Scientists from Lancaster University say that we might be close to combining SSDs and RAM into one component. "UltraRAM," as it's being called, is described as a memory technology which "combines the non-volatility of a data storage memory, like flash, with the speed, energy-efficiency, and endurance of a working memory, like DRAM." The researchers detailed the breakthrough in a recently published paper. Tom's Hardware reports: The fundamental science behind UltraRAM is that it uses the unique properties of compound semiconductors, commonly used in photonic devices such as LEDs, lasers, and infrared detectors can now be mass-produced on silicon. The researchers claim that the latest incarnation on silicon outperforms the technology as tested on Gallium Arsenide semiconductor wafers. Some extrapolated numbers for UltraRAM are that it will offer "data storage times of at least 1,000 years," and its fast switching speed and program-erase cycling endurance is "one hundred to one thousand times better than flash." Add these qualities to the DRAM-like speed, energy efficiency, and endurance, and this novel memory type sounds hard for tech companies to ignore.

If you read between the lines above, you can see that UltraRAM is envisioned to break the divide between RAM and storage. So, in theory, you could use it as a one-shot solution to fill these currently separate requirements. In a PC system, that would mean you would get a chunk of UltraRAM, say 2TB, and that would cover both your RAM and storage needs. The shift, if it lives up to its potential, would be a great way to push forward with the popular trend towards in-memory processing. After all, your storage would be your memory -- with UltraRAM; it is the same silicon.

PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has released the much-awaited final (1.0) specification for PCI Express 6.0. From a report: The next generation of the ubiquitous bus is once again doubling the data rate of a PCIe lane, bringing it to 8GB/second in each direction -- and far, far higher for multi-lane configurations. With the final version of the specification now sorted and approved, the group expects the first commercial hardware to hit the market in 12-18 months, which in practice means it should start showing up in servers in 2023. First announced in the summer of 2019, PCI Express 6.0 is, as the name implies, the immediate follow-up to the current-generation PCIe 5.0 specification. Having made it their goal to keep doubling PCIe bandwidth roughly every 3 years, the PCI-SIG almost immediately set about work on PCIe 6.0 once the 5.0 specification was completed, looking at ways to once again double the bandwidth of PCIe. The product of those development efforts is the new PCIe 6.0 spec, and while the group has missed their original goal of a late 2021 release by mere weeks, today they are announcing that the specification has been finalized and is being released to the group's members. As always, the creation of an even faster version of PCIe technology has been driven by the insatiable bandwidth needs of the industry. The amount of data being moved by graphics cards, accelerators, network cards, SSDs, and other PCIe devices only continues to increase, and thus so must bus speeds to keep these devices fed. As with past versions of the standard, the immediate demand for the faster specification comes from server operators, whom are already regularly using large amounts of high-speed hardware. But in due time the technology should filter down to consumer devices (i.e. PCs) as well.

ArsTechnica: So here's a crazy story. Samsung was supposed to have a big SoC launch on Tuesday, but that launch did not happen. Samsung didn't cancel or delay the event. The January 11 date was announced, but when the time for the event came, nothing happened! Samsung pulled a no-call no-show for a major product launch. [...] The Exynos 2200 was (?) shaping up to be a major launch for Samsung. It is, after all, the first Samsung SoC with the headline-grabbing feature of having an AMD GPU. The two companies announced this deal a year ago, and we've been giddy about it ever since. The Exynos 2200 is (or was) going to debut in the Galaxy S22. That launch event is currently scheduled for February 8, assuming Samsung doesn't ghost everyone again.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, printers have been encumbered with digital rights management systems that prevent users from buying third-party ink and toner cartridges. Printer companies have claimed that their chip-enabled cartridges can "enhance the quality and performance" of their equipment, provide the "best consumer experience," and "protect [the printers] from counterfeit and third-party ink cartridges." Left unsaid is the fact that requiring first-party cartridges also ensures a recurring revenue stream. It's an old business model -- Gillette sold its razor handles cheaply to sell more razors, for example -- and it's one that printer companies have enthusiastically embraced. Lexmark, HP, Canon, Brother, and others all effectively require users to purchase first-party ink and toner. To enforce the use of first-party cartridges, manufacturers typically embed chips inside the consumables for the printers to "authenticate." But when chips are in short supply, like today, manufacturers can find themselves in a bind. So Canon is now telling German customers how to defeat its printers' warnings about third-party cartridges.

