"After years of rapid expansion, California's booming EV market may be showing signs of fatigue," reports the Los Angeles Times, "as high vehicle prices, unreliable charging networks and other consumer headaches appear to dampen enthusiasm for zero-emission vehicles.

"For the first time in more than a decade, electric vehicle sales dropped significantly in the last half of 2023..." Sales of all-electric cars and light trucks in California had started off strong in 2023, rising 48% in the first half of the year compared with a year earlier. By that time, California EV sales numbered roughly 190,807 — or slightly more than a quarter of all EV sales in the nation, according to the California New Car Dealers Assn. But it's what happened in the second half of last year though that's generating jitters. Sales in the third quarter fell by 2,840 from the previous period — the first quarterly drop for EVs in California since the Tesla Model S was introduced in 2012. And the fourth quarter was even worse: Sales dropped 10.2%, from 100,151 to 89,933...

Propelled by the sales success of Tesla, and boosted by electric vehicles from other automakers entering the market, consumer acceptance of EVs had seemed like a given until recently. In fact, robust sales growth is a key assumption in the state's zero-emission vehicle plan... Under the no-gas mandate, zero-emission vehicles must account for 35% of all new vehicle sales by model year 2026.... Nationally, EV sales growth also has slowed as automakers such as Ford and General Motors cut back — at least temporarily — on EV and battery production plans. Hertz, the rental car giant, is also pulling back on plans to shift heavily toward EVs. Hertz several years ago announced plans to buy 100,000 Teslas but is now selling off its EV fleet.

Corey Cantor, EV analyst at Bloomberg BNEF, an energy research firm, said that although recent sales figures are worrisome, there's plenty of momentum behind the EV transition, as evidenced by government mandates around the globe and massive investments by motor vehicle manufacturers and their suppliers. Those investments total $616 billion globally over five years, according to consulting firm AlixPartners.
But EVs haven't reached "price parity" with gas-powered engines, the article points out, so just 7.6% of the vehicles sold last year in the U.S. were electric — while in California, the market share for EVS was 20.1%.

The article also quantifies concerns about reliability of California's public charging system, which "according to studies from academic researchers and market analysts, can be counted on to malfunction at least 20% of the time." After $1 billion in state money for charger companies, the state's Energy Commission will now also start collecting reliability statistics, according to the article. But the article also cites wait times at the chargers. "Even if they were reliable, there aren't enough chargers to go around. EV sales have outpaced public charger installation."

Some good news? The federal government is spending $5 billion nationally to put fast chargers on major highways at 50-mile intervals. California will receive $384 million. Seven major automakers have also teamed up to build a North American charging network of their own, called Ionna. The joint venture plans to install at least 30,000 chargers — which would be open to any EV brand — at stations that will provide restrooms, food service and retail stores on site or nearby.

High-capacity DNA data storage "is closer than you think," Slashdot wrote in 2019.

Now IEEE Spectrum brings an update on where we're at — and where we're headed — by a participant in the DNA storage collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Lab of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. "Organizations around the world are already taking the first steps toward building a DNA drive that can both write and read DNA data," while "funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Asia are investing in the technology stack required to field commercially relevant devices." The challenging part is learning how to get the information into, and back out of, the molecule in an economically viable way... For a DNA drive to compete with today's archival tape drives, it must be able to write about 2 gigabits per second, which at demonstrated DNA data storage densities is about 2 billion bases per second. To put that in context, I estimate that the total global market for synthetic DNA today is no more than about 10 terabases per year, which is the equivalent of about 300,000 bases per second over a year. The entire DNA synthesis industry would need to grow by approximately 4 orders of magnitude just to compete with a single tape drive. Keeping up with the total global demand for storage would require another 8 orders of magnitude of improvement by 2030. But humans have done this kind of scaling up before. Exponential growth in silicon-based technology is how we wound up producing so much data. Similar exponential growth will be fundamental in the transition to DNA storage...

Companies like DNA Script and Molecular Assemblies are commercializing automated systems that use enzymes to synthesize DNA. These techniques are replacing traditional chemical DNA synthesis for some applications in the biotechnology industry... [I]t won't be long before we can combine the two technologies into one functional device: a semiconductor chip that converts digital signals into chemical states (for example, changes in pH), and an enzymatic system that responds to those chemical states by adding specific, individual bases to build a strand of synthetic DNA. The University of Washington and Microsoft team, collaborating with the enzymatic synthesis company Ansa Biotechnologies, recently took the first step toward this device... The path is relatively clear; building a commercially relevant DNA drive is simply a matter of time and money...

