Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this article from Science magazine: Robots can be programmed to lift a car and even help perform some surgeries, but when it comes to picking up an object they have not touched before, such as an egg, they often fail miserably. Now, engineers have come up with an artificial fingertip that overcomes that limitation. The advance enables machines to sense the textures of these surfaces a lot like a human fingertip does....

[W]hen researchers at the University of Bristol began designing an artificial fingertip in 2009, they used human skin as a guide. Their first fingertip — assembled by hand — was about the size of a soda can. By 2018, they had switched to 3D printing. That made it possible to make the tip and all its components about the size of an adult's big toe and more easily create a series of layers approximating the multilayered structure of human skin. More recently, the scientists have incorporated neural networks into the fingertip, which they call TacTip. The neural networks help a robot quickly process what it's sensing and react accordingly — seemingly just like a real finger.

In our fingertips, a layer of nerve endings deforms when skin contacts an object and tells the brain what's happening. These nerves send "fast" signals to help us avoid dropping something and "slow" signals to convey an object's shape. TacTip's equivalent signals come from an array of pinlike projections underneath a rubbery surface layer that move when the surface is touched. The array's pins are like a hairbrush's bristles: stiff but bendable. Beneath that array is, among other things, a camera that detects when and how the pins move. The amount of bending of the pins provides the slow signal and the speed of bending provides the fast signal. The neural network translates those signals into the fingertip's actions, making it grip more tightly for example, or adjust the angle of the fingertip....

In a second project, Lepora's team added more pins and a microphone to TacTip. The microphone mimics another set of nerve endings deep within our skin that sense vibrations felt as we run our fingers across a surface. These nerve endings enhance our ability to feel how rough a surface is. The microphone did likewise when the researchers tested the enhanced fingertip's ability to differentiate among 13 fabrics.
The article points out that in testing, the artificial fingertip's output "closely matched the neuronal signaling patterns of human fingertips undergoing the same tests."

Harvard University's school of engineering has an announcement. "For all the recent advances in integrated lithium niobate photonic circuits — from frequency combs to frequency converters and modulators — one big component has remained frustratingly difficult to integrate: lasers..." Long haul telecommunication networks, data center optical interconnects, and microwave photonic systems all rely on lasers to generate an optical carrier used in data transmission. In most cases, lasers are stand-alone devices, external to the modulators, making the whole system more expensive and less stable and scalable.

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) in collaboration with industry partners at Freedom Photonics and HyperLight Corporation, have developed the first fully integrated high-power laser on a lithium niobate chip, paving the way for high-powered telecommunication systems, fully integrated spectrometers, optical remote sensing, and efficient frequency conversion for quantum networks, among other applications....

"Integrating high-performance plug-and-play lasers would significantly reduce the cost, complexity, and power consumption of future communication systems," said Amirhassan Shams-Ansari, a graduate student at SEAS and first author of the study. "It's a building block that can be integrated into larger optical systems for a range of applications, in sensing, lidar, and data telecommunications." By combining thin-film lithium niobate devices with high-power lasers using an industry-friendly process, this research represents a key step towards large-scale, low-cost, and high-performance transmitter arrays and optical networks.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Hari Pota for sharing the story (via Semicounductor Digest)

"The sudden ear-piercing beep of a radiation meter fills the room," reports CNN, "as a Ukrainian soldier walks in.

"This is where Russian soldiers were living at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and radiation levels are now higher than normal." There's no visible presence of the source of the radioactive material in the room, but Ukrainian officials say it's coming from small particles and dust that the soldiers brought into the building. "They went to the Red Forest and brought radioactive material back with them on their shoes," soldier Ihor Ugolkov explains. "Other places are fine, but radiation increased here, because they were living here."

CNN was given exclusive access to the power plant for the first time since it came back into Ukrainian control. Officials at the plant explain the levels inside the room used by Russian soldiers are only slightly above what the World Nuclear Association describes as naturally occurring radiation. One-time contact would not be dangerous but continuous exposure would pose a health hazard.

