TechCrunch reports: The world's only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned.

In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then again to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment. The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the first controlled fusion reaction to generate more energy than the it consumed. The 2022 shot generated 3.15 megajoules, a small bump over the 2.05 megajoules that the lasers delivered to the BB-sized fuel pellet.

None of the shots to date have been effective enough to feed electrons back into the grid, let alone to offset the energy required to power the entire facility — the facility wasn't designed to do that. The first net-positive shot, for example, required 300 megajoules to power the laser system alone. But they are continued proof that controlled nuclear fusion is more than hypothetical.

The only nuclear power plant still operating in Taiwan was shut down on Saturday, reports Japan's public media organization NHK: People in Taiwan have grown increasingly concerned about nuclear safety in recent years, especially after the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, northeastern Japan... Taiwan's energy authorities plan to focus more on thermoelectricity fueled by liquefied natural gas. They aim to source 20 percent of all electricity from renewables such as wind and solar power next year.
AFP notes that nuclear power once provided more than half of Taiwan's energy, with three plants operating six reactors across an island that's 394 km (245 mi) long and 144 km (89 mi) wide.

So the new move to close Taiwan's last reactor is "fuelling concerns over the self-ruled island's reliance on imported energy and vulnerability to a Chinese blockade," — though Taiwan's president insists the missing nucelar energy can be replace by new units in LNG and coal-fired plants: The island, which targets net-zero emissions by 2050, depends almost entirely on imported fossil fuel to power its homes, factories and critical semiconductor chip industry. President Lai Ching-te's Democratic Progressive Party has long vowed to phase out nuclear power, while the main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party says continued supply is needed for energy security... [The Ma'anshan Nuclear Power Plant] has operated for 40 years in a region popular with tourists and which is now dotted with wind turbines and solar panels. More renewable energy is planned at the site, where state-owned Taipower plans to build a solar power station capable of supplying an estimated 15,000 households annually. But while nuclear only accounted for 4.2 percent of Taiwan's power supply last year, some fear Ma'anshan's closure risks an energy crunch....

Most of Taiwan's power is fossil fuel-based, with liquefied natural gas (LNG) accounting for 42.4 percent and coal 39.3 percent last year. Renewable energy made up 11.6 percent, well short of the government's target of 20 percent by 2025. Solar has faced opposition from communities worried about panels occupying valuable land, while rules requiring locally made parts in wind turbines have slowed their deployment.

Taiwan's break-up with nuclear is at odds with global and regional trends. Even Japan aims for nuclear to account for 20-22 percent of its electricity by 2030, up from well under 10 percent now. And nuclear power became South Korea's largest source of electricity in 2024, accounting for 31.7 percent of the country's total power generation, and reaching its highest level in 18 years, according to government data.... And Lai acknowledged recently he would not rule out a return to nuclear one day. "Whether or not we will use nuclear power in the future depends on three foundations which include nuclear safety, a solution to nuclear waste, and successful social dialogue," he said.
DW notes there's over 100,000 barrels of nuclear waste on Taiwan's easternmost island "despite multiple attempts to remove them... At one point, Taiwan signed a deal with North Korea so they could send barrels of nuclear waste to store there, but it did not work out due to a lack of storage facilities in the North and strong opposition from South Korea...

"Many countries across the world have similar problems and are scrambling to identify sites for a permanent underground repository for nuclear fuel. Finland has become the world's first nation to build one."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CRN: CPU-tracking firm Mercury Research reported on Thursday that Intel's x86 CPU market share grew 0.3 points sequentially to 75.6 percent against AMD's 24.4 percent in the first quarter. However, AMD managed to increase its market share by 3.6 points year over year. These figures only captured the server, laptop and desktop CPU segments. When including IoT and semicustom products, AMD grew its x86 market share sequentially by 1.5 points and year over year by 0.9 points to 27.1 percent against Intel's 72.9 percent... AMD managed to gain ground on Intel in the desktop and server segments sequentially and year over year. But it was in the laptop segment where Intel eked out a sequential share gain, even though rival AMD ended up finishing the first quarter with a higher share of shipments than what it had a year ago...

