An anonymous reader shares a report: Over on the EEVblog, someone noticed an interesting chip that's been apparently flying under our radar for a while. This is an ARM processor capable of running Linux. It's hand-solderable in a TQFP package, has a built-in Mali GPU, support for a touch panel, and has support for 512MB of DDR3. If you do it right, this will get you into the territory of a BeagleBone or a Raspberry Pi Zero, on a board that's whatever form factor you can imagine. Here's the best part: you can get this part for $1 USD in large-ish quantities. A cursory glance at the usual online retailers tells me you can get this part in quantity one for under $3. This is interesting, to say the least.

The chip in question, the Allwinner A13, is a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor. While it's not much, it is a chip that can run Linux in a hand-solderable package. There is no HDMI support, you'll need to add some more chips (that are probably in a BGA package), but, hey, it's only a dollar. If you'd like to prototype with this chip, the best options right now are a few boards from Olimex, and a System on Module from the same company. That SoM is an interesting bit of kit, allowing anyone to connect a power supply, load an SD card, and get this chip doing something. Currently, there aren't really any good solutions for a cheap Linux system you can build at home, with hand-solderable chips.

Two separate reports are saying Apple's yet-to-be-released AirPower charger is facing overheating issues. The product, designed to simultaneously charge an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods, was announced more than a year ago at Apple's 2017 iPhone event. Apple has yet to provide any additional information on AirPower, even during its iPhone event last week. The company even appears to have wiped all mention of it from its website. CNBC reports: Tech writer Sonny Dickson, who has a track record of accurately reporting on Apple, said over the weekend that Apple has struggled with heat management, which affects accuracy and charging speed. Dickson thinks it's unlikely Apple will make its end-of-year release deadline. Daring Fireball's John Gruber said something similar. Gruber said the charging pad, which uses a multi-coil design, is "getting too hot -- way too hot."

"There are engineers who looked at AirPower's design and said it could never work, thermally. ... I think they've either had to go completely back to the drawing board and start over with an entirely different design, or they've decided to give up and they just don't want to say so," Gruber said. Apple gave a broad timeline for AirPower's launch, saying it would go on sale in 2018. So it is still possible it can work out any issues before the end of the year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, the House passed a bipartisan bill that originated in the Senate called the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act (S. 97), which will allow the private sector to partner with U.S. National Laboratories to vet advanced nuclear technologies. The bill also directs the Department of Energy (DOE) to lay the ground work for establishing "a versatile, reactor-based fast neutron source." The Senate also introduced a second bill called the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act (S. 3422) last Thursday, which would direct the DOE to actually establish that fast neutron reactor. That bill also directs the DOE to "make available high-assay, low-enriched uranium" for research purposes. The Nuclear Energy Leadership Act has not yet made it past a Senate vote. The report also mentions a recent U.S. Court of Appeals ruling to keep older reactors online. "The court said that subsidies for nuclear energy proposed by Illinois don't cause any interference with federal control over interstate power markets, which is prohibited," reports Ars.

"In 2017 the state of Illinois agreed to offer a Zero Emissions Credit that included nuclear energy (PDF). The credit was opposed by fossil fuel generators and by the Electric Power Supply Association, who sued the director of the Illinois Power Agency. But the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Department of Justice filed a joint brief in the case several months ago, saying those federal agencies had no problem with Illinois' credit system, according to Utility Dive."

According to Bloomberg, the next round of China tariffs won't include devices that receive and transmit voice data, a category that includes the Apple Watch, Fitbits, Sonos Speakers, and a host of other fitness trackers and home assistants. The Verge reports: The White House recently backed down on the rate at which the imports would be taxed. Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported that listed goods would likely be taxed at only 10 percent. As recently as August, President Trump had considered setting the rate at 25 percent. Customs documents describe the category in vague terms, listing the devices as "machines for the reception, conversion and transmission or regeneration of voice, images or other data." But that vague category has come to encompass a wide range of personal tech, including fitness trackers and personal voice assistants. The Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, BeatsWL, AirPort, and Time Capsule all fall under the code, according to a letter submitted by Apple to the U.S. Trade Representative. Other categories of Apple products will still be affected by the tariff, including adapters, the Mac mini, and any circuit boards or internal components shipped individually to the United States.