"Due to the worldwide continuing shortage of semiconductor components, Canon is currently facing challenges in procuring certain electronic components that are used in our consumables for our multifunction printers (MFP)," a Canon support website says in German. "In order to ensure a continuous and reliable supply of consumables, we have decided to supply consumables without a semiconductor component until the normal supply takes place again." [...] The software on these printers comes with a relatively simple way to defeat the chip checks. Depending on the model, when an error message occurs after inserting toner, users can press either "I Agree," "Close," or "OK." When users press that button, the world does not end. Rather, Canon says users may find that their toner cartridge doesn't give them a low-toner warning before running empty. "Although there are no negative effects on print quality when consumables are used without electronic components, certain additional functions, such as the detection of the toner level, may be impaired," Canon's support site says.

Long-time Slashdot reader jimminy_cricket shares a new article from the technology site Inverse exploring the origin of blinking cursors.

They trace the invention to the 1960s and electronics engineer Charles Kiesling, a naval veteran of the Korean War who "spent his immediate post-war years on a new challenge: the exploding computing age." Still decades away from personal computers — let alone portable ones — Kiesling was joining the ranks of engineers tinkering with room-sized computers like the IBM 650 or the aging ENIAC. He joined Sperry Rand, now Unisys, in 1955, and helped develop the kind of computer guts that casual users rarely think about. This includes innards like logic circuitry, which enable your computer to make complex conditional decisions like "or," "and," or "if only" instead of simply "yes" or "no". One of these seemingly innocuous advancements was a 1967 patent filing Kiesling made for a blinking cursor...."

According to a post on a computer science message board from a user purporting to be Kiesling's son, the inspiration for this invention was simply utility. "I remember him telling me the reason behind the blinking cursor, and it was simple," Kiesling's son writes. "He said there was nothing on the screen to let you know where the cursor was in the first place. So he wrote up the code for it so he would know where he was ready to type on the Cathode Ray Tube."

The blinking, it turns out, is simply a way to catch the coders' attention and stand apart from a sea of text.
The article credits Apple with popularizing blinking cursors to the masses. And it also remembers a fun story about Steve Jobs (shared by Thomas Haigh, a professor of technology history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee): While he was in support of the blinking cursor itself, Haigh says Steve Jobs was famously against controlling it using cursor keys. Jobs attempted — and failed — to remove these keys from the original Mac in an effort to force users into using a mouse instead. In an interaction with biographer Walter Isaacson years later, he even pried them off with his car keys before signing his autograph on the keyboard.

There's a problem with the lithium (Li) ion batteries used in electric cars and for energy storage. The BBC reports that the most widely-used methods for battery recycling won't work nearly as well, since Li batteries are "larger, heavier, much more complex and even dangerous if taken apart wrong."

Slashdot reader quonset shared their report: In your average battery recycling plant, battery parts are shredded down into a powder, and then that powder is either melted (pyrometallurgy) or dissolved in acid (hydrometallurgy). But Li batteries are made up of lots of different parts that could explode if they're not disassembled carefully. And even when Li batteries are broken down this way, the products aren't easy to reuse. "The current method of simply shredding everything and trying to purify a complex mixture results in expensive processes with low value products," says Andrew Abbott, a physical chemist at the University of Leicester. As a result, it costs more to recycle them than to mine more lithium to make new ones. Also, since large scale, cheap ways to recycle Li batteries are lagging behind, only about 5% of Li batteries are recycled globally, meaning the majority are simply going to waste....
Fortunately, the article points out that several labs are working on developing more efficient and eco-friendly ways to recycle Li batteries [D]isassembling Li batteries is currently being done predominantly by hand in lab settings, which will need to change if direct recycling is to compete with more traditional recycling methods. "In the future, there will need to be more technology in disassembly," says Abbott. "If a battery is assembled using robots, it is logical that it needs to be disassembled in the same way." Abbott's team at the Faraday Institution in the UK is investigating the robotic disassembly of Li batteries as part of the ReLib Project, which specialises in the recycling and reuse of Li batteries.

