The case for robot umpires in baseball got some new interest this week — especially for Silicon Valley's baseball fans. As America settled in to watch the final inning of this year's National League Division Series, the Washington Post reports that (human) viewers saw a (human) umpire "call a third strike on a checked swing by San Francisco Giants infielder Wilmer Flores...ending the night, and season, of MLB's best team of 2021." (Though instead of swinging "Flores clearly appeared to hold up.")

But the backlash raises the question of whether a so-called robo-umpire — essentially, a set of highly placed and well-programmed cameras — could have automatically adjudicated the checked swing...

It's not a hypothetical question: MLB is in the middle of a three-year partnership with the independent Atlantic League for just such a robo-umpire, a system called Automatic Balls and Strikes (ABS), that this past season rendered a home-plate umpire moot for his most important job. MLB hasn't given a timetable for when the system could reach the big leagues, but it's clearly a trial balloon. ABS is overseen by TrackMan, a Denmark-based start-up that began by helping golfers with their swing and then expanded to baseball before broadening again to auto-officiating responsibilities. Under their ABS system, players are measured for a strike zone before the season, with their info then fed into the machine. Then, during the game, the company's sensor in the stands behind home plate uses Doppler technology to determine where the ball is thrown and where it should have been thrown based on the player's strike zone. The sensor then relays the call to, well, whoever wants to hear it. In the case of the Atlantic League, this is an actual umpire behind the plate who, in an ironic reversal, is a human who simply does what the machine tells him to do and announces the call.

The system is not being used for checked swings, but the technology is equally applicable; it makes little difference whether a ball is crossing the plate in one direction or a bat crosses it the other way...

But accuracy is only part of the equation. Presumably TrackMan could have made the right call — but what effect would such automation have on us socially? An argument can be made that it would increase consumer confidence and eliminate discord; an equal argument could be made the other way, that subjectivity is what makes the public realm, or at least baseball, a dynamic and interesting place.

The Flores checked swing, in other words, gets at the question that stretches across much of innovation: Just because we could, does that mean we should?
"Some fans have questioned whether judgment calls are part of the fun of baseball and a legalistic rendering is contrary to the spirit of the game," the article points out. And another issue: currently catchers will sometimes even move their glove with the caught ball so it looks like it passed through the strike zone when it didn't. (Or, as Deadspin puts it, "It's lying about where the pitch came in to fool the umpire into giving your team a strike when he shouldn't have." Though they call it "a beautiful art that defines the catcher position... and it will be rendered useless by the emergence of robot umpires.")

Deadspin tracked down the President of TrackMan Baseball, who said that after an entire season of use in the Atlantic league, "Our system was accurate to about a half-inch, and we do this at hundreds of baseball stadiums every single day." But Deadspin worries that if it's actually implemented in Major League Baseball stadium, then pitchers would be afraid to throw borderline pitches, and would be forced to throw more balls over the plate. While endless hits and home runs might sound exciting, it would only lengthen an already slow sport, and the high that comes from witnessing incredible offensive feats would slowly fade as they would become more commonplace.

Quadrupedal robots are one of the most interesting developments in robotics in recent years. They're small, nimble, and able to traverse environments that frustrate wheeled machines. So, of course, it was only a matter of time until someone put a gun on one. From a report: The image in the linked story shows a quadrupedal robot -- a Vision 60 unit built by US firm Ghost Robotics -- that's been equipped with a custom gun by small-arms specialists Sword International. It seems the gun itself (dubbed the SPUR or "special purpose unmanned rifle") is designed to be fitted onto a variety of robotic platforms. It has a 30x optical zoom, thermal camera for targeting in the dark, and an effective range of 1,200 meters. What's not clear is whether or not Sword International or Ghost Robotics are currently selling this combination of gun and robot. But if they're not, it seems they will be soon. As the marketing copy on Sword's website boasts: "The SWORD Defense Systems SPUR is the future of unmanned weapon systems, and that future is now."

