increasingly understaffed, and 39 percent said that they are becoming less personal.

Batteries used to store power produced by renewables are becoming cheap enough to make developers abandon scores of projects for gas-fired generation worldwide. Reuters reports: The long-term economics of gas-fired plants, used in Europe and some parts of the United States primarily to compensate for the intermittent nature of wind and solar power, are changing quickly, according to Reuters' interviews with more than a dozen power plant developers, project finance bankers, analysts and consultants. They said some battery operators are already supplying back-up power to grids at a price competitive with gas power plants, meaning gas will be used less. The shift challenges assumptions about long-term gas demand and could mean natural gas has a smaller role in the energy transition than posited by the biggest, listed energy majors.

In the first half of the year, 68 gas power plant projects were put on hold or cancelled globally, according to data provided exclusively to Reuters by U.S.-based non-profit Global Energy Monitor. [...] "In the early 1990s, we were running gas plants baseload, now they are shifting to probably 40% of the time and that's going to drop off to 11%-15% in the next eight to 10 years," Keith Clarke, chief executive at Carlton Power, told Reuters. Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said. Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate.

The cost of lithium-ion batteries has more than halved from 2016 to 2022 to $151 per kilowatt hour of battery storage, according to BloombergNEF. At the same time, renewable generation has reached record levels. Wind and solar powered 22% of the EU's electricity last year, almost doubling their share from 2016, and surpassing the share of gas generation for the first time, according to think tank Ember's European Electricity Review. "In the early years, capacity markets were dominated by fossil fuel power stations providing the flexible electricity supply," said Simon Virley, head of energy at KPMG. Now batteries, interconnectors and consumers shifting their electricity use are also providing that flexibility, Virley added.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple plans to ditch Qualcomm and build its own custom modem that could launch around 2026. MacRumors reports: Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that Apple's custom technology aspirations include integrating an in-house modem into its system-on-a-chip (SoC), which would eventually see the launch of MacBooks with built-in cellular connectivity. Gurman says Apple will "probably need two or three additional years to get that chip inside cellular versions of the Apple Watch and iPad -- and the Mac, once the part is integrated into the company's system-on-a-chip."

Apple has explored the possibility of developing MacBooks with cellular connectivity in the past. Indeed, the company reportedly considered launching a MacBook Air with 3G connectivity, but former CEO Steve Jobs said in 2008 that Apple decided against it, since it would take up too much room in the case. An integrated SoC would solve that problem. Gurman's latest newsletter also said some of Apple's other ongoing in-house chip projects include camera sensors, batteries, a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip that will eventually replace parts from Broadcom, Micro-LED displays for Apple devices, and a non-invasive glucose monitoring system.

There's been predictions that a transition to electric vehicles would hurt autoworkers. But this week U.S. autoworkers ended their strike after winning "significant gains in pay and benefits," reports the Associated Press: The United Auto Workers union overwhelmingly ratified new contracts with Ford and Stellantis, that along with a similar deal with General Motors will raise pay across the industry, force automakers to absorb higher costs and help reshape the auto business as it shifts away from gasoline-fueled vehicles...

The companies agreed to dramatically raise pay for top-scale assembly plant workers, with increases and cost-of-living adjustments that would translate into 33% wage gains. Top assembly plant workers are to receive immediate 11% raises and will earn roughly $42 an hour when the contracts expire in April of 2028. Under the agreements, the automakers also ended many of the multiple tiers of wages they had used to pay different workers.

They also agreed in principle to bring new electric-vehicle battery plants into the national union contract. This provision will give the UAW an opportunity to unionize the EV battery plants plants, which will represent a rising share of industry jobs in the years ahead.
In October the union's president criticized what had been the original trajectory of the auto industry. "The plan was to draw down engine and transmission plants, and permanently replace them with low-wage battery jobs. We had a different plan. And our plan is winning."

And this week the union's president said they had not only "raised wages dramatically for over a hundred thousand workers" — and improved their retirement security. "We took a major step towards ensuring a just transition to electric vehicles."

In Belvidere, Illinois, the union "won a commitment from Stellantis to reopen a shuttered factory and even add an EV battery plant," the Associated Press notes.

"The new contract agreements were widely seen as a victory for the UAW," their article adds — and perhaps even for other autoworkers. After the UAW's president announced plans to try unionizing other plants, three foreign automakers in the U.S. — Honda, Toyota and Hyundai — "quickly responded to the UAW contract by raising wages for their factory workers."

A professor of religion at Columbia University writes, "I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process." Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor simply machinic but will be the result of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between human beings and technology. Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other... So-called "artificial" intelligence is the latest extension of the emergent process through which life takes ever more diverse and complex forms.
The article lists "four trajectories that will be increasingly important for the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines."

- Writing about neuroprosthetics, the professor argues that "Increasing possibilities for symbiotic relations between computers and brains will lead to alternative forms of intelligence that are neither human nor machinic, but something in between."

- Then there's biobots. The article argues that with nanotechnology, "it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial."

