Bacteria in mud samples have been transformed into microbial fuel cells generating enough electricity to power a toy car — just part of a larger phenomenon that one chemical engineer had originally dismissed as "complete nonsense."

Science magazine remembers how Lars Peter Nielsen's 2009 experiment at Denmark's Aarhus University changed the way the world viewed bacteria: At the start of the experiment, the muck was saturated with hydrogen sulfide — the source of the sediment's stink and color. But 30 days later, one band of mud had become paler, suggesting some hydrogen sulphide had gone missing. Eventually, the microsensors indicated that all of the compound had disappeared....

The first explanation, he says, was that the sensors were wrong. But the cause turned out to be far stranger: bacteria that join cells end to end to build electrical cables able to carry current up to 5 centimeters through mud. The adaptation, never seen before in a microbe, allows these so-called cable bacteria to overcome a major challenge facing many organisms that live in mud: a lack of oxygen. Its absence would normally keep bacteria from metabolizing compounds, such as hydrogen sulfide, as food. But the cables, by linking the microbes to sediments richer in oxygen, allow them to carry out the reaction long distance.
Slashdot reader sciencehabit calls it one of the discoveries "forcing researchers to rewrite textbooks; rethink the role that mud bacteria play in recycling key elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous; and reconsider how they influence aquatic ecosystems and climate change. Scientists are also pursuing practical applications, exploring the potential of cable and nanowire bacteria to battle pollution and power electronic devices."

"I hope AVX512 dies a painful death," Linus Torvalds said last month, "and that Intel starts fixing real problems instead of trying to create magic instructions to then create benchmarks that they can look good on."

Friday PC World published some reactions from Intel: Torvalds wasn't the only person to kick AVX-512 in the shins either. Former Intel engineer Francois Piednoel also said the special instruction simply didn't belong in laptops, as the power and die space area trade-offs just aren't worth it.
But Intel Chief Architect Raja Koduri says their community loves it because they're seeing a huge performance boost: "AVX-512 is a great feature. Our HPC community, AI community, love it," Koduri said, responding to a question from PCWorld about the AVX-512 kerfuffle during Intel's Architecture Day on August 11. "Our customers on the data center side really, really, really love it." Koduri said Intel has been able to help customers achieve a 285X increase in performance in "our good old CPU socket" just by taking advantage of the extension...

Koduri acknowledged some validity to Torvald's heat, too. "Linus' criticism from one angle that 'hey, are there client applications that leverage this vector bit yet?' may be valid," he said. Koduri explained further that Intel has to maintain a hardware software contract all the way from servers to laptops, because that's been the magic of the ecosystem. "(That's) the great thing about the x86 ecosystem, you could write a piece of software for your notebook and it could also run on the cloud," Kodori said. "That's been the power of the x86 ecosystem..."

And no, hate on AVX-512 and special instructions all you want, Intel isn't going to change direction. Koduri said it will continue to lean on AVX-512 as well as other instructions. "We understand Linus' concerns, we understand some of the issues with first generation AVX-512 that had impact on the frequencies etc, etc," he said "and we are making it much much better with every generation."
They also summarize some performance testing by blogger Travis Downs, saying it found AVX-512 "doesn't appear to enforce much of a penalty at all on a laptops. Downs' testing found the clock speed only dropped 100MHz when using one active core under AVX-512.

"At least, it means we need to adjust our mental model of the frequency related cost of AVX-512 instructions," Downs concluded. "Rather than 'generally causing significant downclocking,' on this Ice Lake chip we can say that AVX-512 causes insignificant or zero licence-based downclocking and I expect this to be true on other Ice Lake client chips as well."

The site of a Scottish nuclear power facility should be available for other uses in 313 years' time, according to a new report. The BBC reports: Dounreay, near Thurso, was the UK site for the development of fast reactor research from 1955 to 1994. The facility on the north Caithness coast is in the process of being closed down, demolished and cleaned up. However, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority said it would be 2333 before the 148-acre site is safe for reuse. The date forms part of the authority's newly-published draft strategy.

They said "credible options" for the site in future will be developed over the next two years. Buildings to be demolished include the distinctive dome-shaped Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR). Important stages in the removal of radioactive material from the Prototype Fast Reactor (PFR) are expected to be competed over the next three years. A target date has also been set for the clean-up of a highly contaminated area called the Shaft. Waste is to be removed from the Shaft by 2029, according to the NDA report.

