An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Most companies still haven't shifted their entire NVMe SSD lineups to use PCI Express 4.0, but PCIe 5.0 SSDs for PCs are already on the horizon. Storage company Silicon Motion said in a recent earnings call that it expects its PCIe 5.0-capable SSD controllers for consumer SSDs will be available sometime in 2024, opening the door to a wide variety of high-performance drives from different manufacturers. SSD manufacturer ADATA teased some PCIe 5.0 SSDs at CES last month (albeit without an expected release date), boasting of read speeds up to 14GB/s and write speeds of up to 12GB/s using a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller. Current high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs like Samsung's 980 Pro top out at roughly half those speeds.

Other reports have suggested that these PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs are coming later in 2022, but according to the call transcript, that only applies to the latest version of Silicon Motion's PCIe 5.0 controller for enterprise SSDs -- the products that end up in servers and data centers, not what typically ends up in the PC on your desk or lap. Early PCIe 4.0 SSDs for consumer PCs were also demonstrated at CES a couple of years before they became products that you could actually buy. For 2022 and 2023, Silicon Motion will continue to focus on those PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Budget SSDs like Western Digital's WD Black SN770 SE are only beginning to transition to PCIe 4.0, and according to reviews like this one from Tom's Hardware, their controllers and flash memory aren't yet fast enough to benefit much from the extra bandwidth. Silicon Motion also says that PCIe 4.0 SSDs have only become common in pre-built PCs within the last year because of "extensive verification and testing" requirements.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had engineered a new rubber-like solid substance that has surprising qualities. It can absorb and release very large quantities of energy. And it is programmable. Taken together, this new material holds great promise for a very wide array of applications, from enabling robots to have more power without using additional energy, to new helmets and protective materials that can dissipate energy much more quickly.

"Imagine a rubber band," says Alfred Crosby, professor of polymer science and engineering at UMass Amherst and the paper's senior author. "You pull it back, and when you let it go, it flies across the room. Now imagine a super rubber band. When you stretch it past a certain point, you activate extra energy stored in the material. When you let this rubber band go, it flies for a mile." This hypothetical rubber band is made out of a new metamaterial -- a substance engineered to have a property not found in naturally occurring materials -- that combines an elastic, rubber-like substance with tiny magnets embedded in it. This new "elasto-magnetic" material takes advantage of a physical property known as a phase shift to greatly amplify the amount of energy the material can release or absorb.

A phase shift occurs when a material moves from one state to another: think of water turning into steam or liquid concrete hardening into a sidewalk. Whenever a material shifts its phase, energy is either released or absorbed. And phase shifts aren't just limited to changes between liquid, solid and gaseous states -- a shift can occur from one solid phase to another. A phase shift that releases energy can be harnessed as a power source, but getting enough energy has always been the difficult part. "To amplify energy release or absorption, you have to engineer a new structure at the molecular or even atomic level," says Crosby. However, this is challenging to do and even more difficult to do in a predictable way. But by using metamaterials, Crosby says that "we have overcome these challenges, and have not only made new materials, but also developed the design algorithms that allow these materials to be programmed with specific responses, making them predictable."

In a tech world still hindered by component shortages, choices have to be made. And in the world of laptops, it seems that choice is Windows-based devices over those running Chrome OS. From a report: IDC on Monday released early data from its latest Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. It pointed to a sharp 63.6 percent decline in Chromebook shipments, which the IDC defines as "shipments to distribution channels or end users, in Q4 2021 (4.8 million shipments) compared to Q4 2020 with (13.1 million shipments)." In addition to market saturation, supply issues also hurt Chromebook shipments, as the industry still struggles with a deficit of PC components, from CPUs to integrated circuits for Wi-Fi modules and power management. "Supply has also been unusually tight for Chromebooks as component shortages have led vendors to prioritize Windows machines due to their higher price tags, further suppressing Chromebook shipments on a global scale," Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC's Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers, said in a statement accompanying Monday's announcement.

Backblaze, a cloud storage service that's been running hundreds of thousands of storage drives to keep an eye on reliability, has issued its latest report. ZDNet summarizes the major findings: Over 2021, Backblaze added 40,460 hard drives to its pool of drives, making a total of 206,928 drives in total. Of thee, 3,760 are boot drives and 203,168 are data drives. There's a lot of information in the report to look at, but there are two standout parts from the report:

- The oldest drive is the most reliable: 6TB Seagate drives (model: ST6000DX000) have an average age of 80.4 months (almost seven years) yet incredibly these also have the lowest annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.11 percent.
- Newer drives are also doing really well: 16TB WDC drives (model: WUH721816ALE6L0) and 16TB Toshiba drives (model: MG08ACA16TE) were both added in 2021, and have an AFR of 0.14 and 0.91 percent, respectively.

