Harley-Davidson on Monday launched an all-electric motorcycle brand "LiveWire," the latest effort by the company to ramp up bets on the rapidly growing electric-vehicle market. Reuters reports: Named after Harley's first electric motorbike, which was unveiled in [2014], the "LiveWire" division is slated to launch its first branded motorcycle in July. The company had said in February it would create a separate electric vehicle-focused division, as it aims to attract the next generation of younger and more environmentally conscious riders. "We are seizing the opportunity to lead and define the market in EV," Chief Executive Officer Jochen Zeitz said in a statement on Monday. "LiveWire also plans to innovate and develop technology that will be applicable to Harley-Davidson electric motorcycles in the future." "There's a new logo and a new 'virtual' headquarters, with engineering teams stationed in Silicon Valley and Milwaukee," notes The Verge. "LiveWire will work with Harley-Davidson dealerships as an independent brand, with a blend of digital and physical retail formats."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Electric cars and vans will be cheaper to produce than conventional, fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2027, and tighter emissions regulations could put them in pole position to dominate all new car sales by the middle of the next decade, research has found. By 2026, larger vehicles such as electric sedans and SUVs will be as cheap to produce as petrol and diesel models, according to forecasts from BloombergNEF, with small cars reaching the threshold the following year. The falling cost of producing batteries for electric vehicles, combined with dedicated production lines in carmarkers' plants, will make them cheaper to buy, on average, within the next six years than conventional cars, even before any government subsidies, BloombergNEF found.

The new study, commissioned by Transport & Environment, a Brussels-based non-profit organization that campaigns for cleaner transport in Europe, predicts new battery prices will fall by 58% between 2020 and 2030 to $58 per kilowatt hour. A reduction in battery costs to below $100 per kWh, is viewed as an important step towards greater take-up of fully electric vehicles, and would largely remove the financial appeal of hybrid electric vehicles, which combine a battery with a conventional engine.

A ransomware attack affecting a pipeline that supplies 45% of the fuel supplies for the Eastern U.S. has now led U.S. president Biden to declare a regional emergency providing "regulatory relief" to expand fuel delivery by other routes.

Axios reports: Friday night's cyberattack is "the most significant, successful attack on energy infrastructure" known to have occurred in the U.S., notes energy researcher Amy Myers Jaffe, per Politico. It follows other significant cyberattacks on the federal government and U.S. companies in recent months... 5,500 miles of pipeline have been shut down in response to the attack.
The BBC reports: Experts say fuel prices are likely to rise 2-3% on Monday, but the impact will be far worse if it goes on for much longer... Colonial Pipeline said it is working with law enforcement, cyber-security experts and the Department of Energy to restore service. On Sunday evening it said that although its four mainlines remain offline, some smaller lateral lines between terminals and delivery points are now operational...

Independent oil market analyst Gaurav Sharma told the BBC there is a lot of fuel now stranded at refineries in Texas. "Unless they sort it out by Tuesday, they're in big trouble," said Sharma. "The first areas to be impacted would be Atlanta and Tennessee, then the domino effect goes up to New York..." The temporary waiver issued by the Department of Transportation enables oil products to be shipped in tankers up to New York, but this would not be anywhere near enough to match the pipeline's capacity, Mr Sharma warned.
UPDATE (5/10): "On Monday, U.S. officials sought to soothe concerns about price spikes or damage to the economy by stressing that the fuel supply had so far not been disrupted," reports the Associated Press, "and the company said it was working toward 'substantially restoring operational service' by the weekend."

CNN reports that a criminal group originating from Russia named DarkSide "is believed to be responsible for a ransomware cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline, according to a former senior cyber official. DarkSide typically targets non-Russian speaking countries, the source said... Bloomberg and The Washington Post have also reported on DarkSide's purported involvement in the cyberattack..."

If so, NBC News adds some sobering thoughts: Although Russian hackers often freelance for the Kremlin, early indications suggest this was a criminal scheme — not an attack by a nation state, the sources said. But the fact that Colonial had to shut down the country's largest gasoline pipeline underscores just how vulnerable American's cyber infrastructure is to both criminals and national adversaries, such as Russia, China and Iran, experts say. "This could be the most impactful ransomware attack in history, a cyber disaster turning into a real-world catastrophe," said Andrew Rubin, CEO and co-founder of Illumio, a cyber security firm...

If the culprit turns out to be a Russian criminal group, it will underscore that Russia gives free reign to criminal hackers who target the West, said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cyber firm CrowdStrike and now executive chairman of a think tank, the Silverado Policy Accelerator. "Whether they work for the state or not is increasingly irrelevant, given Russia's obvious policy of harboring and tolerating cyber crime," he said.
Citing multiple sources, the BBC reports that DarkSide "infiltrated Colonial's network on Thursday and took almost 100GB of data hostage. After seizing the data, the hackers locked the data on some computers and servers, demanding a ransom on Friday. If it is not paid, they are threatening to leak it onto the internet... "

The BBC also shares some thoughts from Digital Shadows, a London-based cyber-security firm that tracks global cyber-criminal groups to help enterprises limit their exposure online: Digital Shadows thinks the Colonial Pipeline cyber-attack has come about due to the coronavirus pandemic — the rise of engineers remotely accessing control systems for the pipeline from home. James Chappell, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Digital Shadows, believes DarkSide bought account login details relating to remote desktop software like TeamViewer and Microsoft Remote Desktop.

He says it is possible for anyone to look up the login portals for computers connected to the internet on search engines like Shodan, and then "have-a-go" hackers just keep trying usernames and passwords until they get some to work.

"We're seeing a lot of victims now, this is seriously a big problem now," said Mr Chappell.

The New York Times reports on surprising silver linings of the global chip shortage: Even as a chip shortage is causing trouble for all sorts of industries, the semiconductor field is entering a surprising new era of creativity, from industry giants to innovative start-ups seeing a spike in funding from venture capitalists that traditionally avoided chip makers. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung Electronics, for example, have managed the increasingly difficult feat of packing more transistors on each slice of silicon. IBM on Thursday announced another leap in miniaturization, a sign of continued U.S. prowess in the technology race. Perhaps most striking, what was a trickle of new chip companies is now approaching a flood.

Equity investors for years viewed semiconductor companies as too costly to set up, but in 2020 plowed more than $12 billion into 407 chip-related companies, according to CB Insights. Though a tiny fraction of all venture capital investments, that was more than double what the industry received in 2019 and eight times the total for 2016. Synopsys, the biggest supplier of software that engineers use to design chip, is tracking more than 200 start-ups designing chips for artificial intelligence, the ultrahot technology powering everything from smart speakers to self-driving cars. Cerebras, a start-up that sells massive artificial-intelligence processors that span an entire silicon wafer, for example, has attracted more than $475 million. Groq, a start-up whose chief executive previously helped design an artificial-intelligence chip for Google, has raised $367 million.

"It's a bloody miracle," said Jim Keller, a veteran chip designer whose resume includes stints at Apple, Tesla and Intel and who now works at the A.I. chip start-up Tenstorrent. "Ten years ago you couldn't do a hardware start-up...."

More companies are concluding that software running on standard Intel-style microprocessors is not the best solution for all problems. For that reason, companies like Cisco Systems and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have long designed specialty chips for products such as networking gear. Giants like Apple, Amazon and Google more recently have gotten into the act. Google's YouTube unit recently disclosed its first internally developed chip to speed video encoding.

And Volkswagen even said last week that it would develop its own processor to manage autonomous driving.

