A major industrial conglomerate has resorted to buying washing machines and tearing out the semiconductors inside for use in its own chip modules, according to the CEO of a company central to the chipmaking supply chain. From a report: ASML's Chief Executive Officer Peter Wennink remarked on the situation, without naming the conglomerate, during his company's earnings call Wednesday. The beleaguered firm relayed its struggle to him only the prior week, he said, signalling that chip shortages are going to persist for the foreseeable future, at least for some sectors. "The demand we are currently seeing comes from so many places in the industry," Wennink said, pointing to the wider adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. "It's so widespread. We have significantly underestimated the width of the demand. That, I don't think, is going to go away." Even major chip equipment makers including US-based Lam Research are struggling to get enough components to fulfil orders, potentially making it more difficult for semiconductor fabs to significantly increase their capacity in the near term.

Rolls-Royce is to start building parts for its small modular nuclear reactors in anticipation of receiving regulatory approval from the British government by 2024, one of its directors has said. The Guardian reports: Paul Stein, the chairman of Rolls-Royce SMR, a subsidiary of the FTSE 100 engineering company, said he hoped to be providing power to the UK's national grid by 2029. Speaking to Reuters in an interview conducted virtually, Stein said the regulatory "process has been kicked off, and will likely be complete in the middle of 2024. We are trying to work with the UK government, and others to get going now placing orders, so we can get power on grid by 2029."

Small modular reactors (SMRs) are seen by their proponents as a way to build nuclear power plants in factories, a method that could be cheaper and quicker than traditional designs. The technology, based on the reactors used in nuclear submarines, is seen by Rolls-Royce as a potential earner far beyond any previous business such as jet engines or diesel motors. The government under Boris Johnson put nuclear power at the centre of its energy strategy announced earlier this month, in response to climate concerns and a desire to ditch Russian gas. SMRs are expected to play an important role in an expansion of nuclear to supply a quarter of the UK's energy needs. Lower costs would be crucial in justifying the nuclear push, given that onshore wind is seen as much cheaper and quicker to install.

For nearly two years, netting a PS5, Xbox Series X, or AMD Radeon and Nvidia RTX graphics cards without paying a fortune has been a matter of luck (or a lot of skill). At its peak, scalpers were successfully charging double or even triple MSRP for a modern GPU. But it's looking like the great GPU shortage is nearly over. From a report: In January, sites including Tom's Hardware reported that prices were finally beginning to drop, and drop they did; they've now dropped an average of 30 percent in the three months since. On eBay, the most popular graphics cards are only commanding a street price of $200-$300 over MSRP. And while that might still seem like a lot, some have fallen further: used Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti or AMD RX 6900 XT are currently fetching less than their original asking price, a sure sign that sanity is returning to the marketplace.

Just as importantly, some graphics cards are actually staying in stock at retailers when their prices are too high -- again, something that sounds perfectly normal but that we haven't seen in a while. For many months, boutiques like my local retailer Central Computers could only afford to sell you a GPU as part of a big PC bundle, but now it's making every card available on its own. GameStop is selling a Radeon RX 6600 for just $10 over MSRP, and it hasn't yet sold out. Newegg has also continually been offering an RTX 3080 Ti for just $10 over MSRP (after rebate, too) -- even if $1,200 still seems high for that card's level of performance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Protocol: Add Amazon to the long list of companies looking to build a more immersive future: The ecommerce giant has been looking to hire a number of people for an unannounced AR/VR product in recent months. Among the roles Amazon is looking to fill are a wide variety of senior positions for computer vision scientists, designers, program managers, product managers, researchers and technologists, suggesting that the company is looking to build out a substantive team. "You will develop an advanced XR research concept into a magical and useful new-to-world consumer product," one of the job listings reads, using the industry shorthand for extended reality, which can encompass both AR and VR. Another job listing describes the initiative related to "XR/AR devices," and states that eventual hires will be part of "a greenfield development effort" that will include "developing code for early prototypes through mass production."