Electric trucks have the potential to displace enough oil to make a "significant dent" in transportation sector CO2 emissions, per a Rhodium Group analysis. Axios reports: There's lots of buzz -- and a lot of money -- around electric trucks these days. It estimates the long-term effects of a recent 15-state nonbinding pact (PDF) to bolster the use of zero-emissions heavy trucks and other medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. California, one of the states, also recently approved mandatory regulations on greatly increasing zero-emissions truck sales between 2024 and 2045. The study also explores the impact if these state efforts were transformed into a nationwide mandate, which would mean more than half the U.S. medium- and heavy-duty fleet would be electric by 2045.

"If the [15-state] MOU were expanded nationally, the impact would increase six-fold. By 2035, cumulative oil demand would fall by 806 to 843 million barrels, expanding to 4.6 to 4.9 billion barrels by 2045," Rhodium finds. "The long-term effect of expanding California's approach nationally would reduce oil consumption in 2045 by 16 to 17%," the Aug. 13 analysis notes.

Synology today added a new NAS to its lineup: "DiskStation DS1520+," with five bays. It also has two NVMe PCIe SSD slots for cache. From a report: "Featuring the Intel Celeron Processor J4125, DS1520+ provides a performance boost that sees a 126 percent increase in website responsiveness and a 19.8 percent increase in compute-tasks. The DS1520+ provides dual M.2 2280 NVMe SSD cache slots, along with four 1GbE network ports. DS1520+ comes equipped with five bays that support HDDs and SSDs of up to 16TB. If the need for storage grows, users can expand their DS1520+ using Synology expansion units (purchased separately), giving users a maximum raw capacity of 240TB," says Synology. It's priced at $700, but BetaNews, which has listed the full specs and other details, says Amazon is already selling it at $650.

An anonymous reader shares a report from IEEE Spectrum, written by Mark Crittenden, head of battery development and integration at Oxis Energy: Electric aircraft are all the rage, with prototypes in development in every size from delivery drones to passenger aircraft. But the technology has yet to take off, and for one reason: lack of a suitable battery. For a large passenger aircraft to take off, cruise, and land hundreds of kilometers away would take batteries that weigh thousands of kilograms -- far too heavy for the plane to be able to get into the air in the first place. Even for relatively small aircraft, such as two-seat trainers, the sheer weight of batteries limits the plane's payload, curtails its range, and thus constrains where the aircraft can fly. Reducing battery weight would be an advantage not only for aviation, but for other electric vehicles, such as cars, trucks, buses, and boats, all of whose performance is also directly tied to the energy-to-weight ratio of their batteries. For such applications, today's battery of choice is lithium ion. It reached maturity years ago, with each new incremental improvement smaller than the last. We need a new chemistry.

Since 2004 my company, Oxis Energy, in Oxfordshire, England, has been working on one of the leading contenders -- lithium sulfur. Our battery technology is extremely lightweight: Our most recent models are achieving more than twice the energy density typical of lithium-ion batteries. Lithium sulfur is also capable of providing the required levels of power and durability needed for aviation, and, most important, it is safe enough. After all, a plane can't handle a sudden fire or some other calamity by simply pulling to the side of the road. The new technology has been a long time coming, but the wait is now over. The first set of flight trials have already been completed.
[...]
Three factors will determine whether lithium-sulfur batteries ultimately succeed or fail. First is the successful integration of the batteries into multiple aircraft types, to prove the principle. Second is the continued refinement of the cell chemistry. Third is the continued reduction in the unit cost. A plus here is that sulfur is about as cheap as materials get, so there's reason to hope that with volume manufacturing, the unit cost will fall below that of the lithium-ion design, as would be required for commercial success. Oxis has already produced tens of thousands of cells, and it is currently scaling up two new projects. Right now, it is establishing a manufacturing plant for the production of both the electrolyte and the cathode active material in Port Talbot, Wales. Later, the actual mass production of lithium-sulfur cells will begin on a site that belongs to Mercedes-Benz Brazil, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. This state-of-the-art plant should be commissioned and operating by 2023. If the economies of scale prove out, and if the demand for electric aircraft rises as we expect, then lithium-sulfur batteries could begin to supplant lithium-ion batteries in this field. And what works in the air ought to work on the ground, as well.

Bodhammer shares a report from the University of Michigan: In a step closer to skyscrapers that serve as power sources, a team led by University of Michigan researchers has set a new efficiency record for color-neutral, transparent solar cells. The team achieved 8.1% efficiency and 43.3% transparency with an organic, or carbon-based, design rather than conventional silicon. While the cells have a slight green tint, they are much more like the gray of sunglasses and automobile windows.