A new printer called Forust is using scrap wood to 3D print wooden objects that are as structurally sound as regular carved wood. Created by Andrew Jeffery and a team of researchers at Desktop Metal, the printer prints using fine sawdust that is formed into solid objects. Gizmodo reports: The printer works similarly to an inkjet printer and squirts a binding agent onto a layer of sawdust. Like most 3D printers, the object rises out of the bed of sawdust and then, when complete, can be sanded and finished like regular wood. Jeffrey sees the system as a way to save trees. "Two years ago we started looking into how we might be able to 3D print in new material," he said. "Wood waste was one of the materials we started with early on and realized it could be repurposed and upcycled with 3D printing technology. From there, we focused on building out the process using wood byproducts in order to create real wood-crafted results. We formed the company really to save forests."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Every decade is the decade that tests the limits of Moore's Law, and this decade is no different. With the arrival of Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV) technology, the intricacies of multipatterning techniques developed on previous technology nodes can now be applied with the finer resolution that EUV provides. That, along with other more technical improvements, can lead to a decrease in transistor size, enabling the future of semiconductors. To that end, today IBM is announcing it has created the world's first 2 nanometer node chip. Just to clarify here, while the process node is being called '2 nanometer,' nothing about transistor dimensions resembles a traditional expectation of what 2nm might be. In the past, the dimension used to be an equivalent metric for 2D feature size on the chip, such as 90nm, 65nm, and 40nm. However with the advent of 3D transistor design with FinFETs and others, the process node name is now an interpretation of an 'equivalent 2D transistor' design.

Some of the features on this chip are likely to be low single digits in actual nanometers, such as transistor fin leakage protection layers, but it's important to note the disconnect in how process nodes are currently named. Often the argument pivots to transistor density as a more accurate metric, and this is something that IBM is sharing with us. Today's announcement states that IBM's 2nm development will improve performance by 45% at the same power, or 75% energy at the same performance, compared to modern 7nm processors. IBM is keen to point out that it was the first research institution to demonstrate 7nm in 2015 and 5nm in 2017, the latter of which upgraded from FinFETs to nanosheet technologies that allow for a greater customization of the voltage characteristics of individual transistors. IBM states that the technology can fit '50 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail.' We reached out to IBM to ask for clarification on what the size of a fingernail was, given that internally we were coming up with numbers from 50 square millimeters to 250 square millimeters. IBM's press relations stated that a fingernail in this context is 150 square millimeters. That puts IBM's transistor density at 333 million transistors per square millimeter (MTr/mm^2).

RealNeoMorpheus writes: Arm pioneer Hermann Hauser has once again criticized Nvidia's plan to acquire the semiconductor design company, with The Telegraph reporting Sunday that he believes Nvidia is "clearly showing it will compete unfairly" if the deal is approved. Hauser's concerns reportedly centered on the Grace processor Nvidia announced at GTC 2021. The company's first Arm-based CPU will connect to high-end GPUs via NVLink, which purportedly offers data transfer speeds up to 900 GBps. That's significantly faster than other technologies -- it's also exclusively available to Nvidia.

This is why Hauser told The Telegraph that he believes using a proprietary interface like NVLink could end up "locking customers into [Nvidia] products," which "clearly shows that they will compete unfairly with other Arm-based server companies such as Amazon and Fujitsu," rather than retaining Arm's neutrality. [...] Nvidia told The Telegraph that Hauser "does not understand what Grace will do or its benefits to Arm" and that "we have been working on Grace using off-the-shelf Arm technology, available to all Arm licensees, long before we agreed to acquire Arm."

iFixit has ripped apart Apple's recently-released AirTag, a small battery-powered tag that will allow you to track your items within Apple's "Find My" app on iOS. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an Ars Technica article: Like with most Apple products, it looks like some serious engineering went into the $29 tracker. The device is barely larger than the user-replaceable CR2032 battery that powers it, putting competing devices like the Tile and Samsung Galaxy SmartTags to shame with their comparative bulk. Inside, a single circuit board uses a unique donut-shaped design that crams all the components into a ring under the battery. The hole in the middle of the circuit board lets Apple pack in a surprisingly huge voice coil speaker. The speaker is just for playing ringtones so you can find your AirTagged thing when you lose it, but apparently, the ringtones will be super high quality.

The other very Apple-like quality of the AirTag is that it almost seems designed to sell accessories. The most popular use for these trackers is to help find your car keys, but out of the box, there is no way to attach a keychain to an AirTag. Instead, Apple has enabled a wide ecosystem of AirTag cases ranging from a $13 keyring holder to a $449 (yes, that's four hundred forty-nine dollars) Hermes' luggage tag. iFixit's solution to the much-demanded keyring hole is -- what else -- a power drill! The teardown experts found some suitable dead space inside the AirTag that somehow isn't blocked by either the battery, speaker, or circuit board, and after some careful drilling, iFixit's AirTag now has a keychain hole with the least possible bulk. "The AirTag survived the operation like a champ and works as if nothing happened," the site says. iFixit went on to note that the sound profile "didn't seem to change much," but the IP67 dust and water resistance rating is now greatly compromised.

The Austin-American Statesman reports that Samsung "lost at least $268 million due to damaged products after its semiconductor fabrication plant in Austin was shutdown during the February's Texas freeze, according to the company." Samsung executives said the company's semiconductor business saw profits fall in the first quarter, mainly due to disruptions and product losses caused by the shutdown. Samsung's Austin fab was offline for more than a month after it was shut down due to power outages during the freeze... About 71,000 wafers were affected by production disruptions, said Han Jinman, executive vice-president of Samsung's memory chip business. He estimated the wafer loss is equivalent to $268 million to $357 million.

Semiconductor fabs are typically operational 24 hours a day for years on end. Each batch of wafers — a thin slice of semiconductor used for the fabrication of integrated circuits — can take 45 to 60 days to make, so a shutdown of any length can mean a loss of weeks of work. Restoring a fab is also a complicated process, and even in the best of circumstances can take a week... NXP Semiconductors was also among the facilities that were shut down in February, as its two Austin fabrication facilities were offline for nearly a month. In March, the company estimated the shutdown would result in a $100 million loss in revenue and a month of wafer production...

Jinman said Samsung is working with the state, municipal government and local utility companies to find solutions to prevent similar shutdowns in the future.

Something remarkable happened last weekend, according to a climate change newsletter by the Los Angeles Times.

California, the world's fifth-largest economy, hit nearly 95% renewable energy. Sort of... There are several caveats. For one thing, Saturday's 94.5% figure — a record, as confirmed to me by the California Independent System Operator — was fleeting, lasting just four seconds. It was specific to the state's main power grid, which covers four-fifths of California but doesn't include Los Angeles, Sacramento and several other regions. It came at a time of year defined by abundant sunshine and relatively cool weather, meaning it's easier for renewable power to do the job traditionally done by fossil fuels.

And fossil fuels actually were doing part of the job — more than the 94.5% figure might suggest. California was producing enough clean power to supply nearly 95% of its in-state needs, but it was also burning a bunch of natural gas and exporting electricity to its Western neighbors. It's impossible to say exactly how much of the Golden State's own supply was coming from renewables.

That said, what happened on Saturday is definitely a big deal.... The 94.5% record may have been fleeting, but it wasn't some isolated spike. Most of Saturday afternoon, the renewables number topped 90%, with solar and wind farms doing the bulk of the work and geothermal, biomass and hydropower facilities making smaller contributions. Add in the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant — which isn't counted toward California's renewables mandate — and there was enough climate-friendly power at times Saturday to account for more than 100% of the state's electricity needs...

The important thing now is making sure the puzzle pieces of the grid fit together on hot summer evenings, like the ones last August when insufficient supplies after sundown led to rolling blackouts.

Barcelona city council has installed Spain's first photovoltaic pavement as part of the city's drive to become carbon neutral by 2050. The Guardian reports: The 50 sq meters of non-slip solar panels, installed in a small park in the Glories area of the city, will generate 7,560kWh a year, enough to supply three households. The city has contributed 30,000 euros towards the cost, the remainder being met by the manufacturer. The viability of the scheme will be assessed after six months. "We'll have to assess the wear and tear because obviously it's not the same as putting panels on a roof, although they are highly resistant," says Eloi Badia, who is responsible for climate emergency and ecological transition at Barcelona city council.

