An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Biden administration is planning to aggressively expand offshore wind energy capacity in the United States, potentially holding as many as seven new offshore lease sales by 2025. The move was announced Wednesday by US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and first reported by The New York Times. Haaland said the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is exploring leasing sales along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, in the Gulf of Maine, New York Bight, central Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, as well as offshore the Carolinas, California and Oregon. As part of that initiative, which spans multiple government agencies, the Departments of the Interior, Energy and Commerce committed to a shared goal of generating 30 gigawatts of offshore wind in the US by 2030. The Interior Department estimates that reaching that goal would create nearly 80,000 jobs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Our new paper in Nature Communications presents a global assessment of how many rooftop solar panels we'd need to generate enough renewable energy for the whole world -- and where we'd need to put them. Our study is the first to provide such a detailed map of global rooftop solar potential, assessing rooftop area and sunlight cover at scales all the way from cities to continents. We found that we would only need 50 percent of the world's rooftops to be covered with solar panels in order to deliver enough electricity to meet the world's yearly needs.

We designed a program that incorporated data from over 300 million buildings and analyzed 130 million km of land -- almost the entire land surface area of the planet. This estimated how much energy could be produced from the 0.2 million km of rooftops present on that land, an area roughly the same size as the U.K. We then calculated electricity generation potentials from these rooftops by looking at their location. Generally, rooftops located in higher latitudes such as in northern Europe or Canada can vary by as much as 40% in their generation potential across the year, due to big differences in sunshine between winter and summer. Rooftops near the equator, however, usually only vary in generation potential by around 1% across the seasons, as sunshine is much more consistent. This is important because these large variations in monthly potential can have a significant impact on the reliability of solar-powered electricity in that region. That means places where sunlight is more irregular require energy storage solutions -- increasing electricity costs. Our results highlighted three potential hotspots for rooftop solar energy generation: Asia, Europe and North America.

Of these, Asia looks like the cheapest location to install panels, where -- in countries like India and China -- one kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity, or approximately 48 hours of using your laptop, can be produced for just 0.05p. This is thanks to cheap panel manufacturing costs, as well as sunnier climates. Meanwhile, the costliest countries for implementing rooftop solar are the U.S., Japan and the U.K. Europe holds the middle ground, with average costs across the continent of around 0.096p per kWh. The report mentions this endeavor would be "extremely expensive," and won't be a solution for some industries that require very large currents and specialized electricity delivery. However, the report concludes by saying: "If the costs of solar power continue to decrease, rooftop panels could be one of the best tools yet to decarbonize our electricity supply."

Ken Pillonel, a robotics engineer on YouTube, replaced an iPhone's Lightning port with a working USB-C port. AppleInsider reports: In a YouTube Short titled "World's First USB-C iPhone," Ken Pillonel claims to have installed the component into the iPhone X, replacing Lightning in the process. In the video, the iPhone is said to receive power via the connection, as well as being able to handle data transfers over a USB-C cable. In the description of the video, Pillonel says he reverse-engineered Apple's C94 connector, in order to make a PCB with a female USB-C port. After the schematics were set in place, it then became a challenge to shrink it down and install it into an iPhone.

Pillonel has spent a few months on his creation, with a blog post from May showing the thinking behind the replacement, and the challenges of replacing the Lightning port itself. A video at that time showed a DIY prototype that worked and laid out the work ahead to make it small enough to work within an iPhone enclosure. A late September update advised he had designed and ordered a flexible PCB, a key component in enabling the port switch to occur. He adds a future video is in production, explaining how the board was made and squeezed into the iPhone itself.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you're still searching for a PS5 and are a Best Buy customer, your ship may have just come in -- that is, if you're willing to spend an extra $200 a year for access. That's because the big-box electronics retailer is locking stock of in-demand holiday items like Sony's console behind membership of its new Totaltech program. The expensive customer service package was recently rolled out nationwide. The $200 annual service -- which has benefits like round-the-clock tech support, up to two years of protection on Best Buy purchases (including AppleCare+ insurance, which can cost $200 on its own), and member discounted prices -- is throwing in exclusive access to "the season's hardest-to-find products" as a bonus perk for the holidays, the company said in a statement. The Best Buy retail site had the $500 disc drive model PS5s available for Totaltech members to buy Monday morning, with the consoles gated behind an "exclusive access event" paywall. Instead of selling out instantly, its stock lasted between 90 minutes and two hours -- a relatively glacial sales pace compared to the insane demand for the hardware that consumers have faced since it hit stores last November.

