If you ranked all U.S. companies by annual revenue, Occidental Petroleum comes in at #183.

But Wednesday this massive "hydrocarbon exploration" company "outlined plans to advance its clean energy transition business," reports Reuters, "including spending between $800 million and $1 billion on a facility to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air." The proposed facility, the world's largest direct air capture (DAC) project, is set to begin construction in the second half of this year in the Permian basin, the largest U.S. oilfield, with a start in 2024. The U.S. oil and gas producer is aiming to build a profitable business from providing services and technologies that pull CO2 out of the air and burying it underground to advance government and business climate mitigation goals. This year's investments in the low carbon business will total $275 million, and the company plans to develop over time three carbon sequestration hubs that will be online by 2025 and another 69 smaller DAC facilities by 2035, it told investors....

Occidental's first DAC facility has a goal of removing 1 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere per year — 100 times bigger than all 19 DAC plants currently operating worldwide combined, according to the International Energy Agency.

"There's just not going to be enough other alternatives for CO2 offsets," said Occidental Chief Executive Vicki Hollub. "So this is a sure opportunity." Executives did not say when they expect the business to turn a profit. DAC is currently not commercial on a large scale. "We expect that to play out over the next five to 10 years as we develop plants," Richard Jackson, Occidental's head of U.S. onshore resources and carbon management operations, told Reuters by phone. "The commerciality of those plants will be determined by mainly the market".
Last month Occidental announced that Airbus had already pre-purchased "400,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits from [Occidental's] planned first Direct Air Capture facility," specifically, "the capture and permanent sequestration of 100,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year for four years — with an option to secure more volume in the future."

Occidental called the deal "indicative of the availability of a feasible, affordable, and scalable decarbonization solution for aviation and other hard-to-abate industries."

The U.S. government "is launching a $6 billion effort to rescue nuclear power plants at risk of closing," reports the Associated Press, "citing the need to continue nuclear energy as a carbon-free source of power that helps to combat climate change." A certification and bidding process opened Tuesday for a civil nuclear credit program that is intended to bail out financially distressed owners or operators of nuclear power reactors, the U.S. Department of Energy told The Associated Press exclusively, shortly before the official announcement. It's the largest federal investment in saving financially distressed nuclear reactors... "U.S. nuclear power plants contribute more than half of our carbon-free electricity, and President Biden is committed to keeping these plants active to reach our clean energy goals," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. "We're using every tool available to get this country powered by clean energy by 2035, and that includes prioritizing our existing nuclear fleet to allow for continued emissions-free electricity generation and economic stability for the communities leading this important work...."

A dozen U.S. commercial nuclear power reactors have closed in the past decade before their licenses expired, largely due to competition from cheaper natural gas, massive operating losses due to low electricity prices and escalating costs, or the cost of major repairs. This has led to a rise in emissions in those regions, poorer air quality and the loss of thousands of high-paying jobs, dealing an economic blow to local communities, according to the Department of Energy. A quarter or more of the fleet is at risk, the Department of Energy added. The owners of seven currently operating reactors have already announced plans to retire them through 2025.... Twenty more reactors faced closure in the last decade before states stepped in to save them, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute , the industry's trade association.... Low electricity prices are the main cause of this trend, though federal and state policies to boost wind and solar have contributed as well, the NEI added.

There are 55 commercial nuclear power plants with 93 nuclear reactors in 28 U.S. states. Nuclear power already provides about 20% of electricity in the U.S., or about half the nation's carbon-free energy. If reactors do close before their licenses expire, fossil fuel plants will likely fill the void and emissions will increase, which would be a substantial setback, said Andrew Griffith, acting assistant secretary for nuclear energy at DOE. While natural gas may be cheaper, nuclear power hasn't been given credit for its carbon-free contribution to the grid and that has caused nuclear plants to struggle financially, Griffith added....

David Schlissel, at the Ohio-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said he wishes the federal government, before it allocated the $6 billion, had analyzed whether that money might have been better spent on ramping up renewables, battery storage and energy efficiency projects, which can be done quickly and cheaply to displace fossil fuels.