"As for cost benefits, with a pilot scheme like this it's difficult to know yet how much cheaper it would be if it were scaled up. We're keen to install more on roofs and, if this scheme is successful, on the ground, to power lighting and other public facilities." However, he points out that Barcelona's high population density means it would be difficult to generate enough electricity within the city limits to become self-sufficient. "If we're going to reach a target of zero emissions, we're going to have to think about supplying electricity to blocks of flats, but we'll also have to think of using wind and solar parks outside the city," Badia says. "But installations on the ground like this open up new possibilities, and not just for Barcelona."

The New York Police Department said this week that it will stop using the "Digidog," a four-legged robot occasionally deployed for recon in dangerous situations. NYPD officials confirmed in a statement it had terminated its contract and will return the dog to vendor Boston Dynamics. Last December, the agency leased the Digidog, nicknamed Spot, for $94,000. From a report: John Miller, the police department's deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, told The New York Times that the contract was "a casualty of politics, bad information, and cheap sound bites." Miller bemoaned the role of bad press in the backlash, but in many ways the NYPD's own actions were a blueprint for how not to introduce new tech. And, for activists, how to effectively agitate for banning unwanted technologies.

In truth, it wasn't just sound bites that doomed Spot. New Yorkers didn't want it. In February, the NYPD used Spot to defuse a hostage situation in the Bronx. When video of the device went viral, its flexible legs and camera-for-a-head design spooked people. The robot is quadrupedal but doesn't actually look like a dog. A more immediate comparison is the armed robots featured in a postapocalyptic episode of Black Mirror. This comparison spread rapidly on social media. The NYPD's secrecy worked against it: There was no public comment process for Spot, and residents hadn't known to expect to see robot-dogs respond to hostage situations. The NYPD had exactly this opportunity, months earlier, when it had to disclose both the price and governing policies for all surveillance devices as defined by the city's Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act. Instead, the agency included a passing reference to Spot in a larger section on "situational awareness cameras," with no images.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: The Oculus Quest 2 is a hell of a lot of hardware for $299. In fact, we're convinced that Facebook is making a loss on each unit sold. Even so, that pricing is one of the main reasons it's the most popular headset on Steam and our pick as the best VR headset. Well, that and the ease of use. [...] The thing is, that price seems too good to be true, with no other manufacturer's VR headset close to the specs list of the Quest 2 -- in either tethered or standalone form -- hitting the same low, low price. That money gets you a robust virtual reality headset with 6GB of RAM, a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 CPU, 64GB of storage, 1832x1920 per eye display and a pair of controllers. [...]

But there's one factor that could potentially offset that price -- Facebook has access to a whole lot of your data. This is something the Oculus Quest 2 is upfront about: You absolutely need a Facebook account in order to use the device and it does have its data collection policies in black and white. Although what isn't quite so obvious is how much your data is worth to Facebook. At least it isn't without a tiny bit of digging.

There is another version of the Quest 2 that isn't as discounted as the consumer version, and that's the one aimed at businesses. The actual hardware is identical, but the difference is you don't need to login in with a Facebook account in order to use it. The price for this model? $799. There's also an annual fee of $180 that kicks in a year after purchase, which covers Oculus' business services and support, but that just muddies the waters a little. The point being, the Quest 2 for business, the headset from which Facebook can't access your data directly, costs $500 more. So that's looking essentially like the value the social media giant attributes to your data, which either seems like a lot or barely anything at all, depending on your stance. The Supplemental Oculus Data Policy outlines what sort of data is actually being collected when you use the Quest 2. Such things as your physical dimension, including your hand size, how big your play area is using the Oculus Guardian system, data on any content you create using the Quest 2, as well as more obvious stuff like your device ID and IP address.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The IRS is looking for help to break into cryptocurrency hardware wallets, according to a document posted on the agency website in March of this year. Many cryptocurrency investors store their cryptographic keys, which confer ownership of their funds, with the exchange they use to transact or on a personal device. Some folks, however, want a little more security and use hardware wallets -- small physical drives which store a user's keys securely, unconnected to the internet. The law enforcement arm of the tax agency, IRS Criminal Investigation, and more specifically its Digital Forensic Unit, is now asking contractors to come up with solutions to hack into cryptowallets that could be of interest in investigations, the document states.

"The decentralization and anonymity provided by cryptocurrencies has fostered an environment for the storage and exchange of something of value, outside of the traditional purview of law enforcement and regulatory organizations," the document reads. "There is a portion of this cryptographic puzzle that continues to elude organizations -- millions, perhaps even billions of dollars, exist within cryptowallets." The security of hardware wallets presents a problem for investigators. The document states that agencies may be in possession of a hardware wallet as part of a case, but may not be able to access it if the suspect does not comply. This means that authorities cannot effectively "investigate the movement of currencies" and it may "prevent the forfeiture and recovery" of the funds. "The explicit outcome of this contract is to tame the cybersecurity research into measured, repeatable, consistent digital forensics processes that can be trained and followed in a digital forensics' laboratory," the document says.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to turn every home into a distributed power plant that would generate, store and even deliver energy back into the electricity grid, all using the company's products. TechCrunch reports: While the company has been selling solar and energy storage products for years, a new company policy to only sell solar coupled with the energy storage products, along with Musk's comments Monday, reveal a strategy that aims to scale these businesses by appealing to utilities. "This is a prosperous future both for Tesla and for the utilities," he said. "If this is not done, the utilities will fail to serve their customers. They won't be able to do it," Musk said during an investor call, noting the rolling blackouts in California last summer and the more recent grid failure in Texas as evidence that grid reliability has become a bigger concern.

Last week, the company changed its website to prevent customers from only buying solar or its Powerwall energy storage product and instead required purchasing a system. Musk later announced the move in a tweet, stating "solar power will feed exclusively to Powerwall" and that "Powerwall will interface only between utility meter and house main breaker panel, enabling super simple install and seamless whole house backup during utility dropouts." Musk's pitch is that the grid would need more power lines, more power plants and larger substations to fully decarbonize using renewables plus storage. Distributed residential systems -- of course using Tesla products -- would provide a better path, in Musk's view. His claim has been backed up in part by recent studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which found that the U.S. can reach a zero-carbon grid by more than doubling its transmission capacity, and another from Princeton University showing that the country may need to triple its transmission systems by 2050 to reach net-zero emissions.

The next generation of Mac processors designed by Apple entered mass production this month, Nikkei Asia reported Tuesday, citing sources, bringing the U.S. tech giant one step closer to its goal of replacing Intel-designed central processing units with its own. From the report: Shipments of the new chipset -- tentatively known as the M2, after Apple's current M1 processor -- could begin as early as July for use in MacBooks that are scheduled to go on sale in the second half of this year, the people said. The new chipset is produced by key Apple supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's largest contract chipmaker, using the latest semiconductor production technology, known as 5-nanometer plus, or N5P. Producing such advanced chipsets takes at least three months. The start of mass production came as Apple introduced new iMac and iPad Pro models using the M1. The company said the M1 offers CPU performance up to 85% faster than an iMac using an Intel chipset, and graphics performance that is twice as fast.