Although the PS5's listing page pointed directly to Totaltech membership exclusivity while the hardware was still available, its seemingly unrelated VIP buying privileges aren't listed anywhere on the program's membership benefits and FAQ pages. We would not be shocked to see other highly desired products that have been affected by the chip shortage follow suit, particularly high-end PC GPUs and Xbox Series X/S consoles. The service is replacing a "Best Buy Beta" program that was tested in select markets starting in April. Beta seemed to target a more generalized range of benefits over one focused on tech support and protection, and it notably did not offer special members-only events to buy limited-stock electronics. The company's free My Best Buy membership, which sometimes includes exclusive discount sales, remains unaffected.

"A group of ten EU countries, led by France, have asked the European Commission to recognize nuclear power as a low-carbon energy source that should be part of the bloc's decades-long transition towards climate neutrality," reports EuroNews. While greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear plants are "comparable" to those released by hydropower and wind, critics argue that the resulting radioactive waste is harmful to human health and the environment. "Despite the urgency to combat climate change, member states are still unable to reach a consensus on whether nuclear constitutes a green or dirty energy source," adds EuroNews. From the report: Tapping into Europe's ongoing energy crunch, the countries make the case for nuclear energy as a "key affordable, stable and independent energy source" that could protect EU consumers from being "exposed to the volatility of prices." The letter, which was initiated by France, has been sent to the Commission with the signature of nine other EU countries, most of which already count nuclear as part of their national energy mix: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania. Nuclear plants generate over 26% of the electricity produced in the European Union.
[...]
Despite the urgency to combat climate change, member states are still unable to reach a consensus on whether nuclear constitutes a green or dirty energy source. The Commission has postponed the crucial decision to let countries conclude the debate. On the one side, Germany, which plans to shut down all its reactors by 2022, is leading the anti-nuclear cause, together with Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg and Spain. "We are concerned that including nuclear power in the taxonomy would permanently damage its integrity, credibility and therefore its usefulness," they wrote in July.

On the other side, France, which obtains over 70% of its electricity from nuclear stations, is fighting to label nuclear as sustainable under the taxonomy. As shown by the new letter, Paris has the backing of several Eastern states, which have already earmarked millions for nuclear projects. "While renewable energy sources play a key role for our energy transition, they cannot produce enough low-carbon electricity to meet our needs, at a sufficient and a constant level," the letter says, describing nuclear power as a "safe and innovative" sector with the potential of sustaining one million high-qualified jobs "in the near future".

A report (PDF) from the Commission's research unit released earlier this year indicates Brussels could eventually side with the pro-nuclear team. The paper says greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear plants are "comparable" to those released by hydropower and wind, an assessment shared by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the United States Department of Energy. Critics, however, argue the resulting radioactive waste is harmful to human health and the environment. "Nuclear power is incredibly expensive, hazardous and slow to build," says Greenpeace. Detractors are concerned about potentially disastrous nuclear accidents, similar to those of Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima in 2011, which are still deeply rooted in the collective imagination.

TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, and Sony are considering joint construction of a semiconductor factory in western Japan amid a global chip shortage, Nikkei has learned. From the report: The total investment in the project is estimated at 800 billion yen ($7 billion), with the Japanese government expected to provide up to half the amount. Japan's top auto parts maker Denso is also looking to participate through such steps as setting up equipment at the site. The Toyota Motor group member seeks stable supplies of chips used in its auto parts. Sony may also take a minority stake in a new company that will manage the factory, which will be located in Kumamoto Prefecture, on land owned by Sony and in an area adjacent to the latter's image sensor factory, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The factory will make semiconductors used in camera image sensors, as well as chips for automobiles and other products, and is slated to go into operation by 2024, the people said.