Paul Alcorn reporting for Tom's Hardware: AMD listed the Ryzen 7 2800H and the Ryzen 5 2600H on its website. These new processors bring the inherent goodness of the Raven Ridge architecture, found in the Ryzen 5 2400G and the Ryzen 3 2200G, to gaming notebooks. As such, these processors come with AMD's Zen compute cores paired with the Vega graphics architecture, and they are also AMD's first processors to support DDR4-3200 as a base specification. Both new models feature a similar design as their desktop counterparts, albeit with slightly redesigned in frequencies to adjust for the flimsy cooling in mobile form factors and battery life limitations. That's reflected in the processors' reduced 45W TDP (thermal design power), which is much lower than the 65W TDP found on the desktop parts. AMD does give vendors some wiggle room with a configurable TDP (cTDP) range that spans between 35W and 45W.

The Ryzen 7 2800H is analogous to the 2400G, but it comes with a 3.3 GHz base and 3.8 GHz boost clocks. The four-core, eight-thread CPU is complemented by Vega graphics with 11 CU (Compute Unit) clocked up to a max of 1,300 MHz, which is a nice boost over its desktop counterpart. The Ryzen 5 2600H is similar to the 2200G, but it's four cores are hyper-threaded, which is a big bonus. The Vega graphics come with 8 CUs and boost up to 1,100 MHz.

In less than a decade, most workplace tasks will be done by machines rather than humans, according to the World Economic Forum's latest AI job forecast. From a report: Machines will overtake humans in terms of performing more tasks at the workplace by 2025 -- but there could still be 58 million net new jobs created in the next five years, the World Economic Forum (WEF) said in a report on Monday. Developments in automation technologies and artificial intelligence could see 75 million jobs displaced, according to the WEF report "The Future of Jobs 2018." However, another 133 million new roles may emerge as companies shake up their division of labor between humans and machines, translating to 58 million net new jobs being created by 2022, it said. At the same time, there would be "significant shifts" in the quality, location and format of new roles, according to the WEF report, which suggested that full-time, permanent employment may potentially fall. Some companies could choose to use temporary workers, freelancers and specialist contractors, while others may automate many of the tasks. New skill sets for employees will be needed as labor between machines and humans continue to evolve, the report pointed out.

It will take quite a lot of time before robots become cheaper than workers in emerging markets such as Africa, argues Nico Beckert of Flassbeck Economics, a consortium of researchers who aim to provide economics insights with a more realistic basis. From the post: All industrialized countries used low-cost labour to build industries and manufacture mass-produced goods. Today, labour is relatively inexpensive in Africa, and a similar industrialization process might take off accordingly. Some worry that industrial robots will block this development path. The reason is that robots are most useful when doing routine tasks -- precisely the kind of work that is typical of labour-intensive mass production. At the moment, however, robots are much too expensive to replace thousands upon thousands of workers in labour-intensive industries, most of which are in the very early stages of the industrialization process. Robots are currently best used in technologically more demanding fields like the automobile or electronics industry.

Even a rapid drop in robot prices would not lead to the replacement of workers by robots in the short term in Africa where countries lag far behind in terms of fast internet and other information and communications technologies. They also lack well-trained IT experts. Other problems include an unreliable power supply, high energy costs and high financing costs for new technologies. For these reasons, it would be difficult and expensive to integrate robots and other digital technologies into African production lines.

An anonymous reader quotes the Los Angeles Times: Jerry Brown closed his climate summit in San Francisco on Friday with a dramatic announcement: California will launch its own satellite into orbit to track and monitor the formation of pollutants that cause climate change. "With science still under attack and the climate threat growing, we're launching our own damn satellite," Brown said in prepared remarks. "This groundbreaking initiative will help governments, businesses and landowners pinpoint -- and stop -- destructive emissions with unprecedented precision, on a scale that's never been done before...."

The state will develop the satellite with the San Francisco-based Earth-imaging firm Planet Labs, a company founded by former NASA scientists in 2010. The state may ultimately launch multiple satellites into space, according to the governor's office.... Robbie Schingler, co-founder of Planet Labs, said the project will inform "how advanced satellite technology can enhance our ability to measure, monitor, and ultimately, mitigate the impacts of climate change..." Brown's announcement came in quickly delivered remarks at the close of the three-day gathering and received a standing ovation from many in the audience.
Governors from 17 states (and from both political parties) also pledged to spend $1.4 billion to lower auto emissions, using money from Volkwagen's legal settlement over falsifying clean-air performance data. New York City also announced that its pension fund would invest $4 billion in companies offering climate change solution over the next three years.

And 26 states, cities and businesses said they'd procure non-polluting vehicle fleets by 2030, while ChargePoint and EV Box pledged to build 3.5 million new charging stations around the world.

