North Dakota experienced an almost 40% increase in electricity demand "thanks in part to an explosion of data centers," reports the Washington Post. Yet the state saw a 1% drop in its per kilowatt-hour rates.

"A new study from researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the consulting group Brattle suggests that, counterintuitively, more electricity demand can actually lower prices..." Between 2019 and 2024, the researchers calculated, states with spikes in electricity demand saw lower prices overall. Instead, they found that the biggest factors behind rising rates were the cost of poles, wires and other electrical equipment — as well as the cost of safeguarding that infrastructure against future disasters... [T]he largest costs are fixed costs — that is, maintaining the massive system of poles and wires that keeps electricity flowing. That system is getting old and is under increasing pressures from wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather. More power customers, therefore, means more ways to divvy up those fixed costs. "What that means is you can then take some of those fixed infrastructure costs and end up spreading them around more megawatt-hours that are being sold — and that can actually reduce rates for everyone," said Ryan Hledik [principal at Brattle and a member of the research team]...

[T]he new study shows that the costs of operating and installing wind, natural gas, coal and solar have been falling over the past 20 years. Since 2005, generation costs have fallen by 35 percent, from $234 billion to $153 billion. But the costs of the huge wires that transmit that power across the grid, and the poles and wires that deliver that electricity to customers, are skyrocketing. In the past two decades, transmission costs nearly tripled; distribution costs more than doubled. Part of that trend is from the rising costs of parts: The price of transformers and wires, for example, has far outpaced inflation over the past five years. At the same time, U.S. utilities haven't been on top of replacing power poles and lines in the past, and are now trying to catch up. According to another report from Brattle, utilities are already spending more than $10 billion a year replacing aging transmission lines.

And finally, escalating extreme-weather events are knocking out local lines, forcing utilities to spend big to make fixes. Last year, Hurricane Beryl decimated Houston's power grid, forcing months of costly repairs. The threat of wildfires in the West, meanwhile, is making utilities spend billions on burying power lines. According to the Lawrence Berkeley study, about 40 percent of California's electricity price increase over the last five years was due to wildfire-related costs.
Yet the researchers tell the Washington Post that prices could still increase if utilities have to quickly build more infrastructure just to handle data center. But their point is "This is a much more nuanced issue than just, 'We have a new data center, so rates will go up.'"

As the article points out, "Generous subsidies for rooftop solar also increased rates in certain states, mostly in places such as California and Maine... If customers install rooftop solar panels, demand for electricity shrinks, spreading those fixed costs over a smaller set of consumers.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this article from Interesting Engineering: Bill Gates-backed TerraPower's innovative Natrium reactor project in Wyoming has cleared a critical federal regulatory hurdle. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has successfully completed its final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the project, known as Kemmerer Unit 1, and found no adverse impacts that would block its construction.

The commission officially recommended that a construction permit be issued to TerraPower subsidiary USO for the facility in Lincoln County.

This announcement marks a significant milestone, making the Natrium project the first-ever advanced commercial nuclear power plant in the country to successfully complete this rigorous environmental review process... The first-of-a-kind design utilizes an 840 MW (thermal) pool-type reactor connected to a molten salt-based energy storage system. This storage technology is the plant's most unique feature. It is designed to keep the base output steady, ensuring constant reliability, but it also allows the plant to function like a massive battery. The system can store heat and boost the plant's output to 500 MWe when demand peaks, allowing it to ramp up power quickly to support the grid. TerraPower says it is the only advanced reactor design with this unique capability. The Natrium plant is strategically designed to replace electricity generation capacity following the planned retirement of existing coal-fired facilities in the region.

While the regulatory process for the nuclear components continues, construction on the non-nuclear portions of the site already began in June 2024. When completed, the Natrium plant is poised to be the first utility-scale advanced nuclear power plant in the United States.
The next step for the construction permit application is a final safety evaluation, which is anticipated by December 31, 2025, according to announcement from TerraPower, which notes that the project is being developed through a public-private partnership with the U.S. Energy Department.

"When completed, the Natrium plant will be the first utility-scale advanced nuclear power plant in the United States."

Texas's electricity demand has surged to record highs in 2025 but renewable energy is meeting the challenge. According to new data from the Energy Information Administration, solar output has quadrupled since 2021, wind continues steady growth, and battery storage is increasingly stabilizing the grid during evening peaks. Electrek reports: ERCOT, which supplies power to about 90% of the state, saw demand jump 5% year-over-year to 372 terawatt hours (TWh) -- a 23% increase since 2021. No other major US grid has grown faster over the past year. [...] The biggest growth story in Texas power generation is solar. Utility-scale solar plants produced 45 TWh from January through September, up 50% from 2024 and nearly four times what they generated in 2021 (11 TWh). Wind power also continued to climb, producing 87 TWh through September -- a 4% increase from last year and 36% more than in 2021.

Together, wind and solar supplied 36% of ERCOT's total electricity over those nine months. Solar, in particular, has transformed Texas's daytime energy mix. From June to September, ERCOT solar farms generated an average of 24 gigawatts (GW) between noon and 1 pm -- double the midday output from 2023. That growth has pushed down natural gas use at midday from 50% of the mix in 2023 to 37% this year. The report notes that while natural gas is still Texas's dominant power source, it isn't growing like it used to. "Gas comprised 43% of ERCOT's generation mix during the first nine months of 2025, down from 47% in the first nine months of 2023 and 2024," reports Electrek.

Apple has begun shipping U.S.-made AI servers from a new factory in Houston, Texas -- part of its $600 billion investment in American manufacturing and supply chains. CNBC reports: Apple Chief Operating Officer Sabih Khan said on Thursday that the servers will power the company's Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute services. Apple is using its own silicon in its Apple Intelligence servers. "Our teams have done an incredible job accelerating work to get the new Houston factory up and running ahead of schedule and we plan to continue expanding the facility to increase production next year," Khan said in a statement. The Houston factory is on track to create thousands of jobs, Apple said. The Apple servers were previously manufactured overseas.

IBM announced that its quantum error-correction algorithm can now run in real time on standard AMD field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips -- a major step toward making quantum computing more practical and affordable. Reuters reports: In June, IBM said it had developed an algorithm to run alongside quantum chips that can address such errors. In a research paper seen by Reuters to be published on Monday, IBM will show it can run those algorithms in real time on a type of chip called a field programmable gate array manufactured by AMD.

Jay Gambetta, director of IBM research, said the work showed that IBM's algorithm not only works in the real world, but can operate on a readily available AMD chip that is not "ridiculously expensive." "Implementing it, and showing that the implementation is actually 10 times faster than what is needed, is a big deal," Gambetta said in an interview. IBM has a multi-year plan to build a quantum computer called Starling by 2029. Gambetta said the algorithm work disclosed Friday was completed a year ahead of schedule.

The amount of energy required to supply the data centers powering AI is so vast that meeting that need may be more than a lifetime away, according to a senior executive at Apollo Global. From a report: "The gap between what AI is demanding and what we have everywhere in the world on the grid in terms of generation and transmission is huge and will not be closed in our lifetime," Dave Stangis, who has led and developed Apollo's sustainability strategy over the past four years, said in an interview.

That means sustainable energy investors need to accept that renewables alone aren't enough to power the AI age, he said. The comments encapsulate a new approach across the finance industry, where the economics of the energy transition -- a concept intended to represent the shift to a low-carbon future -- are becoming merged with the economics of an unprecedented boost in supply. "So what is happening around the world, there's no doubt about it, is what you might call energy addition," Stangis said. "The world is scrambling to add every source of power."

