The next version of Android could give you an estimate of your battery's remaining capacity, which naturally degrades over time. "Android 14 laid the initial groundwork for the OS to track battery health information, but Android 15 could actually bring that information in front of users," reports Android Authority. It could also tell you whether your device's battery has been replaced. From the report: The manufacture date and cycle count aren't the only battery-related statistics that Android 14 exposes to apps through new APIs, though. Other battery health details like the date of first use, charging policy, charging status, and state of health are also available. The state of health is particularly interesting because it's an estimate of the battery's current full charge capacity, expressed as a percentage relative to the battery's rated capacity. For example, if your Pixel 8 battery's state of health is measured at 90%, that means its remaining full charge capacity is estimated to be about 4118mAh (compared to the rated 4575mAh).

The Settings app currently doesn't show the battery state of health, but that's set to change in the future, as the latest version of the Settings Services app (an extension to the Settings app on Pixel and other devices) found within Android 14 QPR2 Beta 2 has a new "battery health" page that is set to show the state of health. [...] Strings within the APK suggest this page will show you the "estimated percentage of charge the battery can currently hold compared to when it was new" (i.e. the state of health) before and after "recalibration" of the battery. We don't have the exact details on what "recalibration" entails, but given that one string suggests the "process may take a few weeks," we're guessing that it's simply the system collecting data over a longer period to provide a more accurate estimate of the battery capacity. Meanwhile, the "initial battery health values" are "based on lab results" and hence "may vary from your actual battery state."

[...] We also learned that the Settings app itself will surface "tips" to the user when either the battery capacity is degraded or can't be detected, so the user doesn't have to manually check the "battery health" page. Lastly, we learned that Google is working on exposing more battery-related information to the OS, such as the part status and the serial number. [...] At the very least, we do know that Android will support reading the battery's part status and serial number, provided the battery exposes that information to the OS, and the vendor implements the new version of the Android health HAL. The health HAL is the software responsible for bridging the gap between the OS APIs that read battery/charging information (i.e. everything we talked about before) with the software that controls the battery/charging chips. Version 2.0 of the health HAL needs to be implemented to support all the new Android 14 battery health APIs like state of health, which is why so few devices support that right now.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch, written by Brian Heater: Back in mid-September, a pair of Massachusetts lawmakers introduced a bill "to ensure the responsible use of advanced robotic technologies." What that means in the simplest and most direct terms is legislation that would bar the manufacture, sale and use of weaponized robots. It's an interesting proposal for a number of reasons. The first is a general lack of U.S. state and national laws governing such growing concerns. It's one of those things that has felt like science fiction to such a degree that many lawmakers had no interest in pursuing it in a pragmatic manner. [...] Earlier this week, I spoke about the bill with Massachusetts state representative Lindsay Sabadosa, who filed it alongside Massachusetts state senator Michael Moore.

What is the status of the bill?
We're in an interesting position, because there are a lot of moving parts with the bill. The bill has had a hearing already, which is wonderful news. We're working with the committee on the language of the bill. They have had some questions about why different pieces were written as they were written. We're doing that technical review of the language now -- and also checking in with all stakeholders to make sure that everyone who needs to be at the table is at the table.

When you say "stakeholders" ...
Stakeholders are companies that produce robotics. The robot Spot, which Boston Dynamics produces, and other robots as well, are used by entities like Boston Police Department or the Massachusetts State Police. They might be used by the fire department. So, we're talking to those people to run through the bill, talk about what the changes are. For the most part, what we're hearing is that the bill doesn't really change a lot for those stakeholders. Really the bill is to prevent regular people from trying to weaponize robots, not to prevent the very good uses that the robots are currently employed for.

Does the bill apply to law enforcement as well?
We're not trying to stop law enforcement from using the robots. And what we've heard from law enforcement repeatedly is that they're often used to deescalate situations. They talk a lot about barricade situations or hostage situations. Not to be gruesome, but if people are still alive, if there are injuries, they say it often helps to deescalate, rather than sending in officers, which we know can often escalate the situation. So, no, we wouldn't change any of those uses. The legislation does ask that law enforcement get warrants for the use of robots if they're using them in place of when they would send in a police officer. That's pretty common already. Law enforcement has to do that if it's not an emergency situation. We're really just saying, "Please follow current protocol. And if you're going to use a robot instead of a human, let's make sure that protocol is still the standard."