Plans for the facility -- which would be TSMC's first chip production operation in Japan -- come as the global tech industry grapples with unprecedented semiconductor shortages and supply chain disruptions. The Japanese government, which is increasingly concerned about maintaining supply chain stability amid the chip shortage and rising tensions surrounding the Taiwan Strait, will support the project with subsidies, Nikkei learned. In exchange for subsidies, the government will seek a commitment that chip supplies to the Japanese market will take priority.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, Nintendo of Europe announced a very region-specific -- and era-specific -- tweak for its upcoming collection of N64 games on Switch: an option to switch between the video standards PAL and NTSC. While the announcement may sound ho-hum to outsiders, anyone in Europe with a vested interest in classic gaming will appreciate what the toggle affords. The issue boils down to differences between NTSC and PAL, the leading video broadcast standards on CRT TVs during Nintendo's '80s and '90s heyday. North American and Japanese TV sets were configured for NTSC, which has a refresh rate standard of 60 Hz, while PAL sets dominated Europe with a slightly higher pixel resolution and a lower refresh rate standard of 50 Hz.

Should you merely watch TV series or films on both NTSC and PAL sets, the difference between each is noticeable yet mild. But for much of the '80s and '90s, many TV video games, especially the ones made by the largely Japanese console industry, suffered in PAL because they were coded specifically for NTSC standards. In order to port them to PAL, developers generally didn't go back and reconfigure all of the timings, especially in the case of early 3D games. Instead, their internal clock speeds were often slowed down to 83.3 percent to match European TV refresh rates. This meant both slower gameplay than originally coded and slower playback of music and sound effects. (These also often shipped with NTSC's pixel maximums in mind in such a way that they were squished to fit on PAL displays, as opposed to being optimized for them.)

Sure enough, last month's announcement of N64 games on Nintendo Switch Online put fear into European classic-gamer hearts. That region's reveal video included slightly slower timings of classic N64 games compared to videos posted by Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Japan, since they were emulating the original European retail releases. At that time, Nintendo of Europe did not immediately reply to social media questions about whether European Switch owners would get an option for 60 Hz N64 gameplay -- especially in an LCD TV era, where such CRT-related restrictions no longer technically apply to most EU and UK TV owners. Monday's announcement confirms that European players will get a 60 Hz option by default for every N64 game in the Nintendo Switch Online "Expansion Pack" collection, along with the option to access a game's original 50 Hz version if it launched with multi-language support. Reading between the lines, we believe this means that if a European N64 game only had English language support, its Switch Online version will be the North American NTSC ROM.

Gizmodo takes a hard look at a "growing sense of excitement" about collaboration between bitcoin-mining operations and nuclear power plants (which are now plagued by high operating costs compared to renewables as well as natural gas): Of the three partnerships between bitcoin companies and nuclear energy that the Wall Street Journal mentioned, two involve bitcoin miners partnering with existing nuclear sources to power their operations... These are not companies investing in the future, but rather companies searching for anything that will help keep the profits flowing using existing power plants. It's pretty safe to say that some cash-strapped owners of nuclear plants will be using mining partnerships not to make any technological strides, but rather to simply keep the old plants operating.

"The plants themselves are pretty well-run, and they know what they're doing," said Alex Gilbert, a project manager at the think tank Nuclear Innovation Alliance. "It really is a matter of the economics. There's a certain point where you're definitely unprofitable, and you're going to be likely to close because you're not getting enough money in power markets. But if a bitcoin operation takes 10 to 15 to 30 percent of your power at a reasonable price, that tips you into profitability." This profitability means the plants can stay open, giving miners a little carbon-free energy as a treat while keeping the U.S.'s biggest source of zero-emissions power operational. This is especially a good idea while we wait for more renewables — and policies that favor them — to come online, in what could be the first real-world proof bitcoin is doing some societal good instead of being a waste of energy and resources....

A few small-to-medium reactors should be ready for licensing in a few years and some over the next decade, he said, helped along by private and federal funding. To actually get to a point where the kinds of smaller reactors could be developed that would be competitive with the (rapidly falling) price of renewables, Gilbert said, would take a significantly larger bump from private capital — as well as more customers. "Providing early demand for advance reactors, especially microreactors, that's how bitcoin can most help the nuclear sector," he said.... I'm not a technofuturist who dreams of a libertarian paradise, but I have to admit that there's kind of a cool idea here. If the bitcoin community really believes cryptocurrencies are the money of the future, let them be the first to invest in a budding technology that could be the energy of the future.