"They went everywhere, and they also took some radioactive dust on them [when they left]," Ugolkov adds. It's an example of what Ukrainian officials say was the lax and careless behavior of Russian soldiers while they were in control of the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. The area around Chernobyl, namely the Red Forest, is still the most nuclear contaminated area on the planet, with most of the radioactive particles present on the soil....

Russian soldiers held Chernobyl for a month and are thought to have been operating in contaminated areas most of the time.
Russian soldiers entered the Red Forest and dug trenches, Ukranian officials believe — and on the edge of the area CNN spotted a Russian military ration box "that exhibited radiation levels 50 times above naturally occurring values."

The 169 Ukraine National Guard soldiers, who guarded the facility, were locked in the plant's Cold War era underground nuclear bunker, crammed up in tight quarters without access to natural light, fresh air or communication with the outside world, according to the Ukrainian Interior Minister.

"They were kept here for 30 days without sufficient lighting and food. They were not allowed outside. On the last day they were taken away from here to an unknown direction," Denys Monastyrskyy says while standing inside the bunker.

The minister says he believes the men have been taken to Russia, via Belarus, as prisoners of war, but doesn't know for certain.

Nissan is working with NASA on a new type of battery for electric vehicles that promises to charge more quickly and be lighter yet safe, the Japanese automaker said Friday. CBS News reports: The all-solid-state battery will replace the lithium-ion battery now in use for a 2028 product launch and a pilot plant launch in 2024, according to Nissan. The battery would be stable enough to be used in pacemakers, Nissan said. When finished, it will be about half the size of the current battery and fully charge in 15 minutes instead of a few hours.

The collaboration with the U.S. space program, as well as the University of California San Diego, involves the testing of various materials, Corporate Vice President Kazuhiro Doi told reporters. "Both NASA and Nissan need the same kind of battery," he said. Nissan and NASA are using what's called the "original material informatics platform," a computerized database, to test various combinations to see what works best among hundreds of thousands of materials, Doi said. The goal is to avoid the use of expensive materials like rare metals needed for lithium-ion batteries.

E Ink has unveiled a new version of its "Kaleido" color e-paper color display capable of playing animations and videos. It can also support displays up to 13.3-inches. Gizmodo reports: Kaleido was followed by Kaleido Plus which offered some key improvements, but it is now being replaced by the freshly announced Kaleido 3. We haven't had a chance to go eyes-on with Kaleido 3 just yet, but according to E Ink, "by optimizing the design of the ePaper module structure, E Ink Kaleido 3 has increased its color saturation by 30 percent compared to the previous generation." That's not a stark contrast on paper (pun intended) and Kaleido 3 still only supports 4,096 colors, but in person, the improvements between versions are usually far more obvious.

E Ink also claims that Kaleido 3, which will be available in three sizes (7.8-inch, 10.3-inch, and 13.3-inch) for everything from e-readers to larger tablets, employs a new front light technology that reduces the amount of blue light bouncing off the screen to make reading easier at night without resorting to warmer color temperature options for the LEDs which would throw off the accuracy of the colors being displayed. The most interesting upgrade with Kaleido 3 is that E Ink claims the responsiveness of the display has been improved which "enables the module to play animations and videos, providing new options for digital reading and writing in educational and professional applications."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since its launch, the Raspberry Pi OS (and most operating systems based on it) has shipped with a default "pi" user account, making it simpler to boot up a Pi and start working without needing to hook up the device to a monitor or go through a multi-step setup process. But as of today, that's changing -- new installs of the Raspberry Pi OS are shedding that default user account for both security and regulatory reasons.

Raspberry Pi Foundation software engineer Simon Long explains the thinking in this blog post. "[The "pi" user account] could potentially make a brute-force attack slightly easier, and in response to this, some countries are now introducing legislation to forbid any Internet-connected device from having default login credentials," he writes. This move will improve the Pi operating system's security.

Before, even if you assigned a good password to the "pi" account, attackers could still assume with a reasonable degree of certainty that most Raspberry Pi boards were using the "pi" username. Many Pi OS-based operating systems also ship with the default "pi" user account enabled and are completely passwordless, requiring extra steps to assign the account a password in the first place. The flip side is that the change could break some software and scripts, particularly those that are hard-coded to use the "pi" user account and home folder. "[T]he Raspberry Pi OS now boots into a dedicated setup mode the first time you start it up instead of running the setup wizard as an app in the normal desktop environment," adds Ars. "And that setup wizard now prompts you to create a username and password rather than simply assigning a password to the default 'pi' user account. To aid with setup, the wizard can now pair Bluetooth keyboards and mice without requiring you to plug in a USB accessory first."