Amazon is looking to hire a UX designer to work on "the core system interface along with end-user applications spanning from multi-modal interfaces to 3D AR entertainment experiences," and suggest that applicants should have the ability to "think spatially, with 3D design experience in motion design, animation [and] AR/VR, games," among other things. Applicants for a senior product manager position are told they should have "experience building deeply technical products, e.g. AI/ML, robotics, games." [...] Interestingly, a number of the job listings describe the project as related to a "magical and useful, new-to-world XR consumer product," suggesting it may be looking to establish a new product category. Others even describe it as a "a new-to-world smart-home product."

A writer for The Drive reports that "Recently, I noticed a part that I made for my Honda Accord was removed from Printables, the newly rebranded 3D printing repository offered by Prusa.

"There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for it, but I didn't think anything else about it...until reports of a mass deletion started popping up on Reddit." All models referencing the word "Honda" posted prior to March 30, 2022, were seemingly removed from Printables without warning. These included speaker brackets, key housings, hood latches, shifter bushings, washer fluid caps, roof latch handles, and my trunk lid handle — a part not offered on 10th generation Accords sold in the U.S. at all. In fact, many of the removed parts had no Honda branding but were just compatible with Honda vehicles. As it turns out, Prusa says it was issued a takedown notice from Honda and removed all 3D models that referenced the brand.

"I can confirm to you that we have received a letter from a lawyer representing Honda, informing us that we were required to remove any model which used 'Honda' in the listing, the model itself, or one of several trademarks/logos also associated with Honda," a Prusa spokesperson told The Drive in an email. "This will also be related to the naming of the files it self (sic), as for Honda this would be considered as a violation of their trademark/patents." A Prusa employee responded to a post on the company's forums, noting that Honda sent a "huge legal document" that covered every model that the company wished to have deleted. The document reportedly included items that did not have Honda logos, but also specific items with certain shapes and dimensions — like a washer fluid reservoir cap, for example.

A response from another employee was posted suggesting other sites that host 3D models were also sent a similar takedown notice.

A headline at Hot Hardware calls it "a sexy Linux laptop with deep learning chops... being pitched as the world's most powerful laptop for machine learning workloads."

And here's how Ars Technica describes the Razer x Lambda Tensorbook (announced Tuesday): Made in collaboration with Lambda, the Linux-based clamshell focuses on deep-learning development. Lambda, which has been around since 2012, is a deep-learning infrastructure provider used by the US Department of Defense and "97 percent of the top research universities in the US," according to the company's announcement. Lambda's offerings include GPU clusters, servers, workstations, and cloud instances that train neural networks for various use cases, including self-driving cars, cancer detection, and drug discovery.

Dubbed "The Deep Learning Laptop," the Tensorbook has an Nvidia RTX 3080 Max-Q (16GB) and targets machine-learning engineers, especially those who lack a laptop with a discrete GPU and thus have to share a remote machine's resources, which negatively affects development.... "When you're stuck SSHing into a remote server, you don't have any of your local data or code and even have a hard time demoing your model to colleagues," Lambda co-founder and CEO Stephen Balaban said in a statement, noting that the laptop comes with PyTorch and TensorFlow for quickly training and demoing models from a local GUI interface without SSH. Lambda isn't a laptop maker, so it recruited Razer to build the machine....

While there are more powerful laptops available, the Tensorbook stands out because of its software package and Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS.
The Verge writes: While Razer currently offers faster CPU, GPU and screens in today's Blade lineup, it's not necessarily a bad deal if you love the design, considering how pricey Razer's laptops can be. But we've generally found that Razer's thin machines run quite hot in our reviews, and the Blade in question was no exception even with a quarter of the memory and a less powerful RTX 3060 GPU. Lambda's FAQ page does not address heat as of today.

Lambda is clearly aiming this one at prospective MacBook Pro buyers, and I don't just say that because of the silver tones. The primary hardware comparison the company touts is a 4x speedup over Apple's M1 Max in a 16-inch MacBook Pro when running TensorFlow.
Specifically, Lambda's web site claims the new laptop "delivers model training performance up to 4x faster than Apple's M1 Max, and up to 10x faster than Google Colab instances." And it credits this to the laptop's use of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q 16GB GPU, adding that NVIDIA GPUs "are the industry standard for parallel processing, ensuring leading performance and compatibility with all machine learning frameworks and tools."

