An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When should you be concerned about a NAS hard drive failing? Multiple factors are at play, so many might turn to various SMART (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) data. When it comes to how long the drive has been active, there are backup companies like Backblaze using hard drives that are nearly 8 years old. That may be why some customers have been panicked, confused, and/or angered to see their Western Digital NAS hard drive automatically given a warning label in Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) after they were powered on for three years. With no other factors considered for these automatic flags, Western Digital is accused of age-shaming drives to push people to buy new HDDs prematurely. The practice's revelation is the last straw for some users. Western Digital already had a steep climb to win back NAS customers' trust after shipping NAS drives with SMR (shingled magnetic recording) instead of CMR (conventional magnetic recording). Now, some are saying they won't use or recommend the company's hard drives anymore.

As users have reported online, including on Synology-focused and Synology's own forums, as well as on Reddit and YouTube, Western Digital drives using Western Device Digital Analytics (WDDA) are getting a "warning" stamp in Synology DSM once their power-on hours count hits the three-year mark. WDDA is similar to SMART monitoring and rival offerings, like Seagate's IronWolf, and is supposed to provide analytics and actionable items. The recommended action says: "The drive has accumulated a large number of power on hours [throughout] the entire life of the drive. Please consider to replace the drive soon." There seem to be no discernible problems with the hard drives otherwise.

Synology confirmed this to Ars Technica and noted that the labels come from Western Digital, not Synology. A spokesperson said the "WDDA monitoring and testing subsystem is developed by Western Digital, including the warning after they reach a certain number of power-on-hours." The practice has caused some, like YouTuber SpaceRex, to stop recommending Western Digital drives for the foreseeable future. In May, the YouTuber and tech consultant described his outrage, saying three years is "absolutely nothing" for a NAS drive and lamenting the flags having nothing to do with anything besides whether or not a drive has been in use for three years. A user on SynoForum discussed their "panic" upon seeing the label. And SpaceRex said one of its clients also panicked and quickly replaced the "warning" drives out of fear of losing business-critical data. "It is clearly predatory tactics by Western Digital trying to sell more hard drives," SpaceRex said in a June 10 video. "Users are also concerned that this could prevent people from noticing serious problems with their drive," adds Ars. "Further, you can't repair a pool with a drive marked with a warning label."

Some of the affected products with WDDA include the WD Red Pro, WD Red Plus, and WD Purple. A discussion post about how to disable WDDA via SSH can be found here.

20 miles west of Portland, engineers at an Intel lab are dunking expensive racks of servers "in a clear bath" made of motor oil-like petrochemicals, reports the Oregonian, where the servers "give off a greenish glow as they silently labor away on ordinary computing tasks." Intel's submerged computers operate just as they would on a dry server rack because they're not bathing in water, even though it looks just like it. They're soaking in a synthetic oil that doesn't conduct electricity. So the computers don't short out.

They thrive, in fact, because the fluid absorbs the heat from the hardworking computers much better than air does. It's the same reason a hot pan cools off a lot more quickly if you soak it in water than if you leave it on the stove.

As data centers grow increasingly powerful, the computers are generating so much heat that cooling them uses exorbitant amounts of energy. The cooling systems can use as much electricity as the computers themselves. So Intel and other big tech companies are designing liquid cooling systems that could use far less electricity, hoping to lower data centers' energy costs by as much as a third — and reducing the facilities' climate impact. It's a wholesale change in thinking for data centers, which already account for 2% of all the electricity consumption in the U.S... Skeptics caution that it may be difficult or prohibitively expensive to overhaul existing data centers to adapt to liquid cooling. Advocates of the shift, including Intel, say a transition is imperative to accommodate data centers' growing thirst for power. "It's really starting to come to a head as we're hitting the energy crisis and the need for climate action globally," said Jen Huffstetler, Intel's chief product sustainability officer...

Cooler computers can be packed more tightly together in data centers, since they don't need space for airflow. Computer manufacturers can pack chips together more tightly on the motherboard, enabling more computing power in the same space. And liquid cooling could significantly reduce data centers' environmental and economic costs. Conventional data centers' evaporative cooling systems require tremendous volumes of water and huge amounts of electricity...