The new material is a combination of organic molecules engineered to be transparent in the visible and absorbing in the near infrared, an invisible part of the spectrum that accounts for much of the energy in sunlight. In addition, the researchers developed optical coatings to boost both power generated from infrared light and transparency in the visible range -- two qualities that are usually in competition with one another. The color-neutral version of the device was made with an indium tin oxide electrode. A silver electrode improved the efficiency to 10.8%, with 45.8% transparency. However, that version's slightly greenish tint may not be acceptable in some window applications.

Both versions can be manufactured at large scale, using materials that are less toxic than other transparent solar cells. The transparent organic solar cells can also be customized for local latitudes, taking advantage of the fact that they are most efficient when the sun's rays are hitting them at a perpendicular angle. They can be placed in between the panes of double-glazed windows. [The team is] working on several improvements to the technology, with the next goal being to reach a light utilization efficiency of 7% and extending the cell lifetime to about 10 years. They are also investigating the economics of installing transparent solar cell windows into new and existing buildings. The research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Energy experts are bewildered as to why the manager of California's electric grid called on utilities to cut power to hundreds of thousands of customers over the weekend. "They said that the utilities had plenty of power available and that the blackouts weren't necessary," writes Ivan Penn via The New York Times. From the report: "They set it up like this is a historic event," said Bill Powers, a San Diego engineer who provides expert testimony on utility matters before the state's regulators. "This should not have triggered blackouts." The California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit entity that controls the flow of electricity for 80 percent of California, said it acted after three power plants shut down and wind power production dropped. It also cited a lack of access to electricity from out-of-state sources.

The energy experts noted that the peak electricity use over the weekend fell below peaks in other years, when utilities were able to handle the demand. They also said the operating reserves of power available to the utilities were higher than the 3 percent level where California ISO has traditionally ordered a reduction in electricity use. "It's just misleading to say that it was because it was a hot day," said [David Marcus, an energy consultant and former adviser at the California Energy Commission]. "I think they were being overly cautious." Saturday's peak demand, according to Mr. Marcus, reached 44,947 megawatts, much lower than the 46,797 he saw on Friday. But both of those amounts fell below the peak year for electricity use, 2006, when demand reached 50,270 megawatts, followed by 2017 with 50,116, according to data from California ISO. [...] What happens in the days ahead will continue to test Californians and the electric grid as California ISO forecast electricity demand Monday at near all-time peak levels.

"During the Cold War, the CIA considered building a bird-sized drone designed to spy on the communist bloc," reports Popular Mechanics. "The drone would carry 'black box' spy packages into Russia and China, as well as take secret photographs — all while hiding in plain sight disguised as a bird..." The project envisioned a fleet of 12 bird-shaped drones, powered by nuclear energy, that could stay aloft for up to a month. The drone, which was supposed to act as a robotic spy plane and courier for secret payloads, was never completed... "Aquiline" was a small drone, meant to be kept as close to bird-like size as possible — five feet long, 7.5 feet wide, and a takeoff weight of 83 pounds — under the constraints of the technology of the time. A silent 3.5-horsepower, four-cycle engine would give the drone a speed of 47 to 80 knots and an endurance of 50 hours and 1,200 miles. Aquiline's maximum altitude was estimated at 20,000 feet.

Nuclear power promised to give Aquiline even greater range. The CIA proposed to install a radioisotope propulsion system on the flying drone, one that would convert waste heat from decaying isotopes (like plutonium) into electricity. Such an engine, developed primarily for deep space probes, would boost the drone's endurance to an astonishing 30 days or 36,000 miles.

Aquiline was designed to carry both photographic and intelligence payloads. It could take overhead photographs of sensitive sites while flying much lower than the U-2 spy plane, and would scoop up electronic signals of radios, radar, and other devices for later analysis. Unlike manned planes, Aquiline could fly much closer to its targets, producing high resolution photographs and recording stronger electromagnetic signals. The drone could also secretly drop off payloads of specially developed sensors near sites the CIA wanted to closely monitor...

Radars and human sentries at sensitive sites would mistake Aquiline for a bird and pay little attention to it.
The drone was to have been designed by McDonnell Douglas — and developed Area 51, according to the article.

And since data storage at the time was limited to cumbersome things like punch cards and tapes, the drone would instead beam all of its data to a nearby reconnaissance plane.

