An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A patent lawsuit filed by one of 3D printing's most established firms against a consumer-focused upstart could have a big impact on the wider 3D-printing scene. In two complaints, (1, 2, PDF) filed in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, against six entities related to Bambu Lab, Stratasys alleges that Bambu Lab infringed upon 10 patents that it owns, some through subsidiaries like Makerbot (acquired in 2013). Among the patents cited are US9421713B2, "Additive manufacturing method for printing three-dimensional parts with purge towers," and US9592660B2, "Heated build platform and system for three-dimensional printing methods."

There are not many, if any, 3D printers sold to consumers that do not have a heated bed, which prevents the first layers of a model from cooling during printing and potentially shrinking and warping the model. "Purge towers" (or "prime towers" in Bambu's parlance) allow for multicolor printing by providing a place for the filament remaining in a nozzle to be extracted and prevent bleed-over between colors. Stratasys' infringement claims also target some fundamental technologies around force detection and fused deposition modeling (FDM) that, like purge towers, are used by other 3D-printer makers that target entry-level and intermediate 3D-printing enthusiasts.

A company called ChargerHelp provides certified technicians to service EV charging stations (for a monthly fee). And they've just issued their annual "reliability report," reports CleanTechnica: Its analysis of more than 19 million data points collected from public and private sources in 2023 — including real-time assessments of 4,800 chargers from ChargerHelp technicians in the field — finds that â"software consistently overestimates station uptime, point-in-time status, and the ability to successfully charge a vehicle...."

[W]hen ChargerHelp technicians personally inspected 4,800 charge points, they found more than 10% were reported to be online but were in fact unable to complete a test charge... These findings by ChargerHelp are backed up by many smaller scale studies and surveys over the past several years that have found that claims of 95% uptime or greater do not match real world experience. A 2022 study of 657 chargers at 181 non-Tesla public charging sites in the San Francisco Bay Area determined that only 73% were capable of delivering a charge for more than two minutes, for example.

[I]mprovements have been slow to materialize. In fact, driver satisfaction with public charging has only worsened over the past year, according to the latest J.D. Power Electric Vehicle Experience Ownership Study, released in February. As the variety, price, and range of EVs available to US drivers have become more attractive, mistrust of public charging now constitutes the most significant headwind for EV adoption, J.D. Power says.
The report also "lists the biggest infrastructure pain points," reports the Verge, "including a failure to report broken stalls, inaccurate station status messages, aging equipment, and some habitually unreliable network providers (who go unnamed in the study, unfortunately)." EV chargers can break in many ways, the study concludes. These include broken retractor systems intended to protect the cable from getting mangled by vehicle tires, broken screens, and inoperable payment systems. There is also general damage to the cabinet and, of course, broken cables and connectors.

Across the chargers recorded, ChargerHelp calculates that actual uptime is only 73.7 percent, compared to the 84.6 percent self-reported by the EV network providers.

The Guardian reports Sunday, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, highlighted that Russian forces appeared to have started a fire in one of the cooling towers of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant that it has occupied since the early days of the war. "Radiation levels are within norm," Zelenskiy said before accusing Russia of using its control of the site, whose six reactors are in shutdown mode, "to blackmail Ukraine, all of Europe, and the world". A Ukrainian official in Nikopol, the nearest town across the river Dnipro from the nuclear plant, added that according to "unofficial information", the fire was caused by setting fire to "a large number of automobile tyres" in a cooling tower. Video and pictures showed smoke dramatically billowing from one of the towers, although experts said they are not in use while the reactor is in shutdown mode, prompting some to question whether it was a way of trying raise the stakes over Ukraine's incursion into Russia.
From the CBC: The Russian management of the facility said emergency workers had contained the fire and that there was no threat of it spreading further. "The fire did not affect the operation of the station," it said. The six reactors at the plant located close to the front line of the war in Ukraine are not in operation but the facility relies on external power to keep its nuclear material cool and prevent a catastrophic accident. Moscow and Kyiv have routinely accused each other of endangering safety around it.