Many other tech companies are backing immersion cooling, too. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are all helping fund immersion cooling research at Oregon State... [T]he timing may finally be right for data centers operators to make the shift away from air cooling to something far more efficient. Intel's Huffstetler said she expects to see liquid cooling become widespread in the next three to five years.
The article notes other challenges:

• liquid adds more weight than some buildings' upper floors can support
• Some metals degrade faster in liquid than they do in air.
• And the engineers had to modify the servers by removing their fans — "because they serve no purpose while immersed."

Next year Intel introduces a new transistor — RibbonFET — and a new way of powering it called "PowerVia."

This so-called "backside power" approach "aims to separate power and I/O wiring, shifting power lines to the back of the wafer," reports Tom's Hardware, which "eliminates any possible interference between the data and power wires and increases logic transistor density." IEEE Spectrum explains this approach "leaves more room for the data interconnects above the silicon," while "the power interconnects can be made larger and therefore less resistive."

And Intel has already done some successful powering tests using it on Intel's current transistors: The resulting cores saw more than a 6 percent frequency boost as well as more compact designs and 30 percent less power loss. Just as important, the tests proved that including backside power doesn't make the chips more costly, less reliable, or more difficult to test for defects. Intel is presenting the details of these tests in Tokyo next week at the IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits...

[C]ores can be made more compact, decreasing the length of interconnects between logic cells, which speeds things up. When the standard logic cells that make up the processor core are laid out on the chip, interconnect congestion keeps them from packing together perfectly, leaving loads of blank space between the cells. With less congestion among the data interconnects, the cells fit together more tightly, with some portions up to 95 percent filled... What's more, the lack of congestion allowed some of the smallest interconnects to spread out a bit, reducing parasitic capacitance that hinders performance...

With the process for PowerVia worked out, the only change Intel will have to make in order to complete its move from Intel 4 to the next node, called 20A, is to the transistor... Success would put Intel ahead of TSMC and Samsung, in offering both nanosheet transistors and backside power.

The international space station is equpped with four 39-foot blankets (11.8-meters), reports CBS News. The first one was delivered in December of 2000 — and now it's time for some changes: Two astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station Friday and installed the fifth of six roll-out solar array blankets — iROSAs — needed to offset age-related degradation and micrometeoroid damage to the lab's original solar wings.

Floating in the Quest airlock, veteran Stephen Bowen, making his ninth spacewalk, and crewmate Woody Hoburg, making his first, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 9:25 a.m. EDT, officially kicking off the 264th spacewalk devoted to ISS assembly and maintenance and the seventh so far this year. NASA is in the process of upgrading the ISS's solar power system by adding six iROSAs to the lab's eight existing U.S. arrays. The first four roll-out blankets were installed during spacewalks in 2021 and 2022. Bowen and Hoburg installed the fifth during Friday's spacewalk and plan to deploy the sixth during another excursion next Thursday.

The two new iROSAs were delivered to the space station earlier this week in the unpressurized trunk section of a SpaceX cargo Dragon. The lab's robot arm pulled them out Wednesday and mounted them on the right side of the station's power truss just inboard the starboard wings... As the station sailed 260 miles above the Great Lakes, the 63-foot-long solar array slowly unwound like a window shade to its full length. Well ahead of schedule by that point, the spacewalkers carried out a variety of get-ahead tasks to save time next week when they float back outside to install the second new iROSA.

They returned to the airlock and began re-pressurization procedures at 3:28 p.m., bringing the 6-hour three-minute spacewalk to a close. With nine spacewalks totaling 60 hours and 22 minutes under his belt, Bowen now ranks fifth on the list of the world's most experienced spacewalkers.
"Combined with the 95-kilowatt output of the original eight panels, the station's upgraded system will provide about 215,000 kilowatts of power."