"It looks like a fine package and machine, but pricing starts at $3,499," notes Hot Hardware, adding "There's a $500 up-charge to have it configured to dual-boot Windows 10."

The Verge speculates on what this might portend for the future. "Perhaps the recently renewed interest in Linux gaming, driven by the Steam Deck, will push Razer to consider Linux for its own core products as well."

Earlier this week the Voice of America news service shared a story that begins with exclusive photos from a nuclear lab "from which a Ukrainian official says Russian troops stole radioactive material that could be harmful if mishandled...." It is housed in a building run by a state agency managing the exclusion zone around Chernobyl's nearby decommissioned nuclear power plant, where a 1986 explosion caused the world's worst nuclear accident. The director of the agency, Evgen Kramarenko, provided the laboratory photos to VOA, saying he took them on an April 5 visit, five days after Russian troops withdrew from Chernobyl....

"We have a laboratory that had a big quantity of radioactive instruments that are used to calibrate our radiation dosimeters," Kramarenko told VOA. A dosimeter is a safety device, typically worn by individuals as a badge, that measures exposure to ionizing radiation, including nuclear radiation. The agency's dosimeters are calibrated using small metallic containers of radioactive material made by Ukrainian state enterprise USIE Izotop, which displays a photo of them on its website.

"Most of those calibration instruments were stolen. They look like coins. If the Russian soldiers carry them around, it's very dangerous for them," Kramarenko said....

In a Saturday Facebook post, Kramarenko's agency said occupying Russian troops stole samples of fuel-containing materials from the lab in addition to the radioactive calibration instruments. The agency said it was possible that the Russians threw away the items elsewhere in Chernobyl's exclusion zone, but that a likelier scenario is that they kept items as "souvenirs."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: California, which aims to have a carbon-free power grid within 25 years, got a short glimpse of that possibility earlier this month. The state's main grid ran on more than 97% renewable energy at 3:39 p.m. on Sunday April 3, breaking a previous record of 96.4% that was set just a week earlier, the California Independent System Operator said Thursday in a statement. While these all-time highs are for a brief time, they solidly demonstrate the advances being made to reliably achieve California's clean energy goals," said California ISO CEO Elliot Mainzer said in the statement.

Power production from the sun and wind typically peak in the spring, due to mild temperatures and the angle of the sun allowing for an extended period of strong solar production, the grid operator said. While hitting the new renewable record is remarkable, the state has found itself scrambling for power supplies during the past two summers as it has added more intermittent sources and retired natural-gas plants for environmental reasons. California has set a target to have a zero-carbon power system by 2045.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency -- a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines. The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel's photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity. The team's design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, or up to about 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When the energy is needed, such as on overcast days, TPV cells would convert the heat into electricity, and dispatch the energy to a power grid. With the new TPV cell, the team has now successfully demonstrated the main parts of the system in separate, small-scale experiments. They are working to integrate the parts to demonstrate a fully operational system. From there, they hope to scale up the system to replace fossil-fuel-driven power plants and enable a fully decarbonized power grid, supplied entirely by renewable energy. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: On March 29, wind turbines produced more electricity than coal and nuclear, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an agency that collects energy statistics for the government, says. In the past, wind-powered electricity has gone beyond coal and nuclear on separate days, but this was the first time wind surpassed both on the same day. Natural gas is still the largest source of electricity generation in the country.

The EIA notes that in the spring and fall months, nuclear and coal generators reduce their output because demand tends to be lower, which could contribute to why wind turbines produced more electricity that day. But wind taking the No. 2 spot may be short-lived. The agency says electricity generation from wind on a monthly basis has been lower than natural gas, coal and nuclear generation. According to EIA projections, wind is not expected to surpass any other method in any month of 2022 or 2023.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: How do you bottle renewable energy for when the Sun doesn't shine and the wind won't blow? That's one of the most vexing questions standing in the way of a greener electrical grid. Massive battery banks are one answer. But they're expensive and best at storing energy for a few hours, not for days long stretches of cloudy weather or calm. Another strategy is to use surplus energy to heat a large mass of material to ultrahigh temperatures, then tap the energy as needed. This week, researchers report a major improvement in a key part of that scheme: a device for turning the stored heat back into electricity.