"Samsung's latest solid-state battery technology will power up premium EVs first, giving them up to 621 miles of range," writes PC Magazine: The new batteries — which promise to improve vehicle range, decrease charging times, and eliminate risk of battery fires — could go into mass production as soon as 2027. Multiple automakers have been reportedly testing samples. Samsung did not list any by name but it's worked with Hyundai, Stellantis, and General Motors, among others. "We supplied samples to customers from the end of last year to the beginning of this year and are receiving positive feedback," Samsung SDI VP Koh Joo-young said at SNE Battery Day 2024 in Seoul, according to Korean outlet The Elec and translated by Google.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the batteries won't be cheap. They will initially go in "super premium EVs" and will offer 900 to 1,000 kilometers (559-621 miles) of range and improved safety... Samsung's presentation also reiterated previously announced plans to create batteries that can charge in nine minutes and last 20 years by 2029.
More details from Notebookcheck: According to Samsung SDI's VP, automakers are interested in its solid-state battery packs because they are smaller, lighter, and much safer than what's in current electric cars. Apparently, they are also rather expensive to produce, since it warns that they will first go into the "super premium" EV segment. Those Samsung defines as luxury electric cars that can cover more than 600 miles on a charge.

Samsung's oxide solid-state battery technology is rated for an energy density of about 500 Wh/kg, which is about double the density of mainstream EV batteries. Those have capacities that already allow more than 300 miles on a charge, so 600 miles of range in a similar footprint is not out of the question, but the issue is production costs.
Thanks to Slashdot reader npetrov for sharing the news.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is exploring the possibility of directly converting radiation from nuclear reactors into electricity using radiovoltaics, a technology that could potentially revolutionize nuclear power generation by moving beyond traditional steam turbine methods. The agency is requesting information and suggestions on this topic in an RFI released on August 1st. Nuclear News reports: There's got to be a better way": Methods to convert the energy of nuclear fission reactions and the decay of radioisotopes into electricity have not evolved since the invention of radioisotope power systems and fission reactors over 70 years ago and remain unoptimized," the RFI says. They rely on thermal heat transfer, and "in each step of this indirect conversion method neutrons, heat, and energy are lost to the shielding material, working fluid, and other system materials." Advanced reactor designs that use alternative coolants, including helium, sodium, and salts, would still use what DARPA calls "heritage nuclear power conversion technology" with water and steam as the working fluids, as would the fusion power plants being planned today.

Why now? Tabitha Dodson, the program manager for DARPA DSO, which is launching the RFI, told Nuclear News that "two big things" are driving the interest. "One is the extreme surge of investment in small and advanced nuclear technologies, such as in fusion and space reactors, which do not have a concurrent pairing of advanced power generation methods that doesn't involve liquid-based heat transfer," she said. "Next, there has been an order of magnitude improvement in radiation tolerance and efficiency for voltaics in recent years with encouraging performance that indicates radiovoltaics could scale up as an array usable in nuclear reactors." [...]

What is the ask?: The RFI asks: "Is it possible to achieve [a] direct energy conversion nuclear power system, ranging in power from 10s of watts electric (We) to 100s of kWe?" DARPA wants information "on the potential to improve specific power greater than 1 We/kg conversion from watts-thermal per radiation emission product," and information on the potential to improve damage tolerance of the voltaic to nuclear radiation to reach an operating lifetime comparable to the life of its nuclear source, on the scale of decades. "We will learn what our boundary conditions are when respondents tell us what technologies in the field of voltaics are possible, and we'll use that to see if there is sufficient scientific rationale make a case to present for further DARPA investment," Dodson said. "I also hope people are going to start thinking about nuclear systems that use electromagnetic versus thermal-kinetic methods to harvest nuclear energetic reactions."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Inertial confinement fusion is one method for generating energy through nuclear fusion, albeit one plagued by all manner of scientific challenges (although progress is being made). Researchers at LeHigh University are attempting to overcome one specific bugbear with this approach by conducting experiments with mayonnaise placed in a rotating figure-eight contraption. They described their most recent findings in a new paper published in the journal Physical Review E with an eye toward increasing energy yields from fusion.

The work builds on prior research in the LeHigh laboratory of mechanical engineer Arindam Banerjee, who focuses on investigating the dynamics of fluids and other materials in response to extremely high acceleration and centrifugal force. In this case, his team was exploring what's known as the "instability threshold" of elastic/plastic materials. Scientists have debated whether this comes about because of initial conditions, or whether it's the result of "more local catastrophic processes," according to Banerjee. The question is relevant to a variety of fields, including geophysics, astrophysics, explosive welding, and yes, inertial confinement fusion. [...]