I'm sure you've been following the stories out of places like San Francisco and Oakland, where there's an attempt to weaponize robots. Is that included in this?
We haven't had law enforcement weaponize robots, and no one has said, "We'd like to attach a gun to a robot" from law enforcement in Massachusetts. I think because of some of those past conversations there's been a desire to not go down that route. And I think that local communities would probably have a lot to say if the police started to do that. So, while the legislation doesn't outright ban that, we are not condoning it either. Representative Sabadosa said Boston Dynamics "sought us out" and is "leading the charge on this."

"I'm hopeful that we will be the first to get the legislation across the finish line, too," added Rep. Sabadosa. "We've gotten thank-you notes from companies, but we haven't gotten any pushback from them. And our goal is not to stifle innovation. I think there's lots of wonderful things that robots will be used for. [...]"

You can read the full interview here.

After producing a nuclear fusion reaction last year that released more energy than it used, scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (LLNL) say they have successfully replicated the process at least three times this year. "This marks another significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels," reports CNN. The announcement appears in a December report (PDF) from the LLNL. From the report: After making their historic net energy gain last year, the next important step was to prove the process could be replicated. Brian Appelbe, a research fellow from the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said the ability to replicate demonstrates the "robustness" of the process, showing it can be achieved even when conditions such as the laser or fuel pellet are varied. Each experiment also offers an opportunity to study the physics of ignition in detail, Appelbe told CNN. "This provides valuable information to the scientists in addressing the next challenge to be overcome: how to maximize the energy that can be obtained."

There are different ways of creating energy from fusion, but at NIF, scientists fire an array of nearly 200 lasers at a pellet of hydrogen fuel inside a diamond capsule the size of a peppercorn, itself inside a gold cylinder. The lasers heat up the cylinder's outside, creating a series of very fast explosions, generating large amounts of energy collected as heat. The energy produced in December 2022 was small -- it took around 2 megajoules to power the reaction, which released a total of 3.15 megajoules, enough to boil around 10 kettles of water. But it was sufficient to make it a successful ignition and to prove that laser fusion could create energy.

Since then, the scientists have done it several more times. On July 30, the NIF laser delivered a little over 2 megajoules to the target, which resulted in 3.88 megajoules of energy -- their highest yield achieved to date, according to the report. Two subsequent experiments in October also delivered net gains. "These results demonstrated NIF's ability to consistently produce fusion energy at multi-megajoule levels," the report said. There is still a very long way to go, however, until nuclear fusion reaches the scale needed to power electric grids and heating systems. The focus now is on building on the progress made and figuring out how to dramatically scale up fusion projects and significantly bring down costs.

"The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitizing and then throwing away about 100 million paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save 4.5 million pounds a year," reports Robert Booth via The Guardian. Leading historians are calling these plans "sheer vandalism" and "insane." From the report: Ministers believe digitisation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X to decry it as "bananas" and "a seriously bad idea." The government is proposing to keep the originals of some wills of "famous people" -- likely including those of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Diana, Princess of Wales -- but others would be destroyed after 25 years and only a digital copy would be kept. It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost.

Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links. The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitized documents unavailable to users since late October. "We are advocates of digitization but not at the cost of destroying originals," says Natalie Pithers, interim co-chief executive of the Society of Genealogists. "In any digitization projects mistakes get made. We don't know what further information could be gained in the future from the original documents. There could be somebody in there who did something extraordinary."

Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Microsoft has released a new software tool to remove printer software from HP that was installed without user permission or system need. A few weeks ago, users noticed that Windows Update installed HP printer software even if they did not have HP printers or printers at all. Affecting Windows 10 and 11, consumers reported that this update sometimes caused problems as it could rename their non-HP printers as HP printers causing some printing features to be inaccessible. Microsoft has not disclosed the root cause of the issue. The fix released by Microsoft requires users to download and run a dedicated troubleshooting tool available from Microsoft's support site. "There are four different versions of the troubleshooter, depending on whether you have the 32- or 64-bit version of an Arm or x86 version of Windows," notes Ars Technica. "Microsoft will also release an additional recommended troubleshooting tool 'in the coming weeks' that will fix the problem in Windows 11 upon a user's request without requiring the download of a separate tool."

