Nuclear engineer Lonnie Johnson worked on NASA's Galileo mission, has more than 140 patents, and invented the Super Soaker water gun. But now he's working on "a potential key to unlock a huge power source that's rarely utilized today," reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. [Alternate URL here.]

Waste heat... The Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter, or JTEC, has few moving parts, no combustion and no exhaust. All the work to generate electricity is done by hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Inside the device, pressurized hydrogen gas is separated by a thin, filmlike membrane, with low pressure gas on one side and high pressure gas on the other. The difference in pressure in this "stack" is what drives the hydrogen to compress and expand, creating electricity as it circulates. And unlike a fuel cell, it does not need to be refueled with more hydrogen. All that's needed to keep the process going and electricity flowing is a heat source.

As it turns out, there are enormous amounts of energy vented or otherwise lost from industrial facilities like power plants, factories, breweries and more. Between 20% and 50% of all energy used for industrial processes is dumped into the atmosphere and lost as waste heat, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The JTEC works with high temperatures, but the device's ability to generate electricity efficiently from low-grade heat sources is what company executives are most excited about. Inside JTEC's headquarters, engineers show off a demonstration unit that can power lights and a sound system with water that's roughly 200 degrees Fahrenheit — below the boiling point and barely warm enough to brew a cup of tea, said Julian Bell, JTEC's vice president of engineering. Comas Haynes, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute specializing in thermal and hydrogen system designs, agrees the company could "hit a sweet spot" if it can capitalize on lower temperature heat...

For Johnson, the potential application he's most excited about lies beneath our feet. Geothermal energy exists naturally in rocks and water beneath the Earth's surface at various depths. Tapping into that resource through abandoned oil and gas wells — a well-known access point for underground heat — offers another opportunity. "You don't need batteries and you can draw power when you need it from just about anywhere," Johnson said. Right now, the company is building its first commercial JTEC unit, which is set to be deployed early next year. Mike McQuary, JTEC's CEO and the former president of the pioneering internet service provider MindSpring, said he couldn't reveal the customer, but said it's a "major Southeast utility company." "Crossing that bridge where you have commercial customers that believe in it and will pay for it is important," McQuary said...

On top of some initial seed money, the company brought in $30 million in a Series A funding in 2022 — money that allowed the company to move to its Lee + White headquarters and hire more than 30 engineers. McQuary said it expects to begin another round of fundraising soon.
"Johnson, meanwhile, hasn't stopped working on new inventions," the article points out. "He continues to refine the design for his solid-state battery..."

UPDATE (12/7): The New York Times clarifies today that the damage at Chernobyl hasn't led to a rise in radiation levels: "If there was to be some event inside the shelter that would release radioactive materials into the space inside the New Safe Confinement, because this facility is no longer sealed to the outside environment, there's the potential for radiation to come out," said Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace who has monitored nuclear power plants in Ukraine since 2022 and last visited Chernobyl on October 31. "I have to say I don't think that's a particularly serious issue at the moment, because they're not actively decommissioning the actual sarcophagus."

The I.A.E.A. also said there was no permanent damage to the shield's load-bearing structures or monitoring systems. A spokesman for the agency, Fredrik Dahl, said in a text message on Sunday that radiation levels were similar to what they were before the drone hit.
But "A structure designed to prevent radioactive leakage at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine is no longer operational," Politico reported Saturday, "after Russian drones targeted it earlier this year, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog has found." [T]he large steel structure "lost its primary safety functions, including the confinement capability" when its outer cladding was set ablaze after being struck by Russian drones, according to a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Beyond that, there was "no permanent damage to its load-bearing structures or monitoring systems," it said. "Limited temporary repairs have been carried out on the roof, but timely and comprehensive restoration remains essential to prevent further degradation and ensure long-term nuclear safety," IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in astatement.
The Guardian has pictures of the protective shield — incuding the damage from the drone strike. The shield is the world's largest movable land structure, reports CNN: The IAEA, which has a permanent presence at the site, will "continue to do everything it can to support efforts to fully restore nuclear safety and security," Grossi said.... Built in 2010 and completed in 2019, it was designed to last 100 years and has played a crucial role in securing the site.

The project cost €2.1 billion and was funded by contributions from more than 45 donor countries and organizations through the Chernobyl Shelter Fund, according to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which in 2019 hailed the venture as "the largest international collaboration ever in the field of nuclear safety."