While AMD mostly came out on top in the first quarter, [Mercury Research President Dean] McCarron said ARM's estimated CPU share against x86 products crossed into the double digits for the first time, growing 2.3 points sequentially to 11.9 percent. This was mainly due to a "surge" of Nvidia's Grace CPUs for servers and a large increase of Arm CPU shipments for Chromebooks.
Meanwhile, PC Gamer reports that ARM's share of the PC processor market "grew to 13.6% in the first quarter of 2025 from 10.8% in the fourth quarter of 2024." And they note the still-only-rumors that an Arm-based chip from AMD will be available as soon next year. [I]f one of the two big players in x86 does release a mainstream Arm chip for the PC, that will very significant. If it comes at about the same time as Nvidia's rumoured Arm chip for the PC, well, momentum really will be building and questioning x86's dominance will be wholly justified.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, AWS CEO Matt Garman said the UK must expand nuclear energy to meet the soaring electricity demands of AI-driven data centers. From the report: Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is part of the retail giant Amazon, plans to spend 8 billion pounds on new data centers in the UK over the next four years. Matt Garman, chief executive of AWS, told the BBC nuclear is a "great solution" to data centres' energy needs as "an excellent source of zero carbon, 24/7 power." AWS is the single largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world and has funded more than 40 renewable solar and wind farm projects in the UK.

The UK's 500 data centres currently consume 2.5% of all electricity in the UK, while Ireland's 80 hoover up 21% of the country's total power, with those numbers projected to hit 6% and 30% respectively by 2030. The body that runs the UK's power grid estimates that by 2050 data centers alone will use nearly as much energy as all industrial users consume today.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Matt Garman said that future energy needs were central to AWS planning process. "It's something we plan many years out," he said. "We invest ahead. I think the world is going to have to build new technologies. I believe nuclear is a big part of that particularly as we look 10 years out."

A new set of 27 Linux kernel patches introduces a "Swap Tables" mechanism aimed at enhancing virtual memory management. As Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports, "the hope is for lower memory use, higher performance, dynamic swap allocation and growth, greater extensibility, and other improvements over the existing swap code within the Linux kernel." From the report: Engineer Kairui Song with Tencent posted the Swap Table patch series today for implementing the design ideas discussed in recent months by kernel developers. The results are very exciting so let's get straight to it: "With this series, swap subsystem will have a ~20-30% performance gain from basic sequential swap to heavy workloads, for both 4K and mTHP folios. The idle memory usage is already much lower, the average memory consumption is still the same or will also be even lower (with further works). And this enables many more future optimizations, with better defined swap operations." "The patches also clean-up and address various historical issues with the SWAP subsystem," notes Larabel.

Context: In Linux, swap space acts as an overflow for RAM, storing inactive memory pages on disk to free up RAM for active processes. Traditional swap mechanisms are limited in flexibility and performance. The proposed "Swap Tables" aim to address these issues by allowing more efficient and dynamic management of swap space, potentially leading to better system responsiveness and resource utilization.

Microsoft has stopped production of the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and will mark it as end-of-life in June, with no successor currently planned. Tom's Hardware reports: The Surface Laptop Studio 2 is being put out to pasture quietly, much like other devices that the company has sunset. The Surface Studio, a desktop PC that folded down into a creative studio for drawing, was formally discontinued in December without a successor. Microsoft's audio products, the Surface Headphones 2 and Surface Earbuds, have also quietly disappeared.

The Surface Laptop Studio's discontinuance comes at a hazy time for the Surface brand. On the one hand, two new devices -- the Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch -- were just announced and are set to release next week. On the other hand, the lineup lost its champion, former chief Panos Panay, who left Microsoft for Amazon in 2023, reportedly over budget issues and product cancellations. Panay was succeeded by Pavan Davuluri.

Since Panay's departure, the lineup has been cut down to just the Surface Laptop, Surface Pro, and the Surface Go 4, the latter of which is only sold to business customers at the moment. Without the Surface Laptop Studio, Microsoft has removed systems with discrete GPUs from its hardware lineup, potentially alienating creatives and gamers. Prior to the Surface Laptop Studio, Microsoft's powerhouse system was the Surface Book, which combined a tablet with a base featuring a discrete GPU.

General Motors is partnering with LG to develop lithium manganese-rich (LMR) batteries, which are safer, denser, and cheaper than current EV battery tech. The automaker aims to begin U.S. production by 2028 and become the first to deploy LMR cells in electric vehicles. Ford also announced it would start adopting LMR batteries for its EVs, but not until 2030. The Verge reports: GM's current crop of electric Chevys and Cadillacs use high-nickel batteries, which supply enough energy for around 300-320 miles of range. The new LMR batteries are denser, with greater space efficiency due to their prismatic shape, enabling up to 400 miles of range, GM says. Prismatic cells are packed flat in rigid cases and are generally thought to be less complex to manufacture than cylindrical cells. Less complexity and cheaper materials will hopefully lead to lower-cost EVs, which has been a significant challenge for the auto industry's shift to electric vehicles. "The EV growth rate is really dependent on how quickly we can bring the costs down over time," says GM's VP for batteries Kurt Kelty. "And this is the biggest lever we have. Batteries make up roughly 30 to 40 percent of the cost of vehicles. And if you can drop that down significantly like we're doing here, then it ends up being a lower cost to the consumer."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A student's robot has beaten the world record for solving a four-by-four Rubik's cube -- by 33 seconds. Matthew Pidden, a 22-year-old University of Bristol student, built and trained the "Revenger" over 15 weeks for his computer science bachelor's degree. The robot solved the cube in 45.305 seconds, obliterating the world record of 1 minute 18 seconds. However, the human record for solving the cube is 15.71 seconds.

