According to Reuters, Apple is moving forward with self-driving car technology and is targeting 2024 to produce a passenger vehicle that could include its own breakthrough battery technology. From the report: The iPhone maker's automotive efforts, known as Project Titan, have proceeded unevenly since 2014 when it first started to design its own vehicle from scratch. At one point, Apple drew back the effort to focus on software and reassessed its goals. Doug Field, an Apple veteran who had worked at Tesla Inc, returned to oversee the project in 2018 and laid off 190 people from the team in 2019. Since then, Apple has progressed enough that it now aims to build a vehicle for consumers, two people familiar with the effort said, asking not to be named because Apple's plans are not public. Apple's goal of building a personal vehicle for the mass market contrasts with rivals such as Alphabet Inc's Waymo, which has built robo-taxis to carry passengers for a driverless ride-hailing service.

Central to Apple's strategy is a new battery design that could "radically" reduce the cost of batteries and increase the vehicle's range, according to a third person who has seen Apple's battery design. [...] As for the car's battery, Apple plans to use a unique "monocell" design that bulks up the individual cells in the battery and frees up space inside the battery pack by eliminating pouches and modules that hold battery materials, one of the people said. Apple's design means that more active material can be packed inside the battery, giving the car a potentially longer range. Apple is also examining a chemistry for the battery called LFP, or lithium iron phosphate, the person said, which is inherently less likely to overheat and is thus safer than other types of lithium-ion batteries. [...]

Two people with knowledge of Apple's plans warned pandemic-related delays could push the start of production into 2025 or beyond. Apple has decided to tap outside partners for elements of the system, including lidar sensors, which help self-driving cars get a three-dimensional view of the road, two people familiar with the company's plans said. Apple's car might feature multiple lidar sensors for scanning different distances, another person said. Some sensors could be derived from Apple's internally developed lidar units, that person said. Apple's iPhone 12 Pro and iPad Pro models released this year both feature lidar sensors.

The Verge reports: Firefox's latest update brings native support for Macs that run on Apple's Arm-based silicon, Mozilla announced on Tuesday. Mozilla claims that native Apple silicon support brings significant performance improvements: the browser apparently launches 2.5 times faster and web apps are twice as responsive than they were on the previous version of Firefox, which wasn't native to Apple's chips...

Firefox's support of Apple's Arm-based processors follows Chrome, which added support for Apple's new chips shortly after the M1-equipped MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini were released in November.
Firefox 84 will also be the very last release to support Adobe Flash, notes ZDNet, calling both developments "a reminder of the influence Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has had and continues to exert on software and hardware nine years after his death." Jobs wrote off Flash in 2010 as successful Adobe software but one that was a 'closed' product "created during the PC era — for PCs and mice" and not suitable for the then-brand-new iPad, nor any of its prior iPhones. Instead, Jobs said the future of the web was HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.

At the end of this year Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari also drop support for Flash.

Senior Apple execs recently reflected in an interview with Om Malik what the M1 would have meant to Jobs had been alive today. "Steve used to say that we make the whole widget," Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing told Malik.

"We've been making the whole widget for all our products, from the iPhone, to the iPads, to the watch. This was the final element to making the whole widget on the Mac."
ZDNet also notes that Firefox 84 offers WebRender, "Mozilla's faster GPU-based 2D rendering engine" for MacOS Big Sur, Windows devices with Intel Gen 6 GPUs, and Intel laptops running Windows 7 and 8. "Mozilla promises it will ship an accelerated rendering pipeline for Linux/GNOME/X11 users for the first time."

Firefox now also uses "more modern techniques for allocating shared memory on Linux," writes Mozilla, "improving performance and increasing compatibility with Docker."

And Firefox 85 will include a new network partitioning feature to make it harder for companies to track your web surfing.

Forbes reports: Nuclear advocates see a vast market for reactors in carbon capture and carbon-based products, not only for the next generation of reactors in development, but also for the aging dinosaurs they evolved from...