The new version of the Pi OS also includes experimental support for the Wayland display server protocol, but Long says most people should ignore it for now since it's explicitly labeled as "experimental."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Britain plans to build eight new nuclear reactors and expand production of wind energy as it seeks to reduce dependence on oil and natural gas from Russia and other foreign suppliers following the invasion of Ukraine. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the plans Thursday as part of a new energy security strategy that will also accelerate development of solar power and hydrogen projects. The government said it wants to almost triple nuclear power generation capacity to 24 gigawatts by 2050.

"We're setting out bold plans to scale up and accelerate affordable, clean and secure energy made in Britain, for Britain, from new nuclear to offshore wind, in the decade ahead,'' Johnson said. "This will reduce our dependence on power sources exposed to volatile international prices we cannot control." The strategy comes after oil and natural gas prices soared following the invasion of Ukraine amid concerns that energy supplies from Russia could be curtailed. High energy prices are fueling a cost-of-living crisis in Britain, where household gas and electricity prices jumped 54% this month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols: Mainframes and AI? Isn't that something like a Model-T Ford with a Tesla motor? Actually, no. Mainframes are as relevant in 2022 as they were in the 1960s. IBM's new IBM z16, with its integrated on-chip Telum AI accelerator, is ready to analyze real-time transactions, at scale. This makes it perfect for mainframe mission-critical workloads such as healthcare and financial transactions. This 21st century Big Iron AI accelerator is built onto its core Telum processor. With this new dual-processor 5.2 GHz chip and its 16 cores, it can perform 300 billion deep-learning inferences per day with one-millisecond latency. Can you say fast? IBM can.

Anthony Saporito, a senior technical staff member for IBM Z hardware development, said "One of the Telum design's key innovations is we built an AI accelerator right onto the silicon of the chip and we directly connected all of the cores and built an ecosystem up the stack. Through the hardware design, firmware, the operating systems, and the software, deep learning is built into all of the transactions." According to Patrick Moorhead, Moor Insights & Strategy's chief analyst, "The AI accelerator is a game-changer. The z16 with z/OS has a 20x response time with 19x higher throughput when inferencing compared to a comparable x86 cloud server with 60ms average network latency."

The new model z16 also includes a so-called quantum-safe system to protect organizations from near-future threats that might crack today's encrypted files. This is done with the z16's support of the Crypto Express8S adapter. Built around a CCA cryptographic coprocessor and a PKCS #11 cryptographic coprocessor, it enables users to develop quantum-safe cryptography. It also works with classical cryptography. If you want your data and transactions to be safe both today and tomorrow, this deserves your attention.

Research Sid Assawaworrarit and his colleagues have outfitted an ordinary solar panel with a thermoelectric generator, capable of generating a small amount of electricity from the slight difference in temperature between the ambient air and the surface of a solar panel pointed deep into space. Interesting Engineering reports: "During the day, there's a light coming in from the Sun and hitting the solar cell, but during the night, something of a reverse happens," Assawaworrarit says. That's because solar panels -- like everything warmer than absolute zero -- emit infrared radiation. "There's actually light going out [from the solar panel], and we use that to generate electricity at night. The photons going out into the night sky actually cool down the solar cell," he says.

As those photons leave the skyward surface of the solar panel, they cary heat with them. That means that on a clear night -- when there are no clouds to reflect infrared light back toward the Earth -- the surface of a solar panel will be a few degrees cooler than the air around it. That temperature differential is what Assawaworrarit and his colleagues are taking advantage of. A device called a thermoelectric generator can capture some of the heat flowing from the warmer air to the cooler solar panel and convert it into electricity.