Mr Pidden's robot uses dual webcams to scan the cube, a custom mechanism to manipulate the faces, and a fully self-built solving algorithm to generate efficient solutions. The student now plans to study for a master's degree in robotics at Imperial College London.

Philips has launched a new initiative called "Philips Fixables," offering free, officially drafted 3D-printable replacement parts to encourage self-repair and sustainability. The program is initially available in the Czech Republic but aims to expand over time. Tom's Hardware reports: This is a new idea, so only one component is available right now for download. The piece happens to be a 3mm comb for one of their shavers, but Philips assures there will be more components made available for more of their devices over time. This isn't the release of a grand library of parts by any means, but it does showcase a shift in supporting communities in search of businesses that support repairable hardware. [...]

The official Philips Fixables web page has a link for anyone in the general public to submit a request to add a specific component. Philips will notify customers with a download link if the component they suggested is able to be shared to Philips Fixables. It's not clear what sort of turnaround time to expect for these requests and whether there are limitations on what components will be made available.

According to Philips, consumers must adhere to the recommended print settings for their components to get the best results. This is the only way to ensure the replacement part is sturdy enough to stand in for a repair. Compromising on fill space for time could make or break your user experience, for example, but if done correctly, a replacement 3D print can be a useful long term solution. You can check out the files over at Printables.com.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Countries are meeting at the United Nations on Monday to revive efforts to regulate the kinds of AI-controlled autonomous weapons increasingly used in modern warfare, as experts warn time is running out to put guardrails on new lethal technology. Autonomous and artificial intelligence-assisted weapons systems are already playing a greater role in conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza. And rising defence spending worldwide promises to provide a further boost for burgeoning AI-assisted military technology.

Progress towards establishing global rules governing their development and use, however, has not kept pace. And internationally binding standards remain virtually non-existent. Since 2014, countries that are part of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) have been meeting in Geneva to discuss a potential ban fully autonomous systems that operate without meaningful human control and regulate others. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has set a 2026 deadline for states to establish clear rules on AI weapon use. But human rights groups warn that consensus among governments is lacking. Alexander Kmentt, head of arms control at Austria's foreign ministry, said that must quickly change.

"Time is really running out to put in some guardrails so that the nightmare scenarios that some of the most noted experts are warning of don't come to pass," he told Reuters. Monday's gathering of the U.N. General Assembly in New York will be the body's first meeting dedicated to autonomous weapons. Though not legally binding, diplomatic officials want the consultations to ramp up pressure on military powers that are resisting regulation due to concerns the rules could dull the technology's battlefield advantages. Campaign groups hope the meeting, which will also address critical issues not covered by the CCW, including ethical and human rights concerns and the use of autonomous weapons by non-state actors, will push states to agree on a legal instrument. They view it as a crucial litmus test on whether countries are able to bridge divisions ahead of the next round of CCW talks in September. "This issue needs clarification through a legally binding treaty. The technology is moving so fast," said Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty International's Researcher on Military, Security and Policing. "The idea that you wouldn't want to rule out the delegation of life or death decisions ... to a machine seems extraordinary."

In 2023, 164 states signed a 2023 U.N. General Assembly resolution calling for the international community to urgently address the risks posed by autonomous weapons.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A new report claims that Nvidia has recently raised the official prices of nearly all of its products to combat the impact of tariffs and surging manufacturing costs on its business, with gaming graphics cards receiving a 5 to 10% hike while AI GPUs see up to a 15% increase.

As reported by Digitimes Taiwan, Nvidia is facing "multiple crises," including a $5.5 billion hit to its quarterly earnings over export restrictions on AI chips, including a ban on sales of its H20 chips to China.

Digitimes reports that CEO Jensen Huang has been "shuttling back and forth" between the US and China to minimize the impact of tariffs, and that "in order to maintain stable profitability," Nvidia has reportedly recently raised official prices for almost all its products, allowing its partners to increase prices accordingly.