Google is migrating all its internal workloads to run on both x86 and its custom Axion Arm chips, with major services like YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already running on both architectures. The Register reports: The search and ads giant documented its move in a preprint paper published last week, titled "Instruction Set Migration at Warehouse Scale," and in a Wednesday post that reveals YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already run on both x86 and its Axion Arm CPUs -- as do around 30,000 more applications. Both documents explain Google's migration process, which engineering fellow Parthasarathy Ranganathan and developer relations engineer Wolff Dobson said started with an assumption "that we would be spending time on architectural differences such as floating point drift, concurrency, intrinsics such as platform-specific operators, and performance." [...]

The post and paper detail work on 30,000 applications, a collection of code sufficiently large that Google pressed its existing automation tools into service -- and then built a new AI tool called "CogniPort" to do things its other tools could not. [...] Google found the agent succeeded about 30 percent of the time under certain conditions, and did best on test fixes, platform-specific conditionals, and data representation fixes. That's not an enormous success rate, but Google has at least another 70,000 packages to port.

The company's aim is to finish the job so its famed Borg cluster manager -- the basis of Kubernetes -- can allocate internal workloads in ways that efficiently utilize Arm servers. Doing so will likely save money, because Google claims its Axion-powered machines deliver up to 65 percent better price-performance than x86 instances, and can be 60 percent more energy-efficient. Those numbers, and the scale of Google's code migration project, suggest the web giant will need fewer x86 processors in years to come.

Samsung has officially launched the Galaxy XR, the first Android headset powered by Google's new Android XR platform. Priced at $1,800 without controllers, the device features dual 4.3K Micro-OLED displays, a Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip, extensive camera tracking, and deep Gemini AI integration. Ars Technica reports: Galaxy XR is a fully enclosed headset with passthrough video. It looks similar to the Apple Vision Pro, right down to the battery pack at the end of a cable. It packs solid hardware, including 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 processor. That's a slightly newer version of the chip powering Meta's Quest 3 headset, featuring six CPU cores and an Adreno GPU that supports up to dual 4.3K displays. The new headset has a pair of 3,552 x 3,840 Micro-OLED displays with a 109-degree field of view. That's marginally more pixels than the Vision Pro and almost three times as many as the Quest 3. The displays can refresh at up to 90Hz, but the default is 72Hz to save power.

Like other XR (extended reality) devices, the Galaxy XR is covered with cameras. There are two 6.5 MP stereoscopic cameras that stream your surroundings to the high-quality screens, allowing the software to add virtual elements on top. There are six more outward-facing cameras for headset positioning and hand tracking. Four more cameras are on the inside for eye-tracking, and they can scan your iris for secure unlocking and password fill (in select apps). Samsung says the Galaxy XR has enough juice for two hours of general use or two and a half hours of video. That's not terribly long, but you may not want to wear the 545 grams (1.2 pounds) headset for even two hours. That's even a little heavier than the Quest 3, which has an integrated battery. However, both pale in comparison to the 800 g (1.7 pounds) second-generation Vision Pro.

General Motors is ending production of its Chevy BrightDrop electric delivery vans after sluggish demand and the expiration of key EV tax credits. "This is not a decision we made lightly because of the impact on our employees," GM CEO Mary Barra said during the company's third quarter earnings call Tuesday. "However the commercial electric van market has been developing much slower than expected, and changes to the regulatory framework and fleet incentives has made the business even more challenging." The Verge reports: Brightdrop first launched in 2021 as GM's effort to capture a large portion of the commercial EV market, starting with a pair of electric vans, as well as fleet management software and electric-powered carts for goods delivery. The automaker made deals with Walmart, FedEx, and other major retailers to add the van to their delivery fleets. But after trying to make a go of it as a standalone brand, GM reabsorbed BrightDrop in 2023, and then later assigned it to Chevy in order to tap into the brand's sales and service dealer network.

Now the van will stand as yet another casualty of the expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, which ended on September 30th. In addition to the consumer credit, there was also a $7,500 discount for commercial EVs under 18,000 lbs -- which Brightdrop was eligible for. The van was a range leader, but also was more expensive than its most prominent competitor. Brightdrop's vans started at $74,000, while Ford's E-Transit van with extended battery range sold for $51,600.

British Columbia is permanently banning new cryptocurrency mining operations from connecting to its power grid to conserve electricity for industries that generate more jobs and tax revenue. The province is also capping power allocations for AI and data centers, while launching a competitive allocation process in January 2026. CoinDesk reports: The move from the government of Canada's third-most populous province is part of a broader legislative and regulatory overhaul unveiled Monday [...]. "Government will also implement several regulatory and policy changes in fall 2025 that will ... permanently ban new BC Hydro connections to the electricity grid for cryptocurrency mining to preserve the province's electricity supply and avoid the overburdening of the electricity grid," the government said in a post on its website

The province said the restrictions will help prevent grid strain and ensure industrial development is powered by clean electricity. "We're seeing unprecedented demand from traditional and emerging industries," Charlotte Mitha, the president and CEO of power utility BC Hydro, said in the web post. "The province's strategy empowers BC Hydro to manage this growth responsibly, keeping our grid reliable and our energy future clean and affordable." Crypto mining operations often consume large amounts of electricity without creating many local jobs or tax revenue, according to the statement. By contrast, projects like mines or liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities are seen as more beneficial to the economy.

alternative_right shares a report from the Internet Archive: This October, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is projected to hit a once-in-a-generation milestone: 1 trillion web pages archived. That's one trillion memories, moments, and movements -- preserved for the public and available to access via the Wayback Machine.

We'll be commemorating this historic achievement on October 22, 2025, with a global event: a party at our San Francisco headquarters and a livestream for friends and supporters around the world. More than a celebration, it's a tribute to what we've built together: a free and open digital library of the web.

Filipino workers in Manila are remotely operating robots that restock convenience store shelves across Tokyo. The partnership represents a new economic model where physical labor can be offshored through telepresence. Around 60 workers at Astro Robotics monitor the machines and intervene when problems occur about 4% of the time. They earn between $250 and $315 per month. Japan faces severe labor shortages but has resisted expanding immigration. Offshoring the work through robots solves this while dramatically reducing costs.

Filipino workers are also training the AI systems designed to eliminate the need for human operators entirely. Tokyo-based Telexistence has collected extensive data from its workers and is providing it to a San Francisco startup building fully autonomous robots. The combination of automation and offshoring creates what one University of Michigan professor called a "double whammy" for workers in developed nations. It also exploits workers in developing countries who build the tools meant to replace them. The market for AI agents is expected to grow eightfold to $43 billion by 2030. Human-only work is forecast to drop 27% over the next five years.

Amazon executives believe the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 workers in the United States by 2027 through robotic automation. Internal documents viewed by The New York Times show the automation would save approximately 30 cents on each item the company picks, packs and delivers. The documents reveal that executives told Amazon's board last year they hoped automation would allow the company to flatten its U.S. workforce growth over the next decade.

Amazon expects to sell twice as many products by 2033. That projection translates to more than 600,000 positions Amazon would not need to fill. Amazon opened its most advanced warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana last year as a template for future facilities. The site uses a thousand robots and employed a quarter fewer workers than it would have without automation. The company plans to replicate this design in approximately 40 facilities by the end of 2027. A facility in Stone Mountain, Georgia currently employs roughly 4,000 workers. After a planned robotic retrofit, internal analyses project it will process 10% more items but need as many as 1,200 fewer employees. The documents show Amazon's robotics team has set a goal to automate 75% of its operations.