At the Black Hat security conference, researchers from the Taiwanese cybersecurity firm CyCraft revealed at least seven Taiwanese chip firms have been breached over the past two years, reports Wired: The series of deep intrusions — called Operation Skeleton Key due to the attackers' use of a "skeleton key injector" technique — appeared aimed at stealing as much intellectual property as possible, including source code, software development kits, and chip designs. And while CyCraft has previously given this group of hackers the name Chimera, the company's new findings include evidence that ties them to mainland China and loosely links them to the notorious Chinese state-sponsored hacker group Winnti, also sometimes known as Barium, or Axiom. "This is very much a state-based attack trying to manipulate Taiwan's standing and power," says Chad Duffy, one of the CyCraft researchers who worked on the company's long-running investigation...

The researchers found that, in at least some cases, the hackers appeared to gain initial access to victim networks by compromising virtual private networks, though it wasn't clear if they obtained credentials for that VPN access or if they directly exploited vulnerabilities in the VPN servers. The hackers then typically used a customized version of the penetration testing tool Cobalt Strike, disguising the malware they planted by giving it the same name as a Google Chrome update file. They also used a command-and-control server hosted on Google's or Microsoft's cloud services, making its communications harder to detect as anomalous....

Perhaps the most remarkable of those new clues came from essentially hacking the hackers. CyCraft researchers observed the Chimera group exfiltrating data from a victim's network and were able to intercept an authentication token from their communications to a command-and-control server. Using that same token, CyCraft's analysts were able browse the contents of the cloud server, which included what they describe as a "cheat sheet" for the hackers, outlining their standard operating procedure for typical intrusions. That document was notably written in simplified Chinese characters, used in mainland China but not Taiwan...
"It's possible that what they're seeing is just a small fragment of a larger picture," says the director of Kaspersky's Global Research & Analysis Team, who tells Wired the group has also attacked telecoms, tech firms, and a broad range of other Taiwanese companies.

But in the same article one of CyCraft's researchers argues the group could be looking for even more exploits. "If you have a really deep understanding of these chips at a schematic level, you can run all sorts of simulated attacks on them and find vulnerabilities before they even get released."

Intel on Thursday disclosed a new method for making transistors on semiconductors that its chief architect said could boost the performance Intel's next round of processors by as much as 20%. From a report: The Santa Clara, California-based company is one of the few remaining in the world that both designs and manufactures its own chips. But its manufacturing operations have become a concern among investors after Intel last month said that its next-generation chip-making process, called its 7-nanometer process node, would be delayed. Analysts believe the delays could cement the lead that rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co have gained in making smaller, more power efficient chips. Intel's shares have fallen nearly 20% since the delays were disclosed. On Thursday, Intel sought to buck the notion that the single-number names given to each generation of chip process node tell the entire story by disclosing improvements on its existing 10-nanonmeter process node. It announced a new way of making what it now calls "SuperFin" transistors, which, along with a new material being used to improve the capacitors on chips, is expected to boost the performance of Intel's forthcoming processors, despite their still being made on 10-nanometer manufacturing lines.

Bricks are about as basic as architectural materials can get, yet these simple building blocks have hidden powers that can be leveraged to provide electricity, according to a new study. From a report: Scientists modified a common red brick -- the same kind you'll find on sale for under a dollar at your local hardware store -- so that it could power a green LED light. This proof-of-concept for a "smart brick" reveals that brick technology, which dates back thousands of years, can be tweaked to have futuristic applications, including electrical conductivity and sensing capabilities. The results were published on Tuesday in Nature Communications. "We have created a new brick that can be incorporated into your house that has the functionality of storing electrical energy," said study co-author Julio D'Arcy, assistant professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, in a call. "We are thinking that sensing applications is a low-hanging fruit for these bricks," he added.

Dropbox is officially launching a handful of new consumer features out of beta today, along with some new tools for businesses. From a report: The cloud storage giant first introduced its password manager -- replete with a standalone mobile app for Android and iOS -- back in June. Similar to other password management apps on the market, Dropbox Passwords stores and encrypts users' online passwords and syncs them across all devices (desktop and mobile) so users don't have to remember multiple login credentials. Dropbox Passwords can also suggest strong, randomly generated, individual passwords for your online services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and Dropbox itself.

Dropbox Passwords is the result of last year's acquisition of Massachusetts-based Valt, which swiftly shuttered its own apps ahead of integration with Dropbox. Dropbox Passwords is available to everyone on a Dropbox Plus or Professional subscription from today. The San Francisco-based company is also launching its previously announced computer backup feature in general availability today. The tool, which is available for Dropbox Basic, Plus, and Professional users, automatically creates a cloud-based backup of any folder stored on a PC or Mac and is continuously synced.