The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo, California, for example, is slated to shut down in 2024 and 2025. "If the waste heat from that plant was being combined with electricity production you could be removing 20 million tons per year of carbon from the atmosphere," said Kirsty Gogan, co-founder of Energy for Humanity, at an EarthX panel on Wednesday. "Right now what's happening is these big gigawatt-scale depreciating assets — they're making baseload, clean, emissions-free power, but we're just throwing away the heat, right? Those nuclear plants could be more useful, making a big contribution toward that responsibility we all have to go negative.

"We all try to be neutral, but it ain't good enough. We have to take responsibility for the carbon that's already in the atmosphere and go negative."
That's just one possibility. For example, the article also suggests nuclear energy could be used to generate sustainable aviation fuel (currently made mostly from biomass) from smokestack carbon.

Slashdot reader ogcricket notes the article is based on an hour-long EarthX panel that's now available on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The average cost of a lithium-ion battery pack fell to $137 per kWh in 2020, according to a new industry survey from BloombergNEF. That's an inflation-adjusted decline of 13 percent since 2019. The latest figures continue the astonishing progress in battery technology over the last decade, with pack prices declining 88 percent since 2010. Large, affordable batteries will be essential to weaning the global economy off fossil fuels. Lithium-ion batteries are the key enabling technology for electric vehicles. They're also needed to smooth out the intermittent power generated by windmills and solar panels.

But until recently, batteries were simply too expensive for these applications to make financial sense without mandates and subsidies. Now, that is becoming less and less true. BloombergNEF estimates that battery-pack prices will fall to $100 per kWh by 2024. Specifically, BloombergNEF projects that battery pack prices will fall to $58 per kWh in 2030 and to $44 per kWh in 2035. That's roughly the level necessary for BEVs to be price-competitive with conventional cars without subsidies. Given that electric vehicles are cheap to charge and will likely require less maintenance than a conventional car, they will be an increasingly compelling option over the next decade.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag.com: Mark Lantz, Manager of Advanced Tape Technologies at IBM Research, explains how researchers at IBM and Fujifilm brought together more than 15 years of work to set a new world record in tape storage. What they achieved is an areal density of 317Gbpsi (gigabits per square inch), which translates to a single tape capable of storing 580 terabytes of data. In order to achieve such a high areal density, the research team had to develop a brand new tape and created Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) in the process. Existing magnetic tapes rely on Barium Ferrite (BaFe), but SrFe offers the potential for higher density storage in the same amount of tape. Alongside that, the team also "developed a family of new servo-mechanical technologies including a new servo pattern that is pre-recorded in the servo tracks, a prototype head actuator and a set of servo controllers." The end result is a very high capacity tape that can be read while moving at a speed of 15km/h (9.3mph).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Broadband and TV providers will finally be required to stop charging "rental" fees for equipment that customers own themselves, thanks to a new US law that takes effect on Sunday. The bogus fees were outlawed by the Television Viewer Protection Act (TVPA), which was approved by Congress and signed by President Trump in December 2019. The law was originally scheduled to take effect on June 20, but Congress gave the Federal Communications Commission leeway to delay enforcement by six months if the FCC "finds that good cause exists for such an additional extension." The FCC in April granted the six-month delay to ISPs, claiming that providers needed more time to comply because of the coronavirus pandemic. That decision delayed implementation of the new requirements until December 20, 2020.

The law's implementation will "put an end to the unconscionable business practice of charging consumers a rental fee for cable modem routers even if consumers do not use them!" consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge said in a blog post. "This common-sense correction will permit consumers to continue to use their own equipment, and not be forced to pay for something they neither asked for nor needed." [...] The new law, passed as part of a budget bill, creates a "consumer right to accurate equipment charges" that prohibits TV and broadband providers from charging for "covered equipment provided by the consumer." Covered equipment is defined as "equipment (such as a router) employed on the premises of a person... to provide [TV service] or to provide fixed broadband Internet access service." The companies may not charge rental or lease fees in cases when "the provider has not provided the equipment to the consumer; or the consumer has returned the equipment to the provider."