At the same time, advances in DNA synthesis for DNA storage will increase access to DNA for other uses, notably in the biotechnology industry, and will thereby expand capabilities to reprogram life. Somewhere down the road, when a DNA drive achieves a throughput of 2 gigabases per second (or 120 gigabases per minute), this box could synthesize the equivalent of about 20 complete human genomes per minute. And when humans combine our improving knowledge of how to construct a genome with access to effectively free synthetic DNA, we will enter a very different world... We'll be able to design microbes to produce chemicals and drugs, as well as plants that can fend off pests or sequester minerals from the environment, such as arsenic, carbon, or gold. At 2 gigabases per second, constructing biological countermeasures against novel pathogens will take a matter of minutes. But so too will constructing the genomes of novel pathogens. Indeed, this flow of information back and forth between the digital and the biological will mean that every security concern from the world of IT will also be introduced into the world of biology...

The future will be built not from DNA as we find it, but from DNA as we will write it.
The article makes an interesting point — that biology labs around the world already order chemically-synthesized ssDNA, "delivered in lengths of up to several hundred bases," and sequence DNA molecules up to thousands of bases in length.

"In other words, we already convert digital information to and from DNA, but generally using only sequences that make sense in terms of biology."

Some ZFS news from Phoronix this week. "At the end of last year OpenZFS 2.2.2 was released to fix a rare but nasty data corruption issue, but it turns out there are other data corruption bug(s) still lurking in the OpenZFS file-system codebase." A Phoronix reader wrote in today about an OpenZFS data corruption bug when employing native encryption and making use of send/recv support. Making use of zfs send on an encrypted dataset can cause one or more snapshots to report errors. OpenZFS data corruption issues in this area have apparently been known for years.

Since May 2021 there's been this open issue around ZFS corruption related to snapshots on post-2.0 OpenZFS. That issue remains open. A new ticket has been opened for OpenZFS as well in proposing to add warnings against using ZFS native encryption and the send/receive support in production environments.
jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) spotted the news — and adds a positive note. "Bugs, old and new, are being catalogued and addressed much more quickly now that core development is done under Linux, even though it is not mainstreamed in the kernel."

An article in the Washington Post remembers a 1980s-era "glass box with metal water pipes running through it" that "converted sunlight into hot water. By trapping solar energy like a greenhouse, it heated the water to a scorching 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

"[T]oday, hardly anyone is using these solar water heaters even as photovoltaic panels have popped up on the roofs of nearly 4 million American homes." Unlike photovoltaic panels, which can power your home, solar thermal panels are mainly used to heat water. But they're smaller and more efficient. The technology converts 60 to 70 percent of the sun's energy into heat. Even the best photovoltaics, which generate electricity, only achieve 24 percent efficiency. Now, a new generation of solar water heater manufacturers is hoping subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act, and growing interest in net-zero emissions, will reignite their growth.

Theoretically, solar thermal offers a big opportunity to slash emissions. Nearly 20 percent of an average home's energy is used to heat water, and nearly 50 percent globally, according to MIT. By adopting solar water heaters, the average household can keep 2 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the equivalent of not driving your car for four months, estimates the Environmental Protection Agency. Solar water heaters can also save money, cutting the average utility bill by $400 to $600 per year, the Energy Department estimates...

Only about 370,000 solar thermal systems were operating in the United States by the end of 2021, according to the International Energy Agency, many of them on larger commercial buildings...

Since they can cut fuel consumption to heat water by 50 percent to 70 percent, other countries are embracing the technology: Almost all new residential buildings in Israel must include solar thermal, while in countries as far north as Canada and Denmark, solar thermal energy warms millions of homes with district heating systems. Yet these systems represent a tiny fraction of the potential, supplying 0.4 percent of today's global energy demand for domestic hot water.
New U.S. subsidies can cut the price in half depending on location, the article points out.

Cheap photovoltaics still make economic sense for many homes (unless you're heating a pool). "But the cost of solar thermal could look like a bargain if we consider increasingly unreliable electric grids and the cost to the climate from burning fossil fuels."

Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Microsoft is teasing the potential for unique Xbox hardware in the future and a powerful next-gen console. Four previously exclusive Xbox games are officially coming to the PS5 and Nintendo Switch soon, and Microsoft wants to reassure Xbox fans that it's still very much invested in the future of its platform and hardware. In an official Xbox podcast today, Xbox president Sarah Bond teased that Microsoft will deliver 'the largest technical leap' with the next-generation Xbox: "We've got more to come. There's some exciting stuff coming out in hardware that we're going to share this holiday. We're also invested in the next-generation roadmap. What we're really focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation, which makes it better for players and better for creators and the visions that they're building."

Speaking to The Verge, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer went a step further, teasing that the Xbox hardware teams are thinking about building different kinds of hardware. "I'm very proud of the work that the hardware team is doing, not only for this year, but also into the future," says Spencer. "[We're] really thinking about creating hardware that sells to gamers because of the unique aspects of the hardware. It's kind of an unleashing of the creative capability of our hardware team that I'm really excited about."

Perhaps that unique hardware is an Xbox handheld. "We see a lot of opportunity in different types of devices, and will share specifics on our future hardware plans as soon as we are ready," says Microsoft in an Xbox blog post today.

Jensen Huang took an indirect jab at Sam Altman when he said $7 trillion can buy "apparently all the GPUs." From a report: The Nvidia CEO made the quip at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Monday when asked how many GPU chips that much money could buy. Altman, the OpenAI chief, is reportedly trying to raise trillions to boost supplies of the chips needed for AI processing. Huang told the United Arab Emirates' AI minister, Omar Al Olama, that developing AI wouldn't cost as much as the amount Altman is seeking to raise. The Nvidia CEO said AI infrastructure costs would be considerably less than the $5 trillion to $7 trillion Altman is reportedly trying to raise because of expected advances in computing.

"You can't assume just that you will buy more computers. You have to also assume that the computers are going to become faster and therefore the total amount that you need is not as much," Huang said. He also suggested that the cost of building AI data centers globally would amount to $2 trillion by 2029. Huang said: "There's about a trillion dollars' worth of installed base of data centers. Over the course of the next four or five years, we'll have $2 trillion worth of data centers that will be powering software around the world."

Backblaze has published a report on hard drive failures for 2023, finding that rates increased during the year due to aging drives that it plans to upgrade. From a report: Backblaze, which focuses on cloud-based storage services, claims to have more than three exabytes of data storage under its management. As of the end of last year, the company monitored 270,222 hard drives used for data storage, some of which are excluded from the statistics because they are still being evaluated. That still left a collection of 269,756 hard drives comprised of 35 drive models. Statistics on SSDs used as boot drives are reported separately.

Backblaze found one drive model exhibited zero failures for all of 2023, the Seagate 8 TB ST8000NM000A. However, this came with the caveat that there are only 204 examples in service, and these were deployed only since Q3 2022, so have accumulated a limited number of drive days (total time operational). Nevertheless, as Backblaze's principal cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein pointed out: "Zero failures over 18 months is a nice start."

Minesto, a marine energy tech developer based in Sweden, has deployed their new Dragon 12 tidal energy harvester to the Faroe Islands. Operating like an underwater kite, the Dragon 12 "uses lift generated by tidal flows to fly patterns faster than the currents, harvesting renewable energy," reports New Atlas. From the report: Where devices like Orbital's O2 tidal turbine more or less just sit there in the water harvesting energy from tidal currents, Minesto's Dragon series are anchored to the sea bed, and fly around like kites, treating the currents like wind. Just as land-based wind energy kites fly in figure 8 patterns to accelerate themselves faster than the wind, so does the Dragon underwater. This, says Minesto, lets the Dragon pull more energy from a given tidal current than other designs -- and it also changes the economic equations for relevant sites, making slower tidal flows worth exploiting.

These are by no means small kites -- the Dragon 12 needs to be disassembled to fit in a shipping container. It rocks a monster 12-meter (39-ft) wingspan, and weighs no less than 28 tons. But compared to other offshore power options like wind turbines, it's an absolute minnow, and extremely easy to install using a single smallish boat and a sea bed tether. As with any renewable energy project, the key figure here is LCoE (levelized cost of energy) -- so what's it gonna cost? Well, back in 2017, Minesto projected about US$108/MWh once its first hundred megawatts of capacity are installed -- with costs falling thereafter as low as $54/MWh.