"Researchers engineered a strained germanium layer on silicon that allows charge to move faster than in any silicon-compatible material to date," reports Science Daily. "This record mobility could lead to chips that run cooler, faster, and with dramatically lower energy consumption.

"The discovery also enhances the prospects for silicon-based quantum devices..." Scientists from the University of Warwick and the National Research Council of Canada have reported the highest "hole mobility" ever measured in a material that works within today's silicon-based semiconductor manufacturing.... The researchers created a nanometer-thin germanium epilayer on silicon that is placed under compressive strain. This engineered structure enables electric charge to move faster than in any previously known silicon-compatible material...

The findings establish a promising new route for ultra-fast, low-power semiconductor components. Potential uses include quantum information systems, spin qubits, cryogenic controllers for quantum processors, AI accelerators, and energy-efficient servers designed to reduce cooling demands in data centers. This achievement also represents a significant accomplishment for Warwick's Semiconductors Research Group and highlights the UK's growing influence in advanced semiconductor materials research.

To build three-wheeled, solar electric vehicles, Aptera has now launched its "validation" vehicle assembly line, reports the San Diego Business Journal.

"The validation line will set a technical foundation for the company's eventual low-volume assembly line, ensuring that manufacturing processes are optimized and refined, particularly for the company's composite body structure." To date, Aptera has produced three validation vehicles, two of which are in use driving around the San Diego region, with plans to build another 10 in the coming weeks as progress continues on the validation manufacturing line. "You learn things when you start to put miles on vehicles, putting 10s of thousands of miles on these validation vehicles and learning a lot from the durometer of the suspension, ride quality, spring rates and braking pressure," Aptera co-founder and co-CEO Chris Anthony said. "We've been able to incorporate a lot of the usability stuff back, but also, just as we've gone through the process of building these, a lot of order-of-operation stuff that's educated us on what's going to make for the best initial assembly lines," he added....

Aptera made its public debut on October 16, with the company's executive team participating in the Nasdaq closing bell ceremony that evening. Shares of SEV have hovered between $6.50 and $8.50 for much of the company's first month on the exchange. The company's equity line of credit also took effect in mid-November... expected to aid in Aptera generating at least a portion of the $65 million the company has said it will need to complete validation manufacturing and begin low-volume production for customers. Aptera previously raised some $135 million from more than 17,000 investors in what the company touts as the most successful crowdfunding effort of all time, but Anthony argued Aptera will soon need to invest larger sums of capital to scale its production needs.

"Publicly listing the company gives us a lot more funding mechanisms to get into production," he said. "So just having access to the public markets, public liquidity and the kind of instruments and tools that banks offer to public companies, it just seemed like now is the right time." Alongside the IPO, Aptera made its formal transition to a Public Benefit Corporation, giving the company a legal obligation to consider its effect on employees, communities and customers in addition to the profit motives of its shareholders.
California's state government also awarded Aptera $21 million "to support its push toward scaled manufacturing," the article points out.

It also notes that Aptera's vehicles "are technically classified as motorcycles rather than standard passenger cars, presenting a potentially cheaper alternative for consumers on the hunt for an electric vehicle."

CNN's prediction for 2026? "Any device that uses memory, from phones to tablets and smartwatches, could get pricier." But will it be a little or a lot?

The article cites an analysis from multinational strategy/management consulting firm McKinsey & Company which found America's data center demand could continue growing by 20 to 25 percent per year" through 2030. "That's prompted memory manufacturers like Micron and Samsung to shift their focus to data centers, which use a different type of memory, meaning fewer resources for consumer products. (Jaejune Kim, executive VP for memory at Samsung, said in October that their third quarter saw strong demand for memory for AI and data centers, and that they expected the supply shortage for mobile and PC memory to "intensify further.") Memory prices are rising for consumer products because major manufacturers are instead ramping up production for AI data centers as artificial intelligence companies boom. "It's pretty much brutal and crunched across the board," said Yang Wang, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research.