A major industrial conglomerate has resorted to buying washing machines and tearing out the semiconductors inside for use in its own chip modules, according to the CEO of a company central to the chipmaking supply chain. From a report: ASML's Chief Executive Officer Peter Wennink remarked on the situation, without naming the conglomerate, during his company's earnings call Wednesday. The beleaguered firm relayed its struggle to him only the prior week, he said, signalling that chip shortages are going to persist for the foreseeable future, at least for some sectors. "The demand we are currently seeing comes from so many places in the industry," Wennink said, pointing to the wider adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. "It's so widespread. We have significantly underestimated the width of the demand. That, I don't think, is going to go away." Even major chip equipment makers including US-based Lam Research are struggling to get enough components to fulfil orders, potentially making it more difficult for semiconductor fabs to significantly increase their capacity in the near term.

Rolls-Royce is to start building parts for its small modular nuclear reactors in anticipation of receiving regulatory approval from the British government by 2024, one of its directors has said. The Guardian reports: Paul Stein, the chairman of Rolls-Royce SMR, a subsidiary of the FTSE 100 engineering company, said he hoped to be providing power to the UK's national grid by 2029. Speaking to Reuters in an interview conducted virtually, Stein said the regulatory "process has been kicked off, and will likely be complete in the middle of 2024. We are trying to work with the UK government, and others to get going now placing orders, so we can get power on grid by 2029."

Small modular reactors (SMRs) are seen by their proponents as a way to build nuclear power plants in factories, a method that could be cheaper and quicker than traditional designs. The technology, based on the reactors used in nuclear submarines, is seen by Rolls-Royce as a potential earner far beyond any previous business such as jet engines or diesel motors. The government under Boris Johnson put nuclear power at the centre of its energy strategy announced earlier this month, in response to climate concerns and a desire to ditch Russian gas. SMRs are expected to play an important role in an expansion of nuclear to supply a quarter of the UK's energy needs. Lower costs would be crucial in justifying the nuclear push, given that onshore wind is seen as much cheaper and quicker to install.

For nearly two years, netting a PS5, Xbox Series X, or AMD Radeon and Nvidia RTX graphics cards without paying a fortune has been a matter of luck (or a lot of skill). At its peak, scalpers were successfully charging double or even triple MSRP for a modern GPU. But it's looking like the great GPU shortage is nearly over. From a report: In January, sites including Tom's Hardware reported that prices were finally beginning to drop, and drop they did; they've now dropped an average of 30 percent in the three months since. On eBay, the most popular graphics cards are only commanding a street price of $200-$300 over MSRP. And while that might still seem like a lot, some have fallen further: used Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti or AMD RX 6900 XT are currently fetching less than their original asking price, a sure sign that sanity is returning to the marketplace.

Just as importantly, some graphics cards are actually staying in stock at retailers when their prices are too high -- again, something that sounds perfectly normal but that we haven't seen in a while. For many months, boutiques like my local retailer Central Computers could only afford to sell you a GPU as part of a big PC bundle, but now it's making every card available on its own. GameStop is selling a Radeon RX 6600 for just $10 over MSRP, and it hasn't yet sold out. Newegg has also continually been offering an RTX 3080 Ti for just $10 over MSRP (after rebate, too) -- even if $1,200 still seems high for that card's level of performance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Protocol: Add Amazon to the long list of companies looking to build a more immersive future: The ecommerce giant has been looking to hire a number of people for an unannounced AR/VR product in recent months. Among the roles Amazon is looking to fill are a wide variety of senior positions for computer vision scientists, designers, program managers, product managers, researchers and technologists, suggesting that the company is looking to build out a substantive team. "You will develop an advanced XR research concept into a magical and useful new-to-world consumer product," one of the job listings reads, using the industry shorthand for extended reality, which can encompass both AR and VR. Another job listing describes the initiative related to "XR/AR devices," and states that eventual hires will be part of "a greenfield development effort" that will include "developing code for early prototypes through mass production."

Amazon is looking to hire a UX designer to work on "the core system interface along with end-user applications spanning from multi-modal interfaces to 3D AR entertainment experiences," and suggest that applicants should have the ability to "think spatially, with 3D design experience in motion design, animation [and] AR/VR, games," among other things. Applicants for a senior product manager position are told they should have "experience building deeply technical products, e.g. AI/ML, robotics, games." [...] Interestingly, a number of the job listings describe the project as related to a "magical and useful, new-to-world XR consumer product," suggesting it may be looking to establish a new product category. Others even describe it as a "a new-to-world smart-home product."