The Dragon 12, like other tidal devices, will be more effective in some places than others -- and Denmark's Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the chilly North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland, offer ideal conditions. Home to about 55,000 people and more than a million puffins, the Faroe Islands funnel tidal currents through a number of slim channels. This accelerates the water significantly, and thus increases the energy that devices like the Dragon 12 can harvest. That's where the first Dragon has been deployed, and on Friday, it was connected to the local power grid to begin delivering energy. You can watch a video of the Dragon 12 on YouTube.

"Mutant wolves roaming the deserted streets of Chernobyl appear to have developed resistance to cancer," reports Sky News, "raising hopes the findings can help scientists fight the disease in humans." Dr Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist at Princeton University in the U.S., has been studying how the Chernobyl wolves survive despite generations of exposure to radioactive particles... The researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives — which is more than six times the legal safety limit for a human. Dr Love found the wolves have altered immune systems similar to cancer patients undergoing radiation treatment, but more significantly she also identified specific parts of the animals' genetic information that seemed resilient to increased cancer risk.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: Nvidia is building a new business unit focused on designing bespoke chips for cloud computing firms and others, including advanced AI processors, nine sources familiar with its plans told Reuters. The dominant global designer and supplier of AI chips aims to capture a portion of an exploding market for custom AI chips and shield itself from the growing number of companies pursuing alternatives to its products.

The Santa Clara, California-based company controls about 80% of high-end AI chip market, a position that has sent its stock market value up 40% so far this year to $1.73 trillion after it more than tripled in 2023. Nvidia's customers, which include ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta Platforms, have raced to snap up the dwindling supply of its chips to compete in the fast-emerging generative AI sector. Its H100 and A100 chips serve as a generalized, all-purpose AI processor for many of those major customers. But the tech companies have started to develop their own internal chips for specific needs. Doing so helps reduce energy consumption, and potentially can shrink the cost and time to design.

Nvidia is now attempting to play a role in helping these companies develop custom AI chips that have flowed to rival firms such as Broadcom and Marvell Technology, said the sources, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly...

Nvidia moving into this territory has the potential to eat into Broadcom and Marvell sales.

Since 2006 Baldrson (Slashdot reader #78,598) has been part of the team verifying "The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge," an ongoing challenge to compress a 100-MB excerpt of Wikipedia (approximately the amount a human can read in a lifetime).

"The intention of this prize is to encourage development of intelligent compressors/programs as a path to Artificial General Intelligence," explains the project's web site. 15 years ago, Baldrson wrote a Slashdot post explaining the logic (titled "Compress Wikipedia and Win AI Prize"): The basic theory, for which Hutter provides a proof, is that after any set of observations the optimal move by an AI is find the smallest program that predicts those observations and then assume its environment is controlled by that program. Think of it as Ockham's Razor on steroids.
The amount of the prize also increases based on how much compression is achieved. (So if you compress the 1GB file x% better than the current record, you'll receive x% of the prize...) The first prize was awarded in 2006. And now Baldrson writes: Kaido Orav has just improved 1.38% on the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge with his "fx-cmix" entry.

The competition seems to be heating up, with this winner coming a mere 6 months since the prior winner. This is all the more impressive since each improvement in the benchmark approaches the (unknown) minimum size called the Kolmogorov Complexity of the data.

schwit1 quotes a report from Phys.Org: The Joint European Torus (JET), one of the world's largest and most powerful fusion machines, has demonstrated the ability to reliably generate fusion energy, while simultaneously setting a world record in energy output. These notable accomplishments represent a significant milestone in the field of fusion science and engineering. In JET's final deuterium-tritium experiments (DTE3), high fusion power was consistently produced for five seconds, resulting in a ground-breaking record of 69 megajoules using a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel.

JET is a tokamak, a design which uses powerful magnetic fields to confine a plasma in the shape of a doughnut. Most approaches to creating commercial fusion favor the use of two hydrogen variants -- deuterium and tritium. When deuterium and tritium fuse together they produce helium and vast amounts of energy, a reaction that will form the basis of future fusion powerplants. Dr. Fernanda Rimini, JET Senior Exploitation Manager, said, "We can reliably create fusion plasmas using the same fuel mixture to be used by commercial fusion energy powerplants, showcasing the advanced expertise developed over time."