Backblaze had also been experiencing problems with the 14TB Seagate drives (model: ST14000NM0138) in its Dell storage servers. It seems that following a firmware update the reliability of these drives has improved dramatically. Further reading: Seagate HDDs Top and Bottom Backblaze's 2021 Failure Rates Data (Tom's Hardware)

According to Chinese news outlet Sina, BOE has made breakthroughs in monitor technology and has built the world's first 500 Hz gaming monitor. Tom's Hardware reports: The monitor features a 27-inch, Full HD panel equipped with a high-mobility oxide backplane which is how BOE achieved the blisteringly high refresh rate, with a response time of just 1ms. BOE has ample experience with oxide semiconductor display technology. For example, the company's 500 Hz monitor is significantly faster than the fastest gaming monitors on the market today, from the likes of Asus, Alienware, and Acer, which "only" top out at 360 Hz. Other attributes include accurate 8-bit output and support for an 8-lane eDP signal. Remember that BOE's monitor is a prototype designed for demonstration purposes only. BOE has not stated if it will be making a 500 Hz gaming panel for the mass market anytime soon, so we could be waiting a long until an official monitor arrives in the hands of gamers.

A Charlotte, North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud after stealing and reselling merchandise from an Amazon warehouse, the Department of Justice said in a news release. The Verge reports: Between June 2020 and September 2021, Douglas Wright, Jr., an operations manager at Amazon's Charlotte warehouse, allegedly stole products with a total value of more than $273,000, using his access to get computer parts like internal hard drives and processors, according to the DOJ. Wright said in court on Friday that he shipped the products to his home, then sold them to a computer wholesale company in California. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. A sentencing date has not been set.

Ohio promised Intel roughly $2 billion in tax breaks and incentives to attract its $20 billion chip-making factory to the state, according to the Associated Press. The state's development director tells them it may be the biggest economic development deal in history.

Intel's hoping it creates a powerful new technology hub in the Midwest, while also eventually addressing an ongoing chip shortage, according to the article. Unfortunately, the factory's production isn't expected to come online until 2025, though "The complex could grow much larger and more quickly, Intel executives said, if Congress approves a $52 billion bill that would invest in the chip sector and help ensure more production in the U.S." Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger said the total Ohio investment could top $100 billion over the decade, with six additional factories, making it one of the world's biggest chipmaking sites....

Ohio's offer includes $600 million to help Intel offset the cost of building the factories, which is more expensive than it would be in Asia, said Lydia Mihalik, the state's development director. The state also will pay nearly $700 million for roadwork and water infrastructure upgrades, including a system that will allow the plant to reuse wastewater. The state Legislature this summer approved a 30-year tax break that will allow Intel to save $650 million.

The state's share will be money well spent because the Intel facility will not only create jobs, but also make Ohio more attractive to industries such as auto, aviation and defense that rely on chips, Mihalik said. "These investments will not only ensure that this project is successful here, but will also be supporting the region by increasing local infrastructure to support future growth," Mihalik said.
The article also cites the Semiconductor Industry Association's estimate that America's share of the world's chip manufacturing has declined from 37% in 1990 to 12% today.

"Intel will have to defend itself against claims that the semiconductor goliath knew its microprocessors were defective and failed to tell customers," reports the Register: On Wednesday, Judge Michael Simon, of the US District Court of Oregon, partially denied the tech giant's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit arising from the 2018 public disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre, the family of data-leaking chip microarchitecture design blunders....

To defend against Meltdown and Spectre, Intel and other affected vendors have had to add software and hardware mitigations that for some workloads make patched processors mildly to significantly slower. The disclosure of related flaws has continued since that time, as researchers develop variations on the initial attacks and find other parts of chips that similarly expose privileged data. It is a problem that still is not entirely solved...