A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory achieved a nearly 30% jump in the efficiency of a thermophotovoltaic (TPV), a semiconductor structure that converts photons emitted from a heat source to electricity, just as a solar cell transforms sunlight into power. "This is very exciting stuff," says Andrej Lenert, a materials engineer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "This is the first time [TPVs have] gotten into really promising efficiency ranges, which is ultimately what matters for a lot of applications." Together with related advances, he and others say, the new work gives a major boost to efforts to roll out thermal batteries on a large scale, as cheap backup for renewable power systems. The idea is to feed surplus wind or solar electricity to a heating element, which boosts the temperature of a liquid metal bath or a graphite block to several thousand degrees. The heat can be turned back into electricity by making steam that drives a turbine, but there are trade-offs. High temperatures raise the conversion efficiency, but turbine materials begin to break down at about 1500C. TPVs offer an alternative: Funnel the stored heat to a metal film or filament, setting it aglow like the tungsten wire in an incandescent light bulb, then use TPVs to absorb the emitted light and turn it to electricity.

For the new device, Asegun Henry, an MIT mechanical engineer, tinkered with both the emitter and the TPV itself. Previous TPV setups heated the emitters to about 1400C, which maximized their brightness in the wavelength range for which TPVs were optimized. Henry aimed to push the temperature 1000C higher, where tungsten emits more photons at higher energies, which could improve the energy conversion. But that meant reworking the TPVs as well. With researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Henry's team laid down more than two dozen thin layers of different semiconductors to create two separate cells stacked one on top of another. The top cell absorbs mostly visible and ultraviolet photons, whereas the lower cell absorbs mostly infrared. A thin gold sheet under the bottom cell reflects low-energy photons the TPVs couldn't harvest. The tungsten reabsorbs that energy, preventing it from being lost. The result, the group reports today in Nature, is a TPV tandem that converts 41.1% of the energy emitted from a 2400C tungsten filament to electricity.

By combining two processors into one, the company has squeezed a surprising amount of performance out of silicon. From a report: "UltraFusion gave us the tools we needed to be able to fill up that box with as much compute as we could," Tim Millet, vice president of hardware technologies at Apple, says of the Mac Studio. Benchmarking of the M1 Ultra has shown it to be competitive with the fastest high-end computer chips and graphics processor on the market. Millet says some of the chip's capabilities, such as its potential for running AI applications, will become apparent over time, as developers port over the necessary software libraries. The M1 Ultra is part of a broader industry shift toward more modular chips. Intel is developing a technology that allows different pieces of silicon, dubbed "chiplets," to be stacked on top of one another to create custom designs that do not need to be redesigned from scratch. The company's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has identified this "advanced packaging" as one pillar of a grand turnaround plan. Intel's competitor AMD is already using a 3D stacking technology from TSMC to build some server and high-end PC chips. This month, Intel, AMD, Samsung, TSMC, and ARM announced a consortium to work on a new standard for chiplet designs. In a more radical approach, the M1 Ultra uses the chiplet concept to connect entire chips together.

Apple's new chip is all about increasing overall processing power. "Depending on how you define Moore's law, this approach allows you to create systems that engage many more transistors than what fits on one chip," says Jesus del Alamo, a professor at MIT who researches new chip components. He adds that it is significant that TSMC, at the cutting edge of chipmaking, is looking for new ways to keep performance rising. "Clearly, the chip industry sees that progress in the future is going to come not only from Moore's law but also from creating systems that could be fabricated by different technologies yet to be brought together," he says. "Others are doing similar things, and we certainly see a trend towards more of these chiplet designs," adds Linley Gwennap, author of the Microprocessor Report, an industry newsletter. The rise of modular chipmaking might help boost the performance of future devices, but it could also change the economics of chipmaking. Without Moore's law, a chip with twice the transistors may cost twice as much. "With chiplets, I can still sell you the base chip for, say, $300, the double chip for $600, and the uber-double chip for $1,200," says Todd Austin, an electrical engineer at the University of Michigan.