A volcano in southwestern Iceland began erupting Monday, posing a risk to the nearby Svartsengi Power Plant and the town of Grindavik. "We are looking at a worst-case scenario," said Thorvaldur Thordarson, a volcanologist in Iceland. "The eruption appears big, and only about two kilometers from major infrastructure." The New York Times reports: Thousands of earthquakes had been detected in Iceland since late October, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office. In November, with homes and roads being damaged, the authorities declared a state of emergency and evacuated Grindavik, a town of more than 3,000 people near the volcano. More recently, the Meteorological Office warned of a "significant likelihood of a volcanic eruption in coming days."

Volcanic eruptions are not uncommon in Iceland, which has fewer than 400,000 residents and about 130 volcanoes. Since the 19th century, not a decade has gone by without one, Iceland's tourist website tells interested visitors. The occurrence of eruptions remains "entirely random." The country straddles two tectonic plates, which are themselves divided by an undersea mountain chain that oozes molten hot rock, or magma.

The current seismic activity has not affected one of Iceland's best-known volcanoes, Katla, which some scientists worry is due for an eruption. Katla has erupted five times since 1721, at intervals ranging from 34 to 78 years. The last major one was in 1918. Last month, Icelandic authorities started building defense walls around the geothermal power plant to protect it from lava flows. "Authorities said they were preparing to construct a large dyke designed to divert lava flows around the Svartsengi geothermal power plant, located just over 6 kilometers (4 miles) from Grindavik," reported Reuters in mid November.

"A spokesperson for HS Orka, operator of the power plant, said it supplies power to the entire country, although a disruption would not affect power supply to Reykjavik."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Apple said on Monday that it would pause sales of its flagship smartwatches online starting Thursday and at retail locations on Christmas Eve. Two months ago, Apple lost a patent case over the technology its smartwatches use to detect people's pulse rate. The company was ordered to stop selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 after Christmas, which could set off a run on sales of the watches in the final week of holiday shopping. The move by Apple follows a ruling by the International Trade Commission in October that found several Apple Watches infringe on patents held by Masimo, a medical technology company in Irvine, Calif.

In court, Masimo detailed how Apple poached its top executives and more than a dozen other employees before later releasing a watch with pulse oximeter capabilities -- whichmeasures the percentage of oxygen that red blood cells carry from the lungs to the body -- that were patented by Masimo. To avoid a complete ban on sales, Apple had two months to cut a deal with Masimo to license its technology, or it could appeal to the Biden administration to reverse the ruling. But Joe Kiani, the chief executive of Masimo, said in an interview that Apple had not engaged in licensing negotiations. Instead, he said that Apple had appealed to President Biden to veto the I.T.C. ruling, which Mr. Kiani knows because the administration contacted Masimo about Apple's request. "They're trying to make the agency look like it's helping patent trolls," Mr. Kiani said of the I.T.C.

Mr. Kiani said that he was willing to sell Apple a chip that Masimo had designed to provide pulse oximeter readings on the Apple Watch. The chip is currently in a Masimo medical watch, called the W1, that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The device uses algorithms to process red and near-infrared light to determine how oxygen-rich is the blood in arteries. "If they don't want to use our chip, I'll work with them to make their product good," Mr. Kiani said. "Once it's good enough, I'm happy to give them a license." Apple introduced its first watch with pulse oximetry in 2020. It has included the technology, which it calls "blood oxygen," in subsequent models. But unlike Masimo's W1 device, Apple hasn't had its watches cleared by the F.D.A. for use as a medical device for pulse oximetry. "The Apple Watch accounts for nearly $20 billion of the company's $383.29 billion in annual sales," notes the NYT. The company is the largest smartwatch seller in the world, accounting for about a third of all smartwatch sales.

"For the past two weeks, I've been using a new camera to secretly snap photos and record videos of strangers in parks, on trains, inside stores and at restaurants," writes a reporter for the New York Times. They were testing the recently released $300 Ray-Ban Meta glasses — "I promise it was all in the name of journalism" — which also includes microphones (and speakers, for listening to audio).