Alibaba Cloud claims its new Aegaeon GPU pooling system cuts Nvidia GPU use by 82%, letting 213 H20 accelerators handle workloads that previously required 1,192. The advancements have been detailed in a paper (PDF) at the 2025 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems (SOSP) in Seoul. Tom's Hardware reports: Unlike training-time breakthroughs that chase model quality or speed, Aegaeon is an inference-time scheduler designed to maximize GPU utilization across many models with bursty or unpredictable demand. Instead of pinning one accelerator to one model, Aegaeon virtualizes GPU access at the token level, allowing it to schedule tiny slices of work across a shared pool. This means one H20 could serve several different models simultaneously, with system-wide "goodput" -- a measure of effective output -- rising by as much as nine times compared to older serverless systems.

The system was tested in production over several months, according to the paper, which lists authors from both Peking University and Alibaba's infrastructure division, including CTO Jingren Zhou. During that window, the number of GPUs needed to support dozens of different LLMs -- ranging in size up to 72 billion parameters -- fell from 1,192 to just 213. While the paper does not break down which models contributed most to the savings, reporting by the South China Morning Post says the tests were conducted using Nvidia's H20, one of the few accelerators still legally available to Chinese buyers under current U.S. export controls.

Investigators recovered the OceanGate Titan sub's underwater camera nearly intact, discovering a SanDisk SD card that survived the 2023 implosion and still contained 12 images and 9 videos. TechSpot reports: Scott Manley, the science communication YouTuber, gamer, astrophysicist, and programmer, posted about the latest find: a hardened SubC-branded Rayfin Mk2 Benthic Camera containing the undamaged SD card. The titanium and synthetic sapphire crystal camera is rated to withstand depths of up to 6,000 meters (19,685 feet) -- the Titan imploded at around 3,300 meters (10,827 feet). The casing is intact, though the lens is shattered and the PCBs are slightly damaged.

Incredibly the SD card inside the camera was undamaged. Tom's Hardware reports that it's almost certainly a SanDisk Extreme Pro 512GB, which costs around $62 on Amazon. The camera's SD card was found to be fully encrypted, divided into a small partition for operating system updates and a larger one for user data. Due to impact damage from the accident, several components of the system-on-module (SOM) board -- including connectors and the microcontroller -- were broken, complicating the data extraction process. [...] After determining the data wasn't encrypted beyond the file system level, they successfully accessed the SD card contents using the manufacturer's proprietary equipment and procedures.

Repair Plan Underway to Restore Power at Ukrainian Nuclear Plant The Associated Press reports: Work has begun to repair the damaged power supply to Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the head of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog said Saturday. The repairs are hoped to end a precarious four-week outage that saw it dependent on backup generators.

Russian and Ukrainian forces established special ceasefire zones for repairs to be safely carried out, said the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi... "Both sides engaged constructively with the IAEA to enable the complex repair plan to proceed," Grossi said in a statement...

The Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe's largest nuclear power station, has been operating on diesel back-up generators since Sept. 23 when its last remaining external power line was severed in attacks that Russia and Ukraine each blamed on the other. The plant is in an area under Russian control since early in Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is not in service, but it needs reliable power to cool its six shutdown reactors and spent fuel, to avoid any catastrophic nuclear incidents.

Concrete accounts for about 8% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, notes CNN. But a research team at the University of Pennsylvania just used a robotic 3D printer to construct a bridge with "complex, lattice-like patterns" that are just as strong and durable — but with materials that absorb more carbon dioxide.

Check out the photos of the "Diamanti" projects "post-tensioned concrete canopy". And CNN's report includes an animated photo showing the 3D printer in action: While most regular concrete absorbs carbon dioxide (up to 30% of its production emissions over its entire life cycle, according to some research), Diamanti's enhanced concrete mixture absorbs 142% more carbon dioxide than conventional concrete mixes. Its first design, a pedestrian bridge, uses 60% less material while retaining mechanical strength, says Masoud Akbarzadeh, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the lab that spearheaded the project.

"Through millions of years of evolution, nature has learned that you don't need material everywhere," says Akbarzadeh. "If you take a cross section of a bone, you realize that bone is quite porous, but there are certain patterns within which the load (or weight) is transferred." By mimicking the structures in certain porous bones — known as triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) structures — âDiamanti also increased the surface area of the bridge, increasing the concrete mixture's carbon absorption potential by another 30%... According to Akbarzadeh, 3D printing reduces construction time, material, and energy use by 25%, and its structural system reduces the need for steel by 80%, minimizing use of another emissions-heavy material. He added that using the technique with Diamanti's concrete significantly cuts greenhouse gas emissions compared to regular construction techniques, and reduces construction costs by 25% to 30%.
"Even without the material innovation, the higher surface itself allows higher CO2 absorption," one engineering lecturer tells CNN. The project was a collaboration with chemical company Sika, funded with grants from the U.S. Energy Department, and is now preparing its first full-size prototype in France.

The team has published their findings in the journal Advanced Functional Materials earlier this year.

Amazon is investing hundreds of millions into the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility, a next-generation small modular reactor project in Richland, Washington, developed with X-energy and Energy Northwest. "The question now is will it be enough to kick off a new wave of U.S. nuclear energy innovation -- a field that America largely soured on by the 1980s?" writes GeekWire. From the report: The facility will be located near Richland, Wash., near Energy Northwest's Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant. The initial goal is to install a cluster of four small modular reactors (SMRs) that can produce up to 320 megawatts of power, but the overall vision is to construct 12 reactors total, with a capacity of nearly one gigawatt. If all the funding, permitting and public support come together, construction should start within the next five years, with the plant coming online in the 2030s. [...] For Amazon, its support of the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility is part of a much bigger initiative. The company has set a goal of deploying 5 gigawatts of nuclear power in the U.S. by 2039.

"One thing that Amazon does well is scale technology," said Brandon Oyer, Amazon Web Services' head of power and water for North and South America. "We've done this over and over again ... We'll go and make an investment and then learn how to scale that up, drive out cost, make it more readily available." Targeting SMRs for amplification was a "natural fit," Oyer added. The company believes nuclear aligns with its climate ambitions. Amazon matches all of its electricity use with clean power and is the largest corporate purchaser of wind, solar and other renewable sources. That said, it is struggling to cut its carbon footprint to reach a goal of net-zero emissions by 2040 as the AI-boom stokes energy use.

Amazon reported that its carbon footprint grew by 6% last year. Amazon has dibs on half of the 320 megawatts of electricity that will be generated by the first four reactors at the Washington site, but will take all of it if the power prices are too high for local utilities to afford. Cullen said that if everything goes well with the initial phase, it would be straightforward to build the other eight reactors as the permits will encompass the complete build out. The added reactors would produce enough electricity for about one million homes and should come at a lower cost. "Amazon recognizes the role they can -- and are willing -- to play," Cullen said. The company can take some of the early risk and bring that catalytic capital, he said, which is "every, very difficult for utilities to do."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Hyperscale datacenters stateside will consume 22 percent more grid power by the end of 2025 than a year ago, and are forecast to need nearly three times as much electricity by the end of the decade. Warnings about datacenters' rising energy draw are coming thick and fast of late, and this latest one from 451 Research (now a part of S&P Global) comes with figures and cautions about how fast this change may occur and what grid resources will be required to meet it.

The bit barn building boom is largely fueled by estimated demand for new machine learning models, which require highly configured servers packed with power-hungry GPUs to develop and train. The power and cooling infrastructure required also mean it is easier to build a new facility rather than attempt to retrofit an existing one. As a consequence, utility power to datacenters in America is estimated to jump 11.3 GW to 61.8 GW by the end of this year. 451 calculates this will rise again to 75.8 GW in 2026, then 108 GW in 2028, before hitting 134.4 GW by 2030. These figures also exclude enterprise-owned facilities, only considering those of the hyperscale tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, alongside leased and crypto-mining sites.