The law also includes a right to transparency that requires TV providers to inform customers of the total monthly charges, including all company-imposed fees and a good-faith estimate of all government-imposed fees and taxes, before they enter into a contract. This notice must specify the amount of promotional discounts and when those discounts will expire. The law also gives customers a 24-hour period in which they can cancel new TV service without penalty. The new rule won't prevent TV providers from raising prices on existing customers, even when they're under contract. But the new transparency requirement is a step in the right direction.

Microsoft is working on in-house processor designs for use in server computers that run the company's cloud services, adding to an industrywide effort to reduce reliance on Intel's chip technology, Bloomberg News reports. From the report: The world's largest software maker is using Arm designs to produce a processor that will be used in its data centers, according to people familiar with the plans. It's also exploring using another chip that would power some of its Surface line of personal computers. The people asked not to be identified discussing private initiatives.

Makers of cars and electronic devices from TVs to smartphones are sounding alarm bells about a global shortage of chips, which is causing manufacturing delays as consumer demand bounces back from the coronavirus crisis. From a report: The problem has several causes, industry executives and analysts say, including bulk-buying by U.S. sanctions-hit Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies, a fire at a chip plant in Japan, coronavirus lockdowns in Southeast Asia, and a strike in France. More fundamentally, however, there has been under-investment in 8-inch chip manufacturing plants owned mostly by Asian firms, which means they have struggled to ramp up production as demand for 5G phones, laptops and cars picked up faster than expected. "For the whole electronics industry, we've been experiencing a shortage of components," said Donny Zhang, CEO of Shenzhen-based sourcing company Sand and Wave, who said he faced delays in obtaining a microcontroller unit that was key to a smart headphone product he was working on. "We were originally planning to complete production in one month, but now it looks like we'll need to do it in two." A source at a Japanese electronics component supplier said it was seeing shortages of WiFi and Bluetooth chips and was expecting delays of more than 10 weeks.

Microsoft is rolling out an update today that brings native support for Apple's M1 chip to the Windows productivity suite. "The apps getting the updates are Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote," reports The Verge. "Notably absent, however, is Teams." From the report: The updates are making the apps universal ones -- meaning these versions will run on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, so any upcoming updates or features will be coming at the same time for both platforms. [...] Office users who have automatic updates turned on should have the new versions sometime today, and anyone else can update it through the Mac App Store or Microsoft's AutoUpdate software (depending on if you downloaded Office through the App Store or directly from Microsoft). Outlook users will get not only native Apple Silicon support, but support for iCloud accounts as well, allowing them to sync their email, contacts, and calendars to the app if they use Apple's service to store them. Teams isn't included in today's rollout of updates, but Microsoft says they're working on it. No timeline is available, though.

According to a paper published in the journal Science, researchers report they they have now hit an efficiency of 29.15 percent in the perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell category. ScienceAlert reports: For this type of panel, the long-term target of more than 30 percent is now tantalizingly within reach. The latest lab tests edge ahead of the maximum 28 percent efficiency that perovskite/silicon cells have managed up to this point. [...] In this new research, the 29.15 percent efficiency record was managed with a 1 cm x 1 cm (0.4 inch x 0.4 inch) panel, so some serious scaling up will be required. The team says that should be possible, however. After 300 hours of simulated use, the tandem cell retained 95 percent of its original efficiency, which is another promising sign.

