Using monthly vehicle registration data, Axios is tracking the transition to electric vehicles in the United States. What they found is that a handful of states are driving nearly all the country's electric car adoption. From the report: California -- no surprise -- leads the U.S. in electric vehicle ownership, accounting for 39% of all EVs registered nationwide. Look more closely at the numbers, however, and it turns out EVs represent less than 2% of all vehicles on the road in the Golden State. [...] 4.6% of the new vehicles registered in the U.S. this past May were electric, according to the [S&P Global Mobility's] most recent data. That's more than double EVs' share of monthly registrations in May 2021 (1.9%). EVs still account for only about 0.6% of all registered vehicles in the U.S. Take California's EVs away, and it's just 0.4%.

As of April 1, Florida has the second-highest share of the country's EVs, at 6.7%. Then comes Texas (5.4%), Washington (4.4%), and New York (3.6%). Yet, EVs account for only 1% or less of all vehicles within each of these states. Besides California, the states or areas with the highest share of EVs within their own borders: Hawaii (1.3%), and the District of Columbia (1.2%). "Tesla's brand loyalty more than doubled in the month of May and was higher than any brand in the industry, including Toyota and Ford," S&P Global Mobility analyst Tom Libby tells Axios, noting that the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 are growing in popularity.

"We're just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's coming," says Libby.

The Raspberry Pi 4 has hit a major graphics milestone, adding support for a more modern Vulkan 3D APIa. Ars Technica reports: Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton announced the Pi 4's Vulkan 1.2 conformance on Monday. Support isn't available yet in downloadable Pi-friendly operating systems but should be coming soon. For most people using their Pi as a server, a DIY controller, or a light desktop, Vulkan 1.2 conformance won't be noticeable. Desktop graphics on the standard Raspberry Pi OS are powered by OpenGL, the older graphics API that Vulkan is meant to replace. There is one group that benefits, says Upton: games and other 3D Android applications. Android uses Vulkan as its low-overhead graphics API.

As with most Raspberry Pi advancements, there could be unforeseen opportunities unleashed by this seemingly tiny change. Vulkan 1.2 support gives developers the same 3D-graphics interface (if not anywhere near the same power) as 2019 NVIDIA graphics cards, 2020 Intel chips with integrated graphics, and dozens of other devices. With a Vulkan 1.0 driver installed, developer Iago Toral was able in 2020 to get the original Quake trilogy mostly running on a Pi 4, with not-too-shabby frame rates.

Solid state drives use far less power than hard disc drives. But a new study unexpectedly reveals that their lifetime carbon footprint is much higher than their hard disc cousins, raising difficult questions for the computer industry. From a report: The benefits of SSDs over HDDs are legion. They are smaller, mechanically simpler, faster to read and write data than their hard disc cousins. They are also more energy efficient. So with many computer manufacturers and datacenter operators looking to reduce their carbon footprints, it's easy to imagine that all this makes the choice of memory easy. But all is not as it seems, say Swamit Tannu at University of Wisconsin in Madison and Prashant Nair at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. SSDs have a dirty secret. Tannu and Nair have measured the carbon footprint per gigabyte of these devices across their entire lifetimes and, unexpectedly, it turns out that SSDs are significantly dirtier. "Compared to SSDs, the embodied [carbon] cost of HDDs is at least an order of magnitude lower," say the researchers.

Tannu and Nair come to their conclusion by adding up the amount of carbon emitted throughout the estimated 10-year lifespans of these devices. This includes the carbon emitted during manufacture, during operation, for transportation and for disposal. The carbon emitted during operation is straightforward to calculate. To read and write data, HDDs consume 4.2 Watts versus 1.3W for SSDs. The researchers calculate that a 1 terabyte HDD emits the equivalent of 159 kilograms of carbon dioxide during a 10-year operating lifespan. By comparison, a 1 terabyte SSD emits just 49.2 kg over 10 years. But SSDs are significantly more carbon intensive to manufacture. That's because the chip fabrication facilities for SSDs operate at extreme temperatures and pressures that are energy intensive to maintain. And bigger memories require more chips, which increases the footprint accordingly. All this adds up to a significant carbon footprint for SSD manufacture.