Framework, makers of the modular 13.5-inch Framework laptop that's designed to be easily repaired and upgraded, has launched a dedicated marketplace filled with replacement parts and upgrades for its portable computer. The Verge reports: Writing in a blog post, the company said the marketplace is currently focused on replacement parts and expansion cards, but that it hopes to add more customization modules like additional language keyboards later this year, as well as third-party and community developed modules in 2022.

The marketplace already includes a range of expansion cards for the laptop, which are designed to slot into its four modular compartments to add everything from extra storage to features like MicroSD card slots or more USB ports. There's also user upgradeable RAM and storage for sale. But the store is clearly a work in progress, and lists a host of other items like replacement CPU-equipped mainboards, keyboards, and spare parts like batteries and displays as "coming soon."

Palm probably wasn't a name you were expecting to hear from again, but to the surprise of many, the company recently posted some teasers on Twitter foreshadowing a new gadget coming out later this month. From a report: While Palm hasn't officially revealed detailed info about its upcoming release, the teaser pics in its tweets make it quite clear that Palm is prepping to release a new pair of wireless earbuds. And judging by the silhouette of the device in the background, it seems Palm has taken some inspiration from Apple's ubiquitous AirPods. For a company that's most well known for making phones and PDAs, the decision to move into the audio market might seem like a strange pivot, especially since the last time we saw something from Palm was in 2018 with the tiny Palm Phone. Unlike other smartphones, Palm basically bucked every modern phone trend when it made the Palm Phone, which was designed so that you would spend less time looking at your phone in order to focus more on the world around you, while still providing the essential smartphone functionality.

Slashdot reader TommyROM writes: The Commodore 65 was a never-released computer slated to follow the fabled Commodore 64 from 1982. Developed between 1990 and 1991, it would have been the most powerful 8-bit computer on the market with 128K RAM, high-resolution graphics (up to 1280x400), and stereo sound. A few prototypes were made before Commodore canceled the project in 1991.

Now an updated version of the Commodore 65 has been realized. Project founder Paul Gardner-Stephen began working on recreating the C65 in 2014, and eventually teamed up with the non-profit Museum of Electronic Games & Art to create the FPGA-based Mega65, a modernization of the original Commodore 65 featuring a custom main board, mechanical keyboard, and injection molded case. It uses the original C65 ROMs but improves on the design with SD card support, Ethernet, and HDMI output. It is about 40 times faster than a C64 and backwards compatible, including cartridge and joystick ports. The design is open-sourced for long-term compatibility. Additionally, there is a hand-held version in the works that is also a cellphone. They are currently taking pre-orders for the Mega65 at a price of 666.66 euros ($742 plus shipping).

The Retro Hour podcast has an interview with founder Paul Gardner-Stephen where he discusses the impetus of the project and goes into more details of the design.

During its next@Acer event today, the company announced three new PCs -- a laptop, a two-in-one, and a tablet -- that will be joining its antimicrobial lineup. Ars Technica reports: Something is considered antimicrobial if it's capable of "destroying or inhibiting the growth of microorganisms, and especially pathogenic microorganisms." That means it fights disease-causing things you can't see. Acer claims its Antimicrobial 360 Design, as it brands the feature, fights germs in two ways. First, high-touch surfaces -- such as the chassis's exterior and hinge, the keyboard, the touchpad, and the fingerprint reader -- are coated with a silver-ion agent. For years, research has pointed to silver ions' ability to fight bacteria. As a more recent report published in ACS Applied Bio Materials explains, "They can readily adsorb to most biomolecules (DNA, membrane protein, enzymes, or intracellular cofactors) in bacteria to inactivate their functions." Acer's silver-ion agent is compliant with regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Biocidal Products Regulation; it can cut the bacteria count to 1,000 after a 99.9 percent reduction, based on the International Organization for Standardization 22196 test protocol. The 22196 standard specifies methods for testing the "antibacterial activity of antibacterial-treated plastics and other non-porous surfaces of products."