For TSMC, being the world's largest foundry with nearly 500 customers has its peculiarities. On the one hand, the company can serve almost any client with almost any requirements. On the other hand, it has to stay ahead of everyone else both in terms of capacity and in terms of technology. As far as capacity is concerned, TSMC is unchallenged and is not going to be for years to come. From a report: As for fabrication technologies, TSMC has recently reiterated that it's confident that its N2, N3, and N4 processes will be available on time and will be more advanced than competing nodes. Early this year TSMC significantly boosted its 2021 CapEx budget to a $25-$28 billion range, further increasing it to around $30 billion as a part of its three-year plan to spend $100 billion on manufacturing capacities and R&D. [...] TSMC's N5 family of technologies also includes evolutionary N4 process that will enter risk production later this year and will be used for mass production in 2022. [...] In 2022, the world's largest contract maker of chips will roll out its brand-new N3 manufacturing process, which will keep using FinFET transistors, but is expected to offer the whole package of PPA improvements.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, tweeted Wednesday that bitcoin "incentivises renewable energy." And Elon Musk responded "True."

The BBC adds that the tweets came "despite experts warning otherwise." The cyrptocurrency's carbon footprint is as large as some of the world's biggest cities, studies suggest. But Mr Dorsey claims that could change if bitcoin miners worked hand-in-hand with renewable energy firms.

One expert said it was a "cynical attempt to greenwash" bitcoin. China, where more than two-thirds of power is from coal, accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world...

The tweet comes soon after the release of a White Paper from Mr Dorsey's digital payment services firm Square, and global asset management business ARK Invest. Entitled "Bitcoin as key to an abundant, clean energy future", the paper argues that "bitcoin miners are unique energy buyers", because they offer flexibility, pay in a cryptocurrency, and can be based anywhere with an internet connection. "By combining miners with renewables and storage projects, we believe it could improve the returns for project investors and developers, moving more solar and wind projects into profitable territory," it said.

Author and bitcoin critic David Gerard described the paper as a "cynical exercise in bitcoin greenwashing".

"The reality is: bitcoin runs on coal," he told the BBC.... "Bitcoin mining is so ghastly and egregious that the number one job of bitcoin promoters is to make excuses for it — any excuse at all."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from South China Morning Post: In a rare public appearance since retiring nearly three years ago, Morris Chang, the 89-year-old founder of the world's largest contract chip maker, said China is not yet a competitor in chipmaking and that Taiwan should defend its leadership in semiconductor manufacturing. "Mainland China has given out subsidies to the tune of tens of billions of US dollars over the past 20 years but it is still five years behind TSMC," Chang said. "Its logic chip design capability is still one to two years behind the US and Taiwan. The mainland is still not yet a competitor."

In his speech, Chang also took a swipe at US chip giant Intel, describing its recent decision to enter the contract chip making market as "very ironic" because it turned down an opportunity to invest in TSMC more than three decades ago. Contract chip makers like TSMC typically take orders from so-called fabless chip makers like Qualcomm, which design their products but outsource the manufacturing. Chang said he was rejected by Intel when he approached it for funding in 1985. "In the past, Intel was the alpha sneering at us and thought that we would never get big," he said. "They never thought the business of [outsourced] wafer fabrication would become so important today."

Chang said the US is also at a disadvantage compared with Taiwan because it lacks engineers dedicated to the semiconductor manufacturing sector, adding that the "US level of dedication to manufacturing was absolutely no match for that of Taiwan." "What I need right now are capable and dedicated engineers, technicians and operators. And they have to be willing to throw themselves into manufacturing," he said. "In the US, doing manufacturing isn't popular. It hasn't been popular for decades."

According to Sacramento CBS affiliate KOVR-TV, Yana Sydnor called the police to report a possible home invasion. Turns out, it was a robovac that her son turned on before leaving for the weekend. Android Police reports: At 1 a.m., she and her 2-year-old daughter woke up to loud booms coming from her stairs disrupting her meditation music. She texted her friends about the sounds before they quickly responded, urging her to call 911. "I hear someone walking down my stairs, so it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom," Sydnor recalls telling the dispatcher. Desperate to exit the house and avoid a run-in with the invader, she ran to the bathroom, put her daughter in the tub, and thought about grabbing a ladder to get them both outside to ground level.

Officers arrived within 10 minutes of Sydnor's call. They rammed the front door wide open only to find a poor robovac, fresh from a tumble down a flight of stairs. "My son turned on the vacuum cleaner because he didn't want to do chores before he left for the weekend," she explained to the reporter after a moment of exasperated silence. The vacuum hadn't been used for 2 years and, even after the fall, it still works. We couldn't make out the make and model of the robovac, so we don't quite know if it could stop itself from going over the ledge much less what exactly happened in this case if it did have the ability.

chicksdaddy shares a report from The Security Ledger: Websites for customers of agricultural equipment maker John Deere contained vulnerabilities that could have allowed a remote attacker to harvest sensitive information on the company's customers including their names, physical addresses and information on the Deere equipment they own and operate, The Security Ledger reported. The researcher known as "Sick Codes" published two advisories on Thursday warning about the flaws in the myjohndeere.com website and the John Deere Operations Center website and mobile applications. In a conversation with Security Ledger, the researcher said that a he was able to use VINs (vehicle identification numbers) taken from a farm equipment auction site to identify the name and physical address of the owner. Furthermore, a flaw in the myjohndeere.com website could allow an unauthenticated user to carry out automated attacks against the site, possibly revealing all the user accounts for that site.

Sick Codes disclosed both flaws to John Deere and also to the U.S. Government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which monitors food and agriculture as a critical infrastructure sector. The information obtained from the John Deere websites, including customer names and addresses, could put the company afoul of data security laws like California's CCPA or the Personal Information Protection Act in Deere's home state of Illinois. However, the national security consequences of the company's leaky website could be far greater. Details on what model combines and other equipment is in use on what farm could be of very high value to an attacker, including nation-states interested in disrupting U.S. agricultural production at key junctures, such as during planting or harvest time.

The consolidated nature of U.S. farming means that an attacker with knowledge of specific, Internet connected machinery in use by a small number of large-scale farming operations in the midwestern United States could launch targeted attacks on that equipment that could disrupt the entire U.S. food supply chain, researchers warn. The Agriculture sector and firms that supply it, like Deere, lag other industries in cyber security preparedness and resilience. A 2019 report (PDF) released by Department of Homeland Security concluded that the "adoption of advanced precision agriculture technology and farm information management systems in the crop and livestock sectors is introducing new vulnerabilities" (and that) "potential threats to precision agriculture were often not fully understood or were not being treated seriously enough by the front-line agriculture producers."

According to a report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Texas will add a record 10 GW of utility-scale solar capacity by the end of 2022, compared with 3.2 GW in California. A third of all U.S. utility-scale solar capacity planned to come online in the next two years (30 GW) will be in Texas. Reuters reports: California currently has the most installed utility-scale solar capacity of any state - about 16 gigawatts (GW). One gigawatt can power about 1 million U.S. homes. But since solar power is on only about a third of the time, a gigawatt of solar can only power about 330,000 homes. Texas added 2.5 GW of solar capacity in 2020, and EIA said it expected the state to add another 4.6 GW in 2021 and 5.4 GW in 2022, bringing the state's total to 14.9 GW. Solar is expected to make up the largest share of capacity additions in Texas between 2020 and 2022, with almost half of the additions, compared with 35% for wind and 13% for gas, according to EIA projections.

At today's Spring Loaded event, Apple unveiled a new version of the iPad Pro, equipped with the M1 chip that was first introduced on the company's Mac line. TechCrunch reports: The new chip sports an 8-core CPU, with performance up to 50% faster than the A12Z Bionic found on the previous generation. There's also an 8-core GPU, which it claims is up to 40% faster. The system can be decked out to up to 16 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage. The device further blurs the line between the company's tablet and desktop offerings, as well as improved battery life now listed as "all day." The Pro also adds Thunderbolt support to the USB-C, which allows for a number of new features including external display support and wired transfers up to 40 Gbps.