They call the device "part of a broader ambition in Silicon Valley to shift computing away from smartphone and computer screens and toward our faces." Meta, Apple and Magic Leap have all been hyping mixed-reality headsets that use cameras to allow their software to interact with objects in the real world. On Tuesday, Zuckerberg posted a video on Instagram demonstrating how the smart glasses could use AI to scan a shirt and help him pick out a pair of matching pants. Wearable face computers, the companies say, could eventually change the way we live and work... While I was impressed with the comfortable, stylish design of the glasses, I felt bothered by the implications for our privacy...

To inform people that they are being photographed, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses include a tiny LED light embedded in the right frame to indicate when the device is recording. When a photo is snapped, it flashes momentarily. When a video is recording, it is continuously illuminated. As I shot 200 photos and videos with the glasses in public, including on BART trains, on hiking trails and in parks, no one looked at the LED light or confronted me about it. And why would they? It would be rude to comment on a stranger's glasses, let alone stare at them... [A] Meta spokesperson, said the company took privacy seriously and designed safety measures, including a tamper-detection technology, to prevent users from covering up the LED light with tape.
But another concern was how smart glasses might impact our ability to focus: Even when I wasn't using any of the features, I felt distracted while wearing them... I had problems concentrating while driving a car or riding a scooter. Not only was I constantly bracing myself for opportunities to shoot video, but the reflection from other car headlights emitted a harsh, blue strobe effect through the eyeglass lenses. Meta's safety manual for the Ray-Bans advises people to stay focused while driving, but it doesn't mention the glare from headlights. While doing work on a computer, the glasses felt unnecessary because there was rarely anything worth photographing at my desk, but a part of my mind constantly felt preoccupied by the possibility...

Ben Long, a photography teacher in San Francisco, said he was skeptical about the premise of the Meta glasses helping people remain present. "If you've got the camera with you, you're immediately not in the moment," he said. "Now you're wondering, Is this something I can present and record?"
The reporter admits they'll fondly cherish its photos of their dog [including in the original article], but "the main problem is that the glasses don't do much we can't already do with phones... while these types of moments are truly precious, that benefit probably won't be enough to convince a vast majority of consumers to buy smart glasses and wear them regularly, given the potential costs of lost privacy and distraction."

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: "(The rocks) in the box right now are about 1,600 degrees Celsius," Andrew Ponec said, standing next to a thermal battery the size of a small building. That is nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, "Hotter than the melting point of steel," he explained.

But what makes his box of white-hot rocks so significant is they were not heated by burning tons of coal or gas, but by catching sunlight with the thousands of photovoltaic solar panels that surround his prototype west of Fresno. If successful, Ponec and his start-up Antora Energy could be part of a new, multi-trillion-dollar energy storage sector that simply uses sun or wind to make boxes of rocks hot enough to run the world's biggest factories. "People sometimes feel like they're insulting us by saying, 'Hey, that sounds really simple," Ponec laughed. "And we say, 'No, that's exactly the point'... The problem is you can't shut down your factory when the sun goes behind a cloud or the wind stops blowing, and that's exactly the problem that we focused on."

While the word "battery" most likely evokes the chemical kind found in cars and electronics in 2023, hot rocks currently store ten times as much energy as lithium ion around the world, thanks to an invention from the 1800s known as Cowper stoves. Often found in smelting plants, these massive towers of stacked bricks absorb the wasted heat of a blast furnace until it heats to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and then provides over 100 megawatts of heat energy for about 20 minutes. The process can be repeated 24 times a day for 30 years, and Antora is among the startups experimenting with different kinds of rocks in insulated boxes or molten salt in cylinders to find the most efficient combination...

Antora has managed to raise $80 million in seed money from investors that include Bill Gates, but their main competitor is another Bay Area startup called Rondo that uses abundant refractory brick, which is cheaper than carbon by weight but not as energy dense. Rondo has attracted even more funding than Antora and its first battery is producing commercial power for an ethanol plant in California... Tesla recently predicted a carbon-free world will need an astonishing 240 terawatt-hours of energy storage — more than 340 times the amount of storage built with lithium-ion batteries in 2022. Rondo CEO John O'Donnell predicts more than half of all that new capacity will come in the form of heat batteries, simply because the raw ingredients are so readily available.