The research identifies Virginia and Texas as the two states with by far the highest requirement for bit barn energy supplies in the US this year. 451 forecasts that Virginia's datacenter load, made up of leased and hyperscale facilities, will reach 12.1 GW in 2025, up from 9.3 GW last year. In Texas, demand is driven by cryptomining and leased capacity, and is slated to hit 9.7 GW this year, from less than 8 GW previously. However, the search for an optimum location is seeing datacenter operators explore emerging markets such as Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma and smaller cities in West Texas, looking for "stranded power" and alternative energy generation opportunities, the report says.

Backblaze has been tracking hard disk drive failures in its datacenter since 2013. The backup and cloud storage company's latest analysis of approximately 317,230 drives shows that peak failure rates have dropped dramatically and shifted much later in a drive's lifespan. Where the company once saw failure rates of 13.73% at around three years in 2013 and 14.24% at seven years and nine months in 2021, the current data shows a peak of just 4.25% at 10 years and three months.

This represents the first time the company has observed the highest failure rate occurring at the far end of the drive curve rather than earlier in its operational life, it said. The drives maintained relatively consistent failure rates through most of their use before spiking sharply near the end. The improvement amounts to roughly one-third of the previous peak failure rates.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Heise: The European Commission has revised the Ecodesign requirements for external power supplies (EPS). The new rules aim to increase consumer convenience, resource efficiency, and energy efficiency. Manufacturers have three years to prepare for the changes. The new regulations apply to external power supplies that charge or power devices such as laptops, smartphones, Wi-Fi routers, and computer monitors. Starting in 2028, these products must meet higher energy efficiency standards and become more interoperable. Specifically, USB chargers on the EU market must have at least one USB Type-C port and function with detachable cables.

With the regulation, the EU is also establishing minimum requirements for the efficiency of power supplies with an output power of up to 240 watts that charge via USB Power Delivery (USB-PD), among other things, under other things, minimum requirements. Power supplies with an output power exceeding 10 watts will also have to meet minimum energy efficiency values in partial load operation (10 percent of rated power) in the future, which is intended to reduce unnecessary energy losses. The EU Commission says the new requirements are expected to save around 3% of energy consumption over the lifecycle of external chargers by 2035. Additionally, greenhouse gas emissions are expected to decrease by 9% and pollutant emissions by about 13%.

"The EU also calculates that consumer spending could decrease by around 100 million euros per year by 2035," reports Heise.

Google DeepMind is partnering with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to use its Torax AI software to simulate and optimize plasma behavior inside the company's Sparc fusion reactor. TechCrunch reports: There's a reason Google keeps coming back to the problem: AI might be uniquely suited to making fusion power possible. One of the biggest challenges facing fusion startups is keeping the plasma inside a reactor hot enough for long enough. Unlike nuclear fission reactions, which are self-sustaining, fusion reactions are difficult to maintain outside of stars like the Sun. Without that sort of mass and gravity, the plasma is constantly in danger of diffusing and snuffing itself out.

In CFS's reactors, powerful magnets substitute for gravity to help corral the plasma, but they're not perfect. Reactor operators have to develop control software that can enable the device to continuously react to changing plasma conditions. Problem is, there are almost too many knobs to turn, certainly more than a human is capable of. That's the sort of problem that AI excels at. Experts have cited AI as one of the key technologies that has enabled the industry's remarkable advances over the past several years.

CFS is currently building Sparc, its demonstration reactor, in a suburb outside Boston. The device is about two-thirds completed, and when finished later in 2026, the startup is predicting that it will be the first fusion device capable of producing more power than the plant needs to run itself. Google said Torax can be used with reinforcement learning or evolutionary search models to find the "most efficient and robust paths to generating net energy." The two companies are also exploring whether AI can be used to control the reactor's operation.

Oil, gas and coal will continue to dominate the world's energy mix well beyond 2050, as soaring electricity demand outpaces the shift to renewables, according to a new McKinsey report. From a report: McKinsey expects fossil fuels to account for about 41-55% of global energy consumption in 2050, down from today's 64% but higher than previous projections. U.S. data-center-related power demand is expected to grow nearly 25% a year until 2030, while demand from data centers globally would average 17% growth per year between 2022 and 2030, especially in OECD countries. Alternative fuels are not likely to achieve broad adoption before 2040 unless mandated, but renewables do have the potential to provide 61-67% of the 2050 global power mix, McKinsey said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On Monday, a publicly-sourced archive of more than 10,000 national park signs and monument placards went public as part of a massive volunteer project to save historical and educational placards from around the country that risk removal by the Trump administration. Visitors to national parks and other public monuments at more than 300 sites across the U.S. took photos of signs and submitted them to the archive to be saved in case they're ever removed in the wake of the Trump administration's rewriting of park history. The full archive is available here, with submissions from July to the end of September. The signs people have captured include historical photos from Alcatraz, stories from the African American Civil War Memorial, photos and accounts from the Brown v. Board of Education National History Park, and hundreds more sites. "I'm so excited to share this collaborative photo collection with the public. As librarians, our goal is to preserve the knowledge and stories told in these signs. We want to put the signs back in the people's hands," Jenny McBurney, Government Publications Librarian at the University of Minnesota and one of the co-founders of the Save Our Signs project, said in a press release. "We are so grateful for all the people who have contributed their time and energy to this project. The outpouring of support has been so heartening. We hope the launch of this archive is a way for people to see all their work come together."

An anonymous reader shared this excerpt from a Los Angeles Times newsletter: One of the most consequential moments in California's drive to beat back climate change will take place next month. The state will stop receiving electricity from the Intermountain Power Plant in Central Utah, meaning our reliance on coal as a source of power will essentially be over...

[T]he U.S. got nearly half its electricity from coal-fired plants as recently as 2007. By 2023, that figure had dropped to just 16.2%. California drove an even more dramatic shift, getting just 2.2% of its electricity from coal in 2024 — nearly all of it from the Intermountain plant. Operators plan to cut off that final burst of ions next month.
"And with improved technology to store power, the change has been made without the power shortages that dogged the state up until 2020..."

It's the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. But "Ukraine's foreign minister accused Russia on Sunday of deliberately severing the external power line to the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station," reports Reuters, "in order to link the plant to Moscow's power grid." Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Moscow was attempting to test a reconnection to Russia's grid. Ukraine has long feared that Moscow would try to redirect the plant's output to its grid. But Russian officials have denied any intention of trying to restart the plant, seized by Moscow's forces in the early weeks of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The plant produces no electricity at the moment, but has been without an external electricity source for nearly three weeks. Officials have relied on emergency diesel generators to secure the power needed to keep the fuel cool inside the facility and guard against a meltdown. "Russia intentionally broke the plant's connection with the Ukrainian grid in order to forcefully test reconnection with the Russian grid," Sybiha wrote on X in English. He denounced the "attempted theft of a peaceful Ukrainian nuclear facility".... Each side has accused the other of shelling that caused the line outage.
Russia's continued occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant deprived Ukraine of a quarter of its generating capacity, according to a report from the Brookings Institute — calling Ukraine's energy sector "a key battleground" in the war. The Russian invasion began on the very day that Ukraine launched its so-called island test. This involved completely isolating the Ukrainian and Moldovan power systems from their neighbors to check whether the system was stable. This is a mandatory procedure prior to synchronization with the European grid... Despite this, Ukraine managed not only to militarily defend itself but also to maintain grid stability in wartime conditions and implement all the solutions necessary for an unprecedented synchronization on March 16, 2022.
In 2022 a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (from 1998 to 2007) even argued in the Wall Street Journal that "An unappreciated motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv was positioning itself to break from its longtime Russian nuclear suppliers..." At the time of the invasion, Westinghouse supplied fuel to six of the 15 [Ukrainian] nuclear reactors and could displace the Russians in all of them. The U.S. government had been highly supportive of this effort, and these fuel contracts represented hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly lost sales to Atomstroyexport [a nuclear exporter that's a subsidiary of Russian state corporation Rosatom]. By seizing the nuclear plants, Russia is able to retake the market for Ukrainian nuclear fuel.