The International Data Corporation, a global market research firm, reported earlier this week that the smartphone market is expected to decline by 0.9% in 2026 in part because of memory shortages. Memory prices are expected to surge by 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and may climb an additional 20% early next year, Counterpoint Research said last month... TrendForce, a research firm that follows the semiconductor industry, estimates memory price hikes have made smartphones 8% to 10% more expensive to produce in 2025 (higher production costs don't always translate into higher consumer prices for a variety of reasons).

Some smartphones could cost more as soon as early next year, said Nabila Popal, a senior research director for the International Data Corporation. Cheap Android phones may see the biggest impact, since less expensive products usually have thinner margins. "It's going to be almost impossible for them to not raise prices" of cheaper Android phones, said Popal. Companies may also postpone phone launches to focus on expensive models that may be more profitable. The average selling price for smartphones is expected to climb to $465 in 2026, compared to $457 in 2025, according to Popal, putting the smartphone market at a record high value of $578.9 billion.

But the pendulum is expected to swing back in the other direction late next year as the supply chain adjusts, according to Popal and Wang, potentially bringing prices back down or at least capping increases.

Meta is acquiring AI wearable startup Limitless, maker of a pendant that records conversations and generates summaries. "We're excited that Limitless will be joining Meta to help accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. CNBC reports: Limitless CEO Dan Siroker revealed the deal on Friday via a corporate blog post but did not disclose the financial terms. "Meta recently announced a new vision to bring personal superintelligence to everyone and a key part of that vision is building incredible AI-enabled wearables," Siroker said in the post and an accompanying video. "We share this vision and we'll be joining Meta to help bring our shared vision to life."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A few years ago, Paul Wieland, a 44-year-old information technology professional living in New York's Adirondack Mountains, was wrapping up a home renovation when he ran into a hiccup. He wanted to be able to control his new garage door with his smartphone. But the options available, including a product called MyQ, required connecting to a company's internet servers. He believed a "smart" garage door should operate only over a local Wi-Fi network to protect a home's privacy, so he started building his own system to plug into his garage door. By 2022, he had developed a prototype, which he named RATGDO, for Rage Against the Garage Door Opener. He had hoped to sell 100 of his new gadgets just to recoup expenses, but he ended up selling tens of thousands. That's because MyQ's maker did what a number of other consumer device manufacturers have done over the last few years, much to the frustration of their customers: It changed the device, making it both less useful and more expensive to operate.

Chamberlain Group, a company that makes garage door openers, had created the MyQ hubs so that virtually any garage door opener could be controlled with home automation software from Apple, Google, Nest and others. Chamberlain also offered a free MyQ smartphone app. Two years ago, Chamberlain started shutting down support for most third-party access to its MyQ servers. The company said it was trying to improve the reliability of its products. But this effectively broke connections that people had set up to work with Apple's Home app or Google's Home app, among others. Chamberlain also started working with partners that charge subscriptions for their services, though a basic app to control garage doors was still free.

While Mr. Wieland said RATGDO sales spiked after Chamberlain made those changes, he believes the popularity of his device is about more than just opening and closing a garage. It stems from widespread frustration with companies that sell internet-connected hardware that they eventually change or use to nickel-and-dime customers with subscription fees. "You should own the hardware, and there is a line there that a lot of companies are experimenting with," Mr. Wieland said in a recent interview. "I'm really afraid for the future that consumers are going to swallow this and that's going to become the norm." [...] For Mr. Wieland, the fight isn't over. He started a company named RATCLOUD, for Rage Against the Cloud. He said he was developing similar products that were not yet for sale.

A light aircraft crashed in Gloucestershire after a 3D-printed plastic air-induction elbow softened from engine heat and collapsed, cutting power during final approach and causing the plane to undershoot the runway. Investigators say the part was made from "inappropriate material" and safety actions will be taken in the future regarding 3D printed parts. The BBC reports: Following an "uneventful local flight", the AAIB report said the pilot advanced the throttle on the final approach to the runway, and realized the engine had suffered a complete loss of power. "He managed to fly over a road and a line of bushes on the airfield boundary, but landed short and struck the instrument landing system before coming to rest at the side of the structure," the report read.

It was revealed the part had been installed during a modification to the fuel system and collapsed due to its 3D-printed plastic material softening when exposed to heat from the engine. The Light Aircraft Association (LAA) said it now intends to take safety actions in response to the accident, including a "LAA Alert" regarding the use of 3D-printed parts that will be sent to inspectors.