Professor Ambrogio Fasoli, Program Manager (CEO) at EUROfusion, said, "Our successful demonstration of operational scenarios for future fusion machines like ITER and DEMO, validated by the new energy record, instill greater confidence in the development of fusion energy. Beyond setting a new record, we achieved things we've never done before and deepened our understanding of fusion physics." Dr. Emmanuel Joffrin, EUROfusion Tokamak Exploitation Task Force Leader from CEA, said, "Not only did we demonstrate how to soften the intense heat flowing from the plasma to the exhaust, we also showed in JET how we can get the plasma edge into a stable state thus preventing bursts of energy reaching the wall. Both techniques are intended to protect the integrity of the walls of future machines. This is the first time that we've ever been able to test those scenarios in a deuterium-tritium environment."

James Felton reports via IFL Science: One of the deepest metal mines in Europe -- the Pyhasalmi Mine in central Finland -- is to be turned into an enormous gravity battery capable of storing 2 megawatts of energy. [...] Despite the cool name, the idea behind gravity batteries is really simple. During times when energy sources are producing more energy than the demand, the excess energy is used to move weights (in the form of water or sometimes sand) upwards, turning it into potential energy. When the power supply is low, these objects can then be released, powering turbines as our good friend (and deadly enemy) gravity sends them towards the Earth.

Though generally gravity batteries take the form of reservoirs, abandoned mines moving sand or other weights up when excess power is being produced have also been suggested. Scottish company Gravitricity created a system of winches and hoists that can be installed in such disused mineshafts. The company will install the system in the 1,400-meter-deep (4,600 feet) zinc and copper mine in Pyhajarvi, Finland. "A study last year by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) estimated that gravity batteries in abandoned underground mines could store up to 70TWh of energy -- enough to meet global electricity demands," reports The Independent. "The repurposed mines could also provide economic benefits to the communities that previously relied on the mine for their livelihoods."

Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC announced plans to build a second chip factory in Japan by the end of 2027, bringing total investment in its Japan venture to more than $20 billion. "Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co announced plans in 2021 to build a $7 billion chip plant in Kumamoto in southern Japan's Kyushu," notes Reuters. From the report: In a statement, TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, said its majority-owned unit Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing in Kumamoto would build a second fabrication plant, or fab, in response to rising customer demand. The second fab will begin construction by the end of this year and with both factories the site is expected to have total monthly capacity of more than 100,000 12-inch wafers to be used for automotive, industrial, consumer and high performance computing-related applications, TSMC said. The capacity plan may be further adjusted based upon customer demand, it added.

TSMC's expansion in Kyushu is central to the Japanese government's efforts to rebuild the country's position as a leading chip manufacturing centre and ensure the stable supply of chips amid trade tensions between the United States and China. The decision to build a second fab is a vote of confidence by TSMC in Japan where construction of the first fab has run smoothly and which, Reuters has reported, it sees as a source of diligent workers with a government that is easy to deal with.

A new report from German data recovery company CBL found that devices using NAND chips from reputable brands are declining in quality, with reduced capacity and their manufacturers' logo removed. Furthermore, some USB sticks use the old trick of soldiering a microSD card onto the board. TechSpot reports: Most of the janky USB sticks CBL examined were promotional gifts, the kind given away free with products or by companies at conferences. However, there were some "branded" products that fell into the same inferior-quality category, though CBL didn't say if these were well-known mainstream brands or the kind of brands you've probably never heard of.

Technological advancements have also affected these NAND chips, but not in a good way. The chips originally used single-level cell (SLC) memory cells that only stored one bit each, offering less data density but better performance and reliability. In order to increase the amount of storage the chips offered, manufacturers started moving to four bits per cell (QLC), decreasing the endurance and retention. Combined with the questionable components, it's why CBL warns that "You shouldn't rely too much on the reliability of flash memory."

The report illustrates how some of the components found in the devices had their manufactures' names removed or obscured. One simply printed text over the top of the company name, while another had been scrubbed off completely. There's also a photo of a microSD card found inside a USB stick that had all of its identifying markings removed. It's always wise to be careful when choosing your storage device and beware of offers that seem too good to be true.