A writer for The Drive reports that "Recently, I noticed a part that I made for my Honda Accord was removed from Printables, the newly rebranded 3D printing repository offered by Prusa.

"There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for it, but I didn't think anything else about it...until reports of a mass deletion started popping up on Reddit." All models referencing the word "Honda" posted prior to March 30, 2022, were seemingly removed from Printables without warning. These included speaker brackets, key housings, hood latches, shifter bushings, washer fluid caps, roof latch handles, and my trunk lid handle — a part not offered on 10th generation Accords sold in the U.S. at all. In fact, many of the removed parts had no Honda branding but were just compatible with Honda vehicles. As it turns out, Prusa says it was issued a takedown notice from Honda and removed all 3D models that referenced the brand.

"I can confirm to you that we have received a letter from a lawyer representing Honda, informing us that we were required to remove any model which used 'Honda' in the listing, the model itself, or one of several trademarks/logos also associated with Honda," a Prusa spokesperson told The Drive in an email. "This will also be related to the naming of the files it self (sic), as for Honda this would be considered as a violation of their trademark/patents." A Prusa employee responded to a post on the company's forums, noting that Honda sent a "huge legal document" that covered every model that the company wished to have deleted. The document reportedly included items that did not have Honda logos, but also specific items with certain shapes and dimensions — like a washer fluid reservoir cap, for example.

A response from another employee was posted suggesting other sites that host 3D models were also sent a similar takedown notice.

A headline at Hot Hardware calls it "a sexy Linux laptop with deep learning chops... being pitched as the world's most powerful laptop for machine learning workloads."

And here's how Ars Technica describes the Razer x Lambda Tensorbook (announced Tuesday): Made in collaboration with Lambda, the Linux-based clamshell focuses on deep-learning development. Lambda, which has been around since 2012, is a deep-learning infrastructure provider used by the US Department of Defense and "97 percent of the top research universities in the US," according to the company's announcement. Lambda's offerings include GPU clusters, servers, workstations, and cloud instances that train neural networks for various use cases, including self-driving cars, cancer detection, and drug discovery.

Dubbed "The Deep Learning Laptop," the Tensorbook has an Nvidia RTX 3080 Max-Q (16GB) and targets machine-learning engineers, especially those who lack a laptop with a discrete GPU and thus have to share a remote machine's resources, which negatively affects development.... "When you're stuck SSHing into a remote server, you don't have any of your local data or code and even have a hard time demoing your model to colleagues," Lambda co-founder and CEO Stephen Balaban said in a statement, noting that the laptop comes with PyTorch and TensorFlow for quickly training and demoing models from a local GUI interface without SSH. Lambda isn't a laptop maker, so it recruited Razer to build the machine....

While there are more powerful laptops available, the Tensorbook stands out because of its software package and Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS.
The Verge writes: While Razer currently offers faster CPU, GPU and screens in today's Blade lineup, it's not necessarily a bad deal if you love the design, considering how pricey Razer's laptops can be. But we've generally found that Razer's thin machines run quite hot in our reviews, and the Blade in question was no exception even with a quarter of the memory and a less powerful RTX 3060 GPU. Lambda's FAQ page does not address heat as of today.

Lambda is clearly aiming this one at prospective MacBook Pro buyers, and I don't just say that because of the silver tones. The primary hardware comparison the company touts is a 4x speedup over Apple's M1 Max in a 16-inch MacBook Pro when running TensorFlow.
Specifically, Lambda's web site claims the new laptop "delivers model training performance up to 4x faster than Apple's M1 Max, and up to 10x faster than Google Colab instances." And it credits this to the laptop's use of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q 16GB GPU, adding that NVIDIA GPUs "are the industry standard for parallel processing, ensuring leading performance and compatibility with all machine learning frameworks and tools."

"It looks like a fine package and machine, but pricing starts at $3,499," notes Hot Hardware, adding "There's a $500 up-charge to have it configured to dual-boot Windows 10."

The Verge speculates on what this might portend for the future. "Perhaps the recently renewed interest in Linux gaming, driven by the Steam Deck, will push Razer to consider Linux for its own core products as well."