On a clear night, the device Assawaworrarit tested on the Stanford rooftop generates roughly fifty milliwatts for every square meter of solar panel (50 mW/m2). "I think that's probably a record number," he says. But Assawaworrarit and his team aren't stopping there. He says that with a couple of improvements (and in a good location) such a device could generate twice that amount of electricity. "The theoretical limit is probably about one or two watts per square meter," he says. "That's not a huge number, but there are a lot of applications" where that kind of energy at night would come in handy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. government owns about 1,100 charging stations. It may need more than 100,000 charging stations to support widespread EV use in the next decade, according to testimony from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Tuesday. The testimony, which was first reported by Reuters, mainly delved into the U.S. Postal Service's efforts to transition its fleet to EVs and federal fleet transition issues. GAO found that federal agencies like USPS held certain incorrect assumptions about the cost and benefits of using gas versus electric vehicles, namely that USPS used gas prices that are about $2 per gallon less than the current national average in its estimates, and assumed maintenance and acquisition costs that are higher than the reality.

GAO has identified charging infrastructure costs and installation as a key challenge to acquiring EVs for federal fleets. [...] The General Services Administration (GSA) said that as of March 10, federal agencies have only ordered an additional 1,854 zero-emission vehicles since its prior report. The U.S. government usually purchases about 50,000 vehicles annually. The federal fleet currently has about 657,000 cars, SUVs and trucks, out of which less than 1% are currently electric, according to GSA data.

Ai-Da is the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot that can paint as artists have painted for centuries. The Guardian reports: Devised in Oxford by [Aidan Meller], Ai-Da was created more than two years ago by a team of programmers, roboticists, art experts and psychologists, completed in 2019, and is updated as AI technology improves. She has already demonstrated her ability to sketch and create poems. Her new painting talent was unveiled ahead of the world premier of her solo exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which opens to the public on 22 April.

Titled Leaping into the Metaverse, Ai-Da Robot's Venice exhibition will explore the interface between human experience and AI technology, from Alan Turing to the metaverse, and will draw on Dante's concepts of purgatory and hell to explore the future of humanity in a world where AI technology continues to encroach on everyday human life. Soon, with the amount of data we freely give about ourselves, and through talking to our phones, computers, cars and even kitchen appliances, AI algorithms "are going to know you better than you do," Meller warned.

We are entering a world, he said, "not understanding which is human and which is machine." "How comfortable are you with that?" "What better thing to have a technological robot artist saying: 'Hang on, are you happy with me doing this?' She is almost daring you to say are you comfortable with this. We are not here to promote robots or technology. We are deeply concerned about the nature of what this technology can do," Meller added. "The whole point of Ai-Da is to highlight what is it we are doing, unknowingly, online all the time."

Mercedes-Benz will put more than five thousand workers on collective vacation in two plants in Brazil due to the shortage of semiconductor chips, the company said on Monday. Reuters reports: The production stoppage will happen from April 18 to May 3 and includes 5,000 employees in the Sao Bernardo do Campo plant and 600 in the Juiz de Fora factory, located in the Brazilian states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, respectively. Mercedes said it is adjusting its production of trucks, truck cabins, bus chassis and other auto parts due to the global semiconductor supply crisis. The company had already put about 1,200 workers on collective vacation with pay in March because of supply chain shortages, according to the metalworkers union from the Sao Bernardo do Campo region.

This week the New York Times published an opinion piece by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman arguing that greener energy is the best response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Friedman starts by decrying America's "umpteenth confrontation with a petro-dictator whose viciousness and recklessness are possible only because of the oil wealth he extracts from the ground. "No matter how the war ends in Ukraine, it needs to end with America finally, formally, categorically and irreversibly ending its addiction to oil." Nothing has distorted our foreign policy, our commitments to human rights, our national security and, most of all, our environment than our oil addiction. Let this be the last war in which we and our allies fund both sides.... As long as we're addicted to oil, we are always going to be begging someone, usually a bad guy, to move the price up or down, because we alone are not masters of our own fate. This has got to stop...
Friedman notes that global oil prices collapsing between 1988 and 1992 "helped bankrupt the Soviet Union and hasten its collapse.... We can create the same effects today by overproducing renewables and overemphasizing energy efficiency."