The team has also found a way to achieve direct recycling of the anode and cathode using an ultrasonic probe, "like what the dentist uses to clean your teeth," he explains. "It focuses ultrasound on a surface which creates tiny bubbles that implode and blast the coating off the surface." This process avoids having to shred the battery parts, which can make recovering them exceedingly difficult. According to Abbott's team's research, this ultrasonic recycling method can process 100 times more material over the same period than the more traditional hydrometallurgy method. He says it can also be done for less than half the cost of creating a new battery from virgin material...
Another idea: replacing lithium-ion batteries altogether with something more eco-friendly: Jodie Lutkenhaus, a professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University, has been working on a battery that is made of organic substances that can degrade on command. "Many batteries today are not recycled because of the associated energy and labour cost," says Lutkenhaus. "Batteries that degrade on command may simplify or lower the barrier to recycling. Eventually, these degradation products could be reconstituted back into a fresh new battery, closing the materials life-cycle loop."

It's a fair argument considering that, even when a Li battery is dismantled and its parts are refurbished, there will still be some parts that can't be saved and become waste. A degradable battery like the one Lutkenhaus' team is working on could be a more sustainable power source.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's largest coal port has announced it will now be powered entirely by renewable energy. The announcement from Port of Newcastle comes as coal power generation in Australia's national electricity market fell to its lowest level in the final three months of 2021. Though the port continues to export an average of 165Mt of coal a year, the move is part of a plan to decarbonize the business by 2040, and to increase the non-coal portion of its business so that coal only makes up half its revenue by 2030. It has signed a deal with Iberdrola, which operates the Bodangora windfarm near Dubbo in inland New South Wales, for a retail power purchase agreement that provides the port with large scale generation certificates linked to the windfarm.

Chief executive officer Craig Carmody said the Port of Newcastle's title as the largest coal port in the world "isn't as wonderful as it used to be" and that change was necessary to avoid what happened in Newcastle and the steel industry closed. "I would prefer to be doing this now while we have control over our destiny, while we have revenue coming in, than in a crisis situation where our revenue has collapsed and no one will lend us money," Carmody said. "We get 84 cents a tonne for coal shipped through our port. We get between $6 and $8 for every other product. You can see where I'd rather have my money." As part of its transition the port has converted 97% of its vehicles to electric and engaged in other infrastructure projects to decarbonize its operations. "It's a good thing they're looking at it, but 50% income diversification by 2030, it's still a decade away," said Andrew Stock, climate councillor and retired energy executive who was a founding board member of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. "That's still a lot of coal that's going to go through that port particularly when the IEA and the IPCC have made it clear we have to move. And 50% by 2030 is still 50% coal income."

He went on to say that governments should encourage a "rapid advance in the uptake of renewables" similar to what has occurred in South Australia, which is powered by 100% renewable energy on some days.

Kosovo's government on Tuesday introduced a ban on cryptocurrency mining in an attempt to curb electricity consumption as the country faces the worst energy crisis in a decade due to production outages. Reuters reports: "All law enforcement agencies will stop the production of this activity in cooperation with other relevant institutions that will identify the locations where there is cryptocurrency production," Economy and Energy Minister Artane Rizvanolli said in a statement. Faced with coal-fired power plant outages and high import prices authorities were forced last month to introduce power cuts.