In the interim, however, they shouldn't be allowed to rest on their greenwashing laurels while continuing to churn out emissions as they wait for fast reactor technology to become feasible in 10 years. Government regulations are, of course, anathema to crypto true believers. But a mandate that any new mining facilities source power from nearby nuclear plants could go a long way toward cleaning up bitcoin's act and ensuring the carbon-free energy we desperately need stays on the grid while fancy fast reactors come online.

When automakers were forced to make fewer vehicles with the chips they had available, Business Insider reports that "Naturally, they chose to prioritize those models that had the highest demand and made them the most money.

"At the same time, the reduction in the supply from all brands meant that dealers could make a sale without the traditional haggling over the vehicle's sticker price. The result has been a boon for automakers." Mark Wakefield, a consultant with AlixPartners in Detroit, told Bloomberg that US car companies were now making $3,000 more per car than average, as well as up to $10,000 more on certain pickups and SUVs.

One dealer who sells upgraded pickups in Ohio told Morning Brew that his dealership recently closed a deal in 52 minutes that would have taken four hours before the chip shortage. "The surprising part is the average selling price on those trucks is close to $100,000, and the consumer demand has still been sky-high," the dealer said.

Jim Farley, Ford's CEO, said in June that this new pricing power was "breathtaking" and indicated that the company wouldn't be returning to the days of guessing over how many cars it should produce and then marking them down until they sell. Mary Barra, GM's CEO, has also said that customer orders will play a larger role in her company's production strategy. Kevin Tynan, an auto analyst for Bloomberg, told Insider earlier this year that the industry has been trying to get off the incentives and discounting model for decades. "They don't totally hate this," he said, referring to the shortages. "Moving forward you're probably going to get an industry more like what we're seeing now, where supply is a little bit more managed, and incentives are not as aggressive as they've been."
The article summarizes the prediction of the Bloomberg auto analyst: "Good news for automakers and investors, but that also means consumers can expect to continue to see fewer options, higher prices, and a tighter used-vehicle market going forward."

"Lebanon's electricity network collapsed on Saturday," reports the Washington Post, "after the two most important power stations ran out of fuel, leaving private generators as the only source of power." The state-owned electricity company has been providing citizens with just a few hours of power a day for months, but the total collapse of the national grid will compound the misery of those who can't afford to run generators and had relied on those few hours. The outage marks the latest milestone in the unraveling of Lebanon, which is undergoing what the World Bank has described as one of the world's three biggest financial collapses of the past 150 years.

The banking system was the first to implode in 2019, triggering a 90 percent slide in the value of the currency that has left the government unable to afford fuel, food and medicine imports while plunging millions of Lebanese into poverty. The electricity grid ground to a halt after the country's two main power stations, Deir Ammar and Zahrani, ran out of diesel fuel, leaving the nationwide network without the minimum amount of power required to sustain it, said Energy Minister Walid Fayyad.

The government is working to secure emergency fuel supplies from other sources, including the army, to bridge the shortfall until a shipment of Iraqi oil due to arrive Saturday night can be offloaded and distributed into the network. At most, he said, the total outage can be expected to last only a couple of days, and he hoped to find a stopgap solution faster. But the collapse is a reminder of the dire state of Lebanon's electricity sector, which has been unable to provide 24-hour power for decades. In recent months, its capacity has been further eroded by the lack of money and by corruption, with smugglers diverting state purchases of fuel to sell at a profit in neighboring Syria.

A recent deal struck with Iraq to supply 80,000 tons of fuel a month still falls short of the minimum amount required to ensure a stable grid and at most will be able to keep the power on for about four hours a day, Fayyad said.

The Texas Tribune (an Austin-based non-profit digital news site) reports that climate change "has made the Texas heat worse, with less relief as nighttime temperatures warm, a report from the state's climatologist published Thursday found." Climate data also show that the state is experiencing extreme rainfall — especially in eastern Texas — bigger storm surges as seas rise along the Gulf Coast and more flooding from hurricanes strengthened by a warming ocean, the report says. Those trends are expected to accelerate in the next 15 years, according to the report, which analyzes extreme weather risks for the state and was last updated in 2019. The report was funded in part by Texas 2036, a nonpartisan economic policy nonprofit group named for the state's upcoming bicentennial.