As reported, the new tablet (12.9-inch only for now) features an improved display -- Liquid Retina XDR, according to Apple's marketing terms. Among other things that brings much improved high dynamic range. The display is powered by 10,000 micro-LED. That allows for a hugely improved contrast ratio and 1,000 nits of brightness, without hammering the battery life. The 11-inch version starts at $799 and the 12.9-inch, which adds the Liquid Retina display, starts at $1,099. Pre-orders on the tablets starts April 30 and the product is set to start shipping in the second half of May -- along with a number of other products introduced at today's show.

Researchers have developed a tool that can design complex DNA robots and nanodevices in minutes instead of days. Phys.Org reports: In a paper published today in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from The Ohio State University -- led by former engineering doctoral student Chao-Min Huang -- unveiled new software they call MagicDNA. The software helps researchers design ways to take tiny strands of DNA and combine them into complex structures with parts like rotors and hinges that can move and complete a variety of tasks, including drug delivery. One advantage is that it allows researchers to carry out the entire design truly in 3-D. Earlier design tools only allowed creation in 2-D, forcing researchers to map their creations into 3-D. That meant designers couldn't make their devices too complex.

The software also allows designers to build DNA structures "bottom up" or "top down." In "bottom up" design, researchers take individual strands of DNA and decide how to organize them into the structure they want, which allows fine control over local device structure and properties. But they can also take a "top down" approach where they decide how their overall device needs to be shaped geometrically and then automate how the DNA strands are put together. Combining the two allows for increasing complexity of the overall geometry while maintaining precise control over individual component properties. Another key element of the software is that it allows simulations of how designed DNA devices would move and operate in the real world.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: The latest addition coming to Microsoft Edge is "performance mode." Rolling out first to the Canary channel, "performance mode" in Microsoft Edge is designed to improve how the browser uses the resources available to it. In practice, Microsoft says the new mode will improve speed and responsiveness overall while "optimizing" the use of battery, CPU, and RAM. Apparently, the mode may adjust based on your browsing habits too. "Performance mode helps you optimize speed, responsiveness, memory, CPU and battery usage," says Microsoft. "Performance improvements might vary depending on your individual specifications and browser habits."

One specific change Microsoft notes is that the "Sleeping Tabs" feature in Edge will be locked to five minutes when performance mode is turned on. "Sleeping Tabs" essentially freezes a tab that's left open in the background, saving resources when it's not actively being used. Performance Mode is rolling out now in version 91.0.856.0, available in the Canary channel. The toggle is available in the "System" section of the settings menu.

schwit1 writes: Able to move 1,600 boxes per hour using just one arm, Dill relies on humans to keep it operating efficiently Pickle Robots says that Dill's approach to the box unloading task is unique in a couple of ways. First, it can handle messy trailers filled with a jumble of boxes of different shapes, colors, sizes, and weights. And second, from the get-go it's intended to work under human supervision, relying on people to step in and handle edge cases.

We asked Meyer how much Dill costs, and to our surprise, he gave us a candid answer: Depending on the configuration, the system can cost anywhere from $50-100k to deploy and about that same amount per year to operate. Meyer points out that you can't really compare the robot to a human (or humans) simply on speed, since with the robot, you don't have to worry about injuries or improper sorting of packages or training or turnover. While Pickle is currently working on several other configurations of robots for package handling, this particular truck unloading configuration will be shipping to customers next year.

"Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the nation's most valuable semiconductor company, with a stock price of $645 a share and a market cap of $400 billion, is out to create the metaverse," writes Time magazine.

Huang defines it as "a virtual world that is a digital twin of ours." Huang credits author Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, filled with collectives of shared 3-D spaces and virtually enhanced physical spaces that are extensions of the Internet, for conjuring the metaverse. This is already playing out with the massively popular online games like Fortnite and Minecraft, where users create richly imagined virtual worlds. Now the concept is being put to work by Nvidia and others.

Partnering with Nvidia, BMW is using a virtual digital twin of a factory in Regensburg, Germany, to virtually plan new workflows before deploying the changes in real time in their physical factory. The metaverse, says Huang, "is where we will create the future" and transform how the world's biggest industries operate...

Not to make any value judgments about the importance of video games, but do you find it ironic that a company that has its roots in entertainment is now providing vitally important computing power for drug discovery, basic research and reinventing manufacturing?

No, not at all. It's actually the opposite. We always started as a computing company. It just turned out that our first killer app was video games...

How important is the advent and the adaptation of digital twins for manufacturing, business and society at large?

In the future, the digital world or the virtual world will be thousands of times bigger than the physical world. There will be a new New York City. There'll be a new Shanghai. Every single factory and every single building will have a digital twin that will simulate and track the physical version of it. Always. By doing so, engineers and software programmers could simulate new software that will ultimately run in the physical version of the car, the physical version of the robot, the physical version of the airport, the physical version of the building. All of the software that's going to be running in these physical things will be simulated in the digital twin first, and then it will be downloaded into the physical version. And as a result, the product keeps getting better at an exponential rate.

The second thing is, you're going to be able to go in and out of the two worlds through wormholes. We'll go into the virtual world using virtual reality, and the objects in the virtual world, in the digital world, will come into the physical world, using augmented reality. So what's going to happen is pieces of the digital world will be temporarily, or even semipermanently, augmenting our physical world. It's ultimately about the fusion of the virtual world and the physical world.
See also this possibly related story, "Nvidia's newest AI model can transform single images into realistic 3D models."

The New York Focus site writes: A decade ago, the bankrupt owner of the Greenidge power plant in Dresden, New York, sold the uncompetitive coal-fired relic for scrap and surrendered its operating permits. For the next seven years, the plant sat idle on the western shore of Seneca Lake, a monument to the apparent dead end reached by the state's fossil fuel infrastructure. But today, Greenidge is back up and running as a Bitcoin mining operation. The facility hums with energy-hungry computers that confirm and record Bitcoin transactions, drawing power from the plant's 106-megawatt generator now fueled by natural gas.

The mining activity is exceptionally profitable, thanks to an 800 percent rise in Bitcoin's price since last April. Seeking to ride the boom, the plant's new owners plan to quadruple the power used to process Bitcoin transactions by late next year. Environmental advocates view Greenidge's ambitions, if left unchecked, as an air emissions nightmare. And they fear that dozens of other retired or retiring fossil-fueled power plants across New York could follow Greenidge's example, gaining new life by repurposing as Bitcoin miners or other types of energy-intense data centers.
The New York Times recently touted an alternative to bitcoin mining: the "proof of stake" method, which "instead awards miners new blocks based on how much cryptocurrency they already own." The world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Ethereum, has said it is moving toward proof of stake (that switch is likely to take up to another year). Though some critics say Bitcoin will eventually need to follow, particularly if an environmental backlash grows, there are no current plans to do so and such a move is unpopular within the Bitcoin community.

"That reduces your emissions to almost nothing," said Joseph Pallant, Blockchain for Climate's founder and executive director. Cryptocurrency platforms like Tezos or Near Protocol already use proof of stake and have vastly lowered their energy use.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IGN: In its first five months on the market, The PlayStation 5 has become the fastest-selling console in U.S. history in both unit and dollar sales. As revealed by The NPD Group's Mat Piscatella, this news arrives one month after the PS5 became the fastest-selling console in U.S. history in dollar sales. Despite that new record, the Nintendo Switch has continued its reign as the best selling hardware platform in both units and dollars during March 2021. However, the PS5 did rank first in hardware dollar sales in Q1 2021.

In his final letter to shareholders as Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos said that the company has to "do a better job for our employees." But, as The Verge points out, the outlined strategy includes "a robotic scheme that will develop new staffing schedules using an algorithm." From the report: Bezos pushed back on the idea that, according to news reports, Amazon doesn't care for its employees. "In those reports, our employees are sometimes accused of being desperate souls and treated as robots. That's not accurate,â he wrote. To address concerns about working conditions, Bezos said the company will develop new staffing schedules "that use sophisticated algorithms to rotate employees among jobs that use different muscle-tendon groups to decrease repetitive motion and help protect employees from MSD risks." The technology will roll out throughout 2021, he said.