Tannu and Nair calculate that manufacturing a 1 terabyte SSD emits the equivalent of 320 kg of carbon dioxide. By comparison, a similar HDD emits just 40 kg. So the lifetime footprint for a 1 terabyte SSD is 369.2 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent versus 199 kg for an HDD. So HDDs are much cleaner. That's a counterintuitive result with important implications. At the very least, it suggests that computer manufacturers and cloud data storage operators should reconsider the way they use SSDs and HDDs. For example, almost 40 per cent of the carbon footprint of a desktop computer comes from its SSD, compared to just 4 per cent from the CPU and 11 per cent from the GPU.

Wave Swell Energy's remarkable UniWave 200 is a sea platform that uses an artificial blowhole formation to create air pressure changes that drive a turbine and feed energy back to shore. After a year of testing, the company reports excellent results. New Atlas reports: As we've discussed before, the UniWave system is a floating device that can be towed to any coastal location and connected to the local energy grid. It's designed so that wave swells force water into a specially designed concrete chamber, pressurizing the air in the chamber and forcing it through an outlet valve. Then as the water recedes, it generates a powerful vacuum, which sucks air in through a turbine at the top and generates electricity that's fed into the grid via a cable. As a result, it draws energy from the entire column of water that enters its chamber, a fact the team says makes it more efficient than wave energy devices that only harvest energy from the surface or the sea floor.

[...] A 200-kW test platform was installed last year off King Island, facing the notoriously rough seas of Bass Strait, which separates the island state of Tasmania from the mainland of Australia. There, it's been contributing reliable clean energy to the island's microgrid around the clock for a full 12 months. The WSE team has made a few live tweaks to the design during operation, improving its performance beyond original expectations. "We set out to prove that Wave Swell's wave energy converter technology could supply electricity to a grid in a range of wave conditions, and we have done that," said WSE CEO Paul Geason in a press release. "One key achievement has been to deliver real-world results in Tasmanian ocean conditions to complement the AMC test modeling. In some instances, the performance of our technology in the ocean has exceeded expectations due to the lessons we've learnt through the project, technological improvements and the refinements we have made over the course of the year." "Our team is excited to have achieved a rate of conversion from wave power to electricity at an average of 45 to 50% in a wide range of wave conditions," he continues. "This is a vast improvement on past devices and shows that the moment has arrived for wave power to sit alongside wind, solar and energy storage as part of a modern energy mix."

The King Island platform will remain in place at least until the end of 2022, and the company is now gearing up to go into production. "Having proven our device can survive the toughest conditions the Southern Ocean and Bass Strait can throw at it, and deliver grid compliant electricity, our priority now shifts to commercializing the technology," said Gleason. "For Wave Swell this means ensuring the market embraces the WSE technology and units are deployed to deliver utility scale clean electricity to mainland grids around the world."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Data centers have caused skyrocketing power demand in parts of London. Now, new housing construction could be banned for more than a decade in some neighborhoods of the UK's biggest city because the electricity grid is reaching capacity, as first reported on by the Financial Times. The reason: too many data centers are taking up too much electricity and hogging available fiber optic cables. The Financial Times obtained multiple letters sent from the city's government, the Greater London Authority (GLA), to developers. "Major new applicants to the distribution network... including housing developments, commercial premises and industrial activities will have to wait several years to receive new electricity connections," said one note, according to the news outlet.

The GLA also confirmed the grid issue to Gizmodo in an email, and sent along text from one of the letters, which noted that for some areas utilities are saying "electricity connections will not be available for their sites until 2027 to 2030." Though the Financial Times reported that at least one letter indicated making the necessary electric grid updates in London could take up until 2035. [...] "Data centres use large quantities of electricity, the equivalent of towns or small cities, to power servers and ensure resilience in service," one of the GLA letters seen by the Financial Times reportedly said. [...] Developers are "still getting their heads round this, but our basic understanding is that developments of 25 units or more will be affected. Our understanding is that you just can't build them," said David O'Leary, policy director at the Home Builders Federation, a trade body. Combined, those sections of London contain about 5,000 homes and make up about 11% of the city's housing supply, according the Financial Times. A spokesperson for the London Mayor told Gizmodo in a statement: "The Mayor is very concerned that electricity capacity constraints in three West London boroughs are creating a significant challenge for developers securing timely connections to the electricity network, which could affect the delivery of thousands of much-needed homes...The increased demand for electricity capacity in the area is believed to be largely due to a rapid influx of batteries and data centers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The US Commerce Department says it will strictly control use of subsidies under the recently passed CHIPS and Science Act, which promises to unlock billions of dollars in funding for domestic chip manufacturing. The eagerly anticipated spending bill paves the way for $280 billion in funding for science and technology, roughly $52 billion of which is earmarked for boosting US semiconductor production. Its passing was greeted by companies such as Intel and Micron, the latter of which promised to ramp up stateside memory production over the next few years in exchange for some of that cash.