The products also use Corning Gorilla Glass coated with the silver-ion product. "This is done via trace amounts of silver ions leaching to the glass surface to eliminate the surface bacteria, while still offering other benefits such as improved durability and improved scratch resistance," Acer said. Acer introduced new antimicrobial PCs to its lineup in 2020 but is still adding to the roster. The company sees its antimicrobial coating expanding even further "across multiple product lines," an Acer spokesperson told Ars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Biden administration is planning to aggressively expand offshore wind energy capacity in the United States, potentially holding as many as seven new offshore lease sales by 2025. The move was announced Wednesday by US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and first reported by The New York Times. Haaland said the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is exploring leasing sales along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, in the Gulf of Maine, New York Bight, central Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, as well as offshore the Carolinas, California and Oregon. As part of that initiative, which spans multiple government agencies, the Departments of the Interior, Energy and Commerce committed to a shared goal of generating 30 gigawatts of offshore wind in the US by 2030. The Interior Department estimates that reaching that goal would create nearly 80,000 jobs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Our new paper in Nature Communications presents a global assessment of how many rooftop solar panels we'd need to generate enough renewable energy for the whole world -- and where we'd need to put them. Our study is the first to provide such a detailed map of global rooftop solar potential, assessing rooftop area and sunlight cover at scales all the way from cities to continents. We found that we would only need 50 percent of the world's rooftops to be covered with solar panels in order to deliver enough electricity to meet the world's yearly needs.

We designed a program that incorporated data from over 300 million buildings and analyzed 130 million km of land -- almost the entire land surface area of the planet. This estimated how much energy could be produced from the 0.2 million km of rooftops present on that land, an area roughly the same size as the U.K. We then calculated electricity generation potentials from these rooftops by looking at their location. Generally, rooftops located in higher latitudes such as in northern Europe or Canada can vary by as much as 40% in their generation potential across the year, due to big differences in sunshine between winter and summer. Rooftops near the equator, however, usually only vary in generation potential by around 1% across the seasons, as sunshine is much more consistent. This is important because these large variations in monthly potential can have a significant impact on the reliability of solar-powered electricity in that region. That means places where sunlight is more irregular require energy storage solutions -- increasing electricity costs. Our results highlighted three potential hotspots for rooftop solar energy generation: Asia, Europe and North America.

Of these, Asia looks like the cheapest location to install panels, where -- in countries like India and China -- one kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity, or approximately 48 hours of using your laptop, can be produced for just 0.05p. This is thanks to cheap panel manufacturing costs, as well as sunnier climates. Meanwhile, the costliest countries for implementing rooftop solar are the U.S., Japan and the U.K. Europe holds the middle ground, with average costs across the continent of around 0.096p per kWh. The report mentions this endeavor would be "extremely expensive," and won't be a solution for some industries that require very large currents and specialized electricity delivery. However, the report concludes by saying: "If the costs of solar power continue to decrease, rooftop panels could be one of the best tools yet to decarbonize our electricity supply."

Ken Pillonel, a robotics engineer on YouTube, replaced an iPhone's Lightning port with a working USB-C port. AppleInsider reports: In a YouTube Short titled "World's First USB-C iPhone," Ken Pillonel claims to have installed the component into the iPhone X, replacing Lightning in the process. In the video, the iPhone is said to receive power via the connection, as well as being able to handle data transfers over a USB-C cable. In the description of the video, Pillonel says he reverse-engineered Apple's C94 connector, in order to make a PCB with a female USB-C port. After the schematics were set in place, it then became a challenge to shrink it down and install it into an iPhone.