The problem is that hydrodynamic instabilities tend to form in the plasma state -- Banerjee likens it to "two materials [that] penetrate one another like fingers" in the presence of gravity or any accelerating field -- which in turn reduces energy yields. The technical term is a Rayleigh-Taylor instability, which occurs between two materials of different densities, where the density and pressure gradients move in opposite directions. Mayonnaise turns out to be an excellent analog for investigating this instability in accelerated solids, with no need for a lab setup with high temperature and pressure conditions, because it's a non-Newtonian fluid. "We use mayonnaise because it behaves like a solid, but when subjected to a pressure gradient, it starts to flow," said Banerjee. "As with a traditional molten metal, if you put a stress on mayonnaise, it will start to deform, but if you remove the stress, it goes back to its original shape. So there's an elastic phase followed by a stable plastic phase. The next phase is when it starts flowing, and that's where the instability kicks in." In 2019, Banerjee's team conducted experiments that "involved pouring Hellman's Real Mayonnaise [...] into a Plexiglass container and then creating wavelike perturbations in the mayo," writes Ars' Jennifer Ouellette. "One experiment involved placing the container on a rotating wheel in the shape of a figure eight and tracking the material with a high-speed camera, using an image processing algorithm to analyze the footage. Their results supported the claim that the instability threshold is dependent on initial conditions, namely amplitude and wavelength."

"This latest paper sheds more light on the structural integrity of fusion capsules used in inertial confinement fusion, taking a closer look at the material properties, the amplitude and wavelength conditions, and the acceleration rate of such materials as they hit the Rayleigh-Taylor instability threshold."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Security flaws in your computer's firmware, the deep-seated code that loads first when you turn the machine on and controls even how its operating system boots up, have long been a target for hackers looking for a stealthy foothold. But only rarely does that kind of vulnerability appear not in the firmware of any particular computer maker, but in the chips found across hundreds of millions of PCs and servers. Now security researchers have found one such flaw that has persisted in AMD processors for decades, and that would allow malware to burrow deep enough into a computer's memory that, in many cases, it may be easier to discard a machine than to disinfect it. At the Defcon hacker conference tomorrow, Enrique Nissim and Krzysztof Okupski, researchers from the security firm IOActive, plan to present a vulnerability in AMD chips they're calling Sinkclose. The flaw would allow hackers to run their own code in one of the most privileged modes of an AMD processor, known as System Management Mode, designed to be reserved only for a specific, protected portion of its firmware. IOActive's researchers warn that it affects virtually all AMD chips dating back to 2006, or possibly even earlier.

Nissim and Okupski note that exploiting the bug would require hackers to already have obtained relatively deep access to an AMD-based PC or server, but that the Sinkclose flaw would then allow them to plant their malicious code far deeper still. In fact, for any machine with one of the vulnerable AMD chips, the IOActive researchers warn that an attacker could infect the computer with malware known as a "bootkit" that evades antivirus tools and is potentially invisible to the operating system, while offering a hacker full access to tamper with the machine and surveil its activity. For systems with certain faulty configurations in how a computer maker implemented AMD's security feature known as Platform Secure Boot -- which the researchers warn encompasses the large majority of the systems they tested -- a malware infection installed via Sinkclose could be harder yet to detect or remediate, they say, surviving even a reinstallation of the operating system. Only opening a computer's case, physically connecting directly to a certain portion of its memory chips with a hardware-based programming tool known as SPI Flash programmer and meticulously scouring the memory would allow the malware to be removed, Okupski says. Nissim sums up that worst-case scenario in more practical terms: "You basically have to throw your computer away." In a statement shared with WIRED, AMD said it "released mitigation options for its AMD EPYC datacenter products and AMD Ryzen PC products, with mitigations for AMD embedded products coming soon."

The company also noted that it released patches for its EPYC processors earlier this year. It did not answer questions about how it intends to fix the Sinkclose vulnerability.