However, the Commerce Department has given chipmakers notice that it will not be allowing a free-for-all, and will not let them use government funding for "stock buybacks or to pad their bottom line," it said in a published statement. Instead, subsidies awarded will be "no larger than is necessary to ensure a project happens here in the United States," the Commerce Department said, adding that it wanted to avoid a situation where states and municipalities became embroiled in a subsidy competition in the race to attract chipmakers to build there. The Department also warned that it will not hesitate to clawback funds or pursue other remedies from semiconductor companies that are found to have misused taxpayer dollars. Funding will come with conditions attached: chipmakers that receive a CHIPS subsidy will be prohibited from engaging in "significant transactions in China or other countries of concern" involving any leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing capacity for a period of ten years.

"Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19 as stable for the newest version of the Linux kernel..." reports Phoronix.

But they also note that on the Linux kernel mailing list, "Torvalds went on to write about his Arm-based MacBook [running an AArch64 Apple M1 SoC]... now under Linux thanks to the work of the Asahi Linux project."

Torvalds wrote: [T]he most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It's something I've been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it's finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now.

It's the third time I'm using Apple hardware for Linux development — I did it many years ago for powerpc development on a ppc970 machine. And then a decade+ ago when the Macbook Air was the only real thin-and-lite around. And now as an arm64 platform.

Not that I've used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But I'm trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too.

A proposed $369 billion bill would have far-reaching impacts on America's energy landscape — and in a wide variety of ways. The Washington Post took a close look at its tightly targetted energy-industry tax subisidies. "The goal? To make new green energy production cheaper for utilities to build than fossil fuel plants are." But others benefit too:

The bill contains numerous smaller measures aimed at specific parts of the economy with high emissions: $20 billion for agriculture subsidies to help farmers reduce emissions, $6 billion to reduce emissions in chemical, steel and cement plants, and $3 billion to reduce air pollution at ports.
Yet how do you convince a congressman from a coal-producing state? Politico explores what changed the mind of one of the legislation's last hold-out votes and convinced West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin that "The next generation of clean tech needed Washington's backing to take off."

Brandon Dennison, CEO of the economic development organization Coalfield Development, said he'd argued that the legislation offered a way for the coal-producing region to "stay an energy state.... If we want to benefit from the investments and the jobs that are going to come with that transition, we need to be part of the proactive solutions and policies rather than constantly playing on defense." Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups, said several West Virginia companies pushed Manchin to back the credits as well — even suggesting failure to pass the bill imperiled their plans to invest in new operations. "There were folks who I can't talk about who are directly involved in potentially developing clean energy manufacturing in the state of West Virginia where site visits had happened where all they needed was a set of investments," Walsh said. "And that communication happened as well."

A senior executive with a utility operating in Appalachia said that his company communicated with Manchin how aspects of the bill such as tax credits to build clean energy manufacturing plants at former coal sites and incentives for developing small nuclear reactors and hydrogen would help West Virginia's economy. "We know coal plants are ultimately going to close," the executive said. "What is going to replace them? What are the jobs? What are we transitioning to? In this case, we are going to explore hydrogen, new nuclear and get manufacturing in the state."

Form Energy, a battery storage startup backed by Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and which has plans for a West Virginia manufacturing hub, walked Manchin's staff through its growth trajectories with and without the proposed suite of legislative incentives, a person directly familiar with the interaction said. That person said Form Energy officials showed the differences on a graph. Its investors — including Gates — also called to assuage Manchin's concerns over disbursing the tax credits to companies through a direct pay system rather than using tax equity markets.

This week U.S. lawmakers drew closer to passing a $369 billion bill with wide-ranging climate provisions.

It helps U.S consumers buy electric vehicle chargers, rooftop solar panels, and fuel-efficient heat pumps. It extends energy-industry tax credits for wind, solar and other renewable energy sources -- and for carbon capture technology. In fact, most of its impact is accomplished through tax credits, reports the New York Times, "viewed as one of the least expensive ways to reduce carbon emissions.