Pillonel has spent a few months on his creation, with a blog post from May showing the thinking behind the replacement, and the challenges of replacing the Lightning port itself. A video at that time showed a DIY prototype that worked and laid out the work ahead to make it small enough to work within an iPhone enclosure. A late September update advised he had designed and ordered a flexible PCB, a key component in enabling the port switch to occur. He adds a future video is in production, explaining how the board was made and squeezed into the iPhone itself.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you're still searching for a PS5 and are a Best Buy customer, your ship may have just come in -- that is, if you're willing to spend an extra $200 a year for access. That's because the big-box electronics retailer is locking stock of in-demand holiday items like Sony's console behind membership of its new Totaltech program. The expensive customer service package was recently rolled out nationwide. The $200 annual service -- which has benefits like round-the-clock tech support, up to two years of protection on Best Buy purchases (including AppleCare+ insurance, which can cost $200 on its own), and member discounted prices -- is throwing in exclusive access to "the season's hardest-to-find products" as a bonus perk for the holidays, the company said in a statement. The Best Buy retail site had the $500 disc drive model PS5s available for Totaltech members to buy Monday morning, with the consoles gated behind an "exclusive access event" paywall. Instead of selling out instantly, its stock lasted between 90 minutes and two hours -- a relatively glacial sales pace compared to the insane demand for the hardware that consumers have faced since it hit stores last November.

Although the PS5's listing page pointed directly to Totaltech membership exclusivity while the hardware was still available, its seemingly unrelated VIP buying privileges aren't listed anywhere on the program's membership benefits and FAQ pages. We would not be shocked to see other highly desired products that have been affected by the chip shortage follow suit, particularly high-end PC GPUs and Xbox Series X/S consoles. The service is replacing a "Best Buy Beta" program that was tested in select markets starting in April. Beta seemed to target a more generalized range of benefits over one focused on tech support and protection, and it notably did not offer special members-only events to buy limited-stock electronics. The company's free My Best Buy membership, which sometimes includes exclusive discount sales, remains unaffected.

"A group of ten EU countries, led by France, have asked the European Commission to recognize nuclear power as a low-carbon energy source that should be part of the bloc's decades-long transition towards climate neutrality," reports EuroNews. While greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear plants are "comparable" to those released by hydropower and wind, critics argue that the resulting radioactive waste is harmful to human health and the environment. "Despite the urgency to combat climate change, member states are still unable to reach a consensus on whether nuclear constitutes a green or dirty energy source," adds EuroNews. From the report: Tapping into Europe's ongoing energy crunch, the countries make the case for nuclear energy as a "key affordable, stable and independent energy source" that could protect EU consumers from being "exposed to the volatility of prices." The letter, which was initiated by France, has been sent to the Commission with the signature of nine other EU countries, most of which already count nuclear as part of their national energy mix: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania. Nuclear plants generate over 26% of the electricity produced in the European Union.
[...]
Despite the urgency to combat climate change, member states are still unable to reach a consensus on whether nuclear constitutes a green or dirty energy source. The Commission has postponed the crucial decision to let countries conclude the debate. On the one side, Germany, which plans to shut down all its reactors by 2022, is leading the anti-nuclear cause, together with Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg and Spain. "We are concerned that including nuclear power in the taxonomy would permanently damage its integrity, credibility and therefore its usefulness," they wrote in July.

On the other side, France, which obtains over 70% of its electricity from nuclear stations, is fighting to label nuclear as sustainable under the taxonomy. As shown by the new letter, Paris has the backing of several Eastern states, which have already earmarked millions for nuclear projects. "While renewable energy sources play a key role for our energy transition, they cannot produce enough low-carbon electricity to meet our needs, at a sufficient and a constant level," the letter says, describing nuclear power as a "safe and innovative" sector with the potential of sustaining one million high-qualified jobs "in the near future".

A report (PDF) from the Commission's research unit released earlier this year indicates Brussels could eventually side with the pro-nuclear team. The paper says greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear plants are "comparable" to those released by hydropower and wind, an assessment shared by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the United States Department of Energy. Critics, however, argue the resulting radioactive waste is harmful to human health and the environment. "Nuclear power is incredibly expensive, hazardous and slow to build," says Greenpeace. Detractors are concerned about potentially disastrous nuclear accidents, similar to those of Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima in 2011, which are still deeply rooted in the collective imagination.

TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, and Sony are considering joint construction of a semiconductor factory in western Japan amid a global chip shortage, Nikkei has learned. From the report: The total investment in the project is estimated at 800 billion yen ($7 billion), with the Japanese government expected to provide up to half the amount. Japan's top auto parts maker Denso is also looking to participate through such steps as setting up equipment at the site. The Toyota Motor group member seeks stable supplies of chips used in its auto parts. Sony may also take a minority stake in a new company that will manage the factory, which will be located in Kumamoto Prefecture, on land owned by Sony and in an area adjacent to the latter's image sensor factory, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The factory will make semiconductors used in camera image sensors, as well as chips for automobiles and other products, and is slated to go into operation by 2024, the people said.

Plans for the facility -- which would be TSMC's first chip production operation in Japan -- come as the global tech industry grapples with unprecedented semiconductor shortages and supply chain disruptions. The Japanese government, which is increasingly concerned about maintaining supply chain stability amid the chip shortage and rising tensions surrounding the Taiwan Strait, will support the project with subsidies, Nikkei learned. In exchange for subsidies, the government will seek a commitment that chip supplies to the Japanese market will take priority.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, Nintendo of Europe announced a very region-specific -- and era-specific -- tweak for its upcoming collection of N64 games on Switch: an option to switch between the video standards PAL and NTSC. While the announcement may sound ho-hum to outsiders, anyone in Europe with a vested interest in classic gaming will appreciate what the toggle affords. The issue boils down to differences between NTSC and PAL, the leading video broadcast standards on CRT TVs during Nintendo's '80s and '90s heyday. North American and Japanese TV sets were configured for NTSC, which has a refresh rate standard of 60 Hz, while PAL sets dominated Europe with a slightly higher pixel resolution and a lower refresh rate standard of 50 Hz.

Should you merely watch TV series or films on both NTSC and PAL sets, the difference between each is noticeable yet mild. But for much of the '80s and '90s, many TV video games, especially the ones made by the largely Japanese console industry, suffered in PAL because they were coded specifically for NTSC standards. In order to port them to PAL, developers generally didn't go back and reconfigure all of the timings, especially in the case of early 3D games. Instead, their internal clock speeds were often slowed down to 83.3 percent to match European TV refresh rates. This meant both slower gameplay than originally coded and slower playback of music and sound effects. (These also often shipped with NTSC's pixel maximums in mind in such a way that they were squished to fit on PAL displays, as opposed to being optimized for them.)

Sure enough, last month's announcement of N64 games on Nintendo Switch Online put fear into European classic-gamer hearts. That region's reveal video included slightly slower timings of classic N64 games compared to videos posted by Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Japan, since they were emulating the original European retail releases. At that time, Nintendo of Europe did not immediately reply to social media questions about whether European Switch owners would get an option for 60 Hz N64 gameplay -- especially in an LCD TV era, where such CRT-related restrictions no longer technically apply to most EU and UK TV owners. Monday's announcement confirms that European players will get a 60 Hz option by default for every N64 game in the Nintendo Switch Online "Expansion Pack" collection, along with the option to access a game's original 50 Hz version if it launched with multi-language support. Reading between the lines, we believe this means that if a European N64 game only had English language support, its Switch Online version will be the North American NTSC ROM.

Gizmodo takes a hard look at a "growing sense of excitement" about collaboration between bitcoin-mining operations and nuclear power plants (which are now plagued by high operating costs compared to renewables as well as natural gas): Of the three partnerships between bitcoin companies and nuclear energy that the Wall Street Journal mentioned, two involve bitcoin miners partnering with existing nuclear sources to power their operations... These are not companies investing in the future, but rather companies searching for anything that will help keep the profits flowing using existing power plants. It's pretty safe to say that some cash-strapped owners of nuclear plants will be using mining partnerships not to make any technological strides, but rather to simply keep the old plants operating.

"The plants themselves are pretty well-run, and they know what they're doing," said Alex Gilbert, a project manager at the think tank Nuclear Innovation Alliance. "It really is a matter of the economics. There's a certain point where you're definitely unprofitable, and you're going to be likely to close because you're not getting enough money in power markets. But if a bitcoin operation takes 10 to 15 to 30 percent of your power at a reasonable price, that tips you into profitability." This profitability means the plants can stay open, giving miners a little carbon-free energy as a treat while keeping the U.S.'s biggest source of zero-emissions power operational. This is especially a good idea while we wait for more renewables — and policies that favor them — to come online, in what could be the first real-world proof bitcoin is doing some societal good instead of being a waste of energy and resources....