European gas prices soared more than 30% on Tuesday after low supplies from Russia reignited concerns about an energy crunch as colder weather approaches. In December, Kosovo declared a state of emergency for 60 days which will allow the government to allocate more money to energy imports, introduce more power cuts and harsher measures. The country of 1.8 million people is now importing more than 40% of its consumed energy with high demand during the winter when people use electricity mainly for heating. Around 90% percent of energy production in Kosovo is from lignite, a soft coal that produces toxic pollution when burnt.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Chevy Silverado, one of the top-selling pickup trucks in the US, is going electric. General Motors CEO Mary Barra unveiled Chevy's answer to the Ford F-150 Lightning during a virtual presentation at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. GM hopes that the plug-in pickup's familiar nameplate will help it lure Silverado owners and other truck fans to the world of zero tailpipe emissions. The Silverado EV is the second electric truck for GM, succeeding the GMC Hummer EV, which went into production last year. But when it comes out in late 2023, the electric Silverado will be one of the flagship vehicles in the company's much larger $35 billion push into electric vehicles, as well as the first electric truck for the automaker's Chevy brand.

At launch, the Silverado EV will be available in two configurations: an RST First Edition and a fleet-oriented Work Truck (WT) model. Both models will get more than 400 miles of range on a full charge (though that number still needs to be certified by the Environmental Protection Agency). The base model work truck will start at $39,900, while the fully loaded RST First Edition, named because it will be first off the assembly line in spring 2023, will sell for the suggested price of $105,000. Chevy says that after production ramps up, various versions of the truck will be available for $50,000-$80,000. The automaker is already taking reservations.

Like most electric vehicles, the electric Silverado will be incredibly quick, able to sprint from 0 to 60 mph in less than 4.5 seconds. That's quicker than the RWD single-motor Cybertruck and about on par with the Ford F-150 Lightning and the tri-motor Cybertruck. (Tesla says the quad-motor truck will be able to hit 60 mph in 2.9 seconds.) The RST version sounds like it could easily knock the wind out of you, with 485kW of total power (664 horsepower) and 780 pound-feet of torque while in the Silverado's Wide Open Watts Mode. The RST First Edition of the truck will also feature a host of additional features, including: Four-wheel steering; Automatic Adaptive Air Suspension, enabling the vehicle to be raised or lowered 2 inches; Multi-Flex Midgate that expands the truck's cargo capability while maintaining seating for a rear row passenger Available Multi-Flex Tailgate with power release; 17-inch LCD infotainment screen paired with a neighboring 11-inch-diagonal reconfigurable driver instrument display and a multi-color driver head-up display with a field of view over 14 inches; and Trailering-capable Super Cruise, GM's hands-free driver assistance technology, allowing drivers to travel hands-free on more than 200,000 miles of compatible roads across the US and Canada. GM doesn't have its own charging network, so Silverado EV owners "will need to rely on a patchwork of third-party EV charging companies for most of their needs," notes The Verge. For onboard power, the Silverado bests the F-150 Lightning "putting out an incredible 10.2kW for all sorts of charging needs, including powering an entire home or charging another electric vehicle."

The vehicle will be built in Detroit at GM's Factory Zero EV plant.

Further reading:
Car and Driver: As Chevy Silverado EV Charges after Ford F-150 Lightning, How They Compare
The Drive: Here's What Comes in the $40K 2024 Chevy Silverado EV Work Truck
Engadget: Watch GM's Silverado EV Reveal In 10 Minutes

FangVT writes: Ars Techinca reports on GAF Energy's new solar shingles which are designed to save on installation costs. They are not only designed to look similar to existing asphalt shingles but to be installed in much the same way, including being nailed in place. The system has moved the wiring to the top, so as to simplify inspections and repairs. "Because each one of our panels is 45 Watts and only 10 volts, we have access to a whole host of electronic components that don't have to be able to withstand 300 Watts, 50 volts," the company says. "That allows us to be more efficient in the electricity generated from those panels." And in what they say is a first, UL has certified the shingles both as solar panels and as roofing materials. The company also says they come with a 25 year warrant and will be offering a more comprehensive warranty that will also include guaranteed power output.