In a new video released today, Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot is shown performing "kinetically challenging" work, like moving some medium-weight car parts and precisely picking stuff up. Ars Technica reports: In the latest video, we're on to what looks like "phase 2" of picking stuff up -- being more precise about it. The old clamp hands had a single pivot at the palm and seemed to just apply the maximum grip strength to anything the robot picked up. The most delicate thing Atlas picked up in the last video was a wooden plank, and it was absolutely destroying the wood. Atlas' new hands look a lot more gentle than The Clamps, with each sporting a set of three fingers with two joints. All the fingers share one big pivot point at the palm of the hand, and there's a knuckle joint halfway up the finger. The fingers are all very long and have 360 degrees of motion, so they can flex in both directions, which is probably effective but very creepy. Put two fingers on one side of an item and the "thumb" on the other, and Atlas can wrap its hands around objects instead of just crushing them.

Atlas is picking up a set of car struts -- an object with extremely complicated topography that weighs around 30 pounds -- so there's a lot to calculate. Atlas does a heavy two-handed lift of a strut from a vertical position on a pallet, walks the strut over to a shelf, and carefully slides it into place. This is all in Boston Dynamics' lab, but it's close to repetitive factory or shipping work. Everything here seems designed to give the robot a manipulation challenge. The complicated shape of the strut means there are a million ways you could grip it incorrectly. The strut box has tall metal poles around it, so the robot needs to not bang the strut into the obstacle. The shelf is a tight fit, so the strut has to be placed on the edge of the shelf and slid into place, all while making sure the strut's many protrusions won't crash into the shelf.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vancouver Sun: A cryptocurrency firm has lost a bid to force B.C. Hydro to provide the vast amounts of power needed for its operations, in a court ruling that upholds the provincial government's right to pause power connections for new crypto miners. Conifex Timber Inc., a forestry firm that branched out into cryptocurrency "mining," had gone to the B.C. Supreme Court to have the policy declared invalid. But Justice Michael Tammen ruled Friday that the government's move in December 2022 to pause new connections for cryptocurrency mining for 18 months was reasonable and not unduly discriminatory.

B.C. Hydro CEO Christopher O'Riley had told the court in an affidavit that the data centers proposed by Conifex would have consumed 2.5 million megawatt-hours of electricity a year. That's enough to power and heat more than 570,000 apartments, according to data on the power provider's website. Energy Minister Josie Osborne said when the policy was introduced that cryptocurrency mining consumes "massive amounts of electricity" by running banks of high-powered computers around the clock, but adds "very few jobs" to the local economy. In a statement released Monday, the company said it's "disappointed" with the court's ruling and is considering an appeal. "Conifex continues to believe that the provincial government is missing out on several opportunities available to it to improve energy affordability, accelerate technological innovation, strengthen the reliability and resiliency of the power distribution grid in British Columbia, and achieve more inclusive economic growth," said Conifex in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: As detailed in the new issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have developed a novel 3D-printing approach for creating cultures that grow and operate similar to brain tissue. While traditional 3D-printing involves layering "bio-ink" vertically like a cake, the team instead tasked their machine to print horizontally, as if playing dominoes. As New Atlas explains, researchers placed neurons grown from pluripotent stem cells (those capable of becoming multiple different cell types) within a new bio-ink gel made with fibrinogen and thrombin, biomaterials involved in blood clotting. Adding other hydrogels then helped loosen the bio-ink to solve for the 3 encountered during previous 3D-printed tissue experiments. According to Su-Chun Zhang, a research lead and UW-Madison professor of neuroscience and neurology, the resultant tissue is resilient enough to maintain its structure, but also sufficiently malleable to permit adequate levels of oxygen and nutrient intake for the neurons. "The tissue still has enough structure to hold together but it is soft enough to allow the neurons to grow into each other and start talking to each other," Zhang explains in a recent university profile.

Because of their horizontal construction, the new tissue cells formed connections not only within each layer, but across them, as well -- much like human neurons. The new structures could interact thanks to producing neurotransmitters, and even created support cell networks within the 3D-printed tissue. In these experiments, the team printed both cerebral cortex and striatum cultures. Although responsible for very different functions -- the former associated with thought, language, and voluntary movement; the latter tied to visual information -- the two 3D-printed tissues could still communicate, "in a very special and specific way," Zhang said. Researchers believe their technique isn't limited to creating just those two types of cultures, but hypothetically "pretty much any type of neurons [sic] at any time," according to Zhang. This means the 3D-printing method could eventually help study how healthy portions of the brain interact with parts affected by Alzheimers, examining cell signal pathways in Downs syndrome, as well as use tissue to test new drugs. "Our brain operates in networks," Zhang explained. "We want to print brain tissue this way because cells do not operate by themselves. They talk to each other. This is how our brain works and it has to be studied all together like this to truly understand it."