Among his suggestions are requiring power companies to transition faster to renewable energy sources — as well as "eliminating the regulatory red tape around installing rooftop solar systems."

And he's also got a solution for the spike in fuel prices: If you want to lower gasoline prices today, the most surefire, climate-safe method would be to reduce the speed limit on highways to 60 miles per hour and ask every company in America that can do so to let its employees work at home and not commute every day. Those two things would immediately cut demand for gasoline and bring down the price.

Is that too much to ask to win the war against petro-dictators like Putin — a victory in which the byproduct is cleaner air, not burning tanks?

Early last month on the London Metals Exchange, a Chinese metals producer named Tsingshan Holding Group "wagered a massive bet that the price of nickel would fall," reports CNN Business. At the peak Tsingshan's position "was equivalent to about an eighth of all of the outstanding contracts in the market."

But between Friday, March 4 and Tuesday March 8, the metal soared in value from about $29,000 to $100,000 per ton. "If prices had stood at $100,000 the company would have owed the London Metals Exchange $15 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal." The spike generated margin calls higher than the London Metals Exchange [the LME] had ever seen — and if paid, they would force multiple defaults that would ripple through the exchange and destabilize the global market. Exchange executives scrambled to respond, ultimately throwing a lifeline to the brokers representing Tsingshan and other producers. In an unprecedented move, they halted trading and retroactively canceled all 9,000 trades that occurred on Tuesday, worth about $4 billion in total. The market would remain dark for a week, unleashing a tidal wave of chaos and a mob of angry investors onto the exchange. In its wake, threats of lawsuits abound and trust has eroded. [The day it re-opened, CNN also reported the exchange "had to suspend the electronic trading of nickel shortly after it resumed due to a technical problem."]

Now, the 145 year-old British giant is teetering on a nickel. Over the past century-and-a-half the LME, known for its ring of red couches and barking brokers, has successfully trudged its way through world wars, meltdowns and defaults. But nickel, the metal used in stainless steel and the lithium-ion battery cells in most electric vehicles, might be what finally brings the world's largest market for base metals contracts to its knees."The world's pricing mechanism for nickel is failing," said Daniel Ghali, the director of commodities strategy at TD Securities. "The question is, will it continue to fail?" Others weren't as diplomatic. "The LME is now very likely going to die a slow self-inflicted death through the loss of confidence in it and its products," tweeted Mark Thompson, executive vice-chairman at Tungsten West, a mining development company....

Until 2012, the LME was owned by its members, the same people who traded on the exchange — but then it was sold to Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) for $2.2 billion....

The LME's lack of transparency allows two or three big names to throw around vast sums of money and "hijack" a relatively illiquid market, said Adrian Gardner, principal analyst of nickel markets at Wood Mackenzie.... Sitting on the other side of the short were hedge funds, who had bet that nickel supply would decrease because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine (Russia provides about 20% of all top-grade nickel). When the LME decided to retroactively cancel those $4 billion in gains on March 8, it was hedge funds who lost giant sums of money. Global investment management firm AQR, which has $124 billion in assets under management, was among those that lost money when trades were canceled. "The winners were commodity producers and their banks, and the losers are the various clients that AQR and other large asset managers represent: firefighters, municipal workers, and university endowments," said Jordan Brooks, principal at AQR Capital Management. AQR is considering legal action against the exchange. Investors, said Brooks, "acted in good faith and provided liquidity, but the LME just decided to shift their trading gains to commodities producers and their banks...."

Volume in trading has yet to recover, raising questions about the LME's ability to accurately benchmark the price of the metal. Fewer than 210 contracts were traded in the first hour after the market opened on Tuesday. That's down about 60% from the 90-day average before the trading halt. Other metals on the LME, like copper and aluminum, have also seen a decrease in trade volume....

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange doesn't currently trade nickel, but perhaps it soon will. "[The LME] did something that was egregious and a betrayal of trust," said Brooks. "I'd be shocked if the strategic plans of other exchanges haven't changed in the past three weeks."

U.S. president Joe Biden "will invoke the Defense Production Act to encourage domestic production of minerals required to make batteries for electric vehicles and long-term energy storage," reports CNBC.