"The benefits are worth four times their cost, according to calculations by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago." One example is ending an eligibility cap on the $7,500 tax credit for consumers buying electric vehicles: Currently, the credits are phased out after a manufacturer has sold 200,000 electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles. Restoring the credits would be huge for Tesla and General Motors, which have used up their quotas, as well as companies like Ford Motor and Toyota that will soon lose access to the credits. The new tax credit, available through 2032, would make vehicles from those companies more affordable and address criticism that only rich people can afford electric cars...

As it exists, the 200,000-vehicle cap on tax credits would provide a competitive advantage to market newcomers like BYD of China that are expected to use electric vehicles to enter the U.S. market. They could have benefited from the credit while Tesla, the Texas-based company, could not. The Democratic climate legislation would flip that. As written, the bill appears to disqualify cars not made in North America from the credit. Cars made in North America by foreign companies like Mercedes-Benz, Toyota or Volvo would qualify, but imported models would not.
In fact, the 725-page legislation also includes "a strong dose of industrial policy," with several provisions that "appear designed to undermine China's hold over the electric vehicle supply chain... It favors companies that get their components and raw materials from the United States or its allies, while effectively excluding China." "I think it is absolutely a transformative bill," said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who specializes in energy and climate change...

Cars would qualify for the full credit only if their batteries were made with materials and components from the United States and countries with which it has trade agreements. The percentage of components that have to meet those restrictions to qualify for the credit would increase over time, under the bill. That provision is aimed at encouraging domestic development of businesses like lithium mining and refining.

"Swiss researchers have developed a prototype disposable graphite-anode zinc-air battery that can be printed on a paper substrate, which they hope will reduce e-waste by replacing button cells in disposable paper-mounted electronics," writes Slashdot reader drinkypoo. "They demonstrated using it to operate a LCD digital clock." Here's an excerpt from the research published today in Scientific Report: The battery is based on a metal-air electrochemical cell that uses Zinc as a biodegradable metal in the anode, graphite in the cathode, paper as a separator between the electrodes, and a water-based electrolyte. In addition to paper's inherent biodegradability, sustainability and low cost, this design takes advantage of its natural wicking behavior and hygroscopic nature; The battery remains inactive until it contacts with water which then passively absorbs and transports across the paper membrane, thus activating the battery. The anode and cathode materials developed in this work are compatible with additive manufacturing techniques and we demonstrate that the battery can be stencil printed in a wide range of shapes and sizes. "The current collector is composed of graphite flakes, carbon black, shellac and ethanol," adds drinkypoo.

New submitter know-nothing cunt shares a report from The Register: Scientists from Rice University in Texas have used a dead spider as an actuator at the end of a robot arm -- a feat they claim has initiated the field of "necrobotics." "Humans have relied on biotic materials -- non-living materials derived from living organisms -- since their early ancestors wore animal hides as clothing and used bones for tools," the authors state in an article titled Necrobotics: Biotic Materials as Ready-to-Use Actuators. The article, published by Advanced Science, also notes that evolution has perfected many designs that could be useful in robots, and that spiders have proven especially interesting. Spiders' legs "do not have antagonistic muscle pairs; instead, they have only flexor muscles that contract their legs inwards, and hemolymph (i.e., blood) pressure generated in the prosoma (the part of the body connected to the legs) extends their legs outwards."

The authors had a hunch that if they could generate and control a force equivalent to blood pressure, they could make a dead spider's legs move in and out, allowing them to grip objects and release them again. So they killed a wolf spider "through exposure to freezing temperature (approximately -4C) for a period of 5-7 days" and then used a syringe to inject the spider's prosoma with glue. By leaving the syringe in place and pumping in or withdrawing glue, the researchers were able to make the spider's legs contract and grip. The article claims that's a vastly easier way to make a gripper than with conventional robotic techniques that require all sorts of tedious fabrication and design efforts. "The necrobotic gripper is capable of grasping objects with irregular geometries and up to 130 percent of its own mass," the article notes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Intel is slowly moving into the dedicated graphics market, and its graphics driver releases are looking a lot more like Nvidia's and AMD's than they used to. For its dedicated Arc GPUs and the architecturally similar integrated GPUs that ship with 11th- and 12th-generation Intel CPUs, the company promises monthly driver releases, along with "Day 0" drivers with specific fixes and performance enhancements for just-released games. At the same time, Intel's GPU driver updates are beginning to de-emphasize what used to be the company's bread and butter: low-end integrated GPUs. The company announced yesterday that it would be moving most of its integrated GPUs to a "legacy support model," which will provide quarterly updates to fix security issues and "critical" bugs but won't include the game-specific fixes that newer GPUs are getting.

