"Practical nuclear fusion is, famously, always 10 years in the future," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Except that the Pentagon recently gave an award to a tiny startup to launch a fusion power system into space in just five..." Avalanche Energy Designs, based near a Boeing facility in Seattle...is working on modular "micro fusion packs," small enough to hold in your hand yet capable of powering everything from electric cars to spaceships. Last month, the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) announced it had awarded Avalanche an unspecified sum to develop its Orbitron fusion device to generate either heat or electricity, with the aim of powering a high-efficiency propulsion system aboard a prototype satellite in 2027....

Avalanche's Orbitron... could theoretically fit on a tabletop. It relies on the Ph.D. thesis of Tom McGuire, a student working on inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion at MIT in 2007... McGuire's IEC work languished until it caught the attention of two engineers working at Blue Origin: Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan. In 2018, they formed Avalanche Energy as a side hustle, eventually leaving Blue Origin in the summer of 2021. In March of this year Avalanche emerged from stealth with $5 million in venture-capital funding and a staff of 10, although Avalanche's official address is still a single-family home in Seattle.

Avalanche's website proudly proclaims: "We see our fusion power packs as the foundation for creating a world with abundant clean water, healthy oceans, vast rain forests, and immense glaciers in healthy equilibrium." A patent application filed by Langtry and Riordan contains some details of how their Orbitron may function. It describes an orbital containment system on the order of tens of centimeters in size, where a beam of fuel ions interacts with an electrostatic field to enter an elliptical orbit about an inner electrode. The application describes a system where ions last for a second or more — 10 times as long as in McGuire's simulations, and long enough for each ion to complete millions of orbits in the reactor. An article in GeekWire published as Avalanche exited stealth mode included a claim that the company had already produced neutrons via fusion.

Avalanche envisages small fusion packs with 5- to 15-kilowatt capacity, operating either on their own or grouped by the hundreds for megawatt-scale clean-energy solutions. The Pentagon is interested in the packs to potentially enable small spacecraft to maneuver freely in deep space, with higher power payloads.

The challenge now is for Avalanche to move from a 15-year old Ph.D. thesis in simulation to a working prototype in space, in just 60 months.

"While silicon-based solar cells dominate the photovoltaics market, silicon is far from the only material that can effectively harvest electricity from sunlight," notes Ars Technica: Thin-film solar cells using cadmium and telluride are common in utility-scale solar deployments, and in space, we use high-efficiency cells that rely on three distinct materials to harvest different parts of the spectrum. Another class of materials, which we're currently not using, has been the subject of extensive research: perovskites. These materials are cheap and incredibly easy to process into a functional solar cell. The reason they're not used is that they tend to degrade when placed in sunlight, limiting their utility to a few years. That has drawn the attention of the research community, which has been experimenting with ways to keep them stable for longer.

In Thursday's edition of Science, a research team from Princeton described how they've structured a perovskite material to limit the main mechanism by which it decays, resulting in a solar cell with a lifetime similar to that of silicon. While the perovskite cell isn't as efficient as what is currently on the market, a similar structure might work to preserve related materials that have higher efficiencies.
Their research involved a capping layer that's just a few atoms thick, according to an announcement from Princeton University, calling the resulting solar cell "a major milestone for an emerging class of renewable energy technology... the first of its kind to rival the performance of silicon-based cells, which have dominated the market since their introduction in 1954..."

"The team projects their device can perform above industry standards for around 30 years, far more than the 20 years used as a threshold for viability for solar cells." Perovskites can be manufactured at room temperature, using much less energy than silicon, making them cheaper and more sustainable to produce. And whereas silicon is stiff and opaque, perovskites can be made flexible and transparent, extending solar power well beyond the iconic panels that populate hillsides and rooftops across America....

[Engineering professor/team lead] Loo said it's not that perovskite solar cells will replace silicon devices so much that the new technology will complement the old, making solar panels even cheaper, more efficient and more durable than they are now, and expanding solar energy into untold new areas of modern life. For example, Loo's group recently demonstrated a completely transparent perovskite film (having different chemistry) that can turn windows into energy producing devices without changing their appearance. Other groups have found ways to print photovoltaic inks using perovskites, allowing formfactors scientists are only now dreaming up.