They wouldn't provide a hard number on the price, but "a homeowner won't pay any more for a GAF solar roof than they would if they were to get a new roof and have someone put solar on it," said GAF Energy CEO Martin DeBono. "That's our benchmark. We're half the cost of a Tesla solar roof in any given market right now."

Apple's mixed reality headset that's set to launch in 2022 will be equipped with three displays, according to a research report shared today by display analyst Ross Young. MacRumors reports: The display configuration will include two micro OLED displays along with one AMOLED panel, with Sony set to supply the micro OLED displays that Apple will use. The micro OLED displays will be the main displays for the headset, but it's not yet known just what the AMOLED display will be used for. Modern VR headsets don't use AMOLED technology because the pixel density is too low, so it's possible that Apple is going to add it for low-resolution peripheral vision.

Sony recently showed off a 4K display with 4000 pixels per inch designed for use with VR headsets, and the report suggests that it's possible Sony developed this display specifically for Apple. If Apple is indeed using this Sony technology, an assumed array of 4000 x 4000 pixels indicates the display for the headset will measure in at 1.4 inches diagonally. This kind of advanced display configuration will come at a "high price," and Young suggests that the headset will cost several thousand dollars, which is in line with previous reports that have indicated a price of around $3,000.

ASML Holding has reported a fire at its factory in Berlin, Germany. No one was hurt and the fire was put out on Sunday night, but the incident could exacerbate the current global computer chip shortage. Here's what ASML said about the incident: The fire was extinguished during the night and fortunately no persons were injured during this incident. At this point it is too early to make any statement on the damage or whether the incident will have any impact on the output plan for this year. It will take a few days to conduct a thorough investigation and make a full assessment. As soon as we have such assessment, we will provide an update. The Register reports: ASML is the world's largest supplier of photolithography systems, the machines used to manufacture integrated circuits. Its units -- which cost tens of millions of dollars -- use lasers to etch components into blank silicon wafers, to within an accuracy of nanometers. Berliner Glas, where the fire was extinguished, was acquired by ASML in 2020, and says that over "1,200 employees" work at the firm, now known as ASML Berlin, developing and producing "several key components for ASML lithography systems, including wafer tables and clamps, reticle chucks and mirror blocks."

These are key components for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and deep ultraviolet (DUV) systems. EUV, in particular, which helps ASML's semiconductor-making clients print chips in much finer detail and at a lower cost, is seen as one of the drivers behind the firm's predictions of a $1 trillion semiconductor industry by 2030. The Dutch firm's customers include TSMC and Intel.

Berlin's fire department said last night that an automatic cleaning system had caught fire across an area of 200m^2 on the second floor of a three-storey "industrial" building in Waldkraiburger Strasse in Berlin's Britz district in the Neukolln area. Resources deployed at the site included a drone that could access the roof. The Berlin company's stated production area is 31,780m^2. A spokesperson confirmed to The Register that a part of the Berlin factory was closed -- but said other parts of the factory were still operating. The firm's stock price dipped 2 per cent on the news.

Electric cars make up less than 5% of new U.S. vehicle sales today — but automakers are betting on increasing demand. Chevy even plans to stop producing gas-powered cars altogether over the next 15 years, according to the Washington Post.

But they also ponder the implications of this year's recall of the Chevy Bolt: The crisis involving the Chevrolet Bolt was a painful reminder for the auto industry that despite treating the electric vehicle era as essentially inevitable — a technical fait accompli — significant obstacles to manufacturing the cars, and especially their batteries, continue to threaten that future. "It's a terrible thing that has happened," Tim Grewe, GM's general director for electrification strategy and cell engineering, said in an interview in September...