Most important, Westinghouse, with support from the U.S., was in a position to build nuclear reactors in Ukraine over the next two decades. On Aug. 31, 2021, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her Ukrainian counterpart, Herman Halushchenko, signed a strategic cooperation agreement to build five nuclear units with a value, according to the World Nuclear Association, of more than $30 billion. The timing is telling. In November 2021, Ukraine's leaders signed a deal with Westinghouse to start construction on what they hoped would be at least five nuclear units — the first tranche of a program that could more than double the number of plants in the country, with a potential total value approaching $100 billion. Ukraine clearly intended that Russia receive none of that business.
Brookings looks at how Ukraine's energy sector has fared during the war: The Ukrainian energy sector was designed to be oversized with significant redundancy in order to meet huge Soviet-era industrial demand as well as to make it more resilient to a future world war... A radical change did not occur until 2014, when Ukrainians overthrew the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. In the decade since then, Ukraine has pursued a policy of European Union (EU) integration with determination and without interruption... The real prospect of an improvement in the quality of life and development of Ukraine through integration with the EU and NATO was unacceptable to Russia, which first annexed Crimea and covertly attacked the Ukrainian Donbas, before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Russia's in-depth knowledge of the Ukrainian power system, dating back to the Soviet Union, was used to carry out a well-planned operation to cut off electricity to Ukrainians.

The aim was to break the morale of Ukrainians to continue defending themselves and to collapse the economy so that it could not support the Ukrainian military effort. Ironically, however, the size of the energy system, which had been scaled up in case of war, and the enormous Western support, unexpectedly ensured its resilience to Russian attacks.
Although they note that "During the first two years of the war, Russia fired nearly 2,000 missiles and drones at Ukrainian energy infrastructure... "

And this week in Ukraine, damage to substations, power plants and oil depot temporarily cut off electricity for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian homes and businesses, reports the UN. "As colder weather sets in, strikes on critical infrastructure are deepening humanitarian needs," warned a UN spokesperson on Thursday...

"Amazon Echo Show owners are reporting an uptick in advertisements on their smart displays," reports Ars Technica. The company's Echo Show smart displays have previously shown ads through the company's Shopping Lists feature, as well as advertising for Alexa skills. Additionally, Echo Shows may play audio ads when users listen to Amazon Music on Alexa. However, reports on Reddit (examples here, here, and here) and from The Verge's Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, who owns more than one Echo Show, suggest that Amazon has increased the amount of ads it shows on its smart displays' home screens.

The Echo Show's apparent increase in ads is pushing people to stop using or even return their Echo Shows.
The article notes Amazon's smart displays have also started showing ads for Alexa+ — and The Verge's reporter saw ads on one (but not all) of her Echo Shows this week. (Even when the display is set to show personal photos, ads sometimes appear for herbal supplements, Quest sports chips, and tabletop picture frames.

Ars Technica notes that users "are unable to disable the home screen ads." When reached for comment, an Amazon spokesperson told Ars Technica: "Advertising is a small part of the experience, and it helps customers discover new content and products they may be interested in..." Amazon declined to comment on whether it has increased Echo Show ad loads... According to Amazon, Echo Show home screen ads change based on how close someone is to the gadget. "When the customer is more than four feet away from their device, ads will display full-screen in rotation with other content such as weather, recipes, sports, and news..."

Ferrari's first electric car arrives next summer, reports Carscoops, with a top speed of 193 mph (310 km/h) and accelerating from 0 to 62 mph (0 to 100 km/h) in just 2.5 seconds.

"The Elettrica" will also have a large high-density battery for over 329 miles (530 km) of range, ultra-fast DC charging up to 350 kW, and a 122 kWh capacity and an energy density of 195 Wh/kg that Ferrari "claims is the highest among production EVs."

But what's really interesting is its engine noises: Ferrari's approach to the Elettrica's sound moves away from artificial engine simulation. Instead, a sensor mounted on the inverter detects the powertrain's real mechanical vibrations, which are then amplified to create what the company describes as a natural, evolving tone that reflects how the car is being driven... a reactive soundtrack. Antonio Palermo [Ferrari's head of sound and vibration] calls it "language and connection," a way to keep drivers emotionally engaged with the car without resorting to synthetic gimmicks...

Needless to say, how convincing this synthesized feedback will feel in practice remains to be seen, as much of Ferrari's allure has traditionally rested on the emotional impact of its combustion engines.
"The Torque Shift Engagement system offers five selectable levels of power and torque using the right paddle, while the left paddle adjusts braking intensity," the article points out.

But if the engine noises are well-executed, argues the EV news site Electrek, "I even think it might convince some petrolheads to give EVs a try," . Whether you like them or not, engine sounds are essential, especially in performance vehicles. They are part of the identity of certain cars — a sort of signature. They can be emotional. They can give a sense of power. But beyond that, they are information. The pitch, volume, and texture of the engine sound provide critical, real-time feedback to the driver about RPM, load, and the car's health.

Some electric automakers are using curated soundscapes (like BMW with Hans Zimmer) or trying to mimic V8s (like Dodge with its "Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust")... Other automakers are simply letting the natural sounds of the electric motors exist. There's nothing wrong with that. However, considering that electric motors produce minimal sounds, which are then trapped inside a metal casing, you rarely hear anything significant, especially in modern vehicles with quiet cabins and even active noise cancellation. For most EVs, this is not a problem, but for a performance electric vehicle, it does feel like something is missing...

Ferrari insists the sound will only be used when "functionally useful" to provide feedback to the driver and will be directly tied to torque requests... The entire system was reportedly developed in-house, giving Ferrari complete control over the vehicle's final acoustic signature... [T]hey are embracing the new technology rather than hiding it. They are making a confident statement that an electric powertrain can be emotionally engaging on its own terms, without having to pretend to be something it's not...

If you prefer a completely silent drive, you can disable it.
Electrek's conclusion? "The purists who were worried that Ferrari would lose its soul in the EV transition should be encouraged by this."

I uploaded a photo on my phone to Microsoft's "OneDrive" file-hosting app — and there was a surprise waiting under Privacy and Permissions. "OneDrive uses AI to recognize faces in your photos..."

And...

"You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year."



If I moved the slidebar for that setting to the left (for "No"), it moved back to the right, and said "Something went wrong while updating this setting." (Apparently it's not one of those three times of the year.)

The feature is already rolling out to a limited number of users in a preview, a Microsoft publicist confirmed to Slashdot. (For the record, I don't remember signing up for this face-recognizing "preview".) But there's a link at the bottom of the screen for a "Microsoft Privacy Statement" that leads to a Microsoft support page, which says instead that "This feature is coming soon and is yet to be released." And in the next sentence it's been saying "Stay tuned for more updates" for almost two years...

A Microsoft publicist agreed to answer Slashdot's questions...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: The study by a team from Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children (also known as Sick Kids) and St. Michael's Hospital was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It found that children who spent more time on screens before age eight scored lower on standardized tests. Child psychiatry researchers say handing kids digital devices, like iPads, every time they have a tantrum could lead to future issues. One new study links too much screen time to emotional and anger management problems.