Longtime Slashdot reader WindBourne writes: "A shroud of smoke has sent solar power generation in parts of the eastern US plummeting by more than 50% as wildfires rage in Canada," reports Bloomberg. "Solar farms powering New England were producing 56% less energy at times of peak demand compared with the week before, according to the region's grid operator. Electricity generated by solar across the territory serviced by PJM Interconnection LLC, which spans Illinois to North Carolina, was down about 25% from the previous week."

Not mentioned in the article is that the wind generator output has also dropped. ["Wind power also dropped to 5% of total generation so far this week versus a recent high of 12% during the windy week ended May 12," reports Reuters. "That forced power generators to boost the amount of electricity generated by gas to 45% this week, up from around 40% in recent weeks."]

If forest fires can cut PV output by 50%, what would happen in real disasters when a nation most needs their electricity -- especially as we convert from fossil fuels (stored energy) to electricity? This will hopefully have politicians thinking in terms of national security, as well as anthropogenic global warming, when it comes to western grids.

Logitech is merging its gaming headset maker, Astro, and microphone manufacturer, Blue Microphones, into its Logitech G brand. While the Astro brand will continue as a premium console audio product series under Logitech G, the Blue brand will be phased out. The Verge reports: You can already see the transition playing out on Logitech's website, which still sells Yeti and even Snowball microphones that merely come "with Blue VO!CE" but no longer links to a distinct Blue website or product page. Astrogaming.com, however, still exists.

It's not clear why Logitech is minimizing its influential brands Astro and Blue, which defined the high-end gaming headset category and the microphone-for-streamers category, respectively, but I wonder if Logitech simply decided it had to choose between Blue and Yeti -- and Yeti was the name that rang out. However, Logitech's simply pitching it as a synergy play: you'll be able to control all your formerly Blue, Astro, and Logitech Creator products in the Logitech G software suite when all's said and done. Logitech bought gaming headset maker Astro for $85 million in 2017 and purchased mic manufacturer Blue Microphones for $177 million one year later.

Required Snark writes: Acer is selling computers in Russia even though they claimed they would abide by the Taiwanese government's commitment to the international embargo on western technology. The sales are through their Swiss subsidiary Acer Sales International SA. This subterfuge means Acer's position is nominally true even while they are breaking the embargo. Neither Russian, Swiss or Taiwanese government officials would comment on the report. According to Reuters, "Taiwan-based computer manufacturer Acer supplied at least $70.4 million worth of computer hardware to Russia between April 8, 2022 and March 31, 2023."

The actions aren't illegal because the shipments originated outside Taiwan, circumventing Taipei's sanctions against Russia. "Nor did they involve items restricted at the time of export by Switzerland's sanctions regime, which mirrors that of the European Union," adds Reuters. It does, however, contradict the company's statement on April 8 last year when it said it would "suspend its business in Russia."

GM has confirmed that it will adopt Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) for its future electric vehicles, following in the footsteps of Ford. Electrek reports: This is likely the next step in a domino effect that should solidify NACS as the new charging standard for electric cars in North America. When Tesla announced last year that it opened up its proprietary charging connector to try to make it the industry standard in North America, we thought it might be too little too late, despite agreeing that Tesla's plug was a much superior design than the current CCS standard. However, we were proven wrong last month when Ford announced that it will integrate the NACS in its future electric vehicles.

GM CEO Mary Barra confirmed that General Motors will also adopt NACS with the help of Tesla in future electric vehicles. Barra made the announcement with Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Twitter. She said that the first vehicles with the plug will come in 2025 and like Ford, GM EV owners will all have access to Tesla's Supercharger network starting in 2024 with a CCS to NACS adapter. Like Ford, GM's Bara referenced the more efficient design of Tesla's connector and the "robustness" of Tesla's Supercharger network as reasons to adopt the standard. Barra said in a statement: "Our vision of the all-electric future means producing millions of world-class EVs across categories and price points, while creating an ecosystem that will accelerate mass EV adoption. This collaboration is a key part of our strategy and an important next step in quickly expanding access to fast chargers for our customers. Not only will it help make the transition to electric vehicles more seamless for our customers, but it could help move the industry toward a single North American charging standard."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dell Technologies' Australia subsidiary misled online shoppers into thinking that adding a monitor to their purchase would get them a discount on the display, even though doing so sometimes resulted in customers paying a higher price for the monitor than if they had bought it on its own. That's according to a declaration by the Australian Federal Court on Monday. The deceptive practices happened on Dell's Australian website, but they serve as a reminder to shoppers everywhere that a strikethrough line or sale stamp on an online retailer doesn't always mean you're getting a bargain. On June 5, the Federal Court said Dell Australia was guilty of making "false or misleading representations with respect to the price" of monitors that its website encouraged shoppers to add to their purchase. The purchases were made from August 2019 to the middle of December 2021.