The new record was actually first reported earlier this year, though the peer-reviewed paper detailing the feat has just been published. The scientists used specially tweaked layer compositions for both connecting the electrode layer and keeping the two types of cell together in order to reach their new record. It's another moment to celebrate, but the scientists aren't stopping: previous research suggests that tandem solar cell technology should be able to reach efficiency rates of well above 30 percent, and the team says "initial ideas for this are already under discussion."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: GameStop employees across the country were caught by surprise on Saturday when the video-game chain suddenly announced new shipments of the highly coveted PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles, sending customers flocking to stores. Workers at the U.S. retailer, speaking to Bloomberg and posting on social media, said they had received little notice for the restock and that the crowds were both chaotic and a risk to their health. The latest generation devices from Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have been in short supply since their release last month, leaving gamers everywhere eager for the latest restock. On Saturday afternoon, GameStop told customers that new inventory was arriving, but that it would only be available to pre-order in stores, not online, where scalpers have dominated digital queues. However, employees found out less than an hour before the public, according to GameStop staffers, which left them unprepared for the rush of customers.

One GameStop manager on the East Coast shared an email from the company, sent just a few minutes before the public announcement, saying that their store would have about 15 new consoles available for pre-order. Minutes after the announcement, the manager said, the store had a crowd of about 40 people, violating social-distancing requirements and overwhelming their clerks. GameStop said its last-minute notification to customers was meant to ensure that individuals, not resellers, were able to purchase the consoles. "We realize that in some situations our approach of notifying customers of this opportunity may have caused unintended reactions from both our associates and customers," GameStop said in a statement. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."

The rush occurred as GameStop is facing widespread staffing shortages as the retailer has asked stores across the country to cut hours, the manager said. GameStop, which has been struggling in recent years amid the widespread adoption of digital games, reported a disappointing third quarter last week, sending the stock falling as much as 22%. The retailer has shuttered almost 700 stores this year and will close more locations through 2022 while it continues to cut costs, although it expects to see a sales bump this quarter thanks to the new consoles. On Reddit, GameStop employees are sharing similar complaints, telling stories of big lines and unruly crowds.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from ABC News: What if your electric vehicle could be refueled in less than 5 minutes? No plug, no outlet required. The range anxiety that's stymied sales of EVs? Forget about it.

Three EVs can meet these demands and allay concerns about owning an emissions-free vehicle. There's just one drawback. You can only find them in California.

Welcome to the world of hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs). A tiny market that includes Toyota's Mirai, Hyundai's Nexo and Honda Motor's Clarity Fuel Cell, these "plug-less" EVs are the alternative to their battery electric cousins. Drivers can refuel FCEVs at a traditional gasoline station in less than 5 minutes. The 2021 Mirai gets an EPA estimated 402 miles of range on the XLE trim with the Nexo close behind at 380 miles. Neither cold weather nor heated seats deplete the range, another added bonus.

"Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are superior driving machines compared to traditional vehicles," Jackie Birdsall, senior engineer on Toyota's fuel cell team, told ABC News... "When people hear electric they only think battery electric," Birdsall said. "The battery electric vehicle market is pretty saturated. If we want to have sustainability and longevity we need to be diverse...." Birdsall said 2021 Mirai owners will receive $15,000 in free hydrogen, or enough money to cover the first 67,000 miles. It costs about $90 to fill up the car's 5.6 kilogram tank. These giveaways could help change consumers' minds — at least in California — to try an FCEV.

Long-time Slashdot reader BoredStiff writes: An energy Sankey diagram [where the width of arrows is proportional to flow rates] was published today by the University of Chicago, and shows the history of the American energy system in chart form, from 1800 to 2019.
The Atlantic explains: It is the first attempt to put so much information about U.S. energy history in one place. This particular Sankey diagram shows the inputs and outputs for the U.S. energy system, measured in watts per capita. The left side of the chart shows where energy is coming from (coal, natural gas, or petroleum) and the right side shows what it's being used for (transportation, agriculture, or home lighting and heating)...

[I]t has a lot to teach us about how the energy system got to be the way it is today — and how it might change, and be made to change, in the future... The half century from 1800 to 1850 saw the country devour biomass, most of it in the form of firewood and animal feed. In the 1870s, biomass gave way to the first fossil fuels: coal and, to a lesser extent, petroleum... By the 1910s, coal was dominant.... In the 1920s, it began to fade from the economy, replaced by natural gas, electricity, and — in the transportation sector — petroleum (in the form of gasoline). This was the age of cars and electrified Sun Belt suburbs — and it lasted 50 years, until the energy crisis of the 1970s arrived and capped energy use. Since 1973, per capita energy use hasn't increased.