In addition to giving a nod to working conditions at Amazon, the letter is the first time Bezos has publicly addressed the failed union drive at its Bessemer, Alabama plant. "Does your Chair take comfort in the outcome of the recent union vote in Bessemer? No, he doesn't," Bezos wrote. "I think we need to do a better job for our employees. While the voting results were lopsided and our direct relationship with employees is strong, it's clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees -- a vision for their success."

How many years will the ongoing chip shortage affect technology firms across the world? This week, multiple tech executives offered their own dismal estimates as part of their usual public financial disclosures, with the worst one coming in at "a couple of years." From a report: That nasty estimate comes from Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who offered that vague timeframe to The Washington Post in an interview on Tuesday. He clarified that was an estimate for how long it would take the company to "build capacity" to potentially address supply shortages. The conversation came as Intel offered to step up for two supply chains particularly pinched by the silicon drought: medical supplies and in-car computer systems.

In previous statements, Gelsinger pointed to Intel's current $20 billion plan to build a pair of factories in Arizona, and this week's interview added praise for President Joe Biden's proposed $50 billion chip-production infrastructure plan -- though Gelsinger indicated that Biden should be ready to spend more than that. TSMC CEO C.C. Wei offered a similarly dire estimate to investors on Thursday, saying that the Taiwan-based company hoped to "offer more capacity" for meeting retail and manufacturing demand "in 2023." TSMC, coincidentally, is moving forward with a manufacturing plant of its own in Arizona, which Bloomberg claims could cost "up to $12 billion," despite the company clarifying that it intends to prioritize research, development, and production in its home nation.

Carbon Robotics, a Seattle company led by Isilon Systems co-founder Paul Mikesell, is unveiling its self-driving robot that uses artificial intelligence to identify weeds growing in fields of vegetables, then zaps them with precision thermal bursts from lasers. GeekWire reports: [W]hat farmers need is less a revolution in farming methods than a revolutionary tool that fits into their current farming patterns, Mikesell said. Carbon worked closely with farmers in eastern Oregon and southern Idaho, he said. As a result, Carbon's robot system -- the Autonomous Weeder -- was built about the size of a medium tractor so it would fit in the furrows between rows of common crops like onions and sweet potatoes.

It can cover up to 16 acres of cropland a day, zapping as many as 100,000 weeds an hour, Mikesell said. And since it's self-driving, all a farmer has to do is take it to the field in the morning and turn it on. "We're really intent on not making farmers have to change how they're doing things," Mikesell said. "That's been a key to our success. We fit right into their operations."

Carbon has sold out all the robots it built for the 2021 planting season, and is looking for an industrial partner who could help it build more units for 2022, Mikesell said. The company is looking to get into the hundreds of units built and shipped for next year, he said. "There's a demand for a lot more than that, tens or hundreds of thousands of them."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: South Koreans must learn how to work alongside machines if they want to thrive in a post-pandemic world where many jobs will be handled by artificial intelligence and robots, according to the country's labor minister. "Automation and AI will change South Korea faster than other countries," Minister of Employment and Labor Lee Jae-kap said in an interview Tuesday. "Not all jobs may be replaced by machines, but it's important to learn ways to work well with machines through training."

While people will have to increase their adaptability to work in a fast-changing high-tech environment, policy makers will also need to play their part, Lee said. The government needs to provide support to enable workers to move from one sector of the economy to another in search of employment and find ways to increase the activity of women in the economy, he added. The minister's remarks underline the determination of President Moon Jae-in's government to press ahead with a growth strategy built around tech even if it risks alienating the country's unions -- an important base of support for the ruling camp -- in the short term. "New jobs will be created as technology advances," Lee said. "What's important in policy is how to support a worker move from a fading sector to an emerging one." The government is looking to help with this transition by expanding its employment insurance program to 21 million people, or more than 40% of the population, by 2025. "The program is part of a government initiative to provide financial support in the form of insurance for every worker in the country, whether they are artists, freelancers or deliverymen on digital platforms," adds Bloomberg.

"Separately, the government is providing stipends for young people to encourage them to keep searching for work, as their struggle to stay employed amid slowing economic growth has been made tougher by the pandemic."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The explosion and blackout at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran over the weekend raised the specter of past sabotage -- including the Stuxnet cyberattack that took out some of Natanz's centrifuges between 2007 and 2010 as well as an explosion and fire that occurred there last July -- destroying about three-fourths of a newly opened plant for the assembly of centrifuges. Government officials and news reports gave conflicting accounts of what caused the latest blasts, the extent of damage, and Iran's capacity to quickly recover. Initial reports said there was no harm to the Natanz facility, but Iranian officials later acknowledged damage to its centrifuges.

And while media accounts have suggested saboteurs focused on taking out the facility's electric supply, David Albright, founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., believes the aim was to destroy centrifuges. Power is easy to restore even when electrical equipment is damaged, allowing enrichment work to quickly resume. But an abrupt blackout that also takes out backup power would have destroyed some centrifuges, Albright says, since they need to be powered down slowly. Failure to do so leads to vibrations that can cause centrifuge rotors and bellows to become damaged and in some cases disintegrate, which is what Albright suspects occurred.

A White House plan to rapidly shore up the security of the U.S. power grid will begin with a 100-day sprint, but take years more to transform utilities' ability to fight off hackers, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing a draft version of the plan confirmed by two people. From the report: The plan is the policy equivalent of a high-wire act: it provides incentives for electric companies to dramatically change the way they protect themselves against cyber-attacks while trying to avoid political tripwires that have stalled previous efforts, the details suggest. Among its core tenets, the Biden administration's so-called "action plan" will incentivize power utilities to install sophisticated new monitoring equipment to more quickly detect hackers, and to share that information widely with the U.S. government. It will ask utilities to identify critical sites which, if attacked, could have an outsized impact across the grid, according to a six-page draft of the plan, which was drawn up by the National Security Council and described in detail to Bloomberg News. And it will expand a partially classified Energy Department program to identify flaws in grid components that could be exploited by the country's cyber-adversaries, including Russia, Iran and China.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The Open Invention Network (OIN) defends the intellectual property (IP) rights of Linux and open-source software developers from patent trolls and the like. This is a global fight and now the OIN has a new, powerful allied member in China: Inspur. Inspur is a leading worldwide provider and China's leading data center infrastructure, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) server providers. While not a household name like Lenovo, Inspur ranks among the world's top-three server manufacturers.

Inspur is only the latest of many companies to join the OIN. Besides such primarily hardware-oriented companies as Inspur, Baidu, China's largest search engine company, and global banks such as Barclays and the TD Bank Group, have joined the OIN. In 2021, companies far removed from traditional Linux companies such as Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE all recognize Linux and OSS's importance. Donny Zhang, VP of Inspur information, said, "Linux and open source are critical elements in technologies which we are developing and provisioning. By joining the Open Invention Network, we are demonstrating our continued commitment to innovation, and supporting it with patent non-aggression in core Linux and adjacent open-source software." "Linux is rewriting what is possible in infrastructure computing," says OIN CEO Keith Bergelt. "OSS-based cloud computing and on-premise data centers are driving down the cost-per-compute while significantly increasing businesses' ability to provision AI and machine-learning (ML) capabilities. We appreciate Inspur's participation in joining OIN and demonstrating its commitment to innovation and patent non-aggression in open source."