The recall of the Bolt covered all of the roughly 141,000 units GM had ever built. The company identified the issue as dual defects that led battery materials to make contact with one another and the components to combust spontaneously. It's a danger that comes directly from the core challenge of creating electric-vehicle batteries: the competition to pack more and more energy into them... Even as automakers seek to phase out gasoline engines en masse, high-voltage car batteries remain in their early stages of mass production. Many manufacturers are experimenting with new technologies and battery chemistries. While they do so, they are discovering defects — some of which can prove catastrophic.... Electric-car-battery explosions can release massive amounts of energy — and the fires can burn for hours, stretching longer and registering hotter than fires in cars with internal-combustion engines...

LG, which has made batteries for the Bolt's entire run, is reimbursing GM for nearly $2 billion of costs associated with the recall.... GM has been hit hardest by fire concerns — but Audi and Hyundai also have recalled EVs over fire risks.

Stretch is a new robot from Boston Dynamics that can move approximately 800 heavy boxes per hour. As IEEE Spectrum reports, it's part of "a new generation of robots with the intelligence and flexibility to handle the kind of variation that people take in stride." From the report: Stretch's design is somewhat of a departure from the humanoid and quadrupedal robots that Boston Dynamics is best known for, such as Atlas and Spot. With its single massive arm, a gripper packed with sensors and an array of suction cups, and an omnidirectional mobile base, Stretch can transfer boxes that weigh as much as 50 pounds (23 kilograms) from the back of a truck to a conveyor belt at a rate of 800 boxes per hour. An experienced human worker can move boxes at a similar rate, but not all day long, whereas Stretch can go for 16 hours before recharging. And this kind of work is punishing on the human body, especially when heavy boxes have to be moved from near a trailer's ceiling or floor.

"Truck unloading is one of the hardest jobs in a warehouse, and that's one of the reasons we're starting there with Stretch," says Kevin Blankespoor, senior vice president of warehouse robotics at Boston Dynamics. Blankespoor explains that Stretch isn't meant to replace people entirely; the idea is that multiple Stretch robots could make a human worker an order of magnitude more efficient. "Typically, you'll have two people unloading each truck. Where we want to get with Stretch is to have one person unloading four or five trucks at the same time, using Stretches as tools." All Stretch needs is to be shown the back of a trailer packed with boxes, and it'll autonomously go to work, placing each box on a conveyor belt one by one until the trailer is empty. People are still there to make sure that everything goes smoothly, and they can step in if Stretch runs into something that it can't handle, but their full-time job becomes robot supervision instead of lifting heavy boxes all day.

Stretch is optimized for moving boxes, a task that's required throughout a warehouse. Boston Dynamics hopes that over the longer term the robot will be flexible enough to put its box-moving expertise to use wherever it's needed. In addition to unloading trucks, Stretch has the potential to unload boxes from pallets, put boxes on shelves, build orders out of multiple boxes from different places in a warehouse, and ultimately load boxes onto trucks, a much more difficult problem than unloading due to the planning and precision required. [...] Boston Dynamics spent much of 2021 turning Stretch from a prototype, built largely from pieces designed for Atlas and Spot, into a production-ready system that will begin shipping to a select group of customers in 2022, with broader sales expected in 2023. For Blankespoor, that milestone will represent just the beginning. He feels that such robots are poised to have an enormous impact on the logistics industry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The Kyoto University in Japan has lost about 77TB of research data due to an error in the backup system of its Hewlett-Packard supercomputer. The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, 2021, and resulted in 34 million files from 14 research groups being wiped from the system and the backup file. After investigating to determine the impact of the loss, the university concluded that the work of four of the affected groups could no longer be restored. All affected users have been individually notified of the incident via email, but no details were published on the type of work that was lost.