[L]awsuits have been consolidated into a multi-district proceeding known as "Intel Corp. CPU Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation" (3:18-md-02828-SI). And since 2018, Intel has been trying to get them to go away. Twice before the judge had dismissed the plaintiffs' complaint while allowing the plaintiffs to amend and refile their allegations. This third time, the judge only partially granted Intel's motion to toss the case. Judge Simon dismissed claims based on purchases up through August 2017 because Intel was unaware of the microarchitecture vulnerabilities up to that point. But he allowed seven claims, from September 2017 onward, to proceed, finding the plaintiffs' contention that Intel delayed disclosure of the flaws to maximize holiday season sales plausible enough to allow the case to move forward.

"Based on plaintiffs' allegations, it is not clear that Intel had a countervailing business interest other than profit for delaying disclosure for as long as it did (through the holiday season), for downplaying the negative effects of the mitigation, for suppressing the effects of the mitigation, and for continuing to embargo further security exploits that affect only Intel processors," the judge wrote in his order. [PDF]

The Toronto Star just published a searing excerpt from the book Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower — written by a member of Canada's Parliament: It argues in part that "The social conflict that existed in the early days of Cobalt has been magnified a thousandfold in jurisdictions where the rule of law is compromised, and incursions into Indigenous territories heighten conflict." The world is searching for cobalt, the miracle ingredient of the digital age. The metal's capacity to store energy and stabilize conductors has made possible the proliferation of rechargeable batteries, smartphones and laptops. More crucially, in the face of catastrophic climate change, cobalt offers the hope of a clean-energy future. But cobalt has a much darker side. The relentless drive to feed the cobalt needs of Silicon Valley has led to appalling levels of degradation, child abuse and environmental damage in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the world's number one cobalt producer. The situation is so dire that human rights campaigners have denounced cobalt as the blood mineral of the 21st century.

In the 21st century, Canada's relationship to its resource extraction sector is coming under increasing scrutiny as we contemplate a world of melting ice and burning forests. So what can the story of Cobalt teach us in an age of pandemic, impending climate catastrophe, racial division and class strife? It may be that the shape-shifting metal will prove to be the miracle ingredient that leads us to a more sustainable way of life. Or it may be that we need to find a less rapacious balance between environment, social justice, human rights and the world's depleting resources.
The article points out that big tech companies "would love to cut their ties with the abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but cobalt is an extremely elusive metal, and the struggle to secure cobalt supplies is taking place within the context of a much broader geopolitical struggle with China."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Goatbot for sharingi the article.

CBS News reports that foreign cyberattackers aren't the only potential threat to America's electrical power grid: Domestic violent extremists have been planning to try to disrupt the U.S. power grid and will probably keep doing so, according to a Department of Homeland Security intelligence bulletin shared with law enforcement agencies and utility operators Monday and obtained by CBS News. "Domestic violent extremists have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020, identifying the electric grid as a particularly attractive target given its interdependency with other infrastructure sectors," the bulletin reads. It warns that extremists "adhering to a range of ideologies will likely continue to plot and encourage physical attacks against electrical infrastructure."

Still, the bulletin notes that, "Absent significant technical knowledge or insider assistance, small scale attacks are unlikely to cause widespread, multi-state power loss but may result in physical damage that poses risks to operations or personnel."

"Former heads of nuclear regulatory bodies across Europe and the US put out a statement this week voicing their opposition to nuclear energy as a climate solution," reports The Verge's Justine Calma. The publication spoke with Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to learn more about why some nuclear experts oppose the energy source as a climate fix. Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc shares an excerpt of the interview: Former NRC Chair Gregory Jaczko in an interview with the Verge notes: "I think there's been a lot of misinformation about the role that nuclear power can play in any climate strategy. A lot of attention has been put on nuclear as somehow the technology that's going to solve a lot of problems when it comes to dealing with climate change. I just think that's not true. And it's taking the debate and discussion away from the areas that can have a role and that do need focus and attention." He added: "I think it's money that's not well spent. Nuclear has shown time and time again that it cannot deliver on promises about deployment and costs. And that's really the most important factor when it comes to climate." Jaczko goes on to note how many of the nuclear plants when he was chairman were supposed to come online but have experienced delays and exceptional cost overruns. Two of the four new design reactors that were licensed when he was chairman, which were supposed to be starting production in 2016 and 2017, were canceled, "and that involved federal indictments for fraud among the heads of the company running that reactor development." The other two, he says, "continue to be pushed back and now are scheduled to start in 2022 or 2023" with a price tag that's over $30 billion.