The website would display the add-on price alongside a higher price that had a strikethrough line, suggesting that the monitor was typically sold at the price with the line going through it but that customers would get a discount if they added it to their cart at purchase. (The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, or ACCC, posted a screenshot example here.) However, the strikethrough prices weren't actually representative of what Dell was charging for the monitors for most of the time before the purported discount. In fact, the allegedly discounted price occasionally turned out to be a rip-off, as ACCC commission Liza Carver said in a statement today: "In some cases, consumers paid more for the add-on monitor advertised as 'discounted' than they would have paid if they had bought it as a stand-alone product, which is shocking."

The Australian Federal Court also found that Dell's Australian website used deceptive language, like "Includes x% off," "Total Savings" plus a dollar amount, "Discounted Price" and a dollar amount, and "Get the best price for popular accessories when purchased with this product." According to the ACCC, shoppers spent over $2 million Australian dollars ($1.33 million USD) on 5,300 add-on monitors during this time period. The Australian Federal Court ordered Dell Australia to give full or partial refunds to affected customers. The company must also hire an "independent compliance professional" and contact affected customers. The Australian Federal Court will take comment on further penalties Dell Australia should incur, which could include fines, at a future date. Dell told The Register: "As we acknowledged in November 2022 when the ACCC commenced these proceedings, due to an unrectified error on our part, our web page misrepresented the level of savings consumers could achieve by purchasing a monitor in conjunction with a desktop, laptop, or notebook."

Dell is looking into refunding customers, "plus interest," Dell's statement to The Register added, and the company is "taking steps to improve our pricing processes to ensure this sort of error does not happen again."

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have successfully demonstrated the capability of steering power in a microwave beam from a satellite to targets in space, as well as transmitting some of that power to a detector on Earth. Science Magazine reports: The Caltech mission, funded by the Donald Bren Foundation and Northrop Grumman Corporation, aimed to go a step further with lightweight, inexpensive, and flexible components. The microwave transmitter was an array of 32 flat antennas packed onto a surface slightly larger than a dinner plate. By varying the timing of signals sent to the different antennas, the researchers could steer the array's beam. They pointed it at a pair of microwave receivers about a forearm's distance away and switched the beam from one receiver to the other at will, lighting up an LED on each.

The transmitted power was small, just 200 milliwatts, less than that of a cellphone camera light. But the team was still able to steer the beam toward Earth and detect it with a receiver at Caltech. "It was a proof of concept," says Caltech electrical engineer Ali Hajimiri. "It indicates what an overall system can do."

The Caltech spacecraft still has two more planned experiments. One is now testing 32 different varieties of solar cell to see which best survives the rigors of space. The second is a folded piece of ultralight composite material that will unfurl into a sail-like structure 2 meters across. Although the sail will not hold any solar cells, it is meant to test the kind of thin, flexible, and large deployments required for a future power station.

Millions of storage devices are being shredded each year, even though they could be reused. "You don't need an engineering degree to understand that's a bad thing," says Jonmichael Hands. From a report: He is the secretary and treasurer of the Circular Drive Initiative (CDI), a partnership of technology companies promoting the secure reuse of storage hardware. He also works at Chia Network, which provides a blockchain technology. Chia Network could easily reuse storage devices that large data centres have decided they no longer need. In 2021, the company approached IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) firms, who dispose of old technology for businesses that no longer need it. The answer came back: "Sorry, we have to shred old drives."