Nvidia's new "Scanner" tool for the company's newest GeForce RTX 2080 graphics cards will provide one-click overclocking. PCWorld reports: Nvidia Scanner isn't actually a tool you can download. Instead, it's an API that developers can implement, similar to how current GeForce overclocking software relies on Nvidia's NVAPI. Tom Peterson, Nvidia's director of technical marketing, says all of the major overclocking programs will implement Scanner. You simply press the Test button, and the software starts walking through your graphics card's volt frequency curve, running arithmetic tests all the while. If the overclock starts pushing too far, Nvidia Scanner will discover a math error before your card crashes. When that happens, Scanner ramps up your card's voltage and starts testing again. After about 20 minutes, Scanner will have a complete understanding of your RTX card's capabilities, and automatically generate an overclocking profile built to squeeze as much performance as possible out of it without crashing. Easy-peasy. PCWorld's Brad Chacos mentions a demonstration where "Nvidia's Tom Peterson showed Nvidia Scanner pushing the GeForce RTX 2080 -- which ships with a 1,710MHz boost clock -- all the way to 2,130MHz at 1,068mV."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGate: The newest Apple Watch can now flag potential problems with your heartbeat -- a feature that's been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration and that Apple is marking as a major achievement. But some doctors said that including heart-monitoring tools in such a popular consumer product could prompt unnecessary anxiety and medical visits. Physicians say the watch could be good for patients who have irregular heart rhythms but may not realize it. Some people who have atrial fibrillation, the condition for which the watch is screening, don't always have noticeable symptoms. In an ideal situation, someone who doesn't know they have a problem could get a warning from their watch and take that data to their doctor.

But there is also concern that widespread use of electrocardiograms without an equally broad education initiative could burden an already taxed health-care system. Heart rhythms naturally vary, meaning that it's likely that Apple Watch or any heart monitor could signal a problem when there isn't one -- and send someone running to the doctor for no reason. "People are scared; their heart scares them," John Mandrola, a cardiologist at Baptist Health in Louisville, said. "That leads to more interaction with the health-care system." An extra visit to your doctor may not sound like a bad thing, but Mandrola said it would potentially lead to another round of tests or even unnecessary treatment if there are other signs that can be misinterpreted. And doctors might wind up facing a crowd of anxious Apple Watch users getting false signals -- something physicians have already had to deal with as fitness trackers that monitor heart rates have become popular.

Chrome OS 70, which Google plans to release in the second half of next month, will include native support for SMB file shares, giving it built-in access to files stored on Windows servers. With this, Chrome OS users can add SMB file shares to the Files app and use them to store and load documents. From a report: Currently, using these network resources requires the use of an extension that adds a similar ability to add file shares to the Files app. Google has been working to make Files a more capable application. As well as integrating support for networked files, the company is also experimenting with giving it more access to Android files, something that will streamline the use of Android applications by exposing their data files to Chrome OS apps. The SMB support helps smooth a pain point when mixing Chromebooks with other systems: it makes it easier to use Chrome OS with corporate file servers, home networked storage devices, and of course, Windows PCs. Instead of needing the extra extension to be installed, these things will just work out of the box.

OnePlus CEO Carl Pei confirmed to TechRadar that the OnePlus 6T won't have a headphone jack. Instead, it will feature a larger battery that will be "substantial enough for users to realize." From the report: Our first line of questioning was obvious. Why? Why ditch the jack? Why ditch it now? For Pei, it's about timing, and creating the best smartphone experience. "When we started OnePlus, we set out to make the best possible smartphone, but making a great phone doesn't mean putting every component available into the device," he said. "You've got to make decisions that optimize the user experience, and understand that at times things that provide user value can also add friction. "We also had to think about the negative side [of removing the headphone jack] for our users. We found 59% of our community already owned wireless headphones earlier this year - and that was before we launched our Bullets Wireless headphones. "If we were to do that [remove the jack] two years ago, the percentage [of wireless headphones owners] would have been much lower and it would have caused a lot of friction for our users."

Pei went on to explain that there are user benefits to the removal of the port, which should bring some comfort to OnePlus fans already pouring one out for the headphone jack. "By removing the jack we've freed up more space, allowing us to put more new technology into the product," he said. "One of the big things is something our users have asked us for, improved battery life." Pei wouldn't be drawn on what the "new technology" will be, but we already know the OnePlus 6T will feature an in-display fingerprint scanner, which will eat up some of the space left by the exiting jack. Pei did mention they will include an adapter in the box to allow users to use wired headphone.