The study followed more than 3,000 kids in Ontario over a 15 year span from 2008 to 2023, tracking how much time they spent watching TV or DVDs, playing video games, using the computer or playing on handheld devices like iPads, as reported by their parents. That data was compared to their EQAO standardized test scores, which are used to assess the reading and math skills of kids across Ontario in grades 3 and 6. The findings point to a "significant association," between screen use and lower test scores, according to Dr. Catherine Birken, a pediatrician and senior scientist at Sick Kids and lead author of the study.

"For each additional hour of screen use, there was approximately a 10 percent lower odds of meeting standards in both reading and mathematics ... in Grade 3 and mathematics in Grade 6," said Dr. Catherine Birken, a pediatrician and senior scientist at Sick Kids and lead author of the study, in an interview with CBC News. The study didn't differentiate between different types of screen time -- for example, whether a child was playing a game on their iPad versus FaceTiming a relative in another city, or watching an educational video. It was also an observational study that relied on parents answering questionnaires about how much time their kids spent in front of screens. The study authors note that this means the research can't be taken as definitive proof that screen time causes lower grades, just that the two things tend to go hand in hand.

Toyota is fast-tracking its long-promised all-solid-state EV batteries through a new partnership with Sumitomo Metal Mining, aiming to debut its first production vehicle using the technology by 2027 or 2028. Electrek reports: Toyota said that its new batteries could significantly enhance driving range, charging times, and output, potentially transforming the future of automobiles. Compared to current liquid-based batteries, which use electrolyte solutions, Toyota's all-solid-state batteries utilize a cathode, an anode, and a solid electrolyte. According to Toyota, the next-gen battery tech "offers the potential for smaller size, higher output, and longer life."

The two companies have been developing cathode materials for all-solid-state EV batteries since 2021, focusing on some of the biggest challenges in producing them at a mass scale. Using Sumitomo Metal Mining's proprietary powder synthesis technology, Toyota claimed to have developed a "highly durable cathode material" for all-solid-state batteries. Sumitomo has been supplying cathode materials for electric vehicles for years, but it's now working to introduce the newly developed tech, moving it toward mass production.

Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: Following U.S. lawmakers' call on Tuesday for broader bans on the export of chipmaking equipment to China, China dramatically expanded its rare earths export controls on Thursday, adding five new elements, dozens of pieces of refining technology, and extra scrutiny for semiconductor users as Beijing tightens control over the sector ahead of talks between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. The new rules expands controls Beijing announced in April that caused shortages around the world, before a series of deals with Europe and the U.S. eased the supply crunch.

China produces over 90% of the world's processed rare earths and rare earth magnets. The 17 rare earth elements are vital materials in products ranging from electric vehicles to aircraft engines and military radars. Foreign companies producing some of the rare earths and related magnets on the list will now also need a Chinese export license if the final product contains or is made with Chinese equipment or material, even if the transaction includes no Chinese companies, mimicking rules the U.S. has implemented to restrict other countries' exports of semiconductor-related products to China.

Developing mining and processing capabilities requires a long-term effort, meaning the United States will be on the back foot for the foreseeable future. The Commerce Ministry also added to its "unreliable entity list" 14 foreign organizations, which are mostly based in the United States, restricting their ability to carry out commercial activities within the world's second-largest economy for carrying out military and technological cooperation with Taiwan, or "made malicious remarks about China, and assisted foreign governments in suppressing Chinese companies," it said in a separate statement, referring to TechInsights, a prominent Canadian tech research firm, and nine of its subsidiaries including Strategy Analytics which were among those blacklisted.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: IDC says global PC shipments jumped 9.4 percent in Q3 2025, reaching nearly 76 million units. Asia and Japan led the growth thanks to school projects and corporate refreshes tied to Windows 10's end of support. North America was the weak link, with tariffs and economic unease keeping buyers on the sidelines even as aging fleets strain under Windows 11 pressure.

Lenovo kept its top spot with 25.5 percent market share, followed by HP at 19.8 and Dell at 13.3. Apple and ASUS both posted double-digit growth. IDC's takeaway is clear: the PC market is not surging on flashy new features, it is being pulled forward by deadlines, old batteries, and the reality that five-year-old laptops do not cut it anymore.

Synology has released an update to its Disk Station Manager software that removes verified drive requirements from its 2025 model-year Plus, Value and J-series DiskStation network-attached storage devices. The change allows users to install non-validated third-party drives and create storage pools without restrictions.

The company had expanded its verified drive policy to the entire Plus line a few months earlier. Synology-branded drives carried substantial price premiums over commodity hardware. The HAT5310 enterprise SATA drive costs $299 for 8TB compared to $220 for an identically sized Seagate Exos disk. Users who installed non-verified drives in affected models faced reduced functionality and persistent warning messages in the DSM interface.

Synology said today it is collaborating with third-party drive manufacturers to accelerate testing and verification of additional storage drives. Pool and cache creation on M.2 disks still requires drives from the hardware compatibility list. Synology did not clarify whether the policy change applies to previous-generation products.

South Korea's government may have permanently lost 858TB of information after a fire at a data center in Daejeon. From a report: As reported by DCD, a battery fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center, located in the city of Daejeon, on September 26, has caused havoc for government services in Korea. Work to restore the data center is ongoing, but officials fear data stored on the government's G-Drive may be gone for good. G-Drive, which stands for Government Drive and is not a Google product, was used by government staff to keep documents and other files. Each worker was allocated 30GB of space.

According to a report from The Chosun, the drive was one of 96 systems completely destroyed in the fire, and there is no backup. "The G-Drive couldn't have a backup system due to its large capacity," an unnamed official told The Chosun. "The remaining 95 systems have backup data in online or offline forms." While some departmers do not rely on G-Drive, those that do have been badly impacted in the aftermath of the fire. A source from the Ministry of Personnel Management said: "Employees stored all work materials on the G-Drive and used them as needed, but operations are now practically at a standstill."

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Renewable energy overtook coal as the world's leading source of electricity in the first half of this year -- a historic first, according to new data from the global energy think tank Ember. Electricity demand is growing around the world but the growth in solar and wind was so strong it met 100% of the extra electricity demand, even helping drive a slight decline in coal and gas use. However, Ember says the headlines mask a mixed global picture.

Developing countries, especially China, led the clean energy charge but richer nations including the US and EU relied more than before on planet-warming fossil fuels for electricity generation. This divide is likely to get more pronounced, according to a separate report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). It predicts renewables will grow much less strongly than forecast in the US as a result of the policies of President Donald Trump's administration. Coal, a major contributor to global warming, was still the world's largest individual source of energy generation in 2024, a position it has held for more than 50 years, according to the IEA.

Android Authority notes the start of a new trend we're seeing in some new smartphones: devices shipping without USB cables. It follows the earlier industry shift away from bundled charging bricks, which Apple started back in 2020 with the launch of the iPhone 12. While manufacturers cite environmental benefits, "the main driver behind these decisions for companies like Apple and Sony is, of course, profit," writes Android Authority's Taylor Kerns. From the report: Now, it looks like we may be in for a similar shift with bundled USB cables. As shared on the Linus Tech Tips subreddit, user Brick_Fish's recently purchased Sony Xperia 10 VII came without a charger or a charging cable. In a photo included with the post, you can see iconography on the back of the phone's box that spells out these omissions. Sony's not really a major player in the smartphone space these days, but this seems like the type of trend we should expect to see gain traction over the next couple of years. [...]