"What do you mean, you destroy them?" says Mr Hands, relating the story. "Just erase the data, and then sell them! They said the customers wouldn't let them do that. One ITAD provider said they were shredding five million drives for a single customer." Storage devices are typically sold with a five-year warranty, and large data centres retire them when the warranty expires. Drives that store less sensitive data are spared, but the CDI estimates that 90% of hard drives are destroyed when they are removed. The reason? "The cloud service providers we spoke to said security, but what they actually meant was risk management," says Mr Hands. "They have a zero-risk policy. It can't be one in a million drives, one in 10 million drives, one in 100 million drives that leaks. It has to be zero."

At WWDC today, Apple announced a new Mac Pro powered by the M2 Ultra chip. 9to5Mac reports: The chassis design of the machine appears to be the same as the 2019 Intel Mac Pro. The Mac Pro features eight Thunderbolt ports and six PCI slots for modular expansion. The base model config Mac Pro starts at $6999. Mac Pro with M2 Ultra features a 24-core CPU, up to 76-core GPU and 192 GB RAM. It also features two HDMI ports, dual 10-gigabit Ethernet, and a 32-core Neural Engine for machine learning tasks. It also features the latest wireless connectivity with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. You'll be able to order the new Mac Pro today via Apple.com.

Apple has announced a new operating system for its Vision Pro headset. Called visionOS, the operating system has been designed from the ground up for spatial computing and will have its own App Store where people can download Vision Pro apps and compatible iPhone and iPad apps. The Verge reports: The operating system is focused on displaying digital elements on top of the real world. Apple's video showed new things like icons and windows floating over real-world spaces. The primary ways to use the headset are with your eyes, hands, and your voice. The company described how you can look at a search field and just start talking to input text, for example. Or you can pinch your fingers to select something or flick them up to scroll through a window. The Vision Pro can also display your eyes on the outside of the headset -- a feature Apple calls "EyeSight."

It seems Apple envisions this in part as a productivity device; in one demo, it showed a person looking at things like a Safari window, Messages, and Apple Music window all hovering over a table in the real world. Apple also showed a keyboard hovering in midair, too. And the Vision Pro can also connect to your Mac so you can blow up your Mac's screen within your headset. It will also be a powerful entertainment device, apparently. You can make the screen really big by pinching a corner of a window (Apple demoed this with a clip of Foundation). You can display the screen on other backgrounds, including a cinema-like space or in front of Mt. Hood (Apple's suggestion!), thanks to a feature Apple calls Environments. You'll also be able to watch 3D movies on the device. And Disney is working on content for the headset, which could be a major way for people to get on board with actually using it to watch shows and movies -- Disney Plus will be available on day one, Disney CEO Bob Iger said during the show.

Apple Vision Pro will play games, too, and support game controllers; Apple showed somebody using the device with a PS5 DualSense headset. Over 100 Apple Arcade titles will be available to play on "day one," Apple said during its keynote. The Vision Pro also has a 3D camera, so you can capture "spatial" photos and video and look at those in the headset. And panorama photos can stretch around your vision while you're wearing the device. FaceTime is getting some "spatial" improvements, too; as described in Apple's press release, "Users wearing Vision Pro during a FaceTime call are reflected as a Persona -- a digital representation of themselves created using Apple's most advanced machine learning techniques -- which reflects face and hand movements in real time." You can learn more about Apple's first spatial computer here. A dedicated page for the Vision Pro headset is also now available on Apple.com.

This week the Linux Foundation announced the publication of The Open Source Opportunity for Microgrids: Five Ways to Drive Innovation and Overcome Market Barriers for Energy Resilience. "The research informs readers about microgrids — groups of distributed energy resources designed to improve energy resiliency, with the ability to operate as part of a larger electrical grid, or separately as an island."

The report highlights the current state of the microgrid market and explores the potential for open source technology to accelerate the adoption of microgrids worldwide... The report concludes that microgrids are an essential tool to improve energy resilience and advance decarbonization, and that the market faces a range of challenges that the open source ecosystem is well positioned to address.
Among other things, the report "examines how participation in relevant open source programs and activities can help address gaps and challenges," according to the announcement, "and accelerate the learning, development, and governance of microgrid initiatives." One focus of the report is "enabling market innovation toward energy resilience at scale, supporting the Energy sector to adopt proven open source-enabled business models, security benefits, and cost reductions demonstrated in the IT and Telecom industries."