"It will also help the U.S. minimize dependence on foreign supply chains." The president's order could help companies receive government funding for feasibility studies on projects that extract materials, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite and manganese, for EV production.

The Defense Production Act, established by President Harry Truman during the Cold War, allows the president to use emergency authority to prioritize the development of specific materials for national production.... The administration also said it's reviewing further uses of the law to "secure safer, cleaner, and more resilient energy for America."

The transportation sector is one of the largest contributors to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, representing about one-third of emissions every year. The transition away from gas vehicles to EVs is considered critical to combating human-caused climate change....

The administration in February unveiled a plan to allocate $5 billion to states to fund EV chargers over five years as part of the bipartisan infrastructure package.
The White House said in a statement the move would reduce America's reliance on China and other countries "for the minerals and materials that will power our clean energy future."

Stretch, a logistics robot from Boston Dynamics that's capable of moving boxes and unloading cargo, is now on sale for anyone who wants to purchase one. Though, as TechCrunch notes, "deliveries are not expected until 2023 and 2024." From the report: The company predictably cites ongoing labor issues as a key driver in interest around the new robot. "Labor shortages and supply chain snags continue to create challenges in keeping the flow of goods moving," says CEO Robert Playter. "Stretch makes logistics operations more efficient and predictable, and it improves safety by taking on one of the most physically demanding jobs in the warehouse. Many of our early adopter customers have already committed to deploying the robot at scale, so we are excited Stretch will soon be put to work more broadly, helping retailers and logistics companies handle the continued surging demand for goods."

Walgreens Boots Alliance is opening robot-powered micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S. to fill customers' prescriptions as the role of stores and pharmacists change. CNBC reports: Inside of a large facility in the Dallas area, they fill thousands of prescriptions for customers who take medications to manage or treat high blood pressure, diabetes or other conditions. Each robot can fill 300 prescriptions in an hour, the company said -- roughly the same number that a typical Walgreens pharmacy with a handful of staff may do in a day.

Walgreens Boots Alliance is opening the automated, centralized hubs to keep up in the fast-changing pharmacy industry. The pandemic has intensified the drugstore chain's need to stay relevant as online pharmacies siphon off sales and more customers have items from toilet paper to toothpaste delivered to their doorstep. The global health crisis has also heightened demand for pharmacists, as hospitals and drugstores hired them to administer Covid vaccines and tests. That has forced Walgreens and its competitors, CVS Health and Rite Aid, to rethink the role of their stores and pharmacists.

By 2025, as much as half of Walgreens' prescription volume from stores could be filled at the automated centers, said Rex Swords, who oversees facilities as Walgreens' group president of centralized services, operations and planning. That will free up more of pharmacists' time to provide health care, Brewer said in an interview with CNBC's Bertha Coombs. "We're doing all of this work, so that the pharmacist has an easier job, so that they can get back to being front and center, building a relationship with that patient and interacting the way they were trained -- the work that they love to do," she said. Pharmacists will continue to fill time-sensitive medications and controlled substances at local stores as the company expands its use of robots.

MojoKid writes: Today Intel finally launched its first major foray into discrete GPUs for gamers and creators. Dubbed Intel Arc A-Series and comprised of 5 different chips built on two different Arc Alchemist SoCs, the company announced its entry level Arc 3 Graphics is shipping in market now with laptop OEMs delivering new all-Intel products shortly. The two SoCs set the foundation across three performance tiers, including Arc 3, Arc 5, and Arc 7.

For example, Arc A370M arrives today with 8 Xe cores, 8 ray tracing units, 4GB of GDDR6 memory linked to a 64-bit memory bus, and a 1,550MHz graphics clock. Graphics power is rated at 35-50W. However, Arc A770M, Intel's highest-end mobile GPU will come with 32 Xe cores, 32 ray tracing units, 16GB of GDDR 6 memory over a 256-bit interface and with a 1650MHz graphics clock. Doing the math, Arc A770M could be up to 4X more powerful than Arc 370M. In terms of performance, Intel showcased benchmarks from a laptop outfitted with a Core i7-12700H processor and Arc A370M GPU that can top the 60 FPS threshold at 1080p in many games where integrated graphics could come up far short. Examples included Doom Eternal (63 fps) at high quality settings, and Hitman 3 (62 fps), and Destiny 2 (66 fps) at medium settings. Intel is also showcasing new innovations for content creators as well, with its Deep Link, Hyper Encode and AV1 video compression support offering big gains in video upscaling, encoding and streaming. Finally, Intel Arc Control software will offer unique features like Smooth Sync that blends tearing artifacts when V-Synch is turned off, as well as Creator Studio with background blur, frame tracking and broadcast features for direct game streaming services support.