IEEE Spectrum reports: For decades, hopeful techies have been promising a world where absolutely every object you encounter — bandages, bottles, bananas — will have some kind of smarts thanks to supercheap programmable plastic processors. If you've been wondering why that hasn't happened yet, it's that nobody has built working processors that can be made in the billions for less than a penny each.... The problem, according to engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at British flexible-electronics manufacture PragmatIC Semiconductor, is that even the simplest industry-standard microcontrollers are too complex to make on plastic in bulk.

In research to be presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture later this month, the transatlantic team presents a simple yet fully functional plastic processor that could be made at sub-penny prices. The Illinois team designed 4-bit and 8-bit processors specifically to minimize size and maximize the percentage of working integrated circuits produced. Eighty-one percent of the 4-bit version worked, and that's a good enough yield, says team leader Rakesh Kumar, to breach the one-penny barrier.

"Flexible electronics has been niche for decades," says Kumar. He adds that this yield study shows "that they may be ready for the mainstream."
Thanks to Slashdot reader Iamthecheese for sharing the article

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: [T]he world is now one step closer to seeing operational space-based solar energy as scientists from China's Xidian University completed testing and inspection on a ground array built to collect space-based solar power. They conducted a successful test of the "world's first full-link and full-system solar power plant" on June 5, according to a press statement from the university. The space-based solar power plant is a 246-feet-tall (75 meters) steel tower built on Xidian University's southern campus.

In theory, the Xidian University power plant will connect to orbital satellites that will harvest solar power 24/7 due to their geostationary orbits, before beaming that energy down to Earth via high-frequency microwave beams. The power plant will feature five different subsystems aimed at developing space-based solar power arrays. Space-based solar power has great potential as it can collect energy continuously while sidestepping common problems such as bad weather and waiting for daybreak. However, hurdles do remain, such as assessing the effects of a high-frequency energy beam on communications, air traffic, and the well-being of nearby residents.

Xidian University's new ground station is part of a space-based solar power proposal called OMEGA, which stands for Orb-Shape Membrane Energy Gathering Array. The project was first proposed in 2014 by Duan Baoyan from the Xidian University School of Electromechanical Engineering and his colleagues. [...] China's OMEGA project, meanwhile, has successfully transmitted energy wirelessly as microwaves over a distance of approximately 180 feet (55 meters). This capability puts the project three years ahead of its original schedule, the university says in its press release. Still, Baoyan concedes that a lot of work is still required, and fully operational space-based solar power could still be years away.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The memory of "Batterygate" continues to be a thorn in Apple's side. In case you need a reminder, "Batterygate" refers to a 2016/17 scandal where Apple added an undocumented battery throttling capabilities to iOS 10.2.1 designed to slow the performance of the iPhone if the battery was deemed to be worn. It also came with unexpected side effects, causing handsets to reboot in cold weather or when the battery's charge level was low. The feature was initially rolled out to iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, and iPhone SE and later expanded to include the iPhone 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X models.

This latest UK-based multimillion-pound legal claim has been launched by Justin Gutmann, a consumer rights campaigner, and alleges that Apple deliberately misled users, and rather than roll out a battery recall or replacement program; the company instead pushed out this feature to cover up the fact that older iPhone batteries were not able to cope with the new power demands put on them.

Apple did eventually roll out a $29 battery replacement program, a program that saw the company carry out 11 million battery replacements in 2018, compared to the 1 to 2 million that would normally be carried out in a year. This resulted in Apple issuing a profit warning in January 2019, the company's first since 2002. If Apple loses, the company could be forced to pay damages of more than $950m to the 25 million people who purchased affected iPhones. Following the US settlement in March 2020, Apple agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over the same issue, paying out $25 per iPhone, with the total capped at $310m. "We have never -- and would never -- do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades," Apple said in a statement on Thursday. "Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that."

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. today officially introduced its N2 (2nm class) manufacturing technology, its first node that will use gate-all-around field-effect transistors (GAAFETs), at its 2022 TSMC Technology Symposium. From a report: The new fabrication process will offer a full-now performance and power benefits, but when it comes to transistor density, it will barely impress in 2025 when it comes online. Being an all-new process technology platform, TSMC's N2 brings in two essential innovations: nanosheet transistors (which is what TSMC calls its GAAFETs) and backside power rail that both serve the same goal of increasing performance-per-watt characteristics of the node. GAA nanosheet transistors feature channels surrounded by gates on all four sides, which reduces leakage; furthermore, their channels can be widened to increase drive current and boost performance or shrunken to minimize power consumption and cost. To feed these nanosheet transistors with enough power and now waste any of it, TSMC's N2 uses backside power delivery, which the foundry considers to be among the best solutions to fight resistances in the back-end-of-line (BEOL).