But there's also an interesting discussion about synthetic biology. "Michael Levin and his colleagues at the Allen Discovery Center of Tufts University — biologists, computer scientists and engineers — have created "xenobots," which are "biological robots" that were produced from embryonic skin and muscle cells from an African clawed frog." As Levin and his colleagues wrote in 2020...

Here we show a scalable pipeline for creating functional novel lifeforms: AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform some desired function, and transferable designs are then created using a cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems with predicted behavior. Although some steps in this pipeline still require manual intervention, complete automation in the future would pave the way for designing and deploying living systems for a wide range of functions.
And the article concludes with a discussion of organic-relational AI: While Levin uses computational technology to create and modify biological organisms, the German neurobiologist Peter Robin Hiesinger uses biological organisms to model computational processes by creating algorithms that evolve. This work involves nothing less than developing a new form of "artificial" intelligence... Non-anthropocentric AI would not be merely an imitation of human intelligence, but would be as different from our thinking as fungi, dog and crow cognition is from human cognition.

Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Organism and machine? Organism or machine? Neither organism nor machine? Evolution is not over; something new, something different, perhaps infinitely and qualitatively different, is emerging.

Who would want the future to be the endless repetition of the past?

Bill Gates argues that when it comes to climate change, "there are more reasons to be hopeful than many people realize — and it's not just that renewable energy sources like wind and solar are getting cheaper.

"And it's not just because many of the steps already taken to reduce carbon emissions are working: Carbon emissions from fossil fuels will probably peak in 2025." The main thing that makes me optimistic is all the innovation I'm seeing. As someone who has been funding climate solutions for years, I get to learn from ingenious scientists who are working on ideas that will help the world solve climate change. And their work makes me confident that innovation will help the world get on track to meet its climate goals.

Some people are skeptical when a technology person like me says innovation is the answer. And it's true that new tools aren't the only thing we need. But we won't solve the climate problem without them.

There are two reasons for this. First, we need to eliminate emissions from every sector of the economy. Although some behavior change will help, the world can't achieve its zero-emissions goals without inventing new ways of doing things. For example, the production of concrete and steel alone accounts for around 10 percent of the world's annual greenhouse gases, but right now, we don't have practical ways to make either one without releasing carbon dioxide.

The second reason is that, in a world with limited resources, innovations allow us to magnify the impact of our efforts... We couldn't solve the climate problem with existing technology even if we had unlimited resources — and, of course, we don't have unlimited resources. So we need to be as rigorous as possible about doing the most good with the funding that is available. In my view, that boils down to inventing and deploying new ways to cut emissions and to help people survive and thrive in a warming world.
Gates believes we're at "the beginning of a Clean Industrial Revolution" --pointing readers to Breakthrough Energy's recent State of the Transition Report for more details.

But Gates also provides some specific examples of optimism-fuleing breakthroughs"

• "To reduce emissions, we need to replace the synthetic fertilizers that release nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, when broken down by microbes in the soil; Pivot Bio has genetically modified microbes to provide plants with the nitrogen they need without the excess greenhouse gases that synthetic alternatives produce."

• "Cement and steel are two of the biggest sources of emissions in this category. Boston Metal is well on the way to making steel with electricity (which can be generated without emissions) instead of coal. CarbonCure and Ecocem have developed low-carbon processes for making cement, and Brimstone has a way to do it while actually removing carbon from the air."

• "Because of inefficient windows and gaps in what's known as the building envelope, as much as 40% of heated or cooled air leaks out of the typical building. If we can drive that number down, buildings will require less heating and cooling — which will substantially lower our emissions. Aeroseal has developed a polymer that can seal ducts and other crevices; more than a quarter of a million buildings in the U.S. and Canada are already using their product. Another company, Luxwall, has developed a window that's many times more efficient than the single-pane windows used in most buildings. And unlike double-paned windows, it's thin enough to replace single-paned glass without having to rebuild the frame."

The world's largest single-site solar farm has gone online in the United Arab Emirates. Called the Al Dhafra solar farm, it features almost 4 million bifacial solar panels and will power nearly 200,000 homes -- all while eliminating 2.4 million tons of carbon emissions annually. Electrek reports: Now that Al Dhafra is online, the UAE's solar power production capacity has increased to 3.2 GW. In September, EWEC called for proposals to develop a 1.5 GW solar farm in Al Khazna near Abu Dhabi. UAE is aiming to triple its renewable energy capacity to 14 GW by 2030. The UAE is hosting COP28 in Dubai, which kicks off on November 30, so, understandably, its rulers would time the launch of the world's largest solar farm just ahead of that event -- it's simply good PR.

UAE is rightly being criticized for putting the CEO of its state oil company, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company -- the world's 12th-biggest oil company by production -- in charge of COP28. It's also being criticized for hosting COP28 yet having an all-of-the-above approach to energy. The UAE Energy Strategy 2050 targets an energy mix of 44% clean energy, 38% gas, 12% "clean coal" (yes, it really says that), and 6% nuclear. It says it will become carbon neutral by 2050, but how it will do that on 50% fossil fuels is anyone's guess.