At the moment, the backup process has been stopped. To prevent data loss from happening again, the university has scraped the backup system and plans to apply improvements and re-introduce it in January 2022. The plan is to also keep incremental backups -- which cover files that have been changed since the last backup happened -- in addition to full backup mirrors. While the details of the type of data that was lost weren't revealed to the public, supercomputer research costs several hundreds of USD per hour, so this incident must have caused distress to the affected groups. The Kyoto University is considered one of Japan's most important research institutions and enjoys the second-largest scientific research investments from national grants. Its research excellence and importance is particularly distinctive in the area of chemistry, where it ranks fourth in the world, while it also contributes to biology, pharmacology, immunology, material science, and physics.

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has lost two floppy disks containing personal information on 38 people, the department announced on Dec. 27. From a report: The MPD said the floppy disks contained personal data on 38 people who had applied for public housing in Tokyo's Meguro Ward. The ward office had provided the personal information to the MPD to check if the applicants were affiliated with organized crime groups. Police said no leaks or misuse of the information have been confirmed at this point. According to the MPD's third organized crime control division, the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men in their 20s to 80s who had applied for Meguro Ward-run housing were recorded on the floppy disks. None of them were apparently affiliated with gangs. The police division and Meguro Ward signed an agreement in 2012 to check whether public housing applicants were affiliated with crime syndicates. Police received the floppy disks from the ward in December 2019 and February 2021 to conduct background checks, and kept them in the division's locked storage. The loss of the disks emerged after a Meguro Ward employee made a new inquiry to the police division on Dec. 7 and police went back to the disks to return them. Police say the disks may have been discarded accidentally.

China will work to become a leading global player in robotics by 2025 under a five-year plan announced Tuesday as it ramps up efforts to build a high-tech manufacturing sector resilient to American sanctions. From a report: Coming amid what is expected to be a drawn-out rivalry with the U.S., the plan seeks to help Chinese technology companies compete on the world stage. It was compiled by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other agencies. The plan targets revenue growth of more than 20% per year for the Chinese robotics industry. Despite reaching the 100 billion yuan ($15.7 billion) mark in 2020, the industry still lags in foundational technologies and manufacturing advanced robots. The government wants to improve the industry's ability to innovate. China will support restructuring efforts and mergers, particularly among large corporations, to create more competitive players. It will also provide financial assistance and strengthen cooperation between industry, academia and government to develop more advanced materials and core components. The plan promotes the diversification of supply chains, which has emerged as a top priority for economic security amid the Sino-American rivalry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Behind every TikTok, Zoom call, and cat meme is a data center that stores, processes, or reroutes that data around the world. The more we do online, the bigger these data centers and their energy footprint get. At full capacity, servers within a modern "hyperscale" (aka "massive") data center can use as much power as 80,000 households. Although the data center industry is global, places with the right combination of stable climate and friendly regulations attract outsized attention from data center developers. Ireland is one of these places. The island nation hosts 70 data centers and is now the fastest-growing data center market in Europe. Unfortunately, supplying the equivalent of several extra cities worth of electricity to servers that aid your doomscrolling is starting to take a toll on Ireland's power grid.

Data centers already use around 900 megawatts of electricity in Ireland. According to Paul Deane, an energy researcher working with the MaREI Environmental Research Institute in Ireland, this adds up to at least 11% of Ireland's total electricity supply at present, a situation he described "as a serious energy systems problem." As Deane outlined, meeting this demand is making Ireland's current energy crisis worse and its target of halving greenhouse emissions by 2030 harder to reach. And things are only getting more challenging. A recent report from Eirgrid, Ireland's state-owned grid operator, shows that data centers will consume almost 30% (PDF) of Ireland's annual electricity supply by 2029.