Indeed, when it comes to performance and power consumption, TSMC's nanosheet-based N2 node can boast of a 10% to 15% higher performance at the same power and complexity as well as a 25% to 30% lower power consumption at the same frequency and transistor count when compared to TSMC's N3E. However, the new node increases chip density by only around 1.1X compared to N3E. In general, TSMC's N3 does offer full-node performance increases and power consumption reductions. But density-wise, the new technology can hardly impress. For example, TSMC's N3E node offers a 1.3X chip density increase over N5, which is a substantial increase.

Jakub Kaminski is a robotics engineering graduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. With some volunteers he spent two months designing the perfect tourniquet for the battlefields of Ukraine, designed meet the highest medical standards — and then uploaded it to 3DPrintingForUkraine.com.

Now in less than 8 weeks "around 120 individuals and companies worldwide with 3D printers have accessed the design," reports the Washington Post. [Alternate URL here] "Together, they have made roughly 5,000 reusable tourniquets that are bound for Ukraine, where they will be stitched and sent off to the battlefield, Kaminski said..." Using digital files, people are designing supplies such as bandages, tourniquets, splints and add-ons to AK-47 guns.... [In February, as Russia began its invasion] people in the 3D-printing community talked with Ukrainian military officials, hospital administrators and charity organizations, trying to gauge what they could print quickly that would be most helpful. Tourniquets and bandages were repeated requests. Mykhailo Shulhan, the chief operating officer of a Ukrainian 3D-printing company in Lviv, said that as soon as the invasion began, he started researching how 3D printers helped in other conflicts....

These days, his company, 3D Tech Addtive, develops and prints an array of weapons accessories: AK-47 holsters so soldiers have a way to rest their guns; bullet magazines since empty cartridges often get thrown away instead of reused; carrying bags for grenades; and most recently, anti-reflective lenses for sniper scopes to reduce glare and prevent Ukrainian snipers from being seen. (All together, they have provided over 5,000 components to the front lines, Shulhan estimated....)

While most 3D printers create supplies to stop death or ease fighting conditions, others are focusing on rehabilitating soldiers. Brett Carey, a physical therapist in Hawaii, designs 3D printed splints that can be sent to fighters... Carey has created two digital designs for splints that have been uploaded online and 3D printed over 1,500 times. If injuries are advanced, he has people send him images of their injuries using EM3D — a 3D imaging app — which allows him to make a custom made splint which is then shipped to Ukraine...
The Post also got this quote from the robotics engineering student whose team designed the tourniquets.

"It's a beautiful thing," he said. "If you make people in Ukraine feel better, and enable people to help. ... This is something really special."

It's Warren Buffett versus Google, Facebook and Microsoft, according to a recent article by Bloomberg. (Alternate URL here.) Google, Facebook and Microsoft Corp. — three of the world's biggest corporate buyers of clean power — are sounding the alarm that a nearly $4-billion, Warren Buffett-backed renewable-energy project proposed in Iowa isn't necessarily in the best interest of customers, including them.

If approved, it would be the largest complex of wind farms in the entire country when it comes online by the end of 2024, producing enough electricity for more than 700,000 homes. MidAmerican Energy, a utility owned by Buffett conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has asked state regulators to approve terms including a guaranteed 11.25% rate of return before starting construction on a project it says will help in its efforts to trim carbon emissions by 75% compared to 2005 levels. But the big-name tech giants that operate data centers in the state warn the project, dubbed Wind Prime, could drive up electricity costs. MidAmerican, they say, should consider alternatives....

The fight is an important one to watch because it demonstrates the increasing influence technology giants have on the energy transition. Tech companies have pushed utilities in other parts of the U.S. to offer more clean energy options as they seek to clean up the sources of power for their energy-intensive operations. And since they buy so much power, the utilities often listen to them....