Mike Bouma writes: I just bought the A500 Mini here in the Netherlands. The first reviews are now available.

The Guardian gives the device a 4 out of 5 score in their review: "The A500 is a robust piece of tech nostalgia that will give veteran fans many hours of nostalgic pleasure while also providing an accessible means of introducing younger family members to the Amiga scene. The colorful sprites, pounding techno soundtracks and sardonic wit of the beloved Sensible Software, Team 17 and Bitmap Brothers games retain their appeal and it has been fascinating to rediscover how much the modern independent gaming scene owes to this 35-year-old home computer."

Nintendo Life has reviewed the device, giving it an 8 out of 10 score: "As such, this is an intriguing device for anyone who is even remotely interested in tracking the development of the games industry -- and while its 120-pound price tag makes it more expensive than many of its micro-console rivals, the ability to side-load games is very welcome indeed."

Express.co.uk gives the device a 3.5 out of 5 score in their review: "Overall, the Amiga 500 Mini is a strong addition to the crowded classic console market that will appeal mostly to those that have a lot of nostalgia for this iconic PC gaming machine. And the ability to add extra games is a great little bonus which will add plenty of extra life to the system."

Furthermore, various YouTubers have reviewed the A500 Mini, including Retro Recipes, which gives the device a perfect 5 out of 5 score while stating it beats expectations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: [R]esearchers are now finding vulnerabilities in newer hospital technologies that weren't as ubiquitous a decade ago. Enter autonomous hospital robots, the supposed-to-be-friendly self-controlled digital workhorses that can transport medications, bed linens, food, medications and laboratory specimens across a hospital campus. These robots, such as the ones built by robot maker Aethon, are equipped with the space to transport critical goods and security access to enter restricted parts of the hospital and ride elevators, all while cutting labor costs. But researchers at Cynerio, a cybersecurity startup focused on securing hospital and healthcare systems, discovered a set of five never-before-seen vulnerabilities in Aethon robots, which they say allowed malicious hackers to remotely hijack and control these autonomous robots -- and in some cases over the internet.

The five vulnerabilities, which Cynerio collectively call JekyllBot:5, aren't with the robots themselves but with the base servers that are used to communicate with and control the robots that traverse the hallways of the hospitals and hotels. The bugs range from allowing hackers to create new users with high-level access in order to then log in and remotely control the robots and access restricted areas, snoop on patients or guests using the robot's in-built cameras, or otherwise cause mayhem. Asher Brass, the lead researcher on the Aethon vulnerabilities, warned that the flaws required a "very low skill set for exploitation."

Cynerio said the base servers have a web interface that could be accessed from inside the hospital's network, allowing "guest" users to view real-time robot camera feeds and their upcoming schedules and tasks for the day without needing a password. But although the robots' functionality were protected by an "admin" account, the researchers said the vulnerabilities in the web interface could have allowed a hacker to interact with the robots without needing an admin password to log in. One of the five bugs, the researchers said, exposed robots to remote control using a joystick-style controller in the web interface, while exploiting another one of the bugs to interact with door locks, call and ride elevators, and open and close medication drawers. "The bugs were fixed in a batch of software and firmware updates released by Aethon, after Cynerio alerted the company to the issues," notes TechCrunch. "Aethon is said to have restricted internet-exposed servers to isolate the robots from potential remote attacks, and fixed other web-related vulnerabilities that affected the base station."

How much energy does it take to have a good and healthy life? A new Stanford University study has found that the answer is far less than the average American is using. From a report: Comparing energy use and quality of life across 140 countries, researchers found that the magic number is 75 gigajoules a year, or less. For context, one gigajoule of energy is equal to about 8 gallons of gasoline. Americans use 284 gigajoules a year per capita, nearly four times that much energy, according to the new research. "That suggests to me that we could nudge energy use downwards in a bunch of hyper-consuming countries and not just make a more equitable world, but perhaps make ourselves healthier and happier," said lead author and professor of earth system science Rob Jackson. The link between more energy and better quality of life is established. Globally, around 759 million people lived without electricity and 2.6 billion without clean cooking fuel in 2019, according to the World Bank.