Apple actually beat Sony to the punch here, in a way. The company's latest earbuds, the AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro 3, both ditched bundled USB cables, as well. Still, Sony's the first manufacturer I've heard of to omit charging cables with its smartphones.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Micro Center and iFixit have announced a partnership that combines the DIY repair giant's guides, parts, and toolkits with Micro Center's nationwide chain of computer and electronics stores. Customers browsing iFixit online can now find local Micro Center locations through a built-in locator and even stop in for a free consultation with a certified technician. Inside stores, shoppers will see iFixit toolkits and parts on shelves, while Micro Center's in-house technicians begin using iFixit's gear for professional repairs.

India's electricity grid is struggling to accommodate the nation's economic expansion and isn't adequately equipped to handle future data center demand. Goldman Sachs estimates that power required from utilities needs roughly 7.2% annual growth between fiscal years 2025 and 2035, up from a prior 5.6%.

India's data center base sits in the low single gigawatts today, but Bernstein forecasts reach 5 to 6 gigawatts by 2030. AI servers draw five to seven times the power of a legacy server rack, according to HSBC. Solar farms can be built in 12 to 24 months, but they flood the grid when daytime demand is comparatively low and then fade as households and commercial loads climb after 5 PM. On Goldman's full-year models, the system runs a 1 to 4% energy deficit by fiscal years 2034 through 2035.

Assessments suggest India may need roughly 140 gigawatts of additional coal capacity by fiscal year 2035 versus 2023 levels. The government's current target is roughly 87 gigawatts by fiscal year 2032. Coal plants can run around the clock and can ramp up production during the evening hours to meet surging demand. Some of this coal is bridge capacity to stabilize a faster greening grid, but the scale required exceeds what policymakers have publicly acknowledged or what most analysts expected even two years ago.

Bloomberg reports (paywalled) that Apple's hardware chief John Ternus is the frontrunner to replace Tim Cook as CEO, as Cook nears retirement and prepares to transition into a board chairman role. The Economic Times reports: Cook is turning 65 next month. Chief operating officer John Williams -- once heir apparent -- has handed over the reins of day-to-day operations to Sabih Khan and is on his way out. Even as Cook steps down as CEO, he will stay involved in some capacity, likely as board chairman. [...]

While Khan and Apple's retail chief Deirdre O'Brien can run daily operations, Ternus remains the leading contender for the corner office after Cook, Gurman said. Firstly, he is 50 years old -- the same as Cook when he became CEO -- giving him over a decade to hold the office, he noted. Secondly, Apple needs a technologist instead of a sales person at the helm, considering the company's ambitions, Gurman wrote in the newsletter. While the Cupertino tech giant has managed to expand its homegrown line of chipsets, and the recently launched iPhone 17 lineup is drawing in customers, the company has struggled to find success in categories such as mixed reality, generative artificial intelligence (AI), smart homes and autonomous driving.

Ternus was in the spotlight during Apple's annual hardware event in September, which saw the launch of the iPhone 17 Air, the first major design overhaul for the smartphone family in a long time. Over the years, he has gained more responsibilities under Cook, taking calls on product roadmaps, features and strategies, overseeing matters beyond the traditional scope of a hardware engineering chief, Gurman said.

Porsche's wireless charging system will not be available on the Macan Electric and Taycan because the inductive charging plate cannot physically fit between the front suspension on those models. Dr. Maximilian Muller, Porsche's high voltage engineering lead, told The Drive during a visit to the company's Leipzig facility that the Cayenne Electric's larger dimensions create the necessary space for the charging hardware beneath the front motor. The Cayenne Electric is wider than both the Taycan and Macan Electric. The larger vehicle forced Porsche to design different suspension geometry even though it shares the PPE platform with the Macan Electric. The changes create additional packaging constraints that prevent retrofitting the wireless charging system into existing electric models.

"A group of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have developed a way to use the sensors in high-quality optical mice to capture subtle vibrations and convert them into audible data," reports Tom's Hardware: [T]he high polling rate and sensitivity of high-performance optical mice pick up acoustic vibrations from the surface where they sit. By running the raw data through signal processing and machine learning techniques, the team could hear what the user was saying through their desk. Mouse sensors with a 20,000 DPI or higher are vulnerable to this attack. And with the best gaming mice becoming more affordable annually, even relatively affordable peripherals are at risk....

[T]his compromise does not necessarily mean a complicated virus installed through a backdoor — it can be as simple as an infected FOSS that requires high-frequency mouse data, like creative apps or video games. This means it's not unusual for the software to gather this data. From there, the collected raw data can be extracted from the target computer and processed off-site. "With only a vulnerable mouse, and a victim's computer running compromised or even benign software (in the case of a web-based attack surface), we show that it is possible to collect mouse packet data and extract audio waveforms," the researchers state.
The researchers created a video with raw audio samples from various stages in their pipeline on an accompanying web site where they calculate that "the majority of human speech" falls in a frequency range detectable by their pipeline. While the collected signal "is low-quality and suffers from non-uniform sampling, a non-linear frequency response, and extreme quantization," the researchers augment it with "successive signal processing and machine learning techniques to overcome these challenges and achieve intelligible reconstruction of user speech."

They've titled their paper Invisible Ears at Your Fingertips: Acoustic Eavesdropping via Mouse Sensors. The paper's conclusion? "The increasing precision of optical mouse sensors has enhanced user interface performance but also made them vulnerable to side-channel attacks exploiting their sensitivity."

Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the article.

"Microsoft buys a lot of GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD," writes the Register. "But moving forward, Redmond's leaders want to shift the majority of its AI workloads from GPUs to its own homegrown accelerators..." Driving the transition is a focus on performance per dollar, which for a hyperscale cloud provider is arguably the only metric that really matters. Speaking during a fireside chat moderated by CNBC on Wednesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said that up to this point, Nvidia has offered the best price-performance, but he's willing to entertain anything in order to meet demand.

Going forward, Scott suggested Microsoft hopes to use its homegrown chips for the majority of its datacenter workloads. When asked, "Is the longer term idea to have mainly Microsoft silicon in the data center?" Scott responded, "Yeah, absolutely...

Microsoft is reportedly in the process of bringing a second-generation Maia accelerator to market next year that will no doubt offer more competitive compute, memory, and interconnect performance... It should be noted that AI accelerators aren't the only custom chips Microsoft has been working on. Redmond also has its own CPU called Cobalt and a whole host of platform security silicon designed to accelerate cryptography and safeguard key exchanges across its vast datacenter domains.

The food delivery robots that arrived in Atlanta in June "are not our friends," argues a headline at CNN.

The four-wheeled Serve Robotics machines "get confused at crosswalks. They move with the speed and caution of a first-time driver, stilted and shy, until they suddenly speed up without warning. Their four wheels look like they were made for off-roading, but they still get stuck in the cracks of craggy sidewalks. Most times I see the bots, they aren't moving at all... " Cyclists swerve to avoid them like any other obstacle in the road. Patrons of Shake Shack (a national partner of Serve) weave around the mess of robots parked in front of the restaurant to make their way inside and place orders on iPads... The dawn of everyday, "friendly" robots may be here, but they haven't proven themselves useful — or trustworthy — yet. "People think they are your friends, but they're actually cameras and microphones of corporations," said Joanna Bryson, a longtime AI scholar and professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School in Berlin. "You're right to be nervous..."

When robots show up in a city, it's often not because the residents of said city actively wanted them there or had a say in their arrival said Edward Ongweso Jr. [a researcher at the Security in Context initiative, a tech journalist and self-proclaimed "decelerationist" urging a slower rollout for Silicon Valley tech pioneers and civic leaders embracing untested and unregulated technology]... "They're being rolled out without any sort of input from people, and as a result, in ways that are annoying and inconvenient," Ongweso Jr. said. "I suspect that people would feel a lot differently if they had a choice ... 'what kind of robots are we interested in rolling out in our homes, in our workplaces, on our college campuses or in our communities?'"