By plugging their factories into as many thermal batteries as they need, manufacturers won't have to wait in a years-long line for grid connections and upgrades.
Ponec tells CNN that when it comes to de-carbonizing today, "we have the tools we need. We just need to deploy them.

"The transition is inevitable. It's going to happen. And if you talk behind closed doors to most of the people in the fossil fuel industry, they'll say the same thing."

"Unlike automobiles, jumbo jets cannot run on batteries," notes the Washington Post.

So Friday the White unveiled a plan for "subsidizing sustainable aviation fuels" — which could also give the U.S. a leg up in a brand new industry: Senior White House officials said the program would make the airline industry cleaner while bringing prosperity to rural America. But environmental groups and some scientists expressed reservations about the plan, which would award subsidies based on a scientific model that has previously been used to justify incentives for corn-based ethanol. Studies have found the gasoline additive is exacerbating climate change.

The new tax credits, created through President Biden's signature climate law, are meant to spur production of jet fuels that create no more than half the emissions of the petroleum-based product. Each gallon of such fuel qualifies for a tax credit up to $1.75 per gallon. "The concern is they will end up subsidizing fuels that take an enormous amount of land to produce," said Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University... Administration officials said on a call with reporters Thursday that they are carefully weighing such concerns. Agencies are in the process of updating the scientific model for gauging climate friendliness of jet fuels, they said, and it will be revised to factor in the emissions impact of cropland converted from food to fuel production. Federal agencies plan to complete their revisions by March 1.

"The sustainable aviation fuel industry is a potential 36 billion gallon industry that for all intents and purposes is just getting started," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on the call. "This is a big, big deal."

Alex Williams reports via The New York Times: Vera Molnar, a Hungarian-born artist who has been called the godmother of generative art for her pioneering digital work, which started with the hulking computers of the 1960s and evolved through the current age of NFTs, died on Dec. 7 in Paris. She was 99. Her death was announced on social media by the Pompidou Center in Paris, which is scheduled to present a major exhibition of her work in February. Ms. Molnar had lived in Paris since 1947. While her computer-aided paintings and drawings, which drew inspiration from geometric works by Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, were eventually exhibited in major museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, her work was not always embraced early in her career.

Ms. Molnar in fact began to employ the principles of computation in her work years before she gained access to an actual computer. In 1959, she began implementing a concept she called "Machine Imaginaire" -- imaginary machine. This analog approach involved using simple algorithms to guide the placement of lines and shapes for works that she produced by hand, on grid paper. She took her first step into the silicon age in 1968, when she got access to a computer at a university research laboratory in Paris. In the days when computers were generally reserved for scientific or military applications, it took a combination of gumption and '60s idealism for an artist to attempt to gain access to a machine that was "very complicated and expensive," she once said, adding, "They were selling calculation time in seconds." [...]

Making art on Apollo-era computers was anything but intuitive. Ms. Molnar had to learn early computer languages like Basic and Fortran and enter her data with punch cards, and she had to wait several days for the results, which were transferred to paper with a plotter printer. One early series, "Interruptions," involved a vast sea of tiny lines on a white background. As ARTNews noted in a recent obituary: "She would set up a series of straight lines, then rotate some, causing her rigorous set of marks to be thrown out of alignment. Then, to inject further chaos, she would randomly erase certain portions, resulting in blank areas amid a sea of lines." Another series, "(Des)Ordres" (1974), involved seemingly orderly patterns of concentric squares, which she tweaked to make them appear slightly disordered, as if they were vibrating.

Over the years, Ms. Molnar continued to explore the tensions between machine-like perfection and the chaos of life itself, as with her 1976 plotter drawing "1% of Disorder," another deconstructed pattern of concentric squares. "I love order, but I can't stand it," she told Mr. Obrist. "I make mistakes, I stutter, I mix up my words." And so, she concluded, "chaos, perhaps, came from this." [...] Her career continued to expand in scope in the 1970s. She began using computers with screens, which allowed her to instantly assess the results of her codes and adjust accordingly. With screens, it was "like a conversation, like a real pictorial process," she said in a recent interview with the generative art creator and entrepreneur Erick Calderon. "You move the 'brush' and you see immediately if it suits you or not." [...] Earlier this year, she cemented her legacy in the world of blockchain with "Themes and Variations," a generative art series of more than 500 works using NFT technology that was created in collaboration with the artist and designer Martin Grasser and sold through Sotheby's. The series fetched $1.2 million in sales.