Although, as Deane pointed out, data centers are essential to modern life, a small country with little grid power to spare hosting so many of them puts the sustainability of Ireland's entire power supply at risk. Deane summed up Ireland's issue with data centers as being a mismatch in size. "Data centers are large power users, and our power system is small, so plugging more of them into a small grid will start to have an outsized impact," he said. In stark comparison, Germany, the EU's biggest data center market overall, will use less than 5% of its grid capacity to power data centers in the same period. As well as stoking fears that the industry's growth will create blackouts and power shortages for Irish consumers this winter, data centers may also derail Ireland's drive to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt announced that on December 28th, it successfully produced the first lithium-ion battery cell to be designed, developed, and built completely in Europe by a homegrown company. Teslarati reports: "Last night, the commissioning of the Northvolt Ett gigafactory in northern Sweden led to the assembly of the first battery cell," Northvolt wrote. The company's factory, located in Vasteras, Sweden, is the first factory in Europe to have a cell that has been "fully designed, developed and assembled at a gigafactory by a homegrown European battery company," the company added. The production of the cell is a massive milestone for Northvolt, which has been working to get its gigafactory up and running since 2017. The company said the cell is of a prismatic cell format, which consist of large sheets of anodes, cathodes, and separators sandwiched, rolled up, and pressed to fit into a metallic or hard-plastic housing in cubic form, according to AllAboutCircuits.

Northvolt Labs in Vasteras has been in production since early 2020, the company said. Northvolt plans to expand the production capacity of the facility toward 60 GWh per year, which will fulfill over $30 billion worth of contracts the battery maker has already locked up with various automotive manufacturers, including BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Polestar, Fluence, and Scania. Northvolt Ett will commercially deliver various cell types in 2022. While the company is based in Europe and has various partnerships with European automotive and energy storage companies, it has no plans to only service entities that are only located on the same continent.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC, written by Todd Haselton: Apple's decision to ditch Intel paid off this year. The pivot allowed Apple to completely rethink the Mac, which had started to grow stale with an aging design and iterative annual upgrades. Following the divorce from Intel, Apple has launched far more exciting computers which, paired with an ongoing pandemic that has forced people to work and learn from home, have sent Apple's Mac business soaring. It wasn't always a given. When Apple announced its move away from Intel in 2020, it was fair to question just how well Apple could power laptops and desktop computers. Apple has used in-house chips for iPhones and iPads but had been selling Intel-powered computers for 15 years. It wasn't clear how well its macOS desktop software would work with apps designed to run on Intel chips, or whether its processors would offer any consumer benefits and keep up with intensive tasks that people turned to MacBooks to run. Those fears were quickly quelled.

The first M1 Apple chip was launched in 2020 in a MacBook Air laptop. It was more powerful than Intel's chip while offering longer battery life and enabling a fanless design, which helped keep Apple's new MacBook Air even quieter. It proved to be an early success. In April 2021, CEO Tim Cook said during the company's fiscal second-quarter earnings call that the M1 chip helped fuel the 70.1% growth in Apple's Mac revenue, which hit $9.1 billion during that quarter. The growth continued in fiscal Q3, when Mac revenue was up 16% year over year. That quarter, it launched the all-new iMac, which offered a redesigned super-thin metal body that looks like a screen propped up on a stand. It's slimmer than the Intel models that came before it, while offering other benefits, like a much better webcam, great speakers and a much sharper display than the models it replaced. And Apple made the launch more exciting by offering an array of colors for the iMac, which it hadn't done since it shipped the 1999 iMac. There was a slowdown in fiscal Q4, when Mac revenue grew just 1.6%, as Apple, like all manufacturers, saw a slowdown from the burst of sales driven by the start of the pandemic and dealt with supply chain woes. But fiscal Q4 sales didn't include revenue from its most exciting new computer of the year.

Apple's fiscal Q1 earnings in January will give an indication of how well all its new computers are selling. But it's clear the move from Intel has allowed Apple to move full speed ahead with its own chip development, much like it does for iPhones and iPads, the latter of which has yet to be matched by any other tablet on the market. It's no longer beholden to delays that plagued Intel, which started to lag behind AMD with its new 7nm chips. And Apple has full control over its "stack," which means it can design new computer hardware and software together, instead of letting the power of another company's chips dictate what its computers can and can't do.