A few small-to-medium reactors should be ready for licensing in a few years and some over the next decade, he said, helped along by private and federal funding. To actually get to a point where the kinds of smaller reactors could be developed that would be competitive with the (rapidly falling) price of renewables, Gilbert said, would take a significantly larger bump from private capital — as well as more customers. "Providing early demand for advance reactors, especially microreactors, that's how bitcoin can most help the nuclear sector," he said.... I'm not a technofuturist who dreams of a libertarian paradise, but I have to admit that there's kind of a cool idea here. If the bitcoin community really believes cryptocurrencies are the money of the future, let them be the first to invest in a budding technology that could be the energy of the future.

In the interim, however, they shouldn't be allowed to rest on their greenwashing laurels while continuing to churn out emissions as they wait for fast reactor technology to become feasible in 10 years. Government regulations are, of course, anathema to crypto true believers. But a mandate that any new mining facilities source power from nearby nuclear plants could go a long way toward cleaning up bitcoin's act and ensuring the carbon-free energy we desperately need stays on the grid while fancy fast reactors come online.

When automakers were forced to make fewer vehicles with the chips they had available, Business Insider reports that "Naturally, they chose to prioritize those models that had the highest demand and made them the most money.

"At the same time, the reduction in the supply from all brands meant that dealers could make a sale without the traditional haggling over the vehicle's sticker price. The result has been a boon for automakers." Mark Wakefield, a consultant with AlixPartners in Detroit, told Bloomberg that US car companies were now making $3,000 more per car than average, as well as up to $10,000 more on certain pickups and SUVs.

One dealer who sells upgraded pickups in Ohio told Morning Brew that his dealership recently closed a deal in 52 minutes that would have taken four hours before the chip shortage. "The surprising part is the average selling price on those trucks is close to $100,000, and the consumer demand has still been sky-high," the dealer said.

Jim Farley, Ford's CEO, said in June that this new pricing power was "breathtaking" and indicated that the company wouldn't be returning to the days of guessing over how many cars it should produce and then marking them down until they sell. Mary Barra, GM's CEO, has also said that customer orders will play a larger role in her company's production strategy. Kevin Tynan, an auto analyst for Bloomberg, told Insider earlier this year that the industry has been trying to get off the incentives and discounting model for decades. "They don't totally hate this," he said, referring to the shortages. "Moving forward you're probably going to get an industry more like what we're seeing now, where supply is a little bit more managed, and incentives are not as aggressive as they've been."
The article summarizes the prediction of the Bloomberg auto analyst: "Good news for automakers and investors, but that also means consumers can expect to continue to see fewer options, higher prices, and a tighter used-vehicle market going forward."

"Lebanon's electricity network collapsed on Saturday," reports the Washington Post, "after the two most important power stations ran out of fuel, leaving private generators as the only source of power." The state-owned electricity company has been providing citizens with just a few hours of power a day for months, but the total collapse of the national grid will compound the misery of those who can't afford to run generators and had relied on those few hours. The outage marks the latest milestone in the unraveling of Lebanon, which is undergoing what the World Bank has described as one of the world's three biggest financial collapses of the past 150 years.

The banking system was the first to implode in 2019, triggering a 90 percent slide in the value of the currency that has left the government unable to afford fuel, food and medicine imports while plunging millions of Lebanese into poverty. The electricity grid ground to a halt after the country's two main power stations, Deir Ammar and Zahrani, ran out of diesel fuel, leaving the nationwide network without the minimum amount of power required to sustain it, said Energy Minister Walid Fayyad.

The government is working to secure emergency fuel supplies from other sources, including the army, to bridge the shortfall until a shipment of Iraqi oil due to arrive Saturday night can be offloaded and distributed into the network. At most, he said, the total outage can be expected to last only a couple of days, and he hoped to find a stopgap solution faster. But the collapse is a reminder of the dire state of Lebanon's electricity sector, which has been unable to provide 24-hour power for decades. In recent months, its capacity has been further eroded by the lack of money and by corruption, with smugglers diverting state purchases of fuel to sell at a profit in neighboring Syria.