Emma Roth reports via The Verge: Google is releasing a tool to help users diagnose problems with their Pixel phones. Users can launch the app by entering #*#7287#*# on the dial pad, allowing them to check whether their phone is working correctly before or after a repair. There are a bunch of diagnostic tools available within the app. While users can run a full diagnostic test to detect issues across the entire device, there are also options to run individual tests for physical defects and problems affecting the phone's display, sensors, and connectivity. The new tool is available on all Pixel phones in English.

Aside from the diagnostics app, Google is introducing redesigned repair manuals the company says are "easier for technicians and DIYers to use." Users can download repair manuals from Google's website in English and French, but they're only available for the Pixel Fold, Pixel 8, and Pixel 8 Pro for now. Google says it will add repair manuals for previous and future devices "in the coming months." There's also a new Repair Mode Google introduced earlier this month, which Pixel Phone owners can toggle on when their device is getting repaired. The feature is meant to protect users' private information while their phone is in the hands of a technician [...].

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's parent company, Alphabet, is launching a new company called "Renew Home." The new company will pull in some other projects from Nest and the rest of Alphabet to become a supposed one-stop shop for power savings and clean energy usage. The core concept is partnering with power companies to obtain data about the current condition of the power grid and using that data to change consumer habits. The new company is bankrolled by Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), an Alphabet venture capital firm.

The first existing service getting pulled into Renew Home is Nest Renew. This service for Nest Thermostats uses power company data to tell consumers how their electricity is being generated and what it costs. That data lets your thermostat do things like automatically shift heating and cooling to times of day when energy is cheaper or cleaner, and shows various reports about the cleanness of the energy you've been using. (Nest's feature that lets utility companies remotely take control of your thermostat, Rush Hour Rewards, does not seem to be part of Renew Home.)

Another Alphabet service being pulled into Renew Home is OhmConnect, which is the same basic idea as Nest's grid data-power thermostat adjustments but for more than just your thermostat. OhmConnect is compatible with a very small list of smart devices, like Nest-rival Ecobee and Honeywell thermostats, TL-Link's "Kasa" smart home system, and Tesla vehicles. The backbone of the service appears to be the in-house "OhmPlug" smart outlet, which can monitor the energy usage of anything that plugs into the wall. By seeing that you've turned these smart devices during peak usage times, OhmConnect offers people rewards like gift cards or cash for not using power when the grid is at capacity.

Intel unveiled new computer chips on Thursday, including Gaudi3, an AI chip for generative AI software. Gaudi3 will launch next year and will compete with rival chips from Nvidia and AMD that power big and power-hungry AI models. From a report: The most prominent AI models, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, run on Nvidia GPUs in the cloud. It's one reason Nvidia stock has been up nearly 230% year-to-date while Intel shares are up 68%. And it's why companies like AMD and, now Intel, have announced chips that they hope will attract AI companies away from Nvidia's dominant position in the market.

While the company was light on details, Gaudi3 will compete with Nvidia's H100, the main choice among companies that build huge farms of the chips to power AI applications, and AMD's forthcoming MI300X, when it starts shipping to customers in 2024. Intel has been building Gaudi chips since 2019, when it bought a chip developer called Habana Labs.

Intel launched its Intel Core Ultra processors for AI-powered PCs at its AI Everywhere event today. From a report: The big chip maker said these processors spearhead a new era in computing, offering unparalleled power efficiency, superior compute and graphics performance, and an unprecedented AI PC experience to mobile platforms and edge devices. Available immediately, these processors will be used in over 230 AI PCs coming from renowned partners like Acer, ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, and more.