And according to the foundation's senior vice president of research and communications, the report also "describes the opportunities for open source to accelerate the proliferation of microgrids as a mechanism for clean energy production and consumption."

ARM has joined the Linux Foundation's Open Programmable Infrastructure project, "a community-driven initiative focused on creating a standards-based open ecosystem for next-generation architectures and frameworks" based on programmable processor technologies like DPUs (Data Processing Units) and IPUs (Infrastructure Processing Units).

From the Linux Foundation's announcement: Launched in June 2021 under the Linux Foundation, the project is focused on utilizing open software and standards, as well as frameworks and toolkits, to enable the rapid adoption of DPUs. Arm joins other premier members including Dell Technologies, F5, Intel, Keysight Technologies, Marvell, Nvidia, Red Hat, Tencent, and ZTE. These member companies work together to create an ecosystem of blueprints and standards to ensure that compliant DPUs work with any server.

DPUs are used today to accelerate networking, security, and storage tasks. In addition to performance benefits, DPUs help improve data center security by providing physical isolation for running infrastructure tasks. DPUs also help to reduce latency and improve performance for applications that require real-time data processing. As DPUs create a logical split between infrastructure compute and client applications, the manageability of workloads within different development and management teams is streamlined.

"Arm has been contributing to the OPI Project for a while now," said Kris Murphy, Chair of the OPI Project Governing Board and Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. "Now, as a premier member, we are excited that they're bringing their leadership to the Governing Board and expertise to the technical steering committee and working groups. Their participation will help to ensure that the DPU components are optimized for programmable infrastructure solutions."

"Across network, storage, and security applications, DPUs are already proving the power efficiency and capex benefits of specialized processing technology," said Marc Meunier, director of ecosystem development, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm and member of OPI Governing Board. "As a premier member of the OPI project, we look forward to contributing our expertise in heterogeneous computing and working with other leaders in the industry to create solution blueprints and standards that pave the way for successful deployments."

"The DPU market offers an opportunity for us to change how infrastructure services can be deployed and managed," Arpit Joshipura, General Manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT, the Linux Foundation. "With collaboration across software and hardware vendors representing silicon devices and the entire DPU software stack, the OPI Project is creating an open ecosystem for next generation data centers, private clouds, and edge deployments."

The Washington Post looks at a new study co-authored by Nels Johnson, senior practice adviser for renewable energy development at the Nature Conservancy nonprofit.

Its underlying point: the current way of building renewables will not work. "If we take the business-as-usual approach, land conflicts will probably prevent us from getting to these ambitious clean energy targets," said Jason Albritton, director of the Nature Conservancy's North American climate mitigation program and one of Johnson's co-authors... In its report, the Nature Conservancy describes two different futures in which the United States achieves net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In one future — call it "business as usual" — wind and solar farms are built haphazardly, with little consideration for land impacts. In the other future, developers use land more efficiently. Business as usual would require 266,410 square miles — an area around the size of Texas — to fit all the solar panels and wind turbines, plus batteries to store electricity when sunlight and wind are unavailable and long-distance transmission lines to bring power from rural areas to towns and cities.

The researchers used a statistical model to discover the suite of technologies that would minimize land impacts. A smarter strategy, they found, could slash that footprint by more than half, to 114,642 square miles — a little bigger than Arizona. That's still a lot of land, but it would reduce the opportunities for conflict, the researchers said. The model recommends building more solar and less wind, since photovoltaics produce more power with less land than turbines do... The study sees rooftop solar generating far less power than large solar farms. If one in three rooftops have solar panels by 2050 — a high-end assumption — rooftop solar would contribute 15 percent of U.S. solar power, according to the researchers. "It's an important part of the picture, but it will not ever be totally sufficient," Johnson said.

The researchers also found land savings by avoiding productive farmland and instead building on abandoned fields or rehabilitated mines, landfills and hazardous waste sites known as brownfields.