Richard Speed reports via The Register: Scientists have revealed how data from a NASA telescope was secured thanks to creative thinking and a batch of Raspberry Pi computers. The telescope was the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT), launched on April 16, 2023, from Wanaka Airport in New Zealand. The telescope was raised to approximately 33km in altitude by NASA's 532,000-cubic-meter (18.8-million-cubic-foot) balloon and, above circa 99.5 percent of the Earth's atmosphere, it spent over a month circumnavigating the globe and acquiring observations of astronomical objects. The plan had been for the payload to transmit its data to the ground using SpaceX's Starlink constellation and the US Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). However, the Starlink connection went down soon after launch, on May 1, and the TDRSS connection became unstable on May 24. The boffins decided to attempt a landing on May 25 due to poor communications and concerns the balloon might be pulled away from further land crossings by weather.

The telescope itself was destroyed during the landing; it was dragged along the ground for 3km by a parachute that failed to detach, leaving a trail of debris in its wake. Miraculously, though, SuperBIT's solid-state drive was recovered intact. However, other than as a reference, its data was not needed thanks to the inclusion of Raspberry Pi-powered hardware in the form of four Data Recovery System (DRS) capsules. Each capsule included a Raspberry Pi 3B and 5TB of solid-state storage. A parachute, a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver, and an Iridium short-burst data transceiver were also included so the hardware could report its location to the recovery team. The capsules were connected to the main payload via Ethernet, and 24V DC was also available.

The plan had been to release the first DRS capsule on day 40, and then another every 20 days after that, whenever SuperBIT passed over land. However, when it became clear that SuperBIT would have to come down on May 25, it was decided to drop two DRS capsules over Argentina's Santa Cruz Province. Both of the DRS capsules released were recovered from their reported locations -- a curious cougar apparently nosed around one of them without causing damage -- and the data was fully intact. Of the unreleased DRS capsules, one failed for unknown reasons at launch -- the team speculated that perhaps a cable came loose -- but the other also contained an intact data set.

Simon Jack reports via the BBC: The price paid to generate electricity by offshore wind farms is set to rise by more than 50% as the government tries to entice energy firms to invest. Its comes after an auction for offshore wind projects failed to attract any bids, with firms arguing the price set for electricity generated was too low. The BBC understands the government now will raise the price it pays from 44 pounds per MWh to as much as 70 pounds. It is hoped more offshore wind capacity will lead to cheaper energy bills. Energy companies have told the BBC that electricity produced out at sea would remain cheaper and less prone to shock increases compared to power derived from gas-fired power stations.

The UK is a world leader in offshore wind and is home to the world's four largest farms, supporting tens of thousands of jobs, which provided 13.8% of the UK's electricity generation last year, according to government statistics. But when the government revealed in September that no companies bid for project contracts, plans to nearly quadruple offshore wind capacity from 13 gigawatts GW to 50 by 2030 -- enough to power every home in the UK -- were dealt a heavy blow.

The technology has been described as the "jewel in the UK's renewable energy crown," but firms have been hit by higher costs for building offshore farms, with materials such as steel and labour being more expensive. According to energy companies, the government's failure to recognize the impact of higher costs led some firms to abandon existing projects, and all operators to boycott the most recent auction.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you've only ever used standard Qi chargers with devices that don't have their own schemes, the Wireless Power Consortium's announcement today of the first Qi 2.0 devices being ready to launch before the holidays, with more than 100 in the queue behind them, is great. Qi2 sports a "Magnetic Power Profile" (MPP), created with help by Apple's MagSafe team, to help align devices and chargers' coils for faster, more efficient charging. Qi2-certified devices set onto Qi2 chargers can achieve 15 W charging, up from 7.5 W in the standard Qi scheme.

That brings Qi2 devices up to the same speed as iPhones on MagSafe chargers, and it clears up some consumer confusion about how fast a device might charge on Qi, MagSafe, or proprietary chargers. Should a phone and charger be Qi2 certified, you can now expect about 15 W out of it, regardless of whatever Google, Apple, or third party is behind them. Android and iPhone users alike are no longer beholden to their primary hardware vendor if they want 15 W of wireless juice. This announcement does not, however, bring the Qi2 standard close to the far-out speeds that proprietary setups now offer. [...]

A number of accessory makers, including stalwarts Anker and Belkin, had already lined up their Qi2-compatible offerings, waiting for the certification to drop. It will be interesting to see if Qi2 brings a wave of magnet mania to Android phones, akin to the MagSafe-induced blitz a few years back. Magnetic charging packs, wallets, wireless charging for a non-wireless-charging phone -- there's a lot to work with, especially at now somewhat more respectable charging speeds. Regarding speed, the WPC told Android Authority back in January that the Qi2 standards group intends to standardize charging speeds above 15 W by mid-2024. If you need a fast charge, plugging in the right cable to a well-powered source is still the most certain route. But with magnetic alignment and a good deal more universal compatibility, Qi2 drags the broader wireless charging market forward.