A severe spike in global DRAM prices has pushed Samsung Semiconductor to refuse a long-term RAM order from its own sibling, Samsung Electronics. The move is forcing the smartphone division into short, expensive renegotiations, which will likely mean higher costs for consumer devices. PCWorld reports: Samsung subsidiaries are, naturally, going to look to Samsung Semiconductor first when they need parts. Such was reportedly the case for Samsung Electronics, in search of memory supplies for its newest smartphones as the company ramps up production for 2026 flagship designs. But with so much RAM hardware going into new "AI" data centers -- and those companies willing to pay top dollar for their hardware -- memory manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are prioritizing data center suppliers to maximize profits.

The end result, according to a report from SE Daily spotted by SamMobile, is that Samsung Semiconductor rejected the original order for smartphone DRAM chips from Samsung Electronics' Mobile Experience division. The smartphone manufacturing arm of the company had hoped to nail down pricing and supply for another year. But reports say that due to "chipflation," the phone-making division must renegotiate quarterly, with a long-term supply deal rejected by its corporate sibling. A short-term deal, with higher prices, was reportedly hammered out.

A London Assembly report warns that surging demand from "energy-hungry" data centers is straining the electricity grid and delaying new housing developments. With data-center electricity use expected to rise up to 600% by 2050, officials fear London's housing crisis could worsen without coordinated action. The BBC reports: According to the report (PDF) from the London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee, some new housing developments in west London were temporarily delayed after the electricity grid reached full capacity. The committee's chair James Small-Edwards said energy capacity had become a "real constraint" on housing and economic growth in the city.

In 2022, the General London Assembly (GLA) began to investigate delays to housing developments in the boroughs of Ealing, Hillingdon and Hounslow - after it received reports that completed projects were being told they would have to "wait until 2037" to get a connection to the electricity grid. There were fears the boroughs may have to "pause new housing altogether" until the issue was resolved. But the GLA found short-term fixes with the National Grid and energy regulator Ofgem to ensure the "worst-case scenario" did not happen -- though several projects were still set back. The strains on parts of London's housing highlighted the need for "longer term planning" around grid capacity in the future, said the report.

404 Media's Claire Woodcock writes: As prices for streaming subscriptions continue to soar and finding movies to watch, new and old, is becoming harder as the number of streaming services continues to grow, people are turning to the unexpected last stronghold of physical media: the public library. Some libraries are now intentionally using iconic Blockbuster branding to recall the hours visitors once spent looking for something to rent on Friday and Saturday nights.

John Scalzo, audiovisual collection librarian with a public library in western New York, says that despite an observed drop-off in DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra disc circulation in 2019, interest in physical media is coming back around. "People really seem to want physical media," Scalzo told 404 Media. Part of it has to do with consumer awareness: People know they're paying more for monthly subscriptions to streaming services and getting less. The same has been true for gaming.

As the audiovisual selector with the Free Library of Philadelphia since 2024, Kris Langlais has been focused on building the library's video game collections to meet comparable interest in demand. Now that every branch library has a prominent video game collection, Langlais says that patrons who come for the games are reportedly expressing interest in more of what the library has to offer. "Librarians out in our branches are seeing a lot of young people who are really excited by these collections," Langlais told 404 Media. "Folks who are coming in just for the games are picking up program flyers and coming back for something like that." IP disputes are fueling the shift, too.

The report notes how rights and licensing battles are making some films harder to access -- from titles that quietly slip out of commercial circulation, to streaming-only releases that never make it to disc, to entire shows vanishing during mergers like HBO Max-Discovery+. One prominent example is The People's Joker, which was briefly pulled from the Toronto International Film Festival over a conflict with Batman's rightsholders.

Situations like that are pushing librarians to grab physical copies while they still can, before these works risk disappearing altogether.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Five months after releasing a plan to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence, the Trump administration is turning to robots. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been meeting with robotics industry CEOs and is "all in" on accelerating the industry's development, according to three people familiar with the discussions who were granted anonymity to share details. The administration is considering issuing an executive order on robotics next year, according to two of the people. A Department of Commerce spokesperson said: "We are committed to robotics and advanced manufacturing because they are central to bringing critical production back to the United States."