If you're using either Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive to sync files on a Mac, you'll want to pay attention to the release notes for today's macOS 12.3 beta: the update is deprecating a kernel extension used by both apps to download files on demand. Ars Technica reports: The extension means that files are available when you need them but don't take up space on your disk when you don't. Apple says that "both service providers have replacements for this functionality currently in beta." Both Microsoft and Dropbox started alerting users to this change before the macOS beta even dropped. Dropbox's page is relatively sparse. The page notifies users that Dropbox's online-only file functionality will break in macOS 12.3 and that a beta version of the Dropbox client with a fix will be released in March.

Microsoft's documentation for OneDrive's Files On-Demand feature is more detailed. It explains that Microsoft will be using Apple's File Provider extensions for future OneDrive versions, that the new Files On-Demand feature will be on by default, and that Files On-Demand will be supported in macOS 12.1 and later.

In addition to integrating better with the Finder (also explained by Microsoft here), using modern Apple extensions should reduce the number of obnoxious permission requests each app generates. The extensions should also reduce the likelihood that a buggy or compromised kernel extension can expose your data or damage your system. But the move will also make those apps a bit less flexible -- Microsoft says that the new version of Files On-Demand can't be disabled. That might be confusing if you expect to have a full copy of your data saved to your disk even when you're offline.

MattSparkes shares a report from New Scientist: Quantum computers would need to become around one million times larger than they are today in order to break the SHA-256 algorithm that secures bitcoin, which would put the cryptocurrency at risk from hackers. Breaking this impenetrable code is essentially impossible for ordinary computers, but quantum computers, which can exploit the properties of quantum physics to speed up some calculations, could theoretically crack it open.

[Mark Webber at the University of Sussex, UK, and his colleagues] calculated that breaking bitcoin's encryption in this 10 minute window would require a quantum computer with 1.9 billion qubits, while cracking it in an hour would require a machine with 317 million qubits. Even allowing for a whole day, this figure only drops to 13 million qubits. This is reassuring news for bitcoin owners because current machines have only a tiny fraction of this -- IBM's record-breaking superconducting quantum computer has only 127 qubits, so devices would need to become a million times larger to threaten the cryptocurrency, something Webber says is unlikely to happen for a decade. The study has been published in the journal AVS Quantum Science.

Manufacturers and other buyers of computer chips had less than five days' supply of some chips on hand late last year, leaving them vulnerable to any disruptions in deliveries, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday as it pushed Congress to endorse federal aid for chip makers. The Washington Post reports: Manufacturers' median chip inventory levels have plummeted from about 40 days' supply in 2019 to less than five days, according to a survey of 150 companies worldwide that the Commerce Department conducted in September. "This means a disruption overseas, which might shut down a semiconductor plant for 2-3 weeks, has the potential to disable a manufacturing facility and furlough workers in the United States if that facility only has 3-5 days of inventory," the Commerce Department concluded in a six-page summary of its findings.

The lack of chip inventory leaves auto manufacturers and other chip users with "no room for error," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Tuesday as she presented the findings. "A covid outbreak, a storm, a natural disaster, political instability, problem with equipment -- really anything that disrupts a [chip-making] facility anywhere in the world, we will feel the ramifications here in the United States of America," she said. "A covid outbreak in Malaysia has the potential to shut down a manufacturing facility in America."

"The reality is Congress must act," Raimondo added, urging lawmakers to pass a proposal for $52 billion in federal subsidies to incentivize construction of chip factories. "Every day we wait, we fall further behind." The Senate passed the measure last year. The legislation has been tied up for months in the House, though House Democrats are expected to introduce their version of the legislation as soon as this week. Industry executives say federal funding is likely to create more long-term supply of chips but not to alleviate the short-term shortages because chip factories take years to build.

MojoKid writes: Intel lifted its performance embargo today on its new line of Alder Lake 12th Gen Core mobile processors for laptops. Reviews are hitting the web specifically with Intel's higher-end Alder Lake-H processor SKU. Alder Lake is intended to be a single, scalable CPU architecture, designed to address PC client platforms from ultra-mobile solutions down to 9 watts, up to high-performance 125 Watt+ desktop solutions. Alder Lake-H, the foundation of the Core i9-12900HK 14-core/20-thread chip in this review at HotHardware has a 45W power envelope, but it will boost to much higher levels when power and thermal headroom is available. Coupled with NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti mobile GPU, the machine put up some of the best gaming and content creation benchmark numbers ever recorded on a laptop.