The change affects a wide swath of GPUs, which are not all ancient history. Among others, the change affects all integrated GPUs in the following processor generations, from low-end unnumbered "HD/UHD graphics" to the faster Intel Iris-branded versions: 6th-generation Core (introduced 2015, codenamed Skylake), 7th-generation Core (introduced 2016, codenamed Kaby Lake), 8th-generation Core (introduced 2017-2018, codenamed Kaby Lake-R, Whiskey Lake, and Coffee Lake), 9th-generation Core (introduced 2018, codenamed Coffee Lake), 10th-generation Core (introduced 2019-2020, codenamed Comet Lake and Ice Lake), and various N4000, N5000, and N6000-series Celeron and Pentium CPUs (introduced 2017-2021, codenamed Gemini Lake, Elkhart Lake, and Jasper Lake).

Intel is still offering a single 1.1GB driver package that supports everything from its newest Iris Xe GPUs to Skylake-era integrated graphics. However, the install package now contains one driver for newer GPUs that are still getting new features and a second driver for older GPUs on the legacy support model. The company uses a similar approach for driver updates for its Wi-Fi adapters, including multiple driver versions in the same download package to support multiple generations of hardware. "The upshot is that these GPUs' drivers are about as fast and well-optimized as they're going to get, and the hardware isn't powerful enough to play many of the newer games that Intel provides fixes for in new GPU drivers anyway," writes Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham. "Practically speaking, losing out on a consistent stream of new gaming-centric driver updates is unlikely to impact the users of these GPUs much, especially since Intel will continue to fix problems as they occur."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Siemens and Philadelphia-based ConnectDER have partnered to debut a groundbreaking simple home EV charger connector. Previously, homeowners who wanted to install EV chargers might have had to spend thousands of dollars to modify their home's electrical panel. This new proprietary plug-in adapter will eliminate that cost and allow installation and connection in minutes. ConnectDER makes meter collars that are installed between the home's meter and the meter socket to create a single plug-and-play access point for distributed energy resources (DER) installation. In other words, the collars easily add new electrical service capacity for things like solar and energy storage. Now ConnectDER will exclusively manufacture and supply a proprietary plug-in EV charger adapter to Siemens.

The new adapter will enable electric car owners to charge their EVs by connecting chargers directly through the meter socket, which is on every home. It provides more useable capacity by monitoring total load and controlling the EV circuit to ensure the total capacity rating is within the limit. Bypassing the electrical panel reduces the EV charger installation cost by around 60 to 80% because electrical panel upgrades aren't needed. [...] Nearly half of US home electrical panels previously would have needed upgrades to allow the installation of a typical Level 2 charger, usually a 7-11kW device requiring 40-60 Amps on a 240V line. A Siemens spokesperson said that the company is still finalizing pricing, but "it will be a fraction of the cost of a service panel upgrade or other modifications often needed to make for a charger. Additionally, in some cases, the cost may be fully borne by utility programs."

The adapters themselves are expected to be available by first quarter 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Energy Department on Monday announced it intends to loan a joint venture of General Motors and LG Energy Solution $2.5 billion to help finance construction of new lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing facilities. The conditional commitment for the loan to Ultium Cells LLC for facilities in Ohio, Tennessee, and Michigan is expected to close in the coming months and comes from the government's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program, which has not funded a new loan since 2010. The plan, first reported by Reuters, would mark the Energy Department's first loan exclusively for a battery cell manufacturing project under the vehicle program.

The program previously provided low-cost government loans to Tesla, Ford and Nissan, which included some cell manufacturing. "We have to have vehicle manufacturing capacity but also battery manufacturing capacity," Jigar Shah, who directs the Energy Department loan program office, told Reuters in an interview. "This project provides one of the newest additions to battery manufacturing scale in this country." [...] Shah said the department has received more than $18 billion in loan requests from the auto program and expects at least another $5 billion in requests that are being actively prepared. "I do think there will more loans issued," Shah said, declining to offer a precise timeline. The program currently has $17.7 billion in lending authority available. Shah said "for motivated borrowers, they can close these loans rather quickly." Reuters notes that GM and LG are investing more than $7 billion via the venture. Production at its Ohio battery plant is expected to begin in August. Production is set to begin at its Tennessee plant in late 2023 and in Michigan in 2024.

