A new battery from Energizer comes with "color alert technology" to alert parents if their child has swallowed one. When the coin lithium battery comes into contact with saliva, it activates a blue dye "so parents and caregivers know that medical attention could be required," reports the New York Times. The battery also features more secure packaging and a nontoxic bitter coating. From the report: The new coin lithium battery features more secure packaging, a nontoxic bitter coating to discourage swallowing and "color alert technology" that activates a blue dye when the battery comes into contact with moisture, like saliva, so parents and caregivers know that medical attention could be required. The new battery was announced in a video last week by Energizer and Trista Hamsmith, whose 18-month-old daughter died after swallowing a button battery from a remote control. Ms. Hamsmith founded a nonprofit organization focused on children's safety, successfully advocated for legislation, known as Reese's Law, that requires a secure compartment of the batteries in products that use them as well as stronger warning labels on all packaging, and is now working to make the batteries themselves safer.

Ingested coin or button batteries result in thousands of emergency hospital visits each year, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which notes that "the consequences of a child swallowing a battery can be immediate, devastating and deadly." "A button cell battery can burn through a child's throat or esophagus in as little as two hours if swallowed," according to the agency. Secure packaging and bitter coatings for batteries have long existed, but "the massive breakthrough here is the color alert technology, which helps give caretakers that indicator that something has happened," Jeff Roth, the global category leader for batteries at Energizer, said in an interview on Wednesday. "The most significant part about this is getting help early in the process," he said. "That's really what the color alert technology allows the family to do."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Dropbox said its digital-signature product, Dropbox Sign, was breached by hackers, who accessed user information including emails, user names and phone numbers. The software company said it became aware of the cyberattack on April 24, sought to limit the incident and reported it to law enforcement and regulatory authorities. "We discovered that the threat actor had accessed data related to all users of Dropbox Sign, such as emails and user names, in addition to general account settings," Dropbox said Wednesday in a regulatory filing. "For subsets of users, the threat actor also accessed phone numbers, hashed passwords, and certain authentication information such as API keys, OAuth tokens, and multi-factor authentication."

Dropbox said there is no evidence hackers obtained user accounts or payment information. The company said it appears the attack was limited to Dropbox Sign and no other products were breached. The company didn't disclose how many customers were affected by the hack. The hack is unlikely to have a material impact on the company's finances, Dropbox said in the filing. The shares declined about 2.5% in extended trading after the cyberattack was disclosed and have fallen 20% this year through the close.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Tech Times: China has reached a major landmark in green transportation with the launch of the world's largest fully electric container ship. Developed and manufactured by China Ocean Shipping Group (Cosco), the vessel is now operating a regular service route between Shanghai and Nanjing, aiming to reduce emissions significantly along its journey. The Greenwater 01, an all-electric container ship, is positioning itself to be a shipping industry pioneer. Equipped with a main battery exceeding 50,000 kilowatt-hours, the vessel can accommodate additional battery boxes for longer voyages. These battery boxes, each containing 1,600 kilowatt-hours of electricity and similar in size to standard 20-foot containers, provide flexibility in extending the ship's travel range. With 24 battery boxes onboard, the Greenwater 01 can complete a journey consuming 80,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is equivalent to saving 15 tons of fuel compared to a standard container ship, highlighting the efficiency of electric propulsion systems. According to Cosco, the vessel can reduce CO2 emissions by 2,918 tons per year, which is equivalent to taking 2,035 family cars off the road or planting 160,000 trees.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: U.S. wind power slipped last year for the first time in a quarter-century due to weaker-than-normal Midwest breezes, underscoring the challenge of integrating volatile renewable energy sources into the grid. Power produced by turbines slipped 2% in 2023, even after developers added 6.2 gigawatts of new capacity, according to a government report Tuesday. The capacity factor for the country's wind fleet -- how much energy it's actually generating versus its maximum possible output -- declined to an eight-year low of 33.5%. Most of that decline was driven by the central US, a region densely dotted with turbines.