The average annual temperature in Texas is expected to be 3 degrees warmer by 2036 than the average of the 1950s, the report found. The number of 100-degree days is expected to nearly double compared with 2000-2018, especially in urban areas. "From here on out, it's going to be very unusual that we ever have a year as mild as a typical year during the 20th century," said John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist who authored the report. "Just about all of them are going to be warmer."

A hotter Texas will threaten public health, squeeze the state's water supply, strain the electric grid and push more species toward extinction, experts told The Texas Tribune...

The entire baseline of temperatures in the state has shifted upward — a trend that is likely to continue to cause problems for the state's aging infrastructure, experts said. "I was surprised at how strong the upward trend was in the coldest temperatures of the summer," Nielsen-Gammon said. While global temperature analysis had already shown that trend, he said, it is now very clearly happening on the local level in Texas. Even this year, which was considered a mild year because Texas didn't see temperatures above 100 degrees in much of the state, Nielsen-Gammon said nighttime temperatures stayed warm enough to put 2021 in the top 20% of years with the hottest summer nights on record.

Italian winemakers have increasingly relied on migrant workers for the autumn harvest, but travel restrictions and soaring wage costs are pushing many to turn to machines. From a report: Last year's grape harvest was a harrowing scramble at Mirko Cappelli's Tuscan vineyard. With the Italian border closed because of the pandemic, the Eastern European workers he had come to rely on couldn't get into the country. The company he had contracted to supply grape pickers had no one to offer him. He ultimately found just enough workers to bring the grapes in on time. So, this year Mr. Cappelli made sure he wouldn't face the same problem: He spent â85,000, equivalent to $98,000, on a grape-harvesting machine. The coronavirus pandemic is pushing the wine industry toward automation.

Covid-related travel restrictions left severe shortages of agricultural workers last year, as Eastern Europeans and North Africans were unable to reach fields in Western Europe. Though the shortages have eased this year, the difficulty of finding workers has accelerated the shift, which was already under way across the agricultural sector. While harvests of some crops, like soybeans and corn, are already heavily automated, winemakers have been slower to make the switch. Vintners debate whether automated harvesting is more likely to damage grapes, which can affect the quality of the wine. The cost is a deterrent for many small farmers. Some European regions even ban machine harvesting.

For many vintners in Europe and the U.S., however, the difficulty of finding workers -- a problem they say had grown steadily for years but became acute during the pandemic -- has pushed them to take the robot plunge. It is a change that will outlast the pandemic and could shift longstanding migration patterns that bring tens of thousands of foreign workers to Italy, France and Spain for agricultural harvests each year. Ritano Baragli, president of Cantina Sociale colli Fiorentini Valvirgilio, a winemaker's group in Tuscany, said it has been getting harder to find pickers for several years, as locals increasingly shun the physically demanding, low-paid, short-term work while the demand for pickers has increased. But last year was the worst labor shortage of his half-century career in wine. Use of harvesting machines among the group's members increased 20% this year in response, he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Valve has posted an official teardown of its upcoming handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck. Before diving into the teardown, though, the company spends about a minute to strongly caution against taking one apart unless you're sure you know what you're doing. "Even though it's your PC -- or it will be once you've received your Steam Deck -- and you have every right to open it up and do what you want, we at Valve really don't recommend that you ever open it up," a Valve representative said in the video. "The Steam Deck is a very tightly designed system, and the parts are chosen carefully for this product with its specific construction, so they aren't really designed to be user-swappable." Despite its warnings, however, the company likely understands that people are going to take the Steam Deck apart anyway, so this video could be a handy resource for people who are considering doing so.

In the video, Valve shows how to swap out two parts of the system. First, Valve shows how to replace the thumbsticks. The company cautions that they are completely custom, but says that it will offer a source for "replacement parts, thumbsticks, SSDs, and possibly more" in the coming months. After that, Valve shows how to swap out the SSD, which could be helpful for people who may have reserved the cheapest version of the device with an eMMC hard drive with the intention of upgrading it themselves. Be aware that all versions of the Steam Deck use an m.2 connector, including the version with the eMMC drive, so if you plan to make a swap, you're going to have to reinstall the OS and bring over any games you might have had loaded on your other drive.