Facebook, which also buys large amounts of power to run data centers in Iowa, referred to the proposed project in a joint regulatory filing with Google as an "exceedingly costly, massive increase in generation that MidAmerican has not demonstrated is necessary." Last month, Microsoft filed its own petition with the Iowa Utilities Board saying it planned to join the tech-customer coalition.
Facebook and Google specifically complain that "Without a resource planning analysis, it is difficult if not impossible to assess all feasible alternatives to replace/expand existing generation capacity and which alternatives are a reasonable, cost-effective way to meet reliability requirements, forecasted customer need, a diversified fuel mix, and the like, or if it is simply being proposed to drive utility — or parent company — profitability....

"Wind Prime is an exceedingly costly, massive increase in generation that MidAmerican has not demonstrated is necessary or reasonable in light of other feasible alternatives. Before customers are forced to bear the increased costs that this project will result in, Wind Prime should be carefully considered by the Board through a complete record informed by a full and thorough discovery process."

Slashdot reader MojoKid writes: AMD unveiled new details of its technology roadmap Thursday at its 2022 Financial Analyst Day. Chief among them were disclosures on the company's next-gen RDNA 3 GPU architecture, Zen 4 CPU architecture and Phoenix Point laptop SoC. AMD's new RDNA 3 GPU architecture for Radeon graphic cards and mobile will be a chiplet-based design, much like the company's Ryzen CPU offering. AMD also confirmed that RDNA 3 GPUs would be fabricated on a 5nm process, likely TSMC N5. The company continued to note that an "optimized graphics pipeline" will enable yet higher clock rates, while the GPU's "rearchitected compute unit" will have ray-tracing performance improvements over RDNA 2 as well. AMD says that RDNA 3 GPUs are coming later this year, with RDNA 4 arriving likely in late 2023.

Meanwhile, AMD's Zen 4 is set to be the "world's first 5nm CPU," arriving later this year with an 8 to 10 percent instructrions per clock lift and greater than 15 percent single-threaded performance gain. Zen 4 will also support DDR5, AVX-512 extensions for AI workloads and a massive 125 percent increase in memory bandwidth. AMD is claiming a 35% multithreaded performance lift for Zen 4.

And, its Phoenix Point laptop platform SoC will be both Zen 4 and RNDA 3 infused. This is a first for AMD, since typically its laptop product's integrated graphics trail the company's current-gen GPU architecture by at least a generation. Phoenix point is set to arrive likely in the first half of 2023.

General Motors couldn't produce the component it needed for its 2022 SUV, the Chevrolet Tahoe, reports CNET. So the company's engineers "turned to a novel solution: 3D printing..." GM made a major investment in the tech in 2020, dedicating 15,000 square feet of space to a facility dubbed the Additive Industralization Center, then filling it with HP Multi Jet Fusion 3D printers, among others.... A year later, GM's big investment paid off. Chevrolet engineers made a late change to the 2022 Tahoe's design, necessitating the creation of an additional part: A new, flexible "spoiler closeout seal" fills a gap at the rear of the big SUV. Developing the tooling to injection-mold the things would have taken too long, delaying the delivery of 30,000 vehicles.

Enter 3D printing. Engineers were able to quickly design and print the components using a flexible material that met GM's criteria. They even used a process called vapor polishing to give the parts a perfect shine... Since each Tahoe requires two seals, Chevrolet needed a whopping 60,000 of them. From design to completion took just five weeks. That's less than half the time going the injection-molding route would have taken, which got all those SUVs out the door on time.
CNET calls it "almost certainly the largest deployment of additive tech in a production car" — and "an interesting preview of what's to come."

"Power-hungry, fossil-fuel dependent Japan has successfully tested a system that could provide a constant, steady form of renewable energy, regardless of the wind or the sun," reports Bloomberg: For more than a decade, Japanese heavy machinery maker IHI Corp. has been developing a subsea turbine that harnesses the energy in deep ocean currents and converts it into a steady and reliable source of electricity.... Called Kairyu, the 330-ton prototype is designed to be anchored to the sea floor at a depth of 30-50 meters (100-160 feet).

In commercial production, the plan is to site the turbines in the Kuroshio Current, one of the world's strongest, which runs along Japan's eastern coast, and transmit the power via seabed cables.... Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) estimates the Kuroshio Current could potentially generate as much as 200 gigawatts — about 60% of Japan's present generating capacity....

Japan is already the world's third largest generator of solar power and is investing heavily in offshore wind, but harnessing ocean currents could provide the reliable baseline power needed to reduce the need for energy storage or fossil fuels.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article!