Wind is a key component of the effort to cut carbon emissions, but the data highlights the downside of relying on intermittent energy sources tied to the effects of global weather. Last year's low wind speeds came during El Nino, a warming of the equatorial Pacific that tends to weaken trade winds. La Nina, the Pacific cooling pattern that dominated in 2022 and is poised to return later this year, usually has the opposite effect. The U.S. Energy Information Administration shared the findings in a report published earlier today.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Energy ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) major democracies reached a deal to shut down their coal-fired power plants in the first half of the 2030s, in a significant step towards the transition away from fossil fuels. "There is a technical agreement, we will seal the final political deal on Tuesday," said Italian energy minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, who is chairing the G7 ministerial meeting in Turin. On Tuesday the ministers will issue a final communique detailing the G7 commitments to decarbonize their economies. Pichetto said the ministers were also pondering potential restrictions to Russian imports of liquefied natural gas to Europe which the European Commission is due to propose in the short-term.

The agreement on coal marks a significant step in the direction indicated last year by the COP28 United Nations climate summit to phase out fossil fuels, of which coal is the most polluting. Italy last year produced 4.7% of its total electricity through a handful of coal-fired stations. Rome currently plans to turn off its plants by 2025, except on the island of Sardinia where the deadline is 2028. In Germany and Japan coal has a bigger role, with the share of electricity produced by the fuel higher than 25% of total last year. "This is another nail in the coffin for coal," said Dave Jones, Ember's Global Insights program director. "The journey to phase out coal power has been long: it's been over seven years since the UK, France, Italy, and Canada committed to phase out coal power, so it's good to see the United States and especially Japan at last be more explicit on their intentions."

"The problem is that whilst coal power has already been falling, gas power has not. G7 nations already promised to 'fully or predominantly' decarbonize their power sectors by 2035, and that would mean phasing out not only coal by 2035 but also gas. Coal might be the dirtiest, but all fossil fuels need to be ultimately phased out."

Further reading: Countries Consider Pact To Reduce Plastic Production By 40% in 15 Years

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, we wrote that some of Intel's recent high-end Core i9 and Core i7 processors had been crashing and exhibiting other weird issues in some games and that Intel was investigating the cause. An Intel statement obtained by Igor's Lab suggests that Intel's investigation is wrapping up, and the company is pointing squarely in the direction of enthusiast motherboard makers that are turning up power limits and disabling safeguards to try to wring a little more performance out of the processors.

"While the root cause has not yet been identified, Intel has observed the majority of reports of this issue are from users with unlocked/overclock capable motherboards," the statement reads. "Intel has observed 600/700 Series chipset boards often set BIOS defaults to disable thermal and power delivery safeguards designed to limit processor exposure to sustained periods of high voltage and frequency."

These are the specific settings that Intel believes are causing problems:
Disabling Current Excursion Protection (CEP)
Enabling the IccMax Unlimited bit
Disabling Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB) and/or Enhanced Thermal Velocity Boost (eTVB)

Additional settings which may increase the risk of system instability:
Disabling C-states
Using Windows Ultimate Performance mode
Increasing PL1 and PL2 beyond Intel recommended limits.

Austria called on Monday for fresh efforts to regulate the use of AI in weapons systems that could create so-called 'killer robots', as it hosted a conference aimed at reviving largely stalled discussions on the issue. From a report: With AI technology advancing rapidly, weapons systems that could kill without human intervention are coming ever closer, posing ethical and legal challenges that most countries say need addressing soon. "We cannot let this moment pass without taking action. Now is the time to agree on international rules and norms to ensure human control," Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg told the meeting of non-governmental and international organisations as well as envoys from 143 countries.

"At least let us make sure that the most profound and far-reaching decision, who lives and who dies, remains in the hands of humans and not of machines," he said in an opening speech to the conference entitled "Humanity at the Crossroads: Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Challenge of Regulation." Years of discussions at the United Nations have produced few tangible results and many participants at the two-day conference in Vienna said the window for action was closing rapidly.

Oakland, California is now home to "the first commercial hydrogen fuel station for big-rig trucks in the United States," according to the Los Angeles Times — serving 30 hydrogen fuel-cell trucks.