On Tuesday, D-Wave released its roadmap for upcoming processors and software for its quantum annealers. The company is also announcing that it's going to be developing its own gate-based hardware, which it will offer in parallel with the quantum annealer. Ars Technica's John Timmer talked with company CEO Alan Baratz to understand all the announcements. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The simplest part of the announcement to understand is what's happening with D-Wave's quantum-annealing processor. The current processor, called Advantage, has 5,000 qubits and 40,000 connections among them. These connections play a major role in the chip's performance as, if a direct connection between two qubits can't be established, others have to be used to act as a bridge, resulting in a lower effective qubit count. Starting this week, users of D-Wave's cloud service will have access to an updated version of Advantage. The qubit and connection stats will remain the same, but the device will be less influenced by noise in the system (in technical terms, its qubits will maintain their coherence longer). [...] Further out in the future is the follow-on system, Advantage 2, which is expected late next year or the year after. This will see another boost to the qubit count, going up to somewhere above 7,000. But the connectivity would go up considerably as well, with D-Wave targeting 20 connections per qubit.

D-Wave provides a set of developer tools it calls Ocean. In previous iterations, Ocean has allowed people to step back from directly controlling the hardware; instead, if a problem could be expressed as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO), Ocean could produce the commands needed to handle all the hardware configuration and run the problem on the optimizer. D-Wave referred to this as a hybrid problem solver, since Ocean would use classical computing to optimize the QUBO prior to execution. The only problem is that not everyone who might be interested in trying D-Wave hardware knows how to express their problem as a QUBO. So, the new version of Ocean will allow an additional layer of abstraction by allowing problems to be sent to the system in the format typically used by people who tend to solve these sorts of problems. "You will now be able to specify problems in the language that data scientists and data analysts understand," Baratz promised.

The biggest part of today's announcement, however, may be that D-Wave intends to also build gate-based hardware. Baratz explained that he thinks that optimization is likely to remain a valid approach, pointing to a draft publication that shows that structuring some optimization problems for gate-based hardware may be so computationally expensive that it would offset any gains the quantum hardware could provide. But it's also clear that gate-based hardware can solve an array of problems that a quantum annealer can't. He also argued that D-Wave has solved a number of problems that are currently limiting advances in gate-based hardware that uses electronic qubits called transmons. These include the amount and size of the hardware that's needed to send control signals to the qubits and the ability to pack qubits in densely enough so that they're easy to connect but not close enough that they start to interfere with each other. One of the problems D-Wave faces, however, is that the qubits it uses for its annealer aren't useful for gate-based systems. While they're based on the same bit of hardware (the Josephson junction), the annealer's qubits can only be set as up or down. A gate-based qubit needs to allow manipulations in three dimensions. So, the company is going to try building flux qubits, which also rely on Josephson junctions but use them in a different way. So, at least some of the company's engineering expertise should still apply.

Researchers at Northwestern University have devised a new method for recording information to DNA that takes minutes rather than hours or days. Interesting Engineering reports: The researchers utilized a novel enzymatic system to synthesize DNA that records rapidly changing environmental signals straight into its sequences, and this method could revolutionize how scientists examine and record neurons inside the brain. To record intracellular molecular and digital data to DNA, scientists currently rely on multipart processes that combine new information with existing DNA sequences. This means that, for an accurate recording, they must stimulate and repress the expression of specific proteins, which can take over 10 hours to complete.

The new study's researchers hypothesized they could make this process faster by utilizing a new method they call "Time-sensitive Untemplated Recording using Tdt for Local Environmental Signals," or TURTLES. This way, they would synthesize completely new DNA rather than copying a template of it. The method enabled the data to be recorded into the genetic code in a matter of minutes. "Nature is good at copying DNA, but we really wanted to be able to write DNA from scratch," Northwestern engineering professor Keith E.J. Tyo, the paper's senior author, said, in the press release. "The ex vivo (outside the body) way to do this involves a slow, chemical synthesis. Our method is much cheaper to write information because the enzyme that synthesizes the DNA can be directly manipulated. State-of-the-art intracellular recordings are even slower because they require the mechanical steps of protein expression in response to signals, as opposed to our enzymes which are all expressed ahead of time and can continuously store information."