The New York Times' product-recommendation service "Wirecutter" has sparked widening criticism about how laptops are reviewed. The technology/Apple blog Daring Fireball first complained that they "institutionally fetishize price over quality". That makes it all the more baffling that their recommended "Best Laptop" — not best Windows laptop, but best laptop, full stop — is a Dell XPS 13 that costs $1,340 but is slower and gets worse battery life (and has a lower-resolution display) than their "best Mac laptop", the $1,000 M1 MacBook Air.
Technically Dell's product won in a category titled "For most people: The best ultrabook" (and Wikipedia points out that ultrabook is, after all, "a marketing term, originated and trademarked by Intel.") But this leads blogger Jack Wellborn to an even larger question: why exactly do reviewers refuse to do a comparison between Wintel laptops and Apple's MacBooks? Is it that reviewers don't think they could fairly compare x86 and ARM laptops? It seems easy enough to me. Are they afraid that constantly showing MacBooks outperforming Wintel laptops will give the impression that they are in the bag for Apple? I don't see why. Facts are facts, and a lot of people need or want to buy a Windows laptop regardless. I can't help but wonder if, in the minds of many reviewers, MacBooks were PCs so long as they used Intel, and therefore they stopped being PCs once Apple switched to using their own silicon.
Saturday Daring Fireball responded with their own assessment. "Reviewers at ostensibly neutral publications are afraid that reiterating the plain truth about x86 vs. Apple silicon — that Apple silicon wins handily in both performance and efficiency — is not going to be popular with a large segment of their audience. Apple silicon is a profoundly inconvenient truth for many computer enthusiasts who do not like Macs, so they've gone into denial..."

Both bloggers cite as an example this review of Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go 2, which does begin by criticizing the device's old processor, its un-backlit keyboard, its small selection of ports, and its low-resolution touchscreen. But it ultimately concludes "Microsoft gets most of the important things right here, and there's no laptop in this price range that doesn't come with some kind of trade-off...." A crime of omission — or is the key phrase "in this price range"? (Which gets back to Daring Fireball's original complaint about "fetishizing price over quality.") Are Apple's new Silicon-powered laptops sometimes being left out of comparisons because they're more expensive?

In an update, Wellborn acknowledges that this alleged refusal-to-compare apparently actually precedes Apple's launch of its M1 chip. But he argues that now it's more important than ever to begin making those comparisons: It's a choice between a hot and noisy and/or slow PC laptop running Windows and a cool, silent, and fast MacBook. Most buyers don't know that choice now exists, and it's the reviewer's job to educate them. Excluding MacBooks from consideration does those buyers a considerable disservice.

"It appears that we need the First Law of Robotics NOW!" quips Slashdot reader Bruce66423.

Mint reports: During a tournament in Moscow, a chess-playing robot fractured a 7-year-old boy's finger when the youngster attempted a quick move without giving the device enough time to finish its task. On July 19, at the Moscow Chess Open competition, the incident took place. The youngster is fine, but one of his fingers has been broken, according to Sergey Smagin, vice president of the Russian Chess Federation, who spoke to state-run news organisation RIA Novosti.

The boy, Christopher, is one of the top 30 young chess players in Moscow, and he is just nine years old. In a nation where chess has essentially become a national obsession and source of pride, that makes him very good.
"The boy is all right," the VP of the Russian Chess Federation assured Russia's state-run news organization. "They put a plaster cast on the finger to heal faster."

"The robot broke the child's finger," Sergey Lazarev, Moscow Chess Federation President, told Tass news agency. "This is of course bad." The BBC reports: A video shared on social media shows the robot taking one of the boy's pieces. The boy then makes his own move, and the robot grabs his finger. Four adults rush to help the boy, who is eventually freed and ushered away.

Mr Lazarev said the machine had played many previous matches without incident.