The newspaper says the facility "could mark the start of a nationwide network for fuel-cell truck refueling. It could also flop." Hydrogen fuel is expensive — as much as four times more expensive than gasoline or diesel fuel. The fuel cells, which drive electric motors to drive the truck, are enormously expensive as well.... The vehicles themselves are expensive too. Both battery electric and hydrogen fuel-cell trucks can cost three times as much or more than a $120,000 diesel truck. Those buying the trucks can qualify for state and federal subsidies to make up most of the upfront costs.
But government regulations may spark some demand: New diesel truck sales will be outlawed in California by 2036. Only zero-tailpipe-emission new trucks will be allowed. Already, zero-emission requirements are in place for trucks that enter ocean ports. And only two technologies are available to achieve that goal: battery electric trucks and hydrogen fuel-cell trucks. "We believe a good portion of those will be hydrogen vehicles," said Matt Miyasato, chief of public policy for hydrogen fuel distributor FirstElement Fuel. FirstElement, through its True Zero brand fueling stations, is the largest hydrogen vehicle fuel distributor in the U.S...

Battery electric is gaining a strong foothold in the medium-sized delivery truck market, but hydrogen could have a leg up for long-haul trucking. While a fuel cell is comparable in size to a diesel engine, a battery big enough for long-haul trucks adds weight and size and cuts down on the total freight load the truck can deliver. And while an electric truck battery can take hours to recharge, the refill time for hydrogen is more comparable to filling up with diesel fuel.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Five times the size of Paris. Visible from space. The world's biggest energy plant. Enough electricity to power Switzerland. The scale of the project transforming swathes of barren salt desert on the edge of western India into one of the most important sources of clean energy anywhere on the planet is so overwhelming that the man in charge can't keep up. "I don't even do the math any more," Sagar Adani told CNN in an interview last week.

Adani is executive director of Adani Green Energy Limited (AGEL). He's also the nephew of Gautam Adani, Asia's second richest man, whose $100 billion fortune stems from the Adani Group, India's biggest coal importer and a leading miner of the dirty fuel. Founded in 1988, the conglomerate has businesses in fields ranging from ports and thermal power plants to media and cements. Its clean energy unit AGEL is building the sprawling solar and wind power plant in the western Indian state of Gujarat at a cost of about $20 billion.

It will be the world's biggest renewable park when it is finished in about five years, and should generate enough clean electricity to power 16 million Indian homes... [T]he park will cover more than 200 square miles and be the planet's largest power plant regardless of the energy source, AGEL said.
CNN adds that the company "plans to invest $100 billion into energy transition over the next decade, with 70% of the investments ear-marked for clean energy."

"In less than 15 years, battery costs have fallen by more than 90%," according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, "one of the fastest declines ever seen in clean energy technologies."

And it's expected to get even cheaper, reports Reuters: An expected sharp fall in battery costs for energy storage in coming years will accelerate the shift to renewable energy from fossil fuels, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday... The total capital costs of battery storage are due to tumble by up to 40% by 2030, the Paris-based watchdog said in its Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions report.

"The combination of solar PV (photovoltaic) and batteries is today competitive with new coal plants in India," said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. "And just in the next few years, it will be cheaper than new coal in China and gas-fired power in the United States. Batteries are changing the game before our eyes." [...] The global market for energy storage doubled last year to over 90 gigawatt-hours (GWh), the report said...

The slide in battery costs will also help provide electricity to millions of people without access, cutting by nearly half the average electricity costs of mini-grids with solar PV coupled with batteries by 2030, the IEA said.
The Los Angeles Times notes one place adopting the tech is California: Standing in the middle of a solar farm in Yolo County, [California governor] Newsom announced the state now had battery storage systems with the capacity of more than 10,000 megawatts — about 20% of the 52,000 megawatts the state says is needed to meet its climate goals.
Although Newsom acknowledged it isn't yet enough to eliminate blackouts...

This year Dell moved to soldered RAM for its XPS 14 and 16, writes Digital Trends, which "makes it impossible to upgrade, or even repair."