In recent years, you can see natural gas driving out coal from the electricity sector. It was getting a handle on that change, actually, that led the project's leader to start working on it in the first place. "The changes that are happening in the electricity sector now — changes that are as large as any energy transition we've seen — are difficult to grasp... without animating the data," Elisabeth Moyer, an atmospheric-chemistry professor at the University of Chicago who created the project, told me...

Emily Grubert, an engineering professor at Georgia Tech, noted that nearly all of the transitions depicted were accidental or the result of market forces. It's possible that the transition to zero-carbon energy could be faster, she said, because it will be intentional.

Hyundai Motor Group agreed to buy a controlling stake in Boston Dynamics in a deal that values the mobile robot firm at $1.1 billion. From a report: Hyundai Motor, along with some associated companies and Chairman Euisun Chung, will acquire an 80% interest in the U.S. robotics company from SoftBank Group, leaving the Japanese firm with a 20% share, the companies said in a statement Friday. The deal was first reported by Bloomberg News in November. South Korean conglomerate Hyundai Motor Group has been beefing up its research in robotics as it expands further into electric and autonomous vehicles. Carmaker Hyundai Motor plans to spend over 60 trillion won ($55 billion) in the next five years in these areas to become one of the world's leading auto manufacturers. The broader empire is also exploring practical uses for industrial robots. "The combination of the highly complementary technologies of Hyundai Motor Group and Boston Dynamics, and the continued partnership of SoftBank, will propel development and commercialization of advanced robots," the companies said, helping to create a "robotics value chain ranging from robot component manufacturing to smart logistics solutions."

Joel Hruska, writing at ExtremeTech: It's not just a question of whether top-end hardware is available, but whether midrange and last-gen hardware is selling at reasonable prices. If you want to go AMD, be aware that Ryzen 5000 CPUs are hard to find and the 6800 and 6800 XT are vanishingly rare. The upper-range Ryzen 3000 CPUs available on Amazon and Newegg are also selling for well above their prices six months ago. If you want to build an Intel system, the situation is a little different. A number of the 9th and 10th-gen chips are actually priced at MSRP and not too hard to find. The Core i7-9700K has fallen to $269, for example, and it's still one of Intel's fastest gaming CPUs. At that price, paired with a Z370 motherboard, you could build a gaming-focused system, so long as you don't actually need a new high-end GPU. The Core i7-10700K is $359, which isn't quite as competitive, but it squares off reasonably well against chips like the 3700X at $325. Amazon and Newegg both report the 3600X selling for more, at $400 and $345, respectively.

But even if these prices are appealing, the current GPU market makes building a gaming system much above lower-midrange to midrange a non-starter. Radeon 6000 GPUs and RTX 3000 GPUs are both almost impossible to find, and the older, slower, and less feature-rich cards that you can buy are almost all selling for more today than they were six months ago. Not every GPU has been kicked into the stratosphere, but between the cards you can't buy and the cards you shouldn't buy, there's a limited number of deals currently on the market. Your best bet is to set up price alerts on specific SKUs you are watching with the vendor in question. There is some limited good news, though: DRAM and SSDs are both still reasonably priced. DRAM and SSD prices are both expected to decline 10-15 percent through Q4 2020 compared with the previous quarter, and there are good deals to be had on both. [...] Power supply prices look reasonable, too, and motherboard availability looks solid. If you don't need to buy a GPU right now and you're willing to or prefer to use Intel, there's a more reasonable case to be made for building a system. But if you need a high-end GPU and/or want a high-end Ryzen chip to go with it, you may be better off shopping prebuilt systems or waiting a few more months.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Germany, France, Spain and ten other EU countries have joined forces to invest in processors and semiconductor technologies, key to internet-connected devices and data processing, in a push to catch up with the United States and Asia. Europe's share of the 440-billion-euro ($533 billion) global semiconductor market is around 10%, with the EU currently relying on chips made abroad. The 13 countries said they would work together to bolster Europe's electronics and embedded systems value chain. The group will reach out to companies to form industrial alliances for research and investment into designing and making processors and look into funding for such projects. It will also come up with a European-wide scheme known as an Important Project of Common European Interest which allows for funding under looser EU state aid rules. The group will seek to set up common standards and certification for electronics. The signatories include Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia.