The boy was able to finish the final days of the tournament in a cast, Tass reports.
From the Guardian: Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation, told Baza the robot appeared to pounce after it took one of the boy's pieces. Rather than waiting for the machine to complete its move, the boy opted for a quick riposte, he said. "There are certain safety rules and the child, apparently, violated them. When he made his move, he did not realise he first had to wait," Smagin said. "This is an extremely rare case, the first I can recall," he added.

Lazarev had a different account, saying the child had "made a move, and after that we need to give time for the robot to answer, but the boy hurried and the robot grabbed him". Either way, he said, the robot's suppliers were "going to have to think again"....

According to one 2015 study, one person is killed each year by an industrial robot in the US alone. Indeed, according to the US occupational safety administration, most occupational accidents since 2000 involving robots have been fatalities.
Reportedly the boy's parents have now contacted the public prosecutor's office.

"A Russian grandmaster, Sergey Karjakin, said the incident was no doubt due to 'some kind of software error or something.'"

"High water temperatures threaten to reduce France's already unusually low nuclear output," Reuters reported last week, "piling more pressure on operator EDF at a time when half its reactors are offline due to maintenance and corrosion issues."

Because river water is used to cool the plants, "reactor production is limited during times of high heat to prevent the hot water re-entering rivers from damaging wildlife."

"Given the relative rarity of intense heat waves and outages due to storms, the climate-related hiccups have a small impact on energy production overall — affecting less than 1 percent of annual output for EDF on average..." reports Wired. (Though EDF "recently told reporters that it expects more cuts in the coming months as water levels continue to fall.") But Reuters points out this all comes at a bad time: EDF has already been forced to cut planned output several times this year because of a host of problems at its reactors — and expects an 18.5 billion euros ($18.6 billion) hit to its 2022 core earnings because of production losses.
Now EDF's debt "is projected to reach 60 billion euros by the end of the year," reported Agence France-Presse on Tuesday, adding that the "highly indebted" utility saw announcements of a take-over bid by France's national government to shareholders (at a cost of 9.7 billion euros ($9.9 billion): EDF's finances have been weighed down by declining output from France's ageing nuclear power stations, which it manages, and the state-imposed policy to sell energy at below cost to consumers in an effort to help them pay their energy bills.... The public tender offer is the simplest way to take back full control of EDF, analysts said, without the need for full legal nationalisation — of which there has been none in France since 1981....

Currently over half of France's 56 nuclear reactors are idle, either for maintenance or corrosion problems linked to ageing.... Nuclear energy currently covers some 70 percent of France's electricity needs.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the story.

A long-awaited bill in the U.S. Congress proposes $79 billion (over 10 years) to boost U.S. semiconductor production, reports the Associated Press, "mostly as a result of new grants and tax breaks that would subsidize the cost that computer chip manufacturers incur when building or expanding chip plants in the United States."

But opposing the bill are 31 Republican senators — and democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders: Supporters say that countries all over the world are spending billons of dollars to lure chipmakers. The U.S. must do the same or risk losing a secure supply of the semiconductors that power the nation's automobiles, computers, appliances and some of the military's most advanced weapons systems. Sanders (Independent — Vermont), and a wide range of conservative lawmakers, think tanks and media outlets have a different take. To them, it's "corporate welfare...."

"Not too many people that I can recall — I have been all over this country — say: 'Bernie, you go back there and you get the job done, and you give enormously profitable corporations, which pay outrageous compensation packages to their CEOs, billions and billions of dollars in corporate welfare,'" Sanders said.

Senator Mitt Romney (Republican — Utah), is among the likely Republican supporters. Asked about the Sanders' argument against the bill, Romney said that when other countries subsidize the manufacturing of high technology chips, the U.S. must join the club. "If you don't play like they play, then you are not going to be manufacturing high technology chips, and they are essential for our national defense as well as our economy," Romney said....

"My fear is that more and more companies will locate their manufacturing facilities in other countries and that we will be increasingly vulnerable," said Senator Susan Collin (Republican — Maine).
The bill's supporters remain confident it will pass the U.S. Senate, but then "the window for passing the bill through the House is narrow if progressives join with Sanders and if most Republicans line up in opposition based on fiscal concerns.

"The White House says the bill needs to pass by the end of the month because companies are making decisions now about where to build."