After declining to allow their iPad app to run on the Vision Pro before launch, YouTube now says it has an app on its roadmap. "We're excited to see Vision Pro launch and we're supporting it by ensuring YouTube users have a great experience in Safari," said YouTube spokesperson Jessica Gibby. "We do not have any specific plans to share at this time, but can confirm that a Vision Pro app is on our roadmap." The Verge reports: Gibby didn't give a date for this roadmap, so we'll have to wait and see what YouTube does here -- it could just tweak the iPad app, or it could do a lot more. One thing YouTube and Apple have not done yet is figure out support for the large library of 360 and VR video on YouTube right now -- YouTube has had 3D support since 2011 and 360 support since 2016, but none of it works on the Vision Pro. (Here I am interviewing Michelle Obama at the White House in 360 in 2016!)

I asked Apple if YouTube's 360 and 3D videos will ever work on the Vision Pro during our review, and Apple spokesperson Jackie Roy basically told me they aren't good enough, saying that "much of this content was created for devices that do not deliver a high-quality spatial experience. In some cases, this content could also cause motion discomfort. We've focused our efforts on delivering the best spatial media experience possible including spatial photos and videos, Apple Immersive Video, and 3D movies available on Apple TV." Tough! I asked YouTube if this new app will support VR and 360 video on the Vision Pro and have not heard back yet.

The "technology building blocks" for space solar are already available, reports Clean Technica. "It's just a matter of scaling, systems integration, and adjustments for space-hardiness."

And several groups are looking at it — including the U.S. Space Force To help push costs down, the California Institute of Technology has proposed a sandwich-type solar module that integrates solar harvesting along with conversion to a radio frequency into one compact package, accompanied by a built-in antenna. Last month researchers at the school wrapped up a months-long, in-space test of different types of solar cells. Another approach is illustrated by the Michigan startup Virtus Solis, an industry partner of the University of Bristol. Last June the company and the school received £3.3 million in funding from the UK Net Zero Innovation program, for developing an open-source model for testing the performance of large, centralized antennas in space. "The concept depends upon the use of gigascale antenna arrays capable of delivering over 2GW of power from space onto similar gigascale antenna arrays either at sea or on the ground," the school explained.

As for how such a thing would be launched into space, that's where the U.S. Space Force comes in. Last August, the Space Force awarded a small business contract to the U.S. startup Orbital Composites. The company is tasked with the mission of developing its patented "quantum antenna" and in-space fabrication tools for secure communications in space applications, including space-to-space as well as space-to-Earth and vice versa. The basic idea is to let 3D printing doing much of the work in space. According to Orbital, in-space fabrication would save more than 100 times the cost of applying conventional fabrication methods to large-scale orbiting antennas. "By harnessing the potential of In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM), the company eyes the prospect of creating significantly larger space antennas," Orbital Composites explains. "By fabricating antennas in space, larger and more complex designs are possible that eliminate the constraints of launch and rocket fairings...."

If you're guessing that a hookup between Virtus and Orbital is in the works, that's a good guess. On February 1, at the SpaceCOM conference in Orlando, Florida, Virtus Solis let slip that it is working with Orbital Composites on a space solar pilot project. If all goes according to plan, the project will be up and running in 2027, deploying Virtus's robot-enabled fabrication system with Orbital's 3D printing. As of this writing the two companies have not posted details, but Space News picked up the thread. "The 2027 mission is designed to showcase critical power-generation technologies including in-space assembly of solar panels and transmission of more than one kilowatt to Earth," Space News explained. "The news release calls the 2027 mission "a precursor to large-scale commercial megawatt-class solar installations in space by 2030...."

To be clear, Orbital's press release about its new Space Force quantum antenna contract does not mention anything in particular about space solar. However, the pieces of the puzzle fit. Along with the Virtus and Grumman connections, in October of 2022 Orbital won a small business contract through SpaceWERX, the Space Force's innovative technologies funding arm, to explore the capabilities of ISAM systems.
"SpaceWERX comes under the umbrella of the U.S. Air Force's AFWERX innovation branch, which has developed a program called SSPIDR, short for Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research Project," the article points out. (While Virtus believes most space-based solar power systems could deliver megawatt hours of electricity at prices comparable to today's market.)