Western Digital has made a strategic investment in German startup Cerabyte, a company developing nearly indestructible ceramic-based data storage technology. The partnership aims to accelerate commercialization of Cerabyte's ceramic-on-glass material, which the company claims can preserve data for 5,000 years.

Cerabyte recently demonstrated its technology's resilience by boiling storage devices in salt water and subjecting them to oven-level heat. The company states its ceramic storage withstands fire, moisture, UV light, radiation, corrosion, and EMP bursts. Beyond durability, Cerabyte aims to enable massive capacity increases as the industry moves toward what it calls the "Yottabyte era," while targeting storage costs below $1 per TB by 2030.

Fusion energy "took one step closer to reality," announced the University of Texas at Austin, as their researchers joined with a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Type One Energy Group and "solved a longstanding problem in the field" — how to contain high-energy particles inside fusion reactors. When high-energy alpha particles leak from a reactor, that prevents the plasma from getting hot and dense enough to sustain the fusion reaction. To prevent them from leaking, engineers design elaborate magnetic confinement systems, but there are often holes in the magnetic field, and a tremendous amount of computational time is required to predict their locations and eliminate them. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters, the research team describes having discovered a shortcut that can help engineers design leak-proof magnetic confinement systems 10 times as fast as the gold standard method, without sacrificing accuracy... "What's most exciting is that we're solving something that's been an open problem for almost 70 years," said Josh Burby, assistant professor of physics at UT and first author of the paper. "It's a paradigm shift in how we design these reactors...."

This new method also can help with a similar but different problem in another popular magnetic fusion reactor design called a tokamak. In that design, there's a problem with runaway electrons — high-energy electrons that can punch a hole in the surrounding walls. This new method can help identify holes in the magnetic field where these electrons might leak.

Huawei has launched its first laptop running HarmonyOS instead of Windows, complete with AI features and support for over 2,000 mostly China-focused apps. The product is largely a result of U.S. sanctions that prevented U.S.-based companies like Google and Microsoft from doing business with Huawei, forcing the company to develop its own in-house solution. Liliputing reports: Early version of HarmonyOS were basically skinned version of Android, but over time Huawei has moved the two operating systems further apart and it now includes Huawei's own kernel, user interface, and other features. The version designed for laptops features a desktop-style operating system with a taskbar and dock on the bottom of the screen and support for multitasking by running multiple applications in movable, resizable windows.

Since this is 2025, of course Huawei's demos also heavily emphasize AI features: the company showed how Celia, its AI assistant, can summarize documents, help prepare presentation slides, and more. While the operating system won't support the millions of Windows applications that could run on older Huawei laptops, the company says that at launch it will support more than 2,000 applications including WPS Office (an alternative to Microsoft Office that's developed in China), and a range of Chinese social media applications.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple has "made progress" on a chip for a product that could rival the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The company is also reportedly working on glasses that use augmented reality. The Verge reports: The chip is apparently based on the chips Apple uses for the Apple Watch, though the company has removed parts and is being designed in such a way that it can handle the "multiple cameras" that the smart glasses might have, Bloomberg reports. Apple wants mass production of the chip to start by the end of 2026 or sometime in 2027, so the glasses themselves could come out within that timeframe. [...] Apple is developing chips for camera-equipped Apple Watch and Airpods as well, and the goal is for those chips to be ready "by around 2027," Bloomberg says. The company is also developing new M-series chips and dedicated AI server chips, per the report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: RIP, 486 processor. You've had a long run since Intel released you back in 1989. While Microsoft stopped supporting you with the release of Windows XP in 2001, Linux kept you alive and well for another 20+ years. But all good things must come to an end, and with the forthcoming release of the Linux 6.15 kernel, the 486 and the first Pentium processors will be sunsetted.

Why? Linus Torvalds wrote recently on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), "I really get the feeling that it's time to leave i486 support behind. There's zero real reason for anybody to waste one second of development effort on this kind of issue." Senior Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar put Torvalds' remark into context, writing, "In the x86 architecture, we have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very very few people are using with modern kernels. This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things." "This will be the first time Linux has dropped support for a major chip family since 2012, when Linux stopped supporting the 386 family," notes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "Moving forward, the minimum supported x86 CPU will now be the original Pentium (P5) or newer, requiring the presence of the Time Stamp Counter (TSC) and the CMPXCHG8B (CX8) instruction. These features are absent in the older 486 and early 586 processors, such as the IDT WinChip and AMD Elan families."