Delivery robots aren't unique to Atlanta. AI-driven companies including Avride and Coco Robotics have sent fleets of delivery robots to big cities like Chicago, Dallas and Jersey City, as well as sleepy college towns... "They're popping up everywhere," Ongweso Jr. continued, "because there's sort of a realization that you have to convince people to view them as inevitable. The way to do that is to just push it into as many places as possible, and have these spectacle demonstrations, get some friendly coverage, try to figure out the ways in which you're selling this as the only alternative.... If you humanize it, you're more willing to entertain it and rationalize it being in your area — 'That's just Jeffrey,' or whatever they name it — instead of seeing it for what it is, which is a bunch of investors privately encroaching on a community or workplace," Ongweso Jr. said. "It's not the future. It's a business model."
Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani told CNN their goal in Atlanta was reducing traffic — and that the robots' average delivery distance there was under a mile, taking about 18 minutes per delivery.

Serve Robotics has also launched their robots in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta, according to the site Robotics 247, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Uber Eats. (Although after the robots launched in Los Angeles, a man in a mobility scooter complained the slow-moving robot swerved in front of him.) And "residents of other cities have had to rescue them when they've been felled by weather," reports CNN.

CNN also spoke to Dylan Losey, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech who studies human-robot interaction, who notes that the robots' AI algorithms are "completely unregulated... We don't know if a third party has checked the hardware and software and deemed the system 'safe' — in part because what it means for these systems to be 'safe' is not fully understood or standardized." (CNN's reporter adds that "the last time I got close to a bot, to peer down at a flier someone left on top of it, it revved at me loudly. Perhaps they can sense a hater.")

But Serve's CEO says there's one crucial way robot delivery will be cheaper than humans. "You don't have to tip the robots."

The blackout that left Spain without power last April was the most severe incident to hit European networks in two decades and the first of its kind, according to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity. Damian Cortinas, the organization's chairman, said the April 28 outage was Europe's first blackout linked to cascading voltages. More than 50 million people lost electricity for several hours.

A preliminary report published in July attributed the outage to a chain of power generation disconnections and abnormal voltage surges. The final assessment will be released in the first quarter of next year and presented to the European Commission and member states. A government probe in June found that grid operator Red Electrica failed to replace one of 10 planned thermal plants, reducing reserve capacity. Spain spent only $0.3 on its grid for every dollar invested in renewables between 2020 and 2024, the lowest ratio among European countries and well below the $0.7 average.

Snapchat will start charging users who exceed 5GB of saved Memories, with paid plans starting at $1.99/month for 100GB. "If your memories exceed this limit, you'll need to subscribe to one of its new Memories Storage plans," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The company told TechCrunch in an email that the introductory storage plan offers up to 100GB of storage for $1.99 per month. Snapchat+ users will get up to 250GB of storage as part of their $3.99 monthly subscription, while Snapchat Platinum users will get 5TB as part of their $15.99 monthly subscription. Snapchat explains that when it first launched Memories, it didn't expect it to grow to what it has today, as users have saved more than 1 trillion Memories on the platform.

Snapchat will provide 12 months of temporary Memories storage for any Memories that exceed the 5GB storage limit. The company notes that users can download Memories directly to their devices. If you're over the limit, but don't sign up for a plan, your oldest Snaps will be saved, while the most recent ones that are over the storage limit will be deleted. Snapchat says the change won't affect most users, as the vast majority have under 5GB of Memories. It will mainly impact those with "thousands of Snaps," the company notes. "It's never easy to transition from receiving a service for free to paying for it, but we hope the value we provide with Memories is worth the cost," Snapchat wrote in a blog post. "These changes will allow us to continue to invest in making Memories better for our entire community."

Ford's push for a four-day in-office workweek hit turbulence when someone hijacked meeting room screens to display an anti-RTO protest image targeting CEO Jim Farley. The company quickly removed it and is investigating. The Detroit Free Press reports: According to photos employees took of the image, which were posted on social media and sent to the Detroit Free Press, it contained an image of CEO Jim Farley along with a big red circle with a slash through it over his face and the words "(Expletive) RTO."

"We're aware of an inappropriate use of Ford's IT technology and we're investigating it," Dave Tovar, Ford spokesman, told the Detroit Free Press. Tovar said the image was up for "a short amount of time" and Ford was able to quickly remove it. He said the company is investigating whether the image appeared only in Dearborn offices or globally.

Farley mandated that employees return to the office four days a week earlier this year and it has been in place since Sept. 1, with no fallout such as people quitting over it, Tovar said. Therefore, Tovar said, "I wouldn't be able to speculate on it, as to why someone would do this."

"Your AMD chips may have Intel Inside soon," writes longtime Slashdot reader DesScorp. "Discussions are underway between the two companies to move an undisclosed amount of AMD's chip business to Intel foundries. (AMD currently does their production through TSMC.) The talks come hot on the heels of a flurry of other Intel investments." Tom's Hardware reports: In the past several weeks, Intel has seen a flurry of activity and investments. The United States announced a 9.9% ownership stake in Intel, while Softbank bought $2 billion worth of shares. Alongside Nvidia, Intel announced new x86 chips using Nvidia graphics technology, with the graphics giant also purchasing $5 billion in Intel shares. There have also been reports that Intel and Apple have been exploring ways to work together. The article notes that there is a trade/political dimension to an AMD-Intel deal as well: It makes sense for Intel's former rivals -- especially American companies -- to consider coming to the table. The White House is pushing for 50% of chips bound for America to be built domestically, and tariffs on chips aren't off the table. Additionally, doing business with Intel could make the US government, Intel's largest shareholder, happy, which can be good for business. AMD faced export restrictions on its GPUs earlier this year as the US attempted to throttle China's AI business.

Renewables generated 54% of the EU's net electricity in Q2 2025, with solar power emerging as the leading source at nearly 20% of the total mix. Electrek reports: According to new data from Eurostat, renewable energy sources generated 54% of the EU's net electricity in Q2 2025, up from 52.7% year-over-year. The growth came mainly from solar, which produced 122,317 gigawatt-hours (GWh) -- nearly 20% of the total electricity generation mix. June 2025 was a milestone month: Solar became the EU's single largest electricity source for the first time ever. It supplied 22% of all power that month, edging out nuclear (21.6%), wind (15.8%), hydro (14.1%), and natural gas (13.8%). [...]

In total, 15 EU countries saw their share of renewable generation rise year-over-year. Luxembourg (+13.5 percentage points) and Belgium (+9.1 pp) posted the most significant gains, driven largely by solar power growth. Across the EU, solar made up 36.8% of renewable generation, followed by wind at 29.5%, hydro at 26%, biomass at 7.3%, and geothermal at 0.4%.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: iFixit today disassembled the AirPods Pro 3, giving us a look at what's inside and how the AirPods Pro 3 have changed in comparison to the AirPods Pro 2. [...] To get a look at other components inside the AirPods Pro 3, iFixit essentially had to destroy them because Apple didn't design them to be repaired. Since the first version of the AirPods launched, they've included a battery that is sealed shut with glue, and that hasn't changed with the AirPods Pro 3. iFixit says battery replacements are so difficult that many repair shops won't even attempt to do it. The AirPods Pro Charging Case has the same glued-in battery.

There's no way to attempt a battery repair without causing blemishes on the plastic of the earbuds and the casing, because they have to be pried open. Heat needs to be used to melt the adhesive, and there's no easy way to disconnect the flex cable that's inside each earbud. With the need for specialized equipment and the inability to repair the earbuds and the case without causing damage, the AirPods Pro 3 earned a 0 out of 10 repairability score from iFixit.