The Department of Transportation is also preparing to announce a robotics working group, possibly before the end of the year, according to one person familiar with the planning. A spokesperson for the department did not respond to a request for comment. There's growing interest on Capitol Hill as well. A Republican amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would have created a national robotics commission. The amendment was not included in the bill. Other legislative efforts are underway. The flurry of activity suggests robotics is emerging as the next major front in America's race against China. "There is now recognition that advanced robotics is crucial to the U.S. in terms of manufacturing, technology, national security, defense applications, public safety," said Brendan Schulman, VP of policy and government relations for Boston Dynamics. "The investment that we're seeing in the sector and the efforts in China to dominate the future of robotics are being noticed."

Micron is shutting down its Crucial consumer RAM business in 2026 after nearly three decades, citing heavy demand from AI data centers. "The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage," Sumit Sadana, EVP and chief business officer at Micron Technology, said in a statement. "Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments." Ars Technica reports: Micron said it will continue shipping Crucial consumer products through the end of its fiscal second quarter in February 2026 and will honor warranties on existing products. The company will continue selling Micron-branded enterprise products to commercial customers and plans to redeploy affected employees to other positions within the company.

Crucial launched in 1996 during the Pentium era as Micron's consumer brand for RAM and storage upgrades. Over the years, the brand expanded to encompass other memory-related products such as SSDs, flash memory cards, and portable storage drives. Micron Technology has been manufacturing RAM since 1981.

Despite Windows 10 losing free support, Statcounter shows Windows 11 holding only a modest lead of 53.7% market share compared to Windows 10's 42.7%. Analysts say the slow transition reflects both hardware limitations and a lack of must-have Windows 11 features compelling organizations to refresh their fleets. The Register reports: The Register spoke to Lansweeper principal technical evangelist Esben Dochy, who noted that consumers were more likely to have devices that couldn't be upgraded or follow the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule when it comes to change. He also pointed out consumers in the EU get Microsoft Extended Security Updates (ESU) for free.

For businesses, though, it's different. Dochy told us: "The primary blocker is slow change management processes. These can be slow due to bad planning, lack of resources, difficulty in execution (in highly distributed organizations) etc. "The ESU are used to be secure while those change management processes take place, but organizations will have to pay to get those ESU making it more expensive for unprepared or inefficient organizations." [...]

The challenge facing Windows 11 is that, other than the end of free support for many versions, there is no must-have feature to make enterprises break a hardware refresh cycle, particularly in a difficult economic environment. Microsoft has not released official statistics on Windows 11 adoption. However, hardware vendors have noted the sluggish pace of transition. Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke commented during an analyst call: "If you were to look at it relative to the previous OS end of support, we are 10-12 points behind at that point with Windows 11 than we were with the previous generation."

A Google Antigravity user says the AI-driven "vibe coding" tool accidentally wiped his entire D: drive while trying to clear a project cache. Google says it's investigating, but the episode adds to a growing list of AI tools behaving in ways that "would get a junior developer fired," suggests The Register. From the report: We reached out to the user, a photographer and graphic designer from Greece, who asked we only identify him as Tassos M because he doesn't want to be permanently linked online to what could "become a controversy or conspiracy against Google." [...] Tassos told Antigravity to help him develop software that's useful for any photographer who has to choose a few prime shots from a mountain of snaps. He wanted the software to let him rate images, then automatically sort them into folders based on that rating.

According to his Reddit post, when Tassos figured out the AI agent had wiped his drive, he asked, "Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?". "No, you absolutely did not give me permission to do that," Antigravity responded. "I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part."

Redditors, as they are wont to do, were quick to pounce on Tassos for his own errors, which included running Antigravity in Turbo mode, which lets the Antigravity agent execute commands without user input, and Tassos accepted responsibility. "If the tool is capable of issuing a catastrophic, irreversible command, then the responsibility is shared -- the user for trusting it and the creator for designing a system with zero guardrails against obviously dangerous commands," he opined on Reddit.

As noted earlier, Tassos was unable to recover the files that Antigravity deleted. Luckily, as he explained on Reddit, most of what he lost had already been backed up on another drive. Phew. "I don't think I'm going to be using that again," Tassos noted in a YouTube video he published showing additional details of his Antigravity console and the AI's response to its mistake. Tassos isn't alone in his experience. Multiple Antigravity users have posted on Reddit to explain that the platform had wiped out parts of their projects without permission.