The Intel Core Ultra processors represent an architectural shift for Intel, marking its largest design change in 40 years. These processors harness the Intel 4 process technology and Foveros 3D advanced packaging, leveraging leading-edge processes for optimal performance and capabilities. The processors boast a performance-core (P-core) architecture enhancing instructions per cycle (IPC). Efficient-cores (E-cores) and low-power Efficient-cores (LP E-cores). They deliver up to 11% more compute power compared to competitors, ensuring superior CPU performance for ultrathin PCs.

Features of Intel Core Ultra
Intel Arc GPU: Featuring up to eight Xe-cores, this GPU incorporates AI-based Xe Super Sampling, offering double the graphics performance compared to prior generations. It includes support for modern graphics features like ray tracing, mesh shading, AV1 encode and decode, HDMI 2.1, and DisplayPort 2.1 20G.
AI Boost NPU: Intel's latest NPU, Intel AI Boost, focuses on low-power, long-running AI tasks, augmenting AI processing on the CPU and GPU, offering 2.5x better power efficiency compared to its predecessors.
Advanced Performance Capabilities: With up to 16 cores, 22 threads, and Intel Thread Director for optimized workload scheduling, these processors boast a maximum turbo frequency of 5.1 GHz and support for up to 96 GB DDR5 memory capacity.
Cutting-edge Connectivity: Integrated Intel Wi-Fi 6E and support for discrete Intel Wi-Fi 7 deliver blazing wireless speeds, while Thunderbolt 4 ensures connectivity to multiple 4K monitors and fast storage with speeds of 40 Gbps.
Enhanced AI Performance: OpenVINO toolkits, ONNX, and ONNX Runtime offer streamlined workflow, automatic device detection, and enhanced AI performance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from REVE News: The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects, for the first year on record, combined electricity generation from wind and solar to surpass generation from coal in 2024. EIA expects solar generation in 2024 to increase 39% (228 kilowatthours) from 2023, driven by continued increases in solar capacity. "Renewables, particularly solar photovoltaics, are growing rapidly and making large contributions to electricity generation," DeCarolis said.

EIA expects natural gas prices to be $2.77 per million British thermal units this winter, about 23% lower than previously forecast. The winter season is off to a warmer-than-expected start, so U.S. households are consuming less natural gas for heat than expected. The lower natural gas consumption is also contributing to rising U.S. natural gas inventories, which typically results in lower prices. "We're seeing record domestic natural gas production paired with lower-than-expected natural gas demand, and we expect that is going to push prices lower this winter season," DeCarolis said. EIA will publish its next STEO on January 9, 2024, including the agency's first forecasts for the energy sector through 2025. The full report is available on the EIA website.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft wants to use nuclear energy to power its artificial intelligence operations. And in order to help cut the red tape required to make that happen, Microsoft plans to use AI. From a report: A Microsoft team has spent months building an AI trained on nuclear regulations and licensing requirements to help the tech giant fill out all the applications it needs to build its own power plants. This typically takes years and millions, but Microsoft is urgently looking for more power to bring next-generation AI to life.

That's because the larger the model and the more capable it becomes, the more power it requires. Microsoft today reflects the sensibilities of its founder, Bill Gates, in that the company believes in carbon-neutral energy sources -- and, like Gates who himself invests in nuclear power innovation, the company seems to see more potential in nuclear than other renewable sources of energy.

"If we're going to do that carbon-free, we're going to need all the tools in the tool kit," Michelle Patron, Microsoft's senior director of sustainability policy, told the Journal.

David Shepardson reports via Reuters: U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said she expects to make around a dozen semiconductor chips funding awards within the next year, including multi-billion dollar announcements that could drastically reshape U.S. chip production. She announced the first award on Monday -- $35 million to a BAE Systems facility in Hampshire to produce chips for fighter planes from the "Chips for America" semiconductor manufacturing and research subsidy program approved by Congress in August 2022.

"Next year we'll get into some of the bigger ones with leading-edge fabs," Raimondo told reporters. "A year from now I think we will have made 10 or 12 similar announcements, some of them multi-billion dollar announcements." In an interview with Reuters, Raimondo said that the number of awards could go higher than 12. She said she wants the percentage of semiconductors produced in the United States to rise from about 12% to closer to 20% -- though that is still down from 40% in 1990 -- and to have at least two "leading-edge" U.S. manufacturing clusters. In addition, she wants the U.S. to have cutting-edge memory and packaging production and to "meet the military's needs for current and mature" chips. Raimondo noted that the U.S. currently does not have any cutting-edge manufacturing production and wants to get that to about 10%.