Long-time Slashdot reader Bodhammer shared this story of a remarkable solar-powered tower that produces carbon-neutral, sustainable versions of diesel and jet fuel — using only water and carbon dioxide (plus sunlight) as its inputs. One hundred and sixty-nine sun-tracking reflector panels, each presenting three square meters (~32 sq ft) of surface area, redirect sunlight into a 16-cm (6.3-in) hole in the solar reactor at the top of the 15-m-tall (49-ft) central tower. This reactor receives an average of about 2,500 suns' worth of energy — about 50 kW of solar thermal power.

This heat is used to drive a two-step thermochemical redox cycle. Water and pure carbon dioxide are fed in to a ceria-based redox reaction, which converts them simultaneously into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, or syngas. Because this is all being done in a single chamber, it's possible to tweak the rates of water and CO2 to live-manage the exact composition of the syngas. This syngas is fed to a Gas-to-Liquid (GtL) unit at the bottom of the tower, which produced a liquid phase containing 16% kerosene and 40% diesel, as well as a wax phase with 7% kerosene and 40% diesel — proving that the ceria-based ceramic solar reactor definitely produced syngas pure enough for conversion into synthetic fuels....

The team says the system's overall efficiency (measured by the energy content of the syngas as a percentage of the total solar energy input) was only around 4% in this implementation, but it sees pathways to getting that up over 20% by recovering and recycling more heat, and altering the structure of the ceria structure. "We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system," said ETH Professor Aldo Steinfeld, the corresponding author of the research paper. "This solar tower fuel plant was operated with a setup relevant to industrial implementation, setting a technological milestone towards the production of sustainable aviation fuels."

"The solar tower fuel plant described here represents a viable pathway to global-scale implementation of solar fuel production," reads the study.

"Record-breaking heat across Texas has pushed its fragile power grid to the brink," reports NBC News. "But extreme temperatures are doing something else in the famously pro-business state: stirring opposition to energy-guzzling crypto miners who've flocked there seeking low-cost energy and a deregulatory stance."

Ten industrial-scale crypto miners will consume an estimated 18 gigawatts in years to come — though the state's current capacity is around 80 gigawatts (though it's expected to grow).

The case against them? The energy crypto miners use puts "an almost unprecedented burden" on the Texas grid, according to Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of Grid Edge, a unit of Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting firm. Mining "pushes the system closer to dangerous system peaks at all times," he told NBC News. "It is completely inessential and consuming physical resources, time and money that should be going to decarbonize and strengthen the grid...."

Unlike other electricity systems, the Texas grid does not connect to other states' grids; that means it cannot receive power from other areas in emergencies. Because of their high demand for electricity, crypto miners raise costs for other consumers of power, Hertz-Shargel said. And, on the Texas grid, miners can get paid for powering down during peak demand periods, like the one that recently hit the state. Miners and other industrial customers with these types of arrangements receive revenues for not using electricity; the costs of those revenues are passed on to other electricity customers.... During peak periods, miners can also resell to the grid the electricity they would otherwise have used. Because their contracts can let them buy power at low cost, energy resales when demand is high can generate significant financial benefits in the form of credits against future use....

Electricity customers across the state will cover those credits, said Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. "Ratepayers in Texas are going to be paying it off a little bit every month for decades," Dessler said. "It angers me so much."
But Lee Bratcher, founder of the Texas Blockchain Council, makes the case for industrial-scale bitcoin mines: Bratcher and the crypto miners he represents say they provide three benefits to Texas. Because they can turn off their electricity use during high-demand periods, they can help stabilize the grid and rein in runaway power prices. "Power pricing is set off at peaks and the miners are specifically trying to turn off during peaks," he said. In addition, crypto miners' 24/7 demand for electricity can provide an incentive for wind and solar developers to bring more green power to the grid while new jobs and tax revenues "lead to orders of magnitude of human flourishing in communities where the mines set up," Bratcher said.
Still, 800 locals have signed a petition against plans to built America's largest bitcoin-mining facility — a facility which will consume 1.4 million gallons of water a day and 1 gigawatt of electricity (enough to power 200,000 homes). Jackie Sawicky, a small-business owner, is organizing the opposition to the Riot facility. "There are over 7,000 people in poverty and 8,000 seniors living on fixed incomes here," she told NBC News. "We cannot afford increased water costs and electricity."

According to a 2020 economic impact report commissioned by the Rockdale Municipal Development District, an entity run by area businesspeople, the facility will deliver an estimated $28.5 million in economic benefits to the community over 10 years. The operation employs "nearly 200 full-time benefited employees..."