According to Agrarheute, hackers launched a cyberattack on a Swiss farmer's computer system, disrupting the flow of vital data from a milking robot. Tragically, this led to the death of a cow and her calf. From the report (translated from German into English): According to the CSO, hackers attacked the computers of a farmer from Hagendorn. The dairy farmer's milking robot was also connected to these computers. When the animal owner stopped receiving milking data, he initially suspected a dead zone. But then he learned from the manufacturer of his milking system that he had been hacked. Apparently it was a ransomware attack. The hackers demanded $10,000 to decrypt the data. The farmer considered whether he should give in to the cyber criminals' demands. At first he thought the data on the amount of milk produced was bearable. In addition, the milking robot also worked without a computer or network connection. The cows could therefore continue to be milked.

For one cow , however, the cyberattack ended tragically. The farmer normally receives vital data from his cows via the system. This is particularly important and critical for pregnant animals. One cow's calf died in the womb. Because the computer was paralyzed, Bircher was unable to recognize the emergency in time. They tried everything to at least save the cow, but in the end it had to be put down. Overall, the attack caused monetary damages amounting to the equivalent of over 6,400 euros, mainly due to veterinary costs and the purchase of a new computer. However, the hackers came away empty-handed.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (paywalled), Apple plans to launch a completely redesigned Mac mini with M4 and M4 Pro chips later this year. MacRumors reports: The new Mac mini will be the first major design change to the machine since 2010, making it Apple's smallest ever desktop computer. The new Mac mini will apparently approach the size of an Apple TV, but it may be slightly taller than the current model, which is 1.4 inches high. It will continue to feature an aluminum shell. Individuals working on the new device apparently say that it is "essentially an iPad Pro in a small box."

Apple is said to have tested Mac mini models with at least three USB-C ports on the back, as well as an area for the power cable and an HDMI port. There will continue to be two versions of the Mac mini: one with the standard M4 chip, similar to the iPad Pro, and one with an M4 Pro chip. The base model is set to begin shipping from suppliers this month ahead of release later in the year, while the high-end model will not be ready until October.

"Sonos is delaying two hardware releases originally planned for later this year as it deploys an all-hands-on-deck approach to fixing the app," writes The Verge's Chris Welch. The company released a redesigned mobile app on May 7th that has been riddled with flaws and missing features. Sonos also entered the crowded headphone market in May with the launch of its Ace headphones, but it was immediately "overshadowed" by problems with the new Sonos app, according to Sonos CEO Patrick Spence. The Verge reports: "I will not rest until we're in a position where we've addressed the issues and have customers raving about Sonos again," Spence said during the afternoon earnings call. "We believe our focus needs to be addressing the app ahead of everything else," he continued."This means delaying the two major new product releases we had planned for Q4 until our app experience meets the level of quality that we, our customers, and our partners expect from Sonos." One of those two products is almost certainly Sonos' next flagship soundbar, codenamed Lasso, which I revealed last month. "These products were ready to ship in Q4," Spence said in response to a question on the call.

He also went in-depth on the app issues and how Sonos plans to fix them. Spence remains adamant that overhauling the app and its underlying infrastructure "was the right thing to do" for the company's future; the new app "has a modular developer platform based on modern programming languages that will allow us to drive more innovation faster," he said. But Spence also now acknowledges that the project was rushed. "With the app, my push for speed backfired," he said. "As we rolled out the new software to more and more users, it became evident that there were stubborn bugs we had not discovered in our testing. As a result, far too many of our customers are having an experience that is worse than what they previously had." [...]

For now, Sonos is turning to some longtime experts for help. "I've asked Nick Millington, the original software architect of the Sonos experience, to do whatever it takes to address the issues with our new app," Spence said. Sonos board member Tom Conrad is helping to oversee the app improvement effort and "ensure" things stay on the right track.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a newly published paper titled "Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis," Google's DeepMind Robotics team is showcasing its own work on the game. The researchers have effectively developed a "solidly amateur human-level player" when pitted against a human component. During testing, the table tennis bot was able to beat all of the beginner-level players it faced. With intermediate players, the robot won 55% of matches. It's not ready to take on pros, however. The robot lost every time it faced an advanced player. All told, the system won 45% of the 29 games it played. "This is the first robot agent capable of playing a sport with humans at human level and represents a milestone in robot learning and control," the paper claims. "However, it is also only a small step towards a long-standing goal in robotics of achieving human level performance on many useful real world skills. A lot of work remains in order to consistently achieve human-level performance on single tasks, and then beyond, in building generalist robots that are capable of performing many useful tasks, skillfully and safely interacting with humans in the real world."