When Facebook went down yesterday for nearly six hours, so did Oculus' services. Since Facebook owns VR headset maker Oculus, and controversially requires Oculus Quest users to log in with a Facebook account, many Quest owners reported not being able to load their Oculus libraries. "[A]nd those who just took a Quest 2 out of the box have reported that they're unable to complete the initial setup," adds PCGamer. As VRFocus points out, "the issue has raised another important question relating to Oculus' services being so closely linked with a Facebook account, your Oculus Quest/Quest 2 is essentially bricked until services resume." From the report: This vividly highlights the problem with having to connect to Facebook's services to gain access to apps -- the WiFi connection was fine. Even all the ones downloaded and taking up actual storage space didn't show up. It's why some VR fans began boycotting the company when it made all mandatory that all Oculus Quest 2's had to be affiliated with a Facebook account. If you want to unlink your Facebook account from Oculus Quest and don't want to pay extra for that ability, you're in luck thanks to a sideloadable tool called "Oculess." From an UploadVR article published earlier today: You still need a Facebook account to set up the device in the first place and you need to give Facebook a phone number or card details to sideload, but after that you could use Oculess to forgo Facebook entirely -- just remember to never factory reset. The catch is you'll lose access to Oculus Store apps because the entitlement check used upon launching them will no longer function. System apps like Oculus TV and Browser will also no longer launch, and casting won't work. You can still sideload hundreds of apps from SideQuest though, and if you want to keep browsing the web in VR you can sideload Firefox Reality. You can still use Oculus Link to play PC VR content, but only if you stay signed into Facebook on the Oculus PC app. Virtual Desktop won't work because it's a store app, but you can sideload free alternatives such as ALVR.

To use Oculess, just download it from GitHub and sideload it using SideQuest or Oculus Developer Hub, then launch it from inside VR. If your Quest isn't already in developer mode or you don't know how to sideload you can follow our guide here.

Car buyers are discovering that supply chain constraints "have thrusted prices upwards considerably for new and used vehicles alike," notes Jalopnik.

But while last month Fortune ran an article headlined "Chipmakers to carmakers: Time to get out of the semiconductor Stone Age," Jalopnik argues it's not that simple. The implication here is that the auto industry is far too reliant on archaic tech that isn't applicable to other consumer tech fields. It's now finally reckoning with its reluctance to change, and only a fool would invest in shops to pump out the outdated silicon cars require. But is that a fair assessment? As Fortune notes in its own piece, there are reasons why carmakers — some of the largest corporations in the world — choose the chips they do. The comparison to smartphones is moot... The potential ramifications of a glitch in a metal box traveling at many miles per hour are a little more severe. That's especially true if you're talking about modern vehicles with driver-assist functions...

I asked some auto industry veterans to weigh in... What automakers require is somewhat at odds with what chipmakers prefer and are tooled to produce: smaller, more densely packed chips, that can be manufactured at lower cost and yield more units.... However, to suggest as [Intel CEO] Gelsinger did that the burden to adapt should fall squarely on automakers simplifies the issue. General purpose chipmakers don't seem to grasp the unique challenges of the automotive sector — something that became clear to me after chatting with Jon M. Quigley, Society of Automotive Engineers member and columnist at Automotive Industries. "Qualifying a product, specifically testing activities, are costly and requires time, talent, and equipment," Quigley said. "Some of the test equipment requirements are expensive and often not on hand at the OEM but will require an external lab, and booking time at this lab can be a long lead time activity, and is necessary for certain product certifications. Depending upon the vehicle system commonality, this testing might have to be performed on multiple vehicle platforms. Making changes to an existing product, changing an integrated circuit that only has the difference in the manufacturing processes would still require this sort of testing. Unless there are some compelling associated cost improvements to recoup the investment, this is not very plausible."