Microsoft isn't providing a specific release date for its next-gen Xbox Series X console, but the company did reveal it will launch in the month of November. Sadly, Microsoft and 343 Industries also announced today that Halo Infinite is being delayed to 2021. The Verge reports: The lack of Halo Infinite does mean there's no big launch title for the Xbox Series X later this year. Microsoft is choosing to highlight Xbox Game Pass, alongside "more than 50 new games" that are launching this year with optimizations for Xbox Series X. More than 40 existing games will also be optimized for Xbox Series X, which can include anything from hardware-accelerated DirectX ray tracing, 120fps frame rates, faster loading times, and Quick Resume support. Existing backward compatible games across Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One will also run on the Xbox Series X when it launches in November. We're now waiting to hear exactly when the Xbox Series X will be available, its price, and when people can start preordering the next-gen console. In addition to Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft is also highlighting its Project xCloud gaming service.

"Project xCloud will enter a beta stage from August 11 as a new version of the Xbox Game Pass app will launch on Android devices," reports NME. "While the full service won't be available in the beta phase, users will have the ability to test a smaller selection of titles ahead of the launch next month. [A]round 30 games will be available in the beta stage, with the full 100+ titles added next month (September)."

With SoftBank's Masayoshi Son trying to sell ARM, a columnist for the Observer newspaper has a suggestion for the U.K. government (and specifically Brexit Tories), calling the Cambridge-based company "a kind of public-interest commercial company: licensing state-of-the art instruction sets that can be implemented in silicon architecture by everyone. It was in nobody's pocket." Its business, as its chief founder, Tudor Brown, acknowledges, relied on it never betraying its neutrality... A future owner could almost trash Arm in the pursuit of its own commercial ends. Nvidia, reported to be in advanced talks with Son, is just such a possible owner. Rooted in the games industry, it has found to its surprise that its processing units are much in demand as artificial intelligence applications mushroom. Son wanted to sell Arm to an industry coalition that might protect the company's independence and business model. None could be found, so, desperate for cash, given a string of failed and written-down investments (WeWork, Uber etc), he is now having to sup with a buyer that can only destroy Arm.

Nvidia's ambitions are scarcely hidden. Once it owns Arm it will withdraw its licensing agreements from its competitors, notably Intel and Huawei, and after July next year take the rump of Arm to Silicon Valley, just as Google has done with the British AI company DeepMind. Arm, and Britain's hopes to be a player in hi-tech, will be dead.

Ownership is fundamental and the lesson of the story is that unless Britain creates the legal, cultural and institutional framework allowing companies such as Arm (or DeepMind) to have anchor shareholders — or simply allowing founder shareholders to have powerful differential voting rights as in the U.S. and Canada — we are condemned to inferiority. But even now Britain could act. The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors — some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers — to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry... if Britain is to develop an industrial strategy, this is how it must act...

A successful capitalism is always about framing innovative private dynamism within a fit-for-purpose regulatory and ownership architecture designed by the state, a reality that neither major party has ever understood. The open question is whether Brexit Tories, forced by reality, might change. This kind of audacious deal could appeal to Johnson and Cummings, a statement of intent to match China in our commitment to a decisive presence in 21st-century hi-tech.

Brexit was meant to give Britain the freedom to make this kind of move.

"The Wall Street Journal said it had obtained a Qualcomm presentation lobbying the U.S. government to remove restrictions and let it sell Snapdragon processors to Huawei," reports Engadget: The ban won't prevent Huawei from obtaining necessary parts and could just drive "billions of dollars" of U.S. sales to foreign chip makers like MediaTek and Samsung, Qualcomm reportedly said — lifting the chip ban would theoretically help American companies stay competitive.

There could be a "rapid shift in 5G chipset market share" if Qualcomm is restricted while its foreign rivals aren't, Qualcomm said.

Slashdot reader Third Position quotes CleanTechnica: According to a press release from Argonne National Laboratory, researchers at the lab, working with partners at Northern Illinois University, have discovered a new electrocatalyst that converts carbon dioxide and water into ethanol with very high energy efficiency, high selectivity for the desired final product, and low cost. Ethanol is a particularly desirable commodity because it is an ingredient in nearly all U.S. gasoline and is widely used as an intermediate product in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics industries.