The latest data from research firm Canalys shows continued strength in the worldwide PC market in the first quarter of 2021, with shipments of desktops and notebooks, including workstations, up 55% year on year. From the report: Though this growth rate was buoyed by a weak Q1 2020, total shipments of 82.7 million units is still impressive, and the highest Q1 shipment number since 2012. Backlogs on orders from 2020, particularly for notebooks, were a key driver, though new demand is also a factor as smaller businesses begin their recoveries. Shipments of notebooks and mobile workstations increased 79% year on year to reach 67.8 million units. Desktops improved slightly at the start of 2021 after a string of poor quarters in 2020, with the level of shipment decline easing. Shipments of desktop and desktop workstations fell 5% year on year to 14.8 million units.

The strong recovery from a weak Q1 2020 saw all vendors in the top five achieve double-digit year-on-year shipment growth. Lenovo maintained pole position in the PC market, securing a 25% market share and posting year-on-year growth of 61%, with shipments of 20.4 million units. HP, spurred by strong Chromebook shipments, came second with total shipments of 19.2 million units, a 64% increase on Q1 2020. Dell lost market share against Q4, but took third place in the rankings, growing shipments 23% year on year to hit 12.9 million units. Apple and Acer made up the rest of the top five, shipping 6.6 million and 5.7 million units to enjoy the highest and second-highest annual growth respectively. Cumulatively, the top five vendors accounted for 78.5% of all PC shipments in Q1 2021.

Tesla appears to have drastically increased the price of its Solar Roof tiles in an update to its configurator and quote estimates. Electrek reports: After years of delays, the Tesla Solar Roof is finally gaining momentum with a sharp rise in installations over the last few quarters. The increased deployment came after Tesla launched version 3 of its Solar Roof tiles, which brought a significant price decrease through optimization and faster installation process. Tesla kept refining the product and changed its online cost estimates a few times, decreasing the price again last summer.

But now Tesla appears to have changed course and significantly increased the price of its solar roof in its online configurator. Several Electrek readers and prospective solar roof buyers reached out this weekend to let us know that they are seeing higher prices for the same quotes. Last summer, a quote for a 3,947-square-foot roof with a 12,3 kW solar roof tile system was $54,966 before incentives. Now the Tesla Solar Roof configurator shows prices between $79,938 and $100,621 for the same size roof. While this is a sharp increase in price, Tesla also appears to try to make its online quotes more accurate with a new "roof complexity" factor. [...] However, in this case, the least to the most complex options all result in higher prices than previously quoted for the same address with the same square footage.

Nvidia said it's offering the company's first server microprocessors, extending a push into Intel's most lucrative market with a chip aimed at handling the most complicated computing work. Intel shares fell more than 2% on the news. From a report: The graphics chipmaker has designed a central processing unit, or CPU, based on technology from Arm, a company it's trying to acquire from Japan's SoftBank Group. The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory will be the first to use the chips in their computers, Nvidia said Monday at an online event. Nvidia has focused mainly on graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are used to power video games and data-heavy computing tasks in data centers. CPUs, by contrast, are a type of chip that's more of a generalist and can do basic tasks like running operating systems. Expanding into this product category opens up more revenue opportunities for Nvidia.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has made Nvidia the most valuable U.S. chipmaker by delivering on his promise to give graphics chips a major role in the explosion in cloud computing. Data center revenue contributes about 40% of the company's sales, up from less than 7% just five years ago. Intel still has more than 90% of the market in server processors, which can sell for more than $10,000 each. The CPU, named Grace after the late pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, is designed to work closely with Nvidia graphics chips to better handle new computing problems that will come with a trillion parameters. Systems working with the new chip will be 10 times faster than those currently using a combination of Nvidia graphics chips and Intel CPUs. The new product will be available at the beginning of 2023, Nvidia said.

"Everyone has that story," writes Slashdot reader alaskana98: You know, the one where you spilled a Big Gulp-sized cup of sugary Coke all over your laptop and it somehow still works to this day — although the space bar is permanently glued in place.

Or that time you left your iPhone out in a pouring thunderstorm, stuck it in a bag of rice and after a few days it miraculously turned back on. Yes, we've all been there, maybe cried a little and then went on with life — a little wiser for the wear.

So, fellow Slashdotters, what's your worst tale of hardware horrors?
The original submission has already drawn some interesting tales from long-time Slashdot readers, including two thunderstorm hardware horror stories. And there's also the user who remembers how "In the mid 1980s I blew up a $75,000 laser by not turning the cooling water on before firing it up."

But what's your story? Share your own tale in the comments.

What's your worst damaged hardware horror story?

While difficult negotiations continue over a deal to curtail Iran's nuclear ambitions, this morning Iran suddenly experienced a blackout at its underground Natanz atomic facility, the Associated Press reports: While there was no immediate claim of responsibility, suspicion fell immediately on Israel, where its media nearly uniformly reported a devastating cyberattack orchestrated by the country caused the blackout. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later Sunday night toasted his security chiefs, with the head of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, at his side on the eve of his country's Independence Day... Netanyahu, who also met Sunday with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, has vowed to do everything in his power to stop the nuclear deal...

Natanz has been targeted by sabotage in the past. The Stuxnet computer virus, discovered in 2010 and widely believed to be a joint U.S.-Israeli creation, once disrupted and destroyed Iranian centrifuges at Natanz amid an earlier period of Western fears about Tehran's program. Natanz suffered a mysterious explosion at its advanced centrifuge assembly plant in July that authorities later described as sabotage. Iran now is rebuilding that facility deep inside a nearby mountain. Iran also blamed Israel for the November killing of a scientist who began the country's military nuclear program decades earlier.

Multiple Israeli media outlets reported Sunday that an Israeli cyberattack caused the blackout in Natanz. Public broadcaster Kan said the Mossad was behind the attack. Channel 12 TV cited "experts" as estimating the attack shut down entire sections of the facility. While the reports offered no sourcing for their information, Israeli media maintains a close relationship with the country's military and intelligence agencies...

On Tuesday, an Iranian cargo ship said to serve as a floating base for Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard forces off the coast of Yemen was struck by an explosion, likely from a limpet mine. Iran has blamed Israel for the blast. That attack escalated a long-running shadow war in Mideast waterways targeting shipping in the region.

New submitter evaverdeazul shared this report from Japan Today: The Japanese government is poised to release treated radioactive water accumulated at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea despite opposition from fishermen, sources familiar with the matter said Friday. It will hold a meeting of related ministers as early as Tuesday to formally decide on the plan, a major development following over seven years of discussions on how to discharge the water used to cool down melted fuel at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The treated water containing radioactive tritium, a byproduct of nuclear reactors, is said to pose little risk to human health because even if one drinks the water, so long as the tritium concentration is low, the amounts of tritium would not accumulate in the body and would soon be excreted. There is also no risk of external exposure even if the water comes in contact with skin. Still, concerns remain among Japan's fisheries industry and consumers as well as neighboring countries such as South Korea and China.

The government has said it cannot continue postponing a decision on the disposal issue, given that the storage capacity of water tanks at the Fukushima complex is expected to run out as early as fall next year. It asserts that space needs to be secured on the premises, such as for keeping melted fuel debris that will be extracted from the damaged reactors, to move forward with the decades-long process of scrapping the complex.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc (TEPCO) says it will take around two years for the discharge to start.

Joe_Dragon shares a report from The Register: A power outage kicked off a fire in web hosting biz WebNX's Ogden data center in Utah on Sunday, knocking the facility offline temporarily and leaving several servers in need of a rebuild. Kevin Brown, Fire Marshal for the US city's Fire Department told The Register in a phone interview that firefighters responded to a call on Sunday evening. The fire, he said, "originated in a generator in the building and spread to several servers." Brown said the facility's fire suppression system contained the blaze and that fire department personnel assisted with the cleanup. He said power was cut to the building until an electrical engineer could inspect the facility to make sure current could be restored safely, which he added is standard procedure. He also confirmed that some of Ogden City's IT services were down on Sunday and Monday as a result of the data center fire. "Sunday afternoon the city power was disrupted and, as designed, our backup generators automatically switched on," the company said in a Facebook post. "However, during that transition, one of our backup generators that had been recently tested and benchmarked specifically for this situation experienced a catastrophic failure, caught fire, and as a result initiated the fire suppression protocol."