"This was a big change from the past, where the XPS 15 and 17 were both celebrated for their upgradability." Of course, Dell isn't the first to make the transition. In fact, they're one of the last, which is what makes the decision so much tougher to swallow. Where soldered RAM was previously limited to just MacBooks and ultrabooks, it's now affecting most high-performance laptops for gaming as well. Even the fantastic ROG Zephyrus G14 moved to soldered memory this year.
After two months of research, the article's author acknowledges "there are tangible benefits to companies using soldered RAM, and all the people I spoke to while writing this agree that they outweigh the downsides, but how that applies to the end-user is a bit more complicated." If there's one thing and one thing only that soldered RAM is indisputably good for, it's saving space. [Haval Othman, a senior director of experience engineering at HP] explained the benefits, saying: "If battery life, mobility, form factor (thin and light), and power efficiency are my priority among other design choices, then my mind immediately goes to soldered RAM; because that's where soldered RAM can be beneficial and power-efficient, which will lead to longer battery life. Plus, it's going to give me more space on the motherboard, so I can design the product thinner and lighter. [...] If we want a thin product, the trade-off is soldering more of the devices onto the board."

This tracks. In a laptop, there's only so much space that can be used for components, and that free space grows smaller by the year to make ultrabooks possible. They're an industrywide trend that was first popularized by Apple, and the rest of the laptop manufacturing world quickly caught on. Each year, laptops are released thinner and lighter, and that means having to squeeze the components together in new, innovative ways... Soldering the memory down onto the motherboard means that it can be attached almost anywhere within the laptop instead of being slotted into a specific part of it. It effectively makes the laptop thinner by cutting back on the space that the RAM module takes up. The space saved by soldering memory can be used for other things, such as a bigger battery....

All three companies that I spoke to stress the form factor much more than any tangible cost benefits... Stuart Gill, director of global media relations, campaigns, and corporate content [said] "Both soldered and socketed RAM designs are now quite mature. As a result, we see no impact on the manufacturing process and, therefore, the cost to the consumer."
SO-DIMM chips also have "relatively limited bandwidth," according to HP's Othman, "while when you solder the memory chips onto the board, you can build it for a much wider bandwidth."

But the article ends by looking to the future. "The good news is that SO-DIMM memory might eventually be replaced by the CAMM2 standard." Recently approved by JEDEC, CAMM2 is said to be significantly thinner, and it'll be available both in soldered and non-soldered variants. Using CAMM2 will allow laptops to stack up to 128GB of RAM, and the frequencies are said to be going up, too. CAMM2 can also activate dual-channel memory with just a single module.

They're calling it "the world's largest 3D printer," but also "the factory of the future" — not just a 3D printer, but a manufacturing system. It's the succcessor to a 3D printer that could create an entire house, cutting construction time and labor, according to the Associated Press. And this one "may one day create entire neighborhoods." It has a voracious appetite, consuming as much as 500 pounds (227 kilograms) of material per hour... The university wants to show how homes can be constructed nearly entirely by a printer with a lower carbon footprint. The buildings and construction sector accounts for roughly 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions, largely due to the production and use of materials such as cement, steel and aluminum that have a significant carbon footprint, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Such printed buildings can be recycled, which is unique compared to current construction. "You can basically deconstruct it, you can grind it up if you wish, the 3D printed parts, and reprint with them, do it again," Dagher said before the event...

But it can be used for a variety of other creations and already has been used for a range of things, from boats to defense department structures.
The project is partly funded by the U.S. military, according to the BBC. "Maine University says it hopes the printer can be used to make affordable housing, as well as bridges, boats and wind turbines."

1,000 petabytes.
A million terabytes.
One quintillion bytes (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000).

That's the amount of storage reported by users of the Ceph storage solution (across more than 3,000 Ceph clusters).

The Ceph Foundation is a "directed fund" of the Linux Foundation, providing a neutral home for Ceph, "the most popular open source storage solution for modern data storage challenges" (offering an architecture that's "highly scalable, resilient, and flexible"). It's a software-defined storage platform, providing object storage, block storage, and file storage built on a common distributed cluster foundation.

And Friday they announced the release of Ceph Squid, "which comes with several performance and space efficiency features along with enhanced protocol support." Ceph has solidified its position as the cornerstone of open source data storage. The release of Ceph Squid represents a significant milestone toward providing scalable, reliable, and flexible storage solutions that meet the ever-evolving demands of digital data storage.