Earlier this week the Voice of America news service shared a story that begins with exclusive photos from a nuclear lab "from which a Ukrainian official says Russian troops stole radioactive material that could be harmful if mishandled...." It is housed in a building run by a state agency managing the exclusion zone around Chernobyl's nearby decommissioned nuclear power plant, where a 1986 explosion caused the world's worst nuclear accident. The director of the agency, Evgen Kramarenko, provided the laboratory photos to VOA, saying he took them on an April 5 visit, five days after Russian troops withdrew from Chernobyl....

"We have a laboratory that had a big quantity of radioactive instruments that are used to calibrate our radiation dosimeters," Kramarenko told VOA. A dosimeter is a safety device, typically worn by individuals as a badge, that measures exposure to ionizing radiation, including nuclear radiation. The agency's dosimeters are calibrated using small metallic containers of radioactive material made by Ukrainian state enterprise USIE Izotop, which displays a photo of them on its website.

"Most of those calibration instruments were stolen. They look like coins. If the Russian soldiers carry them around, it's very dangerous for them," Kramarenko said....

In a Saturday Facebook post, Kramarenko's agency said occupying Russian troops stole samples of fuel-containing materials from the lab in addition to the radioactive calibration instruments. The agency said it was possible that the Russians threw away the items elsewhere in Chernobyl's exclusion zone, but that a likelier scenario is that they kept items as "souvenirs."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: California, which aims to have a carbon-free power grid within 25 years, got a short glimpse of that possibility earlier this month. The state's main grid ran on more than 97% renewable energy at 3:39 p.m. on Sunday April 3, breaking a previous record of 96.4% that was set just a week earlier, the California Independent System Operator said Thursday in a statement. While these all-time highs are for a brief time, they solidly demonstrate the advances being made to reliably achieve California's clean energy goals," said California ISO CEO Elliot Mainzer said in the statement.

Power production from the sun and wind typically peak in the spring, due to mild temperatures and the angle of the sun allowing for an extended period of strong solar production, the grid operator said. While hitting the new renewable record is remarkable, the state has found itself scrambling for power supplies during the past two summers as it has added more intermittent sources and retired natural-gas plants for environmental reasons. California has set a target to have a zero-carbon power system by 2045.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency -- a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines. The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel's photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity. The team's design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, or up to about 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When the energy is needed, such as on overcast days, TPV cells would convert the heat into electricity, and dispatch the energy to a power grid. With the new TPV cell, the team has now successfully demonstrated the main parts of the system in separate, small-scale experiments. They are working to integrate the parts to demonstrate a fully operational system. From there, they hope to scale up the system to replace fossil-fuel-driven power plants and enable a fully decarbonized power grid, supplied entirely by renewable energy. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: On March 29, wind turbines produced more electricity than coal and nuclear, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an agency that collects energy statistics for the government, says. In the past, wind-powered electricity has gone beyond coal and nuclear on separate days, but this was the first time wind surpassed both on the same day. Natural gas is still the largest source of electricity generation in the country.

The EIA notes that in the spring and fall months, nuclear and coal generators reduce their output because demand tends to be lower, which could contribute to why wind turbines produced more electricity that day. But wind taking the No. 2 spot may be short-lived. The agency says electricity generation from wind on a monthly basis has been lower than natural gas, coal and nuclear generation. According to EIA projections, wind is not expected to surpass any other method in any month of 2022 or 2023.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: How do you bottle renewable energy for when the Sun doesn't shine and the wind won't blow? That's one of the most vexing questions standing in the way of a greener electrical grid. Massive battery banks are one answer. But they're expensive and best at storing energy for a few hours, not for days long stretches of cloudy weather or calm. Another strategy is to use surplus energy to heat a large mass of material to ultrahigh temperatures, then tap the energy as needed. This week, researchers report a major improvement in a key part of that scheme: a device for turning the stored heat back into electricity.

A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory achieved a nearly 30% jump in the efficiency of a thermophotovoltaic (TPV), a semiconductor structure that converts photons emitted from a heat source to electricity, just as a solar cell transforms sunlight into power. "This is very exciting stuff," says Andrej Lenert, a materials engineer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "This is the first time [TPVs have] gotten into really promising efficiency ranges, which is ultimately what matters for a lot of applications." Together with related advances, he and others say, the new work gives a major boost to efforts to roll out thermal batteries on a large scale, as cheap backup for renewable power systems. The idea is to feed surplus wind or solar electricity to a heating element, which boosts the temperature of a liquid metal bath or a graphite block to several thousand degrees. The heat can be turned back into electricity by making steam that drives a turbine, but there are trade-offs. High temperatures raise the conversion efficiency, but turbine materials begin to break down at about 1500C. TPVs offer an alternative: Funnel the stored heat to a metal film or filament, setting it aglow like the tungsten wire in an incandescent light bulb, then use TPVs to absorb the emitted light and turn it to electricity.