"Some servers will have an extended outage as they may require rebuilds due to some water damage. Those builds have a high probability that data is intact." They added: "Customer's servers in one of our main bays were exposed to water and possible damage may have occurred. No fire damage was inflicted on customer servers."

TAE Technologies, a 20-year-old fusion energy technology developer, is claiming to have hit a milestone in the development of a new technology for generation power from nuclear fusion. The company said its reactors could be operating at commercial scale by the end of the decade, thanks to its newfound ability to produce stable plasma at temperatures over 50 million degrees (nearly twice as hot as the sun). TechCrunch reports: For TAE Technologies, the achievement serves as a validation of the life's work of Norman Rostoker, one of the company's co-founders who had devoted his life to fusion energy research and died before he could see the company he helped create reach its latest milestone. "This is an incredibly rewarding milestone and an apt tribute to the vision of my late mentor, Norman Rostoker," said TAE's current chief executive officer, Michl Binderbauer, in a statement announcing the company's achievement. "Norman and I wrote a paper in the 1990s theorizing that a certain plasma dominated by highly energetic particles should become increasingly better confined and stable as temperatures increase. We have now been able to demonstrate this plasma behavior with overwhelming evidence. It is a powerful validation of our work over the last three decades, and a very critical milestone for TAE that proves the laws of physics are on our side."

Rostoker's legacy lives on inside TAE through the company's technology platform, called, appropriately, "Norman." In the last 18 months that technology has demonstrated consistent performance, reaching over 50 million degrees in several hundred test cycles. Six years ago, the company had proved that its reactor design could sustain plasma indefinitely -- meaning that once the switch is flipped on a reaction, that fusion reaction can continue indefinitely. Now, the company said, it has achieved the necessary temperatures to make its reactors commercially viable. It's with these milestones behind it that TAE was able to raise an additional $280 million in financing, bringing its total up to $880 million and making it one of the best financed private nuclear fusion endeavors in the world.

Verizon is recalling 2.5 million hotspot devices after discovering that the lithium ion battery can overheat, creating a fire and burning hazard. CNBC reports: The recall impacts Ellipsis Jetpack mobile hotspots imported by Franklin Wireless Corp and sold between April 2017 and March 2021. The affected models are labeled: MHS900L, MHS900LS and MHS900LPP. Verizon disclosed the recall Thursday alongside a notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). A Verizon spokesperson said just over 1 million of the recalled devices are currently in use, meaning currently or recently used by customers.

According to the recall notice posted by the CPSC, Verizon had received 15 reports of the hotspots overheating. Six of those reports included incidents of fire damage to bedding or flooring and two involved minor burn injuries. Some of the hotspots were supplied to students by their schools to continue remote learning, according to the recall notice. Parents who received hotspots from their children's schools are advised to contact the schools about receiving a replacement. Other customers can request a replacement by going to ellipsisjetpackrecall.expertinquiry.com or calling 855-205-2627.

MojoKid writes: The new 13-inch ThinkPad X1 Nano is the thinnest and lightest Lenovo ThinkPad ever in the brand's history. The machine weighs just 1.99 pounds (907 grams), while still sporting a fairly powerful Intel Core i7-1160G7 Tiger Lake quad-core CPU, up to a 1TB NVMe SSD, 16GB of 4267MHz LPDDR4X RAM and a 48 Whr battery. In the benchmarks, the machine holds its own for productivity and content creation tasks as well as a bit of light-duty gaming, versus heavier machines in its peer group. In terms of battery life, the new ThinkPad X1 Nano hangs pretty tough as well, offering about 7.5 hours of constant use up-time with HD video playback. With its 2K (2160X1350 -- 16:10) IPS Dolby Vision-certified display and top tier configuration, it doesn't come cheap, as you might imagine. The ThinkPad X1 Nano has a current starting price of $1,289 and tops out at $2,231 for its most powerful configuration with 1TB of fast SSD storage. Regardless, it's impressive what the machine can deliver in terms of features and performance in its weight class.

Fallout from Texas' statewide power outages in February continues to spread. Today, the Texas House of Representatives is scheduled to debate a bill that would require power producers to bear the costs of services that help keep the electrical grid stable. From a report: If the bill passes, it would "unfairly shift the cost of ancillary electric services exclusively onto renewable generators rather than all the beneficiaries," according to a letter written by the Partnership for Renewable Energy Finance (PREF), an industry group, and signed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Goldman Sachs, and a number of other firms. Amazon and other big tech firms have invested heavily in renewable power, seeking to spruce up their images while cutting their power bills. Costs for wind and solar have dropped precipitously in recent years, making investments in wind farms and solar plants attractive to power-hungry data center operators like Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

"It is important to note that these changes neither enhance electric reliability nor lower consumer costs," the letter states. "They appear to be premised on the assumption that renewable energy was disproportionately responsible for the state's February power outages, a thesis that has been unequivocally discredited." The bill would require the grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), to "directly assign" ancillary service costs to wind and solar power, specifically. The PREF letter counters that not only do all generators utilize ancillary services, but costs for those services have remained flat over the last decade while wind and solar have grown by more than 250 percent.

innocent_white_lamb writes: The Saskatchewan government will implement a new tax for passenger electric vehicles. The announcement was made Tuesday. The new $150 annual tax on passenger electric vehicles (EVs) will take effect Oct. 1, 2021. The government said the reason for this tax is that EVs do not contribute to highway maintenance through the provincial fuel tax. The new tax will be collected when the vehicle is registered. The province says it will continue to examine the future potential for expanding the EV tax to commercial vehicles and inter-jurisdictional trucking. The province will also consider options to apply a tax at EV charging stations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Great Britain's electricity system recorded its greenest ever day over the Easter bank holiday as sunshine and windy weather led to a surge in renewable energy. The power plants generating electricity in England, Scotland and Wales produced only 39g of carbon dioxide for every kilowatt-hour of electricity on Monday, according to National Grid's electricity system operator, the lowest carbon intensity recorded since National Grid records began in 1935.

On Easter Monday, wind turbines and solar farms generated 60% of all electricity as households enjoyed a bank holiday lunch. At the same time the UK's nuclear reactors provided 16% of the electricity mix, meaning almost 80% of the grid was powered from low-carbon sources. The low-carbon power surge, combined with lower than average demand for electricity over the bank holiday, kept gas-fired power in Great Britain to 10% of the electricity mix and caused the "carbon intensity" of the electricity system to plummet to its lowest on record.

General Motors confirmed it's making an all-electric version of the Chevy Silverado pickup truck with around 400 miles of range on a full charge. The Verge reports: The company did not immediately say when the electric Silverado will go on sale, but GM president Mark Reuss said at an event on Tuesday that the company will also make commercial fleet-focused versions of the truck. The electric Silverado will be made at "Factory Zero," the recently rebranded Detroit-Hamtramck plant dedicated to EVs and AVs that GM is currently retooling at a cost of more than $2 billion. It's the same plant where GM will build the all-electric Hummer SUV and Hummer pickup.

The Silverado EV will undoubtedly be a flagship vehicle of the custom electric vehicle platform GM announced last year, called Ultium. Designed to be modular, the Ultium platform is what will power most of GM's forthcoming electric vehicles. The company has promised the platform will be able to provide as much as 400 miles of range in the biggest configurations, and that the trucks built on Ultium will feature 800-volt architecture that allows for really fast charging.