Features of Ceph Squid include improvements to BlueStore [a storage back end specifically designed for managing data on disk for Ceph Object Storage Daemon workloads] to reduce latency and CPU requirements for snapshot intensive workloads. BlueStore now uses RocksDB compression by default for increased average performance and reduced space usage. [And the next-generation Crimson OSD also has improvements in stability and read performance, and "now supports scrub, partial recovery and osdmap trimming."]

Ceph continues to drive the future of storage, and welcomes developers, partners, and technology enthusiasts to get involved.
Ceph Squid also brings enhancements for the CRUSH algorithm [which computes storage locations] to support more flexible and cost effective erasure coding configurations.

Tobias Mann reports via The Register: Canadian systems builder 45 Drives is perhaps best known for the dense multi-drive storage systems employed by the likes of Backblaze and others, but over the last year the biz has expanded its line-up to virtualization kit, and now low-power clients and workstations aimed at enterprises and home enthusiasts alike. 45 Drives' Home Client marks a departure from the relatively large rack-mount chassis it normally builds. Founder Doug Milburn told The Register the mini PC is something of a passion project that was born out of a desire to build a better home theater PC.

Housed within a custom passively cooled chassis built in-house by 45 Drive's parent company Protocase, is a quad-core, non-hyperthreaded Intel Alder Lake-generation N97 processor capable of boosting to 3.6GHz, your choice of either 8GB or 16GB of memory, and 250GB of flash storage. The decision to go with a 12-gen N-series was motivated in part by 45 Drives' internal workloads, Milburn explains, adding that to run PowerPoint or Salesforce just doesn't require that much horsepower. However, 45 Drives doesn't just see this as a low-power PC. Despite its name, the box will be sold under both its enterprise and home brands. In home lab environments, these small form factor x86 and Arm PCs have become incredibly popular for everything from lightweight virtualization and container hosts to firewalls and routers. [...]

In terms of software, 45 Drives says it will offer a number of operating system images for customers to choose from at the time of purchase, and Linux will be a first-class citizen on these devices. It's safe to say that Milburn isn't a big fan of Microsoft these days. "We run many hundreds of Microsoft workstations here, but we're kind of moving away from it," he said. "With Microsoft, it's a control thing; it's forced updates; it's a way of life with them." Milburn also isn't a fan of Microsoft's registration requirements and online telemetry. "We want control over what all our computers do. We want no traffic on our network that's out of here," he said. As a result, Milburn says 45 Drives is increasingly relying on Linux, and that not only applies to its internal machines but its products as well. Having said that, we're told that 45 Drives recognizes that Linux may not be appropriate for everyone and will offer Windows licenses at an additional cost. And, these both being x86 machines, there's nothing stopping you from loading your preferred distro or operating system on them after they've shipped. These workstations aren't exactly cheap. They start at $1,099 without the dedicated GPU. "The HL15 will set you back $799-$910 for the bare chassis if you opted for the PSU or not," adds The Register. "Meanwhile, a pre-configured system would run you $1,999 before factoring in drives."

Jonathan M. Gitlin reports Ars Technica: Honda announced today that it will spend $11 billion to expand its electric vehicle manufacturing presence in North America. The Japanese automaker already has a number of factories in the US, Mexico, and Canada, and it's this last one that will benefit from the expansion, with four EV-related plants planned for Ontario. Honda says it has begun evaluating requirements for what it's calling an "innovative and environmentally responsible" EV factory and a standalone EV battery plant in Alliston, Ontario, which is already home to Honda's two existing Canadian manufacturing facilities.

Additionally, the automaker wants to set up another two sites as joint ventures. One will be a plant that processes cathode active materials and their precursors -- the various elements like nickel and manganese that are combined with lithium in lithium-ion batteries -- set up in a partnership with POSCO Future M, a South Korean battery material and chemical company. (POSCO is already working with General Motors on another joint venture battery precursor material facility in Betancour, Quebec, that is supposed to become operational in 2026.) A second joint venture will be a partnership with Asahi Kasei, which will manufacture battery separators, the material that keeps the anode and cathode apart. The locations of these two joint ventures have not yet been announced.

Honda thinks it will be able to start making EVs in Ontario in 2028 and says the assembly plant will have the capacity to build 240,000 EVs per year. Meanwhile, the battery plant is planned to have an annual output of 36 GWh.