Right after the Apple event in October, Samsung mocked the company for not including the power adapter in the iPhone 12 box and also removing it from the older models. Now, as some rumors have predicted, the Galaxy S21's documentation suggests that it will also not come with a charger included in the box. 9to5Mac reports: As reported by Brazilian website Tecnoblog, the new Galaxy S21, Galaxy S21+, and Galaxy S21 Ultra have just been approved by ANATEL in Brazil, which is the equivalent agency to the FCC in the United States. The new devices have the codenames SM-G991B/DS, SM-G996B/DS, and SM-G998B/DS, respectively. While the documentation filed at ANATEL doesn't reveal much detail about upcoming Galaxy smartphones, it does reveal a noteworthy change in the lineup of Samsung's phones for the next year. ANATEL says that all three new Galaxy S21 models will not have a charger included in the box. Headphones will not be included either.

France will build a new, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to replace its Charles de Gaulle carrier by 2038, French President Emmanuel Macron announced Tuesday. The Associated Press reports: Macron framed the decision to use nuclear reactors to propel the future warship as part of France's climate strategy, stressing its lower emissions compared to diesel fuel. Speaking at a nuclear facility in the Burgundy town of Le Creusot, he called France's nuclear weapons and atomic energy industry "the cornerstone of our strategic autonomy," and said the nuclear sector plays a role in France's "status as a great power." One of his advisers noted that having an aircraft carrier also helps France project its global influence. Only a few countries in the world maintain the huge, costly vessels.

The new French aircraft carrier will be about 70,000 tons and 300 meters long, roughly 1.5 times the size of the Charles de Gaulle, which has been deployed for international military operations in Iraq and Syria in recent years, according to French presidential advisers. Its catapults will be electro-magnetic, and American-made, and the ship will be designed to accommodate next-generation warplanes and serve until around 2080, the advisers said. They didn't provide a price tag but French media estimate it will cost around 7 billion euros ($8.5 billion).

Toyota announced today that they will be unveiling a new all-electric SUV in the coming months. Electrek reports: The automaker, which has been seen as a lagger when it comes to all-electric vehicles, says that it's their 'first step' for battery-electric vehicles. Toyota has yet to launch an all-electric vehicle outside of China. Toyota announced a new midsize electric SUV today: "Toyota announced today that it will preview a brand-new model for its European Battery Electric line-up -- a mid-sized battery-electric SUV based on the forthcoming the e-TNGA platform."

For now, they are only showing the silhouette (pictured above), but the automaker says that more details are coming in the next few months. The un-named preview model will be based on Toyota's new e-TNGA platform. Thanks to its clever design the new platform is both highly versatile and easily adaptable for a range of product types. They unveiled this image with the announcement -- showing a dual motor all-wheel-drive powertrain and modular battery pack. The automaker confirmed that the vehicle is already being readied for production.

More than a week after Black Friday, Apple's announced its AirPods Max over-ear headphones for $549. It's available for preorder now, and will ship Dec. 15. From a report: Apple said its AirPods Max are designed with similar features to its $249 in-ear AirPods Pro, but in an over-ear design. As a result, it offers many of the same features as its AirPods cousins, including simple setup and connections, active noise cancellation, transparency mode to pipe sound from the outside world into your ears along with whatever you're listening to, and "spatial" simulated surround-sound audio. It also comes in five colors, including silver, green and pink. "With AirPods Max, we are bringing that magical AirPods experience to a stunning over-ear design with high-fidelity audio," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, in a statement Tuesday.