The robot's biggest trouble areas are responding to fast balls, high and low balls. It also has trouble with backhand and the ability to read the spin on an incoming ball. Here's how the researchers plan to address the issue with fast balls: "To address the latency constraints that hinder the robot's reaction time to fast balls, we propose investigating advanced control algorithms and hardware optimizations. These could include exploring predictive models to anticipate ball trajectories or implementing faster communication protocols between the robot's sensors and actuators."

At the Flash Memory Summit 2024 this week, NVM Express published the NVMe 2.1 specifications, which hope to enhance storage unification across AI, cloud, client, and enterprise. Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: New NVMe capabilities with the revised specifications include:

- Enabling live migration of PCIe NVMe controllers between NVM subsystems.
- New host-directed data placement for SSDs that simplifies ecosystem integration and is backwards compatible with previous NVMe specifications.
- Support for offloading some host processing to NVMe storage devices.
- A network boot mechanism for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF).
- Support for NVMe over Fabrics zoning.
- Ability to provide host management of encryption keys and highly granular encryption with Key Per I/O.
- Security enhancements such as support for TLS 1.3, a centralized authentication verification entity for DH-HMAC-CHAP, and post sanitization media verification.
- Management enhancements including support for high availability out-of-band management, management over I3C, out-of-band management asynchronous events and dynamic creation of exported NVM subsystems from underlying NVM subsystem physical resources. You can learn more about these updates at NVMExpress.org.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Unlike Tesla, which hopes to develop its own bipedal 'bot to work on its production line sometime next year, BMW has brought in a robot from Figure AI. The Figure 02 robot has hands with sixteen degrees of freedom and human-equivalent strength. "We are excited to unveil Figure 02, our second-generation humanoid robot, which recently completed successful testing at the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg. Figure 02 has significant technical advancements, which enable the robot to perform a wide range of complex tasks fully autonomously," said Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI.

BMW wanted to test how to integrate a humanoid robot into its production process -- how to have the robot communicate with the production line software and human workers and determine what requirements would be necessary to add robots to the mix. The Figure robot was given the job of inserting sheet metal parts into fixtures as part of the process of making a chassis. BMW says this required particular dexterity and that it's an ergonomically awkward and tiring task for humans.

Now that the trial is over, Figure's robot is no longer working at Spartanburg, and BMW says it has "no definite timetable established" to add humanoid robots to its production lines. "The developments in the field of robotics are very promising. With an early-test operation, we are now determining possible applications for humanoid robots in production. We want to accompany this technology from development to industrialization," said Milan Nedeljkovi, BMW's board member responsible for production. BMW Group published a video of the Figure 02 robot on YouTube.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has revealed technical details of its in-house data transfer tool, called Effingo, and bragged that it uses the project to move an average of 1.2 exabytes every day. As explained in a paper [PDF] and video to be presented on Thursday at the SIGCOMM 2024 conference in Sydney, bandwidth constraints and the stubbornly steady speed of light mean that not even Google is immune to the need to replicate data so it is located close to where it is processed or served.

Indeed, the paper describes managed data transfer as "an unsung hero of large-scale, globally-distributed systems" because it "reduces the network latency from across-globe hundreds to in-continent dozens of milliseconds." The paper also points out that data transfer tools are not hard to find, and asks why a management layer like Effingo is needed. The answer is that the tools Google could find either optimized for transfer time or handled point-to-point data streams -- and weren't up to the job of handling the 1.2 exabytes Effingo moves on an average day, at 14 terabytes per second. To shift all those bits, Effingo "balances infrastructure efficiency and users' needs" and recognizes that "some users and some transfers are more important than the others: eg, disaster recovery for a serving database, compared to migrating data from a cluster with maintenance scheduled a week from now."