Five years after founding Atari in 1972, Nolan Bushnell started work on a chain of pizza restaurants with singing animatronic robots and videogames — called Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre. While 600 of the restaurants still operate today, "the company is in the process of remodeling its more than 400 U.S. locations," reports the Los Angeles Times, "and the last 30 or so remaining animatronic bands are being shown the door in favor of interactive dance floors and large screens that feature Chuck E. and pals in animated form." That is, they're being evicted everywhere but Northridge, Los Angeles... The goal — or hope — for the company is to have at least one location that can serve both new generations as well as nostalgia hunters, especially fans of animatronic figures.

Animatronics have long been the stars of themed entertainment, at least as long as Disneyland has been putting mechanical creatures in its rides and shows. In the '80s and '90s, theme parks began switching to screen-based entertainment to mirror blockbuster movies, but today animatronics have been making a comeback. The recent makeover, for instance, of Disneyland's Adventureland Treehouse came with the addition of multiple animatronic figures, and Universal Studios' Super Nintendo World is full of mechanical kinetic energy from an assortment of characters. Additionally, this year's video game-inspired movie "Five Nights at Freddy's" is centered on a haunted pizzeria where the animatronics become sentient. The film is indicative of the cult fandom that has long existed around Chuck E. Cheese and its former competitor Showbizz Pizza Place, as evidenced by the documentary "The Rock-afire Explosion," which charts the pizza and animatronic band wars of the '80s...

Restaurant franchise's CEO David McKillips says the company is acknowledging not just changing technological tastes but the realities of maintaining animatronic groups, which are programmed in Texas but maintained locally. "These are decades old, and we have a dedicated technician at every single location who spends a fair amount of time making sure the animatronics are working properly," McKillips says, adding that "it's a fairly complex issue" to keep the bands up and running.
The animatronic band's final restaurant hopes to become a tourist destination offering "retro glory," according to the article. (The robots are still powered by floppy disks.) And there are fans who still fondly remember the singing robots, judging by an episode of the Simpsons where Homer hunts down the last animatronic robots that sang in a 1970s chain of pizza parlors — titled "Do Pizza Bots Dream of Electric Guitars"

Unfortunately, in the episode Homer has to compete with a reboot-minded J. J. Abrams...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Zotac's ZBox PI430AJ mini PC is the first computer to use Frore System's fanless AirJet cooler, and as tested by HKEPC, it's not a gimmick. Two AirJet coolers were able to keep Intel's N300 CPU below 70 degrees Celsius under load, allowing for an incredibly thin mini PC with impressive performance. AirJet is the only active cooling solution for PCs that doesn't use fans; even so-called liquid coolers still use fans. Instead of using fans to push and pull air, AirJet uses ultrasonic waves, which have a variety of benefits: lower power consumption, near-silent operation, and a much thinner and smaller size. AirJet coolers can also do double duty as both intake and exhaust vents, whereas a fan can only do intake or exhaust, not both.

Equipped with two of the smaller AirJet Mini models, which are rated to cool 5.25 watts of heat each, the ZBox PI430AJ is just 23.7mm thick, or 0.93 inches. The mini PC's processor is Intel's low-end N300 Atom CPU with a TDP of 7 watts, and after HKEPC put the ZBox through a half-hour-long stress test, the N300 only peaked at 67 C. That's all thanks to AirJet being so thin and being able to both intake and exhaust air. For comparison, Beelink's Mini S12 Pro mini PC with the lower-power N100, which has a TDP of 6 watts, is 1.54 inches thick (66% thicker than the ZBox PI430AJ). Traditional fan-equipped coolers just can't match AirJet coolers in size, which is perhaps AirJet's biggest advantage. Last month, engineers from Frore Systems integrated the AirJet into an M2-based Apple MacBook Air. "With proper cooling, the relatively inexpensive laptop matched the performance of a more expensive MacBook Pro based on the same processor," reports Tom's Hardware.