Alder Lake-H CPU derivatives will scale back to 8-core chips with a mix of Performance cores and Efficiency cores consistent with Intel's new hybrid architecture. Additional benchmarks and performance recorded on the new Alienware x17 R2 with an identical hardware config were equally as impressive. Intel 12th Gen-powered laptops are starting to become available in market now, with lower power Alder Lake-U SKUs for thin and light machines arriving later this year.

Wired reports on 22-year-old Sam Zeloof, who builds semiconductors in his family's New Jersey garage, "about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947." With a collection of salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors. He had sliced up wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs using ultraviolet light, and dunked them in acid by hand, documenting the process on YouTube and his blog. "Maybe it's overconfidence, but I have a mentality that another human figured it out, so I can too, even if maybe it takes me longer," he says... His chips lag Intel's by technological eons, but Zeloof argues only half-jokingly that he's making faster progress than the semiconductor industry did in its early days. His second chip has 200 times as many transistors as his first, a growth rate outpacing Moore's law, the rule of thumb coined by an Intel cofounder that says the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years.

Zeloof now hopes to match the scale of Intel's breakthrough 4004 chip from 1971, the first commercial microprocessor, which had 2,300 transistors and was used in calculators and other business machines. In December, he started work on an interim circuit design that can perform simple addition....

Garage-built chips aren't about to power your PlayStation, but Zeloof says his unusual hobby has convinced him that society would benefit from chipmaking being more accessible to inventors without multimillion-dollar budgets. "That really high barrier to entry will make you super risk-averse, and that's bad for innovation," Zeloof says.

nickwinlund77 shares a report from SciTechDaily: UNSW Sydney-led research paves the way for large silicon-based quantum processors for real-world manufacturing and application. Australian researchers have proven that near error-free quantum computing is possible, paving the way to build silicon-based quantum devices compatible with current semiconductor manufacturing technology. [...] [The researcher's] paper is one of three published today in Nature that independently confirm that robust, reliable quantum computing in silicon is now a reality. This breakthrough is featured on the front cover of the journal.

[Professor Andrea Morello of UNSW, who led the work] et al achieved 1-qubit operation fidelities up to 99.95 percent, and 2-qubit fidelity of 99.37 percent with a three-qubit system comprising an electron and two phosphorous atoms, introduced in silicon via ion implantation. A Delft team in the Netherlands led by Lieven Vandersypen achieved 99.87 percent 1-qubit and 99.65 percent 2-qubit fidelities using electron spins in quantum dots formed in a stack of silicon and silicon-germanium alloy (Si/SiGe). A RIKEN team in Japan led by Seigo Tarucha similarly achieved 99.84 percent 1-qubit and 99.51 percent 2-qubit fidelities in a two-electron system using Si/SiGe quantum dots.

The UNSW and Delft teams certified the performance of their quantum processors using a sophisticated method called gate set tomography, developed at Sandia National Laboratories in the U.S. and made openly available to the research community. Morello had previously demonstrated that he could preserve quantum information in silicon for 35 seconds, due to the extreme isolation of nuclear spins from their environment. But the trade-off was that isolating the qubits made it seemingly impossible for them to interact with each other, as necessary to perform actual computations. Today's paper describes how his team overcame this problem by using an electron encompassing two nuclei of phosphorus atoms. The three papers from the UNSW team, Delft team and RIKEN group in Tokyo can be found at their respective links.

AMD's GPU technology is returning to mobile handsets with Samsung's Exynos 2200 system-on-chip, which was announced on Tuesday. The Register reports: The Exynos 2200 processor, fabricated using a 4nm process, has Armv9 CPU cores and the oddly named Xclipse GPU, which is an adaptation of AMD's RDNA 2 mainstream GPU architecture. AMD was in the handheld GPU market until 2009, when it sold the Imageon GPU and handheld business for $65m to Qualcomm, which turned the tech into the Adreno GPU for its Snapdragon family. AMD's Imageon processors were used in devices from Motorola, Panasonic, Palm and others making Windows Mobile handsets. AMD's now returning to a more competitive mobile graphics market with Apple, Arm and Imagination also possessing homegrown smartphone GPUs.