Rachel Metz reports via MIT Technology Review: Imagine a box, similar to a Wi-Fi router, that sits in your home and tracks all kinds of physiological signals as you move from room to room: breathing, heart rate, sleep, gait, and more. Dina Katabi, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, built this box in her lab. And in the not-so-distant future, she believes, it will be able to replace the array of expensive, bulky, uncomfortable gear we currently need to get clinical data about the body. Speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, Katabi said the box she's been building for the last several years takes advantage of the fact that every time we move -- even if it's just a teeny, tiny bit, such as when we breathe -- we change the electromagnetic field surrounding us.

Her device transmits a low-power wireless signal throughout a space the size of a one- or two-bedroom apartment (even through walls), and the signal reflects off people's bodies. The device then uses machine learning to analyze those reflected signals and extract physiological data. So far, it has been installed in over 200 homes of both healthy people and those with conditions like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, depression, and pulmonary diseases, she said. Katabi cofounded a startup called Emerald Innovations to commercialize the technology and has already made the device available to biotech and pharmaceutical companies for studies.

Three years ago, Apple introduced 3D Touch for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, a pressure-sensitive feature that uses capacitive sensors integrated into the smartphone's display to sense three degrees of pressure in a user's touch and respond differently based on the amount of pressure exerted. It's a neat idea as it has allowed users to interact with the user interface in a completely new way. Now, with the release of the new iPhone XR, Apple seems to be on the way to phasing it out. The Verge reports: While both the new iPhone XS and XS Max include 3D Touch, Apple has chosen not to include the feature on the iPhone XR. Yes, that phone is cheaper, and Apple had to strip out some features, but 3D Touch has been included on iPhones in that price range since it was introduced not too long ago, so this feels less like necessary cost savings and more like planned omission. There have always been a few core problems with 3D Touch. For one, its use often amounted to the right click of a mouse, which is funny coming from the company that famously refused to put a dedicated right button on its mice or trackpads. And selecting from those right click options was rarely faster or a substantially more useful way of getting something done than just tapping the button and manually navigating to where you needed to go. People also didn't know the feature was there. The iPhone did little to train users on 3D Touch. And even the people who knew it was there had no way to tell which icons supported it without just 3D pressing everything to see what happened.

Apple isn't entirely removing the concept of 3D Touch from the iPhone XR. Instead, the phone will include something Apple is calling Haptic Touch, which will make a click when you activate a button's secondary feature by pressing and holding it. But that replacement underscores just how useless 3D Touch has really become: it's not more than a very, very fancy long press. That's something phones have always been capable of. And despite the name, I've found long press features to be faster and easier to use than their 3D Touch equivalent. Instagram, for instance, lets you preview photos with a 3D Touch on the iPhone or a long press on Android. I find the Android version to be simpler and quicker. Here's what Apple's marketing leader, Phil Schiller, had to say about the feature back in 2015 when it was first introduced: "'Engineering-wise, the hardware to build a display that does what [3D Touch] does is unbelievably hard,' says Schiller. 'And we're going to waste a whole year of engineering -- really, two -- at a tremendous amount of cost and investment in manufacturing if it doesn't do something that [people] are going to use. If it's just a demo feature and a month later nobody is really using it, this is a huge waste of engineering talent.'"

A year after unveiling the AirPower all-in-one wireless charger for the iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods, Apple has now erased all references to AirPower from its website. The company has yet to ship it. From a report: A year ago during the iPhone X unveiling Apple announced AirPower -- an all-in-one wireless charger for the iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods. The product never shipped, and today it seems that Apple has scrubbed almost all traces of it off its website. At the time of writing this is the only reference to AirPower I can find on Apple's website. So what happened to AirPower? Well, while only Apple really knows (and at the time of writing Apple hasn't responded to a request for information), it seems like the product was vaporware and that the promise of an all-in-one charger has died. I can't think off the top of my head of another product that Apple has announced at a major event and then failed to deliver, which suggests that some things are beyond the reach of even a company as powerful as Apple.

The new iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max will use eSIM technology to allow users to use two phone lines on a single device. You could have a work or personal number, or an American and Canadian number if you travel across the border frequently. The reprogrammable SIM card is "soldered onto the iPhone's motherboard directly," and measures just 6 millimeters by 5 millimeters," reports Ars Technica, citing GSMArena.com. From the report: These handsets will have a new "dual SIM dual standby" option, one of which will be a nano SIM. In other words, they will have two distinct phone numbers. (Chinese models will have two SIM slots instead of the eSIM option.) Since their debut in 1991, traditional, physical SIM cards have decreased dramatically in size. eSIMs have already been around for nearly a year, since they were introduced into the Apple Watch and Google Pixel 2, among other devices.