That said, you can continue running Linux on Pentium CPUs, but you'll have to "run museum kernels," as Torvalds pointed out in 2022 when he first floated the idea of ending support for 486.

Google has partnered with Elementl Power to develop at least 600 MW of nuclear capacity at each of three planned sites. It's unknown where the three proposed sites will be located or how much Google is investing. World Nuclear News reports: The two companies will work "with utility and regulated power partners to identify and advance new projects" and Elementl "will continue the evaluation of potential technology, engineering, procurement and construction, and other project partners, while prioritising specific sites for accelerated development."

Elementl Power, founded in 2022, describes itself as a technology-agnostic advanced nuclear project developer which aims to provide "turn-key development, financing and ownership solutions for customers that want access to clean baseload power but may not want to own or operate nuclear power assets." It says its mission is to "to deploy over 10 gigawatts of next-generation nuclear power in the US by 2035."

It is not Google's first nuclear power deal -- in October 2024 the company signed an agreement with Kairos Power to purchase power from its fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature small modular reactors, with a fleet of up to 500 MW of capacity by 2035. The aim of the power purchase agreement was to facilitate Kairos Power to develop, construct, and operate plants and sell energy, ancillary services, and environmental attributes to Google. At the time of that announcement Google said that it would help it achieve net-zero emissions across all of its operations and value chain by 2030. Further reading: Google tries to greenwash massive AI energy consumption with another vague nuclear deal (The Register)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: There's a new warehouse robot at Amazon that has a sense of touch, allowing it to handle a job previously only done by humans. Amazon unveiled the robot, called Vulcan, Wednesday at an event in Germany. CNBC got an exclusive first look at Vulcan in April, as it stowed items into tall, yellow bins at a warehouse in Spokane, Washington. An up-close look at the "hand" of the robot reveals how it can feel the items it touches using an AI-powered sensor to determine the precise pressure and torque each object needs. This innovative gripper helps give Vulcan the ability to manipulate 75% of the 1 million unique items in inventory at the Spokane warehouse. Amazon has used other robotic arms inside its warehouses since 2021, but those rely on cameras for detection and suction for grasp, limiting what types of objects they can handle.

Vulcan can also operate 20 hours a day, according to Aaron Parness, who heads up the Amazon Robotics team that developed the machine. Still, Parness told CNBC that instead of replacing people in its warehouses, Vulcan will create new, higher skilled jobs that involve maintaining, operating, installing and building the robots. When asked if Amazon will fully automate warehouses in the future, Parness said, "not at all." "I don't believe in 100% automation," he said. "If we had to get Vulcan to do 100% of the stows and picks, it would never happen. You would wait your entire life. Amazon understands this." The goal is for Vulcan to handle 100% of the stowing that happens in the top rows of bins, which are difficult for people to reach, Parness said. [...] Amazon said Vulcan is operating at about the same speed as a human worker and can handle items up to 8 pounds. It operates behind a fence, sequestered from human workers to reduce the risk of accidents.

Data storage firm Seagate is working to develop a 100-terabyte hard drive by 2030, touting blistering demand from data centers for the 70-year-old technology in the artificial intelligence boom. From a report: BS Teh, Seagate's chief commercial officer, told CNBC that the company is aiming to launch such a drive -- which would have about three times the capacity of the firm's top-of-the-line hard drives -- by 2030. The largest hard disk drive Seagate currently produces is the 36-terabyte Exos M model, which it launched in January.

"You may be thinking, 'Who would need it?'" Teh said, referring to the idea of a 100-terabyte hard drive. "Well, plenty." He added: "I think there's definitely strong demand. This is a key enabler for the industry to be able to deliver the storage capacity that the market needs, because there's no other technology that's able to produce this capacity of storage technology to meet the growth that the market needs."

According to the Washington Post (paywalled), the Trump administration plans to eliminate the Energy Star program -- a long-standing EPA initiative that has saved Americans over $500 billion in energy costs since 1992. "The organization states that the average American saves about $450 per year on energy bills by choosing appliances that have been Energy Star-certified," adds Engadget. From the report: The EPA hasn't said when this would go into effect and when consumers would stop seeing Energy Star certifications on home appliances. It's technically illegal for a presidential administration to end this program without Congress, but the same goes for many of Trump's pronouncements and executive orders. "Eliminating the Energy Star program would directly contradict this administration's promise to reduce household energy costs," Paula Glover, president of the nonprofit coalition Alliance to Save Energy, told CNN. "For just $32 million a year, Energy Star helps American families save over $40 billion in annual energy costs. That's a return of $350 for every federal dollar invested."