It's easy for those of us on the outside to miss the many steps of validation automotive components are required to go through before they end up in what we drive. Ultimately, carmakers don't care how small or new a chip is; all that matters is that it works for its intended purpose and is properly vetted... Chipmakers want as much miniaturization as possible to maximize production efficiency, automakers need significant lead time to make sure a chip will work for them. Each industry has reasons for operating the way it does. That doesn't change the fact that someone's going to have to budge to address this shortfall....

Over time, the transition to newer technology may naturally happen, but certainly not quickly enough to Band-Aid the snags of the present moment. That doesn't give anyone a single, solitary scapegoat, and it's not the easy answer anyone likely wants to hear — not prospective shoppers, not automakers and not the CEO of Intel. But it's the most realistic answer nonetheless.
In the meantime, one analyst that Jalopnik spoke to predicted automakers will try strategic partnerships with chipmakers — that is, "find ways to own or control more of the chip supply base going forward by partnering with ASIC design companies who do similar design service for networking companies."

"Pound for pound, gallon for gallon, hour-for-hour, the two-stroke gas powered engines in leaf blowers and similar equipment are vastly the dirtiest and most polluting kind of machinery still in legal use," James Fallows writes.

"According to the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the two-stroke leaf blowers and similar equipment in the state produce more ozone pollution than all of California's tens of millions of cars, combined." How can such little engines do so much damage? It's all about technological progress, and the lack of it: Over the past 50 years, gasoline engines for trucks and automobiles have become so much more efficient that they have reduced most of their damaging emissions-per-mile by at least 95 percent... Two-stroke engines, by contrast, are based on long-obsolete technology that inefficiently burns a slosh of oil and gasoline, and pumps out much of the unburned fuel as toxic aerosols... They're the basis of noisy, dirty scooters and tuk-tuks in places like Jakarta, Hanoi, Manila, and Bangkok, where they're being phased out as too polluting.

Using a two-stroke engine is like heating your house with an open pit fire in the living room — and chopping down your trees to keep it going, and trying to whoosh away the fetid black smoke before your children are poisoned by it. But these machines persist in American landscaping because they are cheap. And because — to be brutally honest — the people paying the greatest price in much of suburban American are the hired lawn-crew workers...
Fallows points out America's Environmental Protection Agency concluded the engines expose their operators to unusually high levels of carcinogens include benzene and other dangerous substances. And "The noise produced by two-stroke engines really is different from other sounds. New acoustic research shows that its distinctive low-frequency noise penetrates vastly further than other machine-generated sound waves. It goes through solid walls.

"There is an obvious, rapidly improving alternative. That is battery-powered equipment (to say nothing of rakes)... If batteries can power a multi-ton F-150 truck, it is fatuous for landscapers to say that they aren't strong enough for a dozen-pound leaf blower."

Tesla announced that it's delivered a new record number of electric cars in its third quarter, according to Reuters, "beating Wall Street estimates after Chief Executive Elon Musk asked staff to 'go super hardcore' to make a quarter-end delivery push."

Slashdot reader McGruber shared Reuters' report: Tesla has weathered the chip crisis better than rivals, with its overall deliveries surging 20% in the July to September period from its previous record in the second quarter, marking the sixth consecutive quarter-on-quarter gains... Tesla delivered 241,300 vehicles globally in the July to September quarter, up 73% from a year earlier. Analysts had expected the electric-car maker to deliver 229,242 vehicles, according to Refinitiv data.

General Motors, Honda and some of its bigger rivals posted declines in U.S. sales in the third quarter, hit by a prolonged chip shortage. GM's third-quarter U.S. sales fell nearly 33% to its lowest level in more than a decade.

"Like a half-filled bag of salty snacks, there simply aren't enough semiconductor chips to go around these days," writes CNET.

"At General Motors, the crisis struck one of its biggest cash cows as Cadillac confirmed too few chips led it to scrap the Super Cruise [hands-free highway driving] feature from its flagship Escalade SUV."

Slashdot reader McGruber writes: A Cadillac spokesperson said "Super Cruise is an important feature for the Cadillac Escalade program. Although it's temporarily unavailable at the start of regular production due to the industry-wide shortage of semiconductors, we're confident in our team's ability to find creative solutions to mitigate the supply chain situation and resume offering the feature for our customers as soon as possible."
CNET adds that in addition, "Essentially, Super Cruise is unavailable across GM's entire lineup of cars."