"Researchers at MIT have discovered an unfixable vulnerability in Apple Silicon that could allow attackers to bypass a chip's 'last line of defense'," writes the Apple Insider blog, "but most Mac users shouldn't be worried." More specifically, the team at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory found that Apple's implementation of pointer authentication in the M1 system-on-chip can be overcome with a specific hardware attack they've dubbed "PACMAN." Pointer authentication is a security mechanism in Apple Silicon that makes it more difficult for attackers to modify pointers in memory. By checking for unexpected changes in pointers, the mechanism can help defend a CPU if attackers gain memory access.... The flaw comes into play when an attacker successfully guesses the value of a pointer authentication code and disables it.

The researchers found that they could use a side-channel attack to brute-force the code. PACMAN echoes similar speculative execution attacks like Spectre and Meltdown, which also leveraged microarchitectural side channels. Because it's a flaw in the hardware, it can't be fixed with a software patch.

[A]ctually carrying out the PACMAN attack requires physical access to a device, meaning the average Mac user isn't going to be at risk of exploit. The flaw affects all kinds of ARM-based chips — not just Apple's. The vulnerability is more of a technological demonstration of a wider issue with pointer authentication in ARM chips, rather than an issue that could lead to your Mac getting hacked.
MIT has made more information available at the site PACMANattack.com — including answers to frequently asked questions. Q: Is PACMAN being used in the wild?
A: No.
Q: Does PACMAN have a logo?
A: Yeah!
The MIT team says their discovery represents "a new way of thinking about how threat models converge in the Spectre era." But even then, MIT's announcement warns the flaw "isn't a magic bypass for all security on the M1 chip." PACMAN can only take an existing bug that pointer authentication protects against, and unleash that bug's true potential for use in an attack by finding the correct PAC. There's no cause for immediate alarm, the scientists say, as PACMAN cannot compromise a system without an existing software bug....

The team showed that the PACMAN attack even works against the kernel, which has "massive implications for future security work on all ARM systems with pointer authentication enabled," says Ravichandran. "Future CPU designers should take care to consider this attack when building the secure systems of tomorrow. Developers should take care to not solely rely on pointer authentication to protect their software."
TechCrunch obtained a comment from Apple: Apple spokesperson Scott Radcliffe provided the following: "We want to thank the researchers for their collaboration as this proof of concept advances our understanding of these techniques. Based on our analysis as well as the details shared with us by the researchers, we have concluded this issue does not pose an immediate risk to our users and is insufficient to bypass operating system security protections on its own."

Apple's M1 chips have an "unpatchable" hardware vulnerability that could allow attackers to break through its last line of security defenses, MIT researchers have discovered. TechCrunch reports: The vulnerability lies in a hardware-level security mechanism utilized in Apple M1 chips called pointer authentication codes, or PAC. This feature makes it much harder for an attacker to inject malicious code into a device's memory and provides a level of defense against buffer overflow exploits, a type of attack that forces memory to spill out to other locations on the chip. Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, however, have created a novel hardware attack, which combines memory corruption and speculative execution attacks to sidestep the security feature. The attack shows that pointer authentication can be defeated without leaving a trace, and as it utilizes a hardware mechanism, no software patch can fix it.

The attack, appropriately called "Pacman," works by "guessing" a pointer authentication code (PAC), a cryptographic signature that confirms that an app hasn't been maliciously altered. This is done using speculative execution -- a technique used by modern computer processors to speed up performance by speculatively guessing various lines of computation -- to leak PAC verification results, while a hardware side-channel reveals whether or not the guess was correct. What's more, since there are only so many possible values for the PAC, the researchers found that it's possible to try them all to find the right one.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Robots can now be covered in living skin grown from real human cells to make them look more like us. As robots increasingly take on roles as nurses, care workers, teachers and other jobs that involve close personal contact, it is important to make them look more human so we feel comfortable interacting with them, says Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo in Japan. At the moment, robots are sometimes coated in silicone rubber to give them a fleshy appearance, but the rubber lacks the texture of human skin, he says.

To make more realistic-looking skin, Takeuchi and his colleagues bathed a plastic robot finger in a soup of collagen and human skin cells called fibroblasts for three days. The collagen and fibroblasts adhered to the finger and formed a layer similar to the dermis, which is the second-from-top layer of human skin. Next, they gently poured other human skin cells called keratinocytes onto the finger to recreate the upper layer of human skin, called the epidermis. The resulting 1.5-millimeter-thick skin was able to stretch and contract as the finger bent backwards and forwards. As it did this, it wrinkled like normal skin, says Takeuchi. "It is much more realistic than silicone."