"If you live in San Jose, Dallas, or Vancouver, you may soon be sharing the sidewalk with an army of delivery robots," reports PC Magazine (citing a report from TechCrunch. Uber Eats is expanding its partnership with Serve Robotics to deploy up to 2,000 zero-emission bots: Currently covering Los Angeles and San Francisco, Serve Robotics has been working with more than 200 California restaurants to dish out meals via the Uber Eats platform... Serve's sidewalk robots run seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. They're capable of Level 4 autonomy, allowing them to operate routinely without human intervention, TechCrunch reports.

Uber is no stranger to driverless robots. Together with AI-powered partner Cartken, the firm recently expanded a food delivery pilot from Miami to Fairfax, Virginia, where bots now roam the sidewalks, dropping off meals and providing curbside pickup to locals.
Last week Uber also announced it was making robotaxis available via the Uber app in Phoenix.

TechCrunch argues this new expansion "validates Serve's goal to mass commercialize robotics for autonomous delivery" — while also signalling Uber's deeper commitment to autonomy.

Swiss start-up Sun-Ways has developed a concept to install solar panels between train tracks, using a specially built train to "unroll" the panels during the night when fewer trains are running. Fast Company reports: As wild as it all sound, Sun-Ways actually has two competitors. Greenrail and Bankset Energy, respectively located in Italy and England, are already testing similar concepts. But Sun-Ways stands out in two ways. For one, it uses standard-size panels, whereas the others use smaller panels that are placed on top of crossties. And unlike its competitors, Sun-ways doesn't require manual installation. It has a train for that!

Sun-ways is putting this idea to the test during a $560,000 pilot project in Western Switzerland. The pilot, which is slated for this summer, will trial a version of the mechanism using a regular train that's been retrofitted for the occasion. Running on a 140-foot stretch near the city of Neuchatel, the train will install about 60 solar panels, turning the gap between train tracks into a reflective black ribbon.

For now, 100% of the electricity generated by the solar panels will go straight to the grid to power nearby households. But eventually, the team is planning to use some of that electricity to power the very trains that run above the panels. According to Danichert, 5,000 kilometers of "solar rails" (which is the current length of the entire Swiss railroad network) can generate 1 gigawatt of energy per year, or enough energy to power about 750,000 homes. Considering there are over 1 million kilometers of railway tracks worldwide, the potential could be huge, even if the system can't be installed on every one of those tracks. But most importantly, it wouldn't take up any space from farmland or forests, and it wouldn't ruin any landscapes.

Shadow has decided to cut the price of its cloud storage service Shadow Drive. Users can now get 2TB of storage for $5.3 per month instead of $9.6 per month. From a report: As for the free tier, things aren't changing. Users who sign up get 20GB of online storage for free. Shadow is also the company behind Shadow PC, a cloud computing service that lets you rent a virtual instance of a Windows PC in a data center near you. It works particularly well to play demanding PC games on any device, such as a cheap laptop, a connected TV or a smartphone. Coming back to Shadow Drive, as the name suggests, Shadow Drive works a lot like Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud Drive or Dropbox. Users can upload and download files from a web browser. They are stored in a data center based in France so that you can access them later.

North America has emerged as the fastest-growing market for new battery cell manufacturing factories, driven by incentives provided by the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), according to a report by Clean Energy Associates. Electrek reports: CEA says that China is still the leading battery cell manufacturing hub, but its share will decline in "coming years." Europe has seen delays and cancellations of several planned battery factories, mostly due to high energy prices and other countries' pro-clean energy and EV manufacturing policies luring projects away. Global EV battery usage increased by 72% in just a year, from 2021 to 2022. And going forward, CEA forecasts an impressive two-year 186% growth rate on the 1,706 GWh of batteries produced in 2022.

The reason is obvious for the rapid increase in battery factories: The International Energy Agency's "Global EV Outlook 2023" reports that EV sales exceeded 10 million in 2022, and 14% of all new cars sold were electric in 2022 -- up from around 9% in 2021 and less than 5% in 2020. And battery and EV manufacturing are only going to continue to experience huge growth.