"The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide," says Di-Jia Liu, senior chemist in Argonne's chemical sciences and engineering division and also a scientist at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. "The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide," he says. The new electrochemical process converts carbon dioxide emitted from industrial processes, such as fossil fuel power plants or alcohol fermentation plants, into valuable commodities at reasonable cost... It breaks down carbon dioxide and water molecules and selectively reassembles them into ethanol using an external electrical field.
"What we are witnessing is a convergence of technologies that may result in ways to substantially lower the amount of carbon dioxide that gets added to the atmosphere by industry," writes CleanTechnica, " and at far lower cost than previously thought possible."

schwit1 writes: Researchers at NASA's Glenn Research Center have now demonstrated a method of inducing nuclear fusion without building a massive stellarator or tokamak. In fact, all they needed was a bit of metal, some hydrogen, and an electron accelerator.

The team believes that their method, called lattice confinement fusion, could be a potential new power source for deep space missions. They have published their results in two papers in Physical Review C...

"What we did was not cold fusion," says Lawrence Forsley, a senior lead experimental physicist for the project. Cold fusion, the idea that fusion can occur at relatively low energies in room-temperature materials, is viewed with skepticism by the vast majority of physicists. Forsley stresses this is hot fusion, but "We've come up with a new way of driving it."
The article contains a good description of the technical details, and end by summarizing the hopes of the project's analytical physicist and nuclear diagnostics lead. "This method of fusion offers a potentially reliable source for craft operating in places where solar panels may not be useable, for example.

"And of course, what works in space could be used on Earth."

The international R&D hub Imec has made a millimetre-wave motion detection radar integrated in a standard 28nm CMOS chip, reports Electronics Weekly, adding that it consumes just 62 mW,"making the sensor integrable into small, battery-powered devices..." The radar operates in the frequency band around 60 GHz, a license-free ISM band that can be used for new IoT applications for industrial and medical purposes... "Being extremely compact and energy efficient, the 60 GHz radar system can be integrated in smart health devices such as smartphones, health monitoring systems or wearables", says Barend van Liempd, program manager radar at imec.

"The radar enables such devices to sense their surroundings, which will shape the way in which we control and use these devices. For instance, a phone with integrated radar on your bedside table can monitor sleep quality by contactless tracking of breathing rate and heart rate variability. The radar is as well suited for classification of other physical activities, which will open a new range of smart applications in the context of personalized health, baby monitoring, sports, elderly care, patient monitoring, nurse efficiency or worker safety."

"Our prototype shows that radar technology is becoming ready for the next big step: the use in battery-powered devices. Now, we are looking for companies that want to exploit these ideas to enter the market by realizing new radar solutions", says Kathleen Philips, Director IoT at imec.
"It is thought to be useful for detecting finger and hand motion, heartbeat and a person's speed and position..." writes Joe2020, "but I'm sure Slashdot readers can think of a variety of other uses for it."

America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission honored a document request from a UFO group — which has inadvertently revealed a very real incident last fall at America's largest nuclear reactor in Arizona, reports Forbes: Documents gained under the Freedom of Information Act show how a number of small drones flew around a restricted area at Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant on two successive nights last September. Security forces watched, but were apparently helpless to act as the drones carried out their incursions before disappearing into the night. Details of the event gives some clues as to just what they were doing, but who sent them remains a mystery...

"Officer noticed several drones (5 or 6) flying over the site. The drones are circling the 3 unit site inside and outside the Protected Area. The drones have flashing red and white lights and are estimated to be 200 to 300 feet above the site. It was reported the drones had spotlights on while approaching the site that they turned off when they entered the Security Owner Controlled Area..."

The drones departed at 22:30, eighty minutes after they were first spotted. The security officers estimated that they were over two feet in diameter. This indicates that they were not simply consumer drones like the popular DJI Phantom, which have a flight endurance of about half an hour and is about a foot across, but something larger and more capable. The Lockheed Martin Indago, a military-grade quadcopter recently sold to the Swiss Army, has a flight endurance of about seventy minutes and is more than two feet across. At several thousand dollars apiece minimum, these are far less expendable than consumer drones costing a few hundred. All of which suggests this was not just a prank.

The next night events were repeated...
The article notes that two months later America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission "decided not to require drone defenses at nuclear plants, asserting that small drones could not damage a reactor or steal nuclear material. It is highly likely that such sites are still vulnerable to drone overflights."

The article also notes that this reactor supplies electricity to major American cities including Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Tucson.