A recent deal struck with Iraq to supply 80,000 tons of fuel a month still falls short of the minimum amount required to ensure a stable grid and at most will be able to keep the power on for about four hours a day, Fayyad said.

The Texas Tribune (an Austin-based non-profit digital news site) reports that climate change "has made the Texas heat worse, with less relief as nighttime temperatures warm, a report from the state's climatologist published Thursday found." Climate data also show that the state is experiencing extreme rainfall — especially in eastern Texas — bigger storm surges as seas rise along the Gulf Coast and more flooding from hurricanes strengthened by a warming ocean, the report says. Those trends are expected to accelerate in the next 15 years, according to the report, which analyzes extreme weather risks for the state and was last updated in 2019. The report was funded in part by Texas 2036, a nonpartisan economic policy nonprofit group named for the state's upcoming bicentennial.

The average annual temperature in Texas is expected to be 3 degrees warmer by 2036 than the average of the 1950s, the report found. The number of 100-degree days is expected to nearly double compared with 2000-2018, especially in urban areas. "From here on out, it's going to be very unusual that we ever have a year as mild as a typical year during the 20th century," said John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist who authored the report. "Just about all of them are going to be warmer."

A hotter Texas will threaten public health, squeeze the state's water supply, strain the electric grid and push more species toward extinction, experts told The Texas Tribune...

The entire baseline of temperatures in the state has shifted upward — a trend that is likely to continue to cause problems for the state's aging infrastructure, experts said. "I was surprised at how strong the upward trend was in the coldest temperatures of the summer," Nielsen-Gammon said. While global temperature analysis had already shown that trend, he said, it is now very clearly happening on the local level in Texas. Even this year, which was considered a mild year because Texas didn't see temperatures above 100 degrees in much of the state, Nielsen-Gammon said nighttime temperatures stayed warm enough to put 2021 in the top 20% of years with the hottest summer nights on record.

Italian winemakers have increasingly relied on migrant workers for the autumn harvest, but travel restrictions and soaring wage costs are pushing many to turn to machines. From a report: Last year's grape harvest was a harrowing scramble at Mirko Cappelli's Tuscan vineyard. With the Italian border closed because of the pandemic, the Eastern European workers he had come to rely on couldn't get into the country. The company he had contracted to supply grape pickers had no one to offer him. He ultimately found just enough workers to bring the grapes in on time. So, this year Mr. Cappelli made sure he wouldn't face the same problem: He spent â85,000, equivalent to $98,000, on a grape-harvesting machine. The coronavirus pandemic is pushing the wine industry toward automation.

Covid-related travel restrictions left severe shortages of agricultural workers last year, as Eastern Europeans and North Africans were unable to reach fields in Western Europe. Though the shortages have eased this year, the difficulty of finding workers has accelerated the shift, which was already under way across the agricultural sector. While harvests of some crops, like soybeans and corn, are already heavily automated, winemakers have been slower to make the switch. Vintners debate whether automated harvesting is more likely to damage grapes, which can affect the quality of the wine. The cost is a deterrent for many small farmers. Some European regions even ban machine harvesting.

For many vintners in Europe and the U.S., however, the difficulty of finding workers -- a problem they say had grown steadily for years but became acute during the pandemic -- has pushed them to take the robot plunge. It is a change that will outlast the pandemic and could shift longstanding migration patterns that bring tens of thousands of foreign workers to Italy, France and Spain for agricultural harvests each year. Ritano Baragli, president of Cantina Sociale colli Fiorentini Valvirgilio, a winemaker's group in Tuscany, said it has been getting harder to find pickers for several years, as locals increasingly shun the physically demanding, low-paid, short-term work while the demand for pickers has increased. But last year was the worst labor shortage of his half-century career in wine. Use of harvesting machines among the group's members increased 20% this year in response, he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Valve has posted an official teardown of its upcoming handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck. Before diving into the teardown, though, the company spends about a minute to strongly caution against taking one apart unless you're sure you know what you're doing. "Even though it's your PC -- or it will be once you've received your Steam Deck -- and you have every right to open it up and do what you want, we at Valve really don't recommend that you ever open it up," a Valve representative said in the video. "The Steam Deck is a very tightly designed system, and the parts are chosen carefully for this product with its specific construction, so they aren't really designed to be user-swappable." Despite its warnings, however, the company likely understands that people are going to take the Steam Deck apart anyway, so this video could be a handy resource for people who are considering doing so.