The robot skin could also be healed when it was cut by grafting a collagen sheet onto the wound. However, the skin began to dry out after a while since it didn't have blood vessels to replenish it with moisture. In the future, it may be possible to incorporate artificial blood vessels into the skin to keep it hydrated, as well as sweat glands and hair follicles to make it more realistic, says Takeuchi. It should also be possible to make different skin colors by adding melanocytes, he says. The researchers now plan to try coating a whole robot in the living skin. The research has been published in the journal Matter.

Developer James Brown created a custom LEGO computer terminal brick, complete with "an actual processor and a working screen to help bring the fictional computer to reality," reports Tom's Hardware. From the report: The iconic computer terminal brick it's based off of is made using the 2 x 2 slope brick. James has created this one entirely from scratch with the help of a 3D printer and an ARM-based microcontroller. It powers up and features screen animations that look like lines of terminal code scrolling by as well as a loading animation. The screen used inside this custom LEGO is super tiny -- less than half an inch across -- and Brown appears to have ordered tons of these things. Just last month, he used a handful of them to create a custom mechanical keyboard on which each key has its own OLED display. The keyboard can be programmed with a demo video showing the letters changing from lowercase to capital on the fly.

Rather than using a Raspberry Pi to power the tiny terminal, Brown had a custom PCB printed just for the project using a different ARM-based chip. On this board is an STM32F030F4P6TR -- an ARM Cortex M0 series microcontroller with a 32-bit single core and 16KB of flash. An RP2040 SoC could be used in its place, should you wish to spin your own PCB. It's connected to a .42-inch OLED display which has a resolution of 72 x 40px. Brown explains that it gets power from an old LEGO 9V system that uses conductive strips inside the studs.

Instead of taking apart an existing brick, Brown opted to design one from scratch. This process involved 3D-printing a mold in which he could cast the brick with the electronic components fit inside. The final product is a semi-translucent blue brick that illuminates with the light from the OLED display.

Meta plans to stop making consumer versions of its Portal video calling hardware and instead pivot the product line to focus on use cases for businesses, like conference calling. The Verge reports: The change in strategy, first reported by The Information and confirmed to The Verge by a source familiar with the matter, comes as Meta is reassessing its ambitious hardware plans against investor concerns about the billions of dollars it's spending on projects that have yet to pay off financially.

The Portal line debuted in 2018 with two displays meant as dedicated video calling stations. [...] New versions have been released in the time since, including the portable Portal Go, but the device never became a huge hit. The research firm IDC estimates that Meta shipped 800,000 Portals in 2021, accounting for less than 1 percent of the global smart speaker and display market, according to The Information. Meta currently sells four Portal products, from a $99 TV-connected camera to a $349 smart display.

The Biden administration on Thursday pledged to have 500,000 public charging stations for electric vehicles in place by 2030. "The proposed standards, which will be published next week in the Federal Register, dictate that a charging station be located every 50 miles along the interstate and no more than a mile off the highway," reports USA Today. "Stations would be required to maintain a minimum number and type of chargers capable of serving multiple customers." From the report: Stations would be prohibited from requiring drivers to have a membership or be part of a club to use their chargers. Real-time information on pricing and location would have to be available to help motorists using a GPS app better plan their trip. The Federal Highway Administration's proposed standards will apply to federally funded charging stations in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The goal is to ensure a seamless system of charging stations that can be used by motorists no matter what car they drive, where they live or how they pay. [...] The administration is providing more than $5 billion to states over the next five years to build a network of charging stations along the nation's interstates.

A recent executive brief from data storage industry analyst firm Trendfocus reports that OEMs have disclosed that Microsoft is pushing them to drop HDDs as the primary storage device in pre-built Windows 11 PCs and use SSDs instead, with the current deadlines for the switchover set for 2023. Tom's Hardware reports: Interestingly, these actions from Microsoft come without any firm SSD requirement listed for Windows 11 PCs, and OEMs have pushed back on the deadlines. [...] Microsoft's most current(opens in new tab) list of hardware requirements calls for a '64 GB or larger storage device' for Windows 11, so an SSD isn't a minimum requirement for a standard install. However, Microsoft stipulates that two features, DirectStorage and the Windows Subsystem for Android(opens in new tab), require an SSD, but you don't have to use those features. It is unclear whether or not Microsoft plans to change the minimum specifications for Windows 11 PCs after the 2023 switchover to SSDs for pre-built systems.