Google today unveiled its new Google TV Streamer, a $99.99 set-top box replacing the Chromecast. The device, shipping September 24, boasts improved performance with a 22% faster processor (over its predecessor), doubled RAM, and 32GB storage. It integrates Thread and Matter for smart home control, featuring a side-panel accessible via the remote. The Streamer supports Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos and includes an Ethernet port. Design changes include a low-profile form factor in two colors and a redesigned remote with a finder function. Software enhancements use Gemini AI for content summaries and custom screensavers.

A CNN reporter spent more than two hours waiting for EV chargers — thanks to "ill-mannered charger hogs who don't respect EV etiquette." [T]o protect batteries from damage, charging speeds slow way down once batteries get beyond 80% full. In fact, it can take as long, or even longer, to go from 80% charged to completely full than to reach 80%. Meanwhile, lines of electric vehicles wait behind almost-full cars. I was waiting behind people with batteries that were 92%, 94% and even 97% full, as I could see on the charger screens. Still, they stayed there. I made my own situation worse by giving up on one location and going to another with more chargers, but there were even more EVs waiting there.

Given that a lack of public charging is turning many consumers off to EVs, according to multiple surveys, this is a major issue. Both Electrify America and EVgo said they are rapidly expanding their networks to, as EVgo's Rafalson put it, "skate ahead of the puck," trying to make sure there are enough chargers to meet future demand... "I think what you're seeing is demand for public fast charging is really skyrocketing," said Sara Rafalson, executive vice president for policy at EV charging company EVgo, "and I would say we've been really at an inflection point in the last year, year and a half, with demand...."

Electrify America, one of America's biggest charging companies, is experimenting with a solution to the problem of charger hogs who can make it slow and unpleasant to travel in an EV. At 10 of the busiest EV fast charging stations in California, Electrify America has enacted a strict limit. Once a car's batteries are 85% charged, charging will automatically stop and the driver will be told to unplug and leave or face additional 40-cent-per-minute "idle time" fees for taking the space. It's similar to something Tesla vehicles do automatically. When a Tesla car, truck or SUV plugs into a particularly heavily-used Supercharger station, the vehicle itself may automatically limit charging to just 80% "to reduce congestion," according to Tesla's on-line Supercharger Support web page.

In that case, though, the user can still override the limit using the vehicle's touchscreen. There will be no getting around Electrify America's limit.
Electrify America's president points out an EV driver could need a full charge (if they're travelling somewhere with fewer charges) — or if they're driving an EV with a relatively short range. So the article notes that some EV charging companies "have experimented with plans that charge different amounts of money at different times to give drivers incentives to fill their batteries at less busy hours...

"For the time being, let's just hope that EV drivers who don't really need to fill all the way up will learn to be more considerate."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Ars Technica: [I]t might be worth spending more to get a panel that converts more of the incoming sunlight to electricity, since it allows you to get more out of the price paid to get each panel installed. But silicon panels are already pushing up against physical limits on efficiency. Which means our best chance for a major boost in panel efficiency may be to combine silicon with an additional photovoltaic material.

Right now, most of the focus is on pairing silicon with a class of materials called perovskites. Perovskite crystals can be layered on top of silicon, creating a panel with two materials that absorb different areas of the spectrum — plus, perovskites can be made from relatively cheap raw materials. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to make perovskites that are both high-efficiency and last for the decades that the silicon portion will. Lots of labs are attempting to change that, though. And two of them reported some progress this week, including a perovskite/silicon system that achieved 34 percent efficiency.
One team of researchers "sent a sample to a European test lab, which came out with an efficiency of 33.7 percent," Ars Technica notes. "The researchers have a few ideas that should boost this to 35 percent, but didn't attempt them for this paper.

"For comparison, the maximum efficiency for silicon alone is in the area of 27 percent, so that represents a very significant boost and is one of the highest perovskite/silicon combinations ever reported."

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from the blog 9to5Mac: In 2022, Apple agreed to pay a $50 million dollar settlement for certain eligible 2015-2019 MacBook owners who experienced problems with their butterfly keyboards. The claims process opened in late 2022, and the settlement got final approval last May. Starting today, eligible MacBook owners are finally receiving their payouts...