Samsung and AMD announced the companies were working together on graphics in June last year. With Exynos 2200, Samsung has moved on from Arm's Mali GPU family, which was in the predecessor Exynos 2100 used in the current flagship Galaxy smartphones. Samsung says the power-optimized GPU has hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which simulates lighting effects and other features to make gaming a better experience. [...] The Exynos 2200 has an image signal processor that can apparently handle 200-megapixel pictures and record 8K video. Other features include HDR10+ support, and 4K video decoding at up to 240fps or 8K decoding at up to 60fps. It supports display refresh rates of up to 144Hz.

The eight-core CPU cluster features a balance of high-performing and power-efficient cores. It has one Arm Cortex-X2 flagship core, three Cortex-A710 big cores and four Cortex-A510s, which is in the same ballpark as Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Mediatek's Dimensity 9000, which are the only other chips using Arm's Armv9 cores and are made using a 4nm process. An integrated 5G modem supports both sub-6GHz and millimeter wave bands, and a feature to mix LTE and 5G signals speeds up data transfers to 10Gbps. The chip also has a security processor and an AI engine that is said to be two times faster than its predecessor in the Exynos 2100.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: For the first time, a team of scientists has now demonstrated the quantum mechanical principle of superabsorption that underpins quantum batteries in a proof-of-concept device. "Superabsorption is a quantum collective effect where transitions between the states of the molecules interfere constructively," James Quach, corresponding author of the study, told New Atlas. "Constructive interference occurs in all kinds of waves (light, sound, waves on water), and occurs when different waves add up to give a larger effect than either wave on its own. Crucially this allows the combined molecules to absorb light more efficiently than if each molecule were acting individually." In a quantum battery, this phenomenon would have a very clear benefit. The more energy-storing molecules you have, the more efficiently they'll be able to absorb that energy -- in other words, the bigger you make the battery, the faster it will charge. At least, that's how it should work in theory. Superabsorption had yet to be demonstrated on a scale large enough to build quantum batteries, but the new study has now managed just that.

To build their test device, the researchers placed an active layer of light-absorbing molecules -- a dye known as Lumogen-F Orange -- in a microcavity between two mirrors. "The mirrors in this microcavity were made using a standard method to make high quality mirrors," explained Quach. "This is to use alternating layers of dielectric materials -- silicon dioxide and niobium pentoxide -- to create what is known as a 'distributed Bragg reflector.' This produces mirrors which reflect much more of the light than a typical metal/glass mirror. This is important as we want light to stay inside the cavity as long as possible." The team then used ultrafast transient-absorption spectroscopy to measure how the dye molecules were storing the energy and how fast the whole device was charging. And sure enough, as the size of the microcavity and the number of molecules increased, the charging time decreased, demonstrating superabsorption at work. "The idea here is a proof-of-principle that enhanced absorption of light is possible in such a device," Quach told New Atlas. "The key challenge though is to bridge the gap between the proof-of-principle here for a small device, and exploiting the same ideas in larger usable devices. The next steps are to explore how this can be combined with other ways of storing and transferring energy, to provide a device that could be practically useful."

The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

1.77 million people live in South Australia, speading across 984,321 square kilometres (or 380,048 square miles), according to Wikipedia. Today the Sydney Morning Herald announced that South Australia "sourced an average of just over 100 per cent of the electricity it needed from renewable power for 6 and a half days leading up to December 29 last year."

They're calling it "a record for the state and perhaps for comparable energy grids around the world." The state's previous record was just over three days, says Geoff Eldridge, an energy analyst who runs the website NEMlog.com.au, which tracks the operations of the National Energy Market covering Australia's east-coast states and South Australia.

His analysis shows that for the six days identified, the state produced on average 101 per cent of the energy it needed from wind, rooftop solar and solar farms, with just a fraction of the energy the state used being drawn from gas, in order to keep the grid stable. At times during the period, slightly less renewable energy was available and at other times renewable capacity was higher than needed, he says.

Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre, said he believed that aside from some small island grids such as those in Hawaii and Tasmania, it was likely that South Australia's six-day run on renewables was a record for a grid supporting an advanced economy.

During the unprecedented 156-hour renewable run, the share of wind in total energy supplied averaged 64.4 per cent, while rooftop solar averaged 29.5 per cent and utility-scale solar averaged 6.2 per cent, clean energy website RenewEconomy.com.au reported, using Mr Eldridge's data.
(Thanks to Slashdot reader betsuin for sharing the article)