As always, the issue with switching all systems to SSDs boils down to cost: Trendfocus Vice President John Chen tells us that replacing a 1TB HDD requires stepping down to a low-cost 256 GB SSD, which OEMs don't consider to be enough capacity for most users. Conversely, stepping up to a 512 GB SSD would 'break the budget' for lower-end machines with a strict price limit. "The original cut-in date based on our discussions with OEMs was to be this year, but it has been pushed out to sometime next year (the second half, I believe, but not clear on the firm date)," Chen told Tom's Hardware. "OEMs are trying to negotiate some level of push out (emerging market transition in 2024, or desktop transition in 2024), but things are still in flux."

The majority of PCs in developed markets have already transitioned to SSDs for boot drives, but there are exceptions. Chen notes that it is possible that Microsoft could make some exceptions, but the firm predicts that dual-drive desktop PCs and gaming laptops with both an SSD for the boot drive and an HDD for bulk storage will be the only mass-market PCs with an HDD. [...] It's unclear what measures, if any, Microsoft would take with OEMs if they don't comply with its wishes, and the company has decided not to comment on the matter. Trendfocus says the switchover will have implications for HDD demand next year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Solid Power, a Colorado-based battery developer, moved one step closer to producing solid-state batteries for electric vehicles on Monday. The company has completed an automated "EV cell pilot line" with the capacity to make around 15,000 cells per year, which will be used first by Solid Power and then by its OEM partners for testing. "The installation of this EV cell pilot line will allow us to produce EV-scale cells suitable for initiating the formal automotive qualification process. Over the coming quarters, we will work to bring the EV cell pilot line up to its full operational capability and look forward to delivering EV-scale all-solid-state cells to our partners later this year," said Solid Power CEO Doug Campbell.

Solid-state batteries differ from the lithium-ion batteries currently used in EVs in that they replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid layer between the anode and cathode. It's an attractive technology for multiple reasons: Solid-state cells should have a higher energy density, they should be able to charge more quickly, and they should be safer, as they're nonflammable (which should further reduce the pack density and weight, as it will need less-robust protection). It's one of those technologies that to a very casual observer is perennially five years away, but in Europe there are already operational Mercedes-Benz eCitaro buses with solid-state packs.

The tech is taking a little longer to get ready for passenger EVs, but it does appear to be maturing. Solid Power is one of the leading solid-state battery developers, having been established in 2012. Its approach is to use a sulfur-based solid electrolyte and an anode that's very high in silicon -- more than 50 percent, according to Solid Power. [...] This new line is designed to produce the same sized large-format pouch cells currently used by automotive OEMs in their EVs, with cell capacities ranging from 60-100 Ah. BMW and Ford will be the first carmakers to receive cells for testing by the end of this year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: President Joe Biden ordered emergency measures Monday to boost crucial supplies to U.S. solar manufacturers and declared a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Southeast Asia as he attempted to jumpstart progress toward his climate change-fighting goals. His invoking of the Defense Production Act and other executive actions comes amid complaints by industry groups that the solar sector is being slowed by supply chain problems due to a Commerce Department inquiry into possible trade violations involving Chinese products. The Commerce Department announced in March that it was scrutinizing imports of solar panels from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia, concerned that products from those countries are skirting U.S. anti-dumping rules that limit imports from China.

White House officials said Biden's actions aim to increase domestic production of solar panel parts, building installation materials, high-efficiency heat pumps and other components including cells used for clean-energy generated fuels. They called the tariff suspension affecting imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia a bridge measure while other efforts increase domestic solar power production -- even as the administration remains supportive of U.S. trade laws and the Commerce Department investigation. [...]

The use of executive action comes as the Biden administration's clean energy tax cuts, and other major proposals meant to encourage domestic green energy production, have stalled in Congress. The Defense Production Act lets the federal government direct manufacturing production for national defense and has become a tool used more commonly by presidents in recent years. The Trump administration used it to produce medical equipment and supplies during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden invoked its authority in April to boost production of lithium and other minerals used to power electric vehicles.