Apple finally moved away from the butterfly keyboard on the 16-inch MacBook Pro in late 2019. By mid 2020, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air also moved to the new Magic Keyboard. However, that wouldn't be the end of the story for Apple... In mid 2022, Apple was required to pay a $50 million settlement. The claims process started later that year, although there were some caveats. For one, you could only claim this settlement if you lived in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, or Washington. This excludes 43 US states, so a good number of people with butterfly keyboards weren't even covered. Additionally, the estimated payout amount varied depending on the severity of your keyboard problems:

- Up to $395 for 2 or more top case replacements
- Up to $125 for 1 top case replacement
- Up to $50 for keycap replacements

Obviously, this wasn't the most ideal outcome for customers, but if you were eligible and filed a claim (or multiple), you're in luck!
The original goal "was to make the keyboards thinner and the laptops slimmer," remembers ZDNet. This backfired spectacularly as MacBook owners started complaining that the keys would easily stick or get jammed by dust, crumbs, or other tiny objects. Noted tech blogger John Gruber even called the new keyboards "the worst products in Apple's history."
Gruber's headline? "Appl Still Hasn't Fixd Its MacBook Kyboad Problm"

A professor at Brigham Young University "has figured out a way to shave critical years off the complicated design and licensing processes for modern nuclear reactors," according to an announcement from the university.

"AI is teaming up with nuclear power." The typical time frame and cost to license a new nuclear reactor design in the United States is roughly 20 years and $1 billion. To then build that reactor requires an additional five years and between $5 and $30 billion. By using AI in the time-consuming computational design process, [chemical engineering professor Matt] Memmott estimates a decade or more could be cut off the overall timeline, saving millions and millions of dollars in the process — which should prove critical given the nation's looming energy needs.... "Being able to reduce the time and cost to produce and license nuclear reactors will make that power cheaper and a more viable option for environmentally friendly power to meet the future demand...."

Engineers deal with elements from neutrons on the quantum scale all the way up to coolant flow and heat transfer on the macro scale. [Memmott] also said there are multiple layers of physics that are "tightly coupled" in that process: the movement of neutrons is tightly coupled to the heat transfer which is tightly coupled to materials which is tightly coupled to the corrosion which is coupled to the coolant flow. "A lot of these reactor design problems are so massive and involve so much data that it takes months of teams of people working together to resolve the issues," he said... Memmott's is finding AI can reduce that heavy time burden and lead to more power production to not only meet rising demands, but to also keep power costs down for general consumers...

Technically speaking, Memmott's research proves the concept of replacing a portion of the required thermal hydraulic and neutronics simulations with a trained machine learning model to predict temperature profiles based on geometric reactor parameters that are variable, and then optimizing those parameters. The result would create an optimal nuclear reactor design at a fraction of the computational expense required by traditional design methods. For his research, he and BYU colleagues built a dozen machine learning algorithms to examine their ability to process the simulated data needed in designing a reactor. They identified the top three algorithms, then refined the parameters until they found one that worked really well and could handle a preliminary data set as a proof of concept. It worked (and they published a paper on it) so they took the model and (for a second paper) put it to the test on a very difficult nuclear design problem: optimal nuclear shield design.

The resulting papers, recently published in academic journal Nuclear Engineering and Design, showed that their refined model can geometrically optimize the design elements much faster than the traditional method.
In two days Memmott's AI algorithm determined an optimal nuclear-reactor shield design that took a real-world molten salt reactor company spent six months. "Of course, humans still ultimately make the final design decisions and carry out all the safety assessments," Memmott says in the announcement, "but it saves a significant amount of time at the front end....

"Our demand for electricity is going to skyrocket in years to come and we need to figure out how to produce additional power quickly. The only baseload power we can make in the Gigawatt quantities needed that is completely emissions free is nuclear power."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

After months of back and forth, Intel has finally agreed to extend the warranty on all affected 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs by an additional two years. This extension increases the warranty period for new boxed Intel CPUs from three to five years. For CPUs pre-installed in systems, Intel directs users to contact their PC's manufacturer for support, maintaining its established channels for warranty claims. The Verge adds: Intel has said that a primary cause of the instability issues for the desktop CPUs was due to an "elevated operating voltage" and that it was working on a patch for mid-August that addresses the root cause of that. But the patch apparently won't fix any damage that's already happened, meaning the best way to fix a damaged chip is to replace it.