schwit1 shares a report from EurekAlert: A nitrogen doped carbon-coated nickel anode can catalyze an essential reaction in hydrogen fuel cells at a fraction of the cost of the precious metals currently used, Cornell University researchers have found. The new discovery could accelerate the widespread use of hydrogen fuel cells, which hold great promise as efficient, clean energy sources for vehicles and other applications. It's one of a string of discoveries for the Hector D. Abruna lab in their ongoing search for active, inexpensive, durable catalysts for use in alkaline fuel cells.

Recent experiments with nonprecious-metal HOR electrocatalysts needed to overcome two major challenges, the researchers wrote: low intrinsic activity from too strong a hydrogen binding energy, and poor durability due to rapid passivation from metal oxide formation. To overcome these challenges, the researchers designed a nickel-based electrocatalyst with a 2 nanometer shell made of nitrogen-doped carbon. Their hydrogen fuel cell has an anode (where hydrogen is oxidized) catalyst consisting of a solid nickel core surrounded by the carbon shell. When paired with a cobalt-manganese cathode (where oxygen is reduced), the resulting completely precious-metal-free hydrogen fuel cell outputs more than 200 milliwatts per square centimeter.

The presence of nickel oxide species on the surface of the nickel electrode slows the hydrogen oxidation reaction dramatically, Abruna said. The nitrogen-doped carbon coating serves as a protection layer and enhances the HOR kinetics, making the reaction quicker and much more efficient. In addition, the presence of the graphene coating on the nickel electrode prevents the formation of nickel oxides -- resulting in electrodes with dramatically enhanced lifetimes. These electrodes are also much more tolerant to carbon monoxide, which rapidly poisons platinum. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Greenpeace and other environmental groups launched a new campaign today to push the Bitcoin network to slash its growing greenhouse gas emissions. The Verge reports: The goal of the campaign, dubbed "Change the code, not the climate," is to switch up the energy-hungry process of verifying transactions and mining new Bitcoins. [...] In order to validate transactions, Bitcoin miners rely on specialized hardware to solve complex puzzles. Their computers gobble up a lot of energy in the process, and the miners get new tokens in return. It's a process called "proof of work," in which the energy used is sort of the price paid to verify transactions. The process is deliberately energy-intensive as a safety measure. The baked-in inefficiency is meant to discourage bad actors from manipulating the data because it would cost a lot of energy to do so.

The new campaign aims to move Bitcoin away from that energy-hungry proof of work process. The most popular alternative is called proof of stake. Cryptocurrencies that use proof of stake use vastly less energy because there are no puzzles to solve. Instead of essentially paying with electricity to participate in the process, you have to offer up some of your own tokens. This is supposed to prove that you have a "stake" in keeping the ledger accurate. If you mess anything up, you lose tokens as a penalty. While proof of stake might make solve a lot of Bitcoin's pollution problems, experts have been skeptical that miners would be willing to make the change. Miners invest a lot in their hardware and would be hard-pressed to abandon it. And some fans of proof of work maintain that it's the most secure way to maintain the ledger. "We know Bitcoin stakeholders are incentivized not to change," the campaign acknowledges on its website. "Changing Bitcoin would render a whole lot of expensive infrastructure worthless, meaning Bitcoin stakeholders will need to walk away from sunk costs -- or find other creative solutions."

As the Guardian notes, the campaign is launching a huge digital advertising push via the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Marketwatch, Politico, Facebook and others. "Organizers are also taking legal action against proposed mining sites and using their large memberships to push bitcoin's biggest investors and influencers to call for a code change." Additionally, the campaign is urging people to tweet at cryptocurrency influencers to support the campaign.