When Apple unveiled the iPhone Xs and Xs Max earlier today, it said they will contain the A12 Bionic chip -- the first smartphone processor to be made using 7nm manufacturing technology. But, as IEEE Spectrum points out, Huawei made the same claim late last month when it unveiled the Kirin 980 system on a chip. From the report: Apple's new A12 Bionic is made up of four CPU cores, six GPU cores, and an 8-core "neural engine" to handle machine learning tasks. According to Apple, the neural engine can perform 5 trillion operations per second -- an eight-fold boost -- and consumes one-tenth the energy of its previous incarnation. Of the GPU cores, two are designed for performance and are 15 percent faster than their predecessors. The other four are built for efficiency, with a 50 percent improvement on that metric. The system can decide which combination of the three types of cores will run a task most efficiently.

Huawei's chip, the Kirin 980, was unveiled at the IFA 2018 in Berlin on 31 August. It packs 6.9 billion transistors onto a one-square-centimeter chip. The company says it's the first chip to use processors based on Arm's Cortex-A76, which is 75 percent more powerful and 58 percent more efficient compared to its predecessors the A73 and A75. It has 8 cores, two big, high-performance ones based on the A76, two middle-performance ones that are also A76s, and four smaller, high-efficiency cores based on a Cortex-A55 design. The system runs on a variation of Arm's big.LITTLE architecture, in which immediate, intensive workloads are handled by the big processors while sustained background tasks are the job of the little ones. Kirin 980's GPU component is called the Mali-G76, and it offers a 46 percent performance boost and a 178 percent efficiency improvement from the previous generation. The chip also has a dual-core neural processing unit that more than doubles the number of images it can recognize to 4,500 images per minute. Apple will be the first to bring the 7nm chip in volume to market, as Huawei is expected to to start shipping its Mate 20 series phone (with the 7nm chip) a month or two later. Qualcomm also announced late last month that it's begun sampling its 7nm next-gen Snapdragon SoC. As IEEE Spectrum notes, the real winner is TSMC, which is making all three processors.

Tesla is temporarily enabling free Supercharging and extending the range of some cars' batteries for those in Hurricane Florence's path. "Tesla used to offer the option to buy a Model S or Model X with a 75 kWh battery pack software-locked at a capacity of 60 kWh," reports Electrek. "The option would result in a less expensive vehicle with a shorter range and the option to pay to remotely enable the longer range at a later stage."

Some owners on the Carolina Coast report that they've received a notification explaining the temporary new benefits: "We are temporarily enabling your car to access additional battery capacity, as well as free Supercharging, in preparation for Hurricane Florence. We hope this gives you the peace of mind to get to a safe location, and will notify you before returning your car to its original configuration in mid-October. Badging on your display may adjust during this period. Safe travels." From the report: This is a very cool move from Tesla. When they did it last year, it was misrepresented by many who focused on the software-limited battery packs -- saying that it means Tesla was screwing people over by limiting the battery capacity. The option was more about offering a less expensive battery pack without having to produce a different size pack, which helps streamline production. It gave buyers a less expensive option and they could always unlock the capacity later for a price. For those who decided to not unlock it, it now gives an opportunity for Tesla to let them have more range at a critical time by using Tesla's over-the-air software update capability.

Apple just killed the iPhone's headphone jack for good. Not only is the company no longer selling iPhones with headphone jacks, as they've removed the iPhone SE and 6s from their website, but they're no longer including a Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter with the purchase of a new 2018 iPhone. The Verge also reports that the company is discontinuing the iPhone X with the introduction of its three new iPhones today. From the report: With the iPhone XS starting at a price of $999, and the addition of the cheaper $749 iPhone XR announced today, the iPhone X has become redundant. [...] There's no longer a good reason to shell out for the more expensive iPhone X, except maybe the exclusivity of owning a phone that was ushered in with the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone. It was the first to introduce the now-ubiquitous notch that's influenced the entire mobile industry with a wave of copycat designs, and the first iPhone with Face ID. It introduced intuitive gesture controls and with the phone came wireless charging, plus AirPods.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The European Parliament has passed a resolution calling for an international ban on so-called killer robots. It aims to pre-empt the development and use of autonomous weapon systems that can kill without human intervention. Last month, talks at the UN failed to reach consensus on the issue, with some countries saying the benefits of autonomous weapons should be explored. And some MEPs were concerned legislation could limit scientific progress of artificial intelligence. While others said it could become a security issue if some countries allowed such weapons while others did not. The resolution comes ahead of negotiations scheduled at the United Nations in November, where it is hoped an agreement on an international ban can be reached. Israel, Russia, South Korea and the U.S. opposed the new measures, saying that they wanted to explore potential "advantages" from autonomous weapons systems.