In the video, Valve shows how to swap out two parts of the system. First, Valve shows how to replace the thumbsticks. The company cautions that they are completely custom, but says that it will offer a source for "replacement parts, thumbsticks, SSDs, and possibly more" in the coming months. After that, Valve shows how to swap out the SSD, which could be helpful for people who may have reserved the cheapest version of the device with an eMMC hard drive with the intention of upgrading it themselves. Be aware that all versions of the Steam Deck use an m.2 connector, including the version with the eMMC drive, so if you plan to make a swap, you're going to have to reinstall the OS and bring over any games you might have had loaded on your other drive.

On Tuesday, D-Wave released its roadmap for upcoming processors and software for its quantum annealers. The company is also announcing that it's going to be developing its own gate-based hardware, which it will offer in parallel with the quantum annealer. Ars Technica's John Timmer talked with company CEO Alan Baratz to understand all the announcements. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The simplest part of the announcement to understand is what's happening with D-Wave's quantum-annealing processor. The current processor, called Advantage, has 5,000 qubits and 40,000 connections among them. These connections play a major role in the chip's performance as, if a direct connection between two qubits can't be established, others have to be used to act as a bridge, resulting in a lower effective qubit count. Starting this week, users of D-Wave's cloud service will have access to an updated version of Advantage. The qubit and connection stats will remain the same, but the device will be less influenced by noise in the system (in technical terms, its qubits will maintain their coherence longer). [...] Further out in the future is the follow-on system, Advantage 2, which is expected late next year or the year after. This will see another boost to the qubit count, going up to somewhere above 7,000. But the connectivity would go up considerably as well, with D-Wave targeting 20 connections per qubit.

D-Wave provides a set of developer tools it calls Ocean. In previous iterations, Ocean has allowed people to step back from directly controlling the hardware; instead, if a problem could be expressed as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO), Ocean could produce the commands needed to handle all the hardware configuration and run the problem on the optimizer. D-Wave referred to this as a hybrid problem solver, since Ocean would use classical computing to optimize the QUBO prior to execution. The only problem is that not everyone who might be interested in trying D-Wave hardware knows how to express their problem as a QUBO. So, the new version of Ocean will allow an additional layer of abstraction by allowing problems to be sent to the system in the format typically used by people who tend to solve these sorts of problems. "You will now be able to specify problems in the language that data scientists and data analysts understand," Baratz promised.

The biggest part of today's announcement, however, may be that D-Wave intends to also build gate-based hardware. Baratz explained that he thinks that optimization is likely to remain a valid approach, pointing to a draft publication that shows that structuring some optimization problems for gate-based hardware may be so computationally expensive that it would offset any gains the quantum hardware could provide. But it's also clear that gate-based hardware can solve an array of problems that a quantum annealer can't. He also argued that D-Wave has solved a number of problems that are currently limiting advances in gate-based hardware that uses electronic qubits called transmons. These include the amount and size of the hardware that's needed to send control signals to the qubits and the ability to pack qubits in densely enough so that they're easy to connect but not close enough that they start to interfere with each other. One of the problems D-Wave faces, however, is that the qubits it uses for its annealer aren't useful for gate-based systems. While they're based on the same bit of hardware (the Josephson junction), the annealer's qubits can only be set as up or down. A gate-based qubit needs to allow manipulations in three dimensions. So, the company is going to try building flux qubits, which also rely on Josephson junctions but use them in a different way. So, at least some of the company's engineering expertise should still apply.