For the new device, Asegun Henry, an MIT mechanical engineer, tinkered with both the emitter and the TPV itself. Previous TPV setups heated the emitters to about 1400C, which maximized their brightness in the wavelength range for which TPVs were optimized. Henry aimed to push the temperature 1000C higher, where tungsten emits more photons at higher energies, which could improve the energy conversion. But that meant reworking the TPVs as well. With researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Henry's team laid down more than two dozen thin layers of different semiconductors to create two separate cells stacked one on top of another. The top cell absorbs mostly visible and ultraviolet photons, whereas the lower cell absorbs mostly infrared. A thin gold sheet under the bottom cell reflects low-energy photons the TPVs couldn't harvest. The tungsten reabsorbs that energy, preventing it from being lost. The result, the group reports today in Nature, is a TPV tandem that converts 41.1% of the energy emitted from a 2400C tungsten filament to electricity.

By combining two processors into one, the company has squeezed a surprising amount of performance out of silicon. From a report: "UltraFusion gave us the tools we needed to be able to fill up that box with as much compute as we could," Tim Millet, vice president of hardware technologies at Apple, says of the Mac Studio. Benchmarking of the M1 Ultra has shown it to be competitive with the fastest high-end computer chips and graphics processor on the market. Millet says some of the chip's capabilities, such as its potential for running AI applications, will become apparent over time, as developers port over the necessary software libraries. The M1 Ultra is part of a broader industry shift toward more modular chips. Intel is developing a technology that allows different pieces of silicon, dubbed "chiplets," to be stacked on top of one another to create custom designs that do not need to be redesigned from scratch. The company's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has identified this "advanced packaging" as one pillar of a grand turnaround plan. Intel's competitor AMD is already using a 3D stacking technology from TSMC to build some server and high-end PC chips. This month, Intel, AMD, Samsung, TSMC, and ARM announced a consortium to work on a new standard for chiplet designs. In a more radical approach, the M1 Ultra uses the chiplet concept to connect entire chips together.

Apple's new chip is all about increasing overall processing power. "Depending on how you define Moore's law, this approach allows you to create systems that engage many more transistors than what fits on one chip," says Jesus del Alamo, a professor at MIT who researches new chip components. He adds that it is significant that TSMC, at the cutting edge of chipmaking, is looking for new ways to keep performance rising. "Clearly, the chip industry sees that progress in the future is going to come not only from Moore's law but also from creating systems that could be fabricated by different technologies yet to be brought together," he says. "Others are doing similar things, and we certainly see a trend towards more of these chiplet designs," adds Linley Gwennap, author of the Microprocessor Report, an industry newsletter. The rise of modular chipmaking might help boost the performance of future devices, but it could also change the economics of chipmaking. Without Moore's law, a chip with twice the transistors may cost twice as much. "With chiplets, I can still sell you the base chip for, say, $300, the double chip for $600, and the uber-double chip for $1,200," says Todd Austin, an electrical engineer at the University of Michigan.

Mike Bouma writes: I just bought the A500 Mini here in the Netherlands. The first reviews are now available.

The Guardian gives the device a 4 out of 5 score in their review: "The A500 is a robust piece of tech nostalgia that will give veteran fans many hours of nostalgic pleasure while also providing an accessible means of introducing younger family members to the Amiga scene. The colorful sprites, pounding techno soundtracks and sardonic wit of the beloved Sensible Software, Team 17 and Bitmap Brothers games retain their appeal and it has been fascinating to rediscover how much the modern independent gaming scene owes to this 35-year-old home computer."

Nintendo Life has reviewed the device, giving it an 8 out of 10 score: "As such, this is an intriguing device for anyone who is even remotely interested in tracking the development of the games industry -- and while its 120-pound price tag makes it more expensive than many of its micro-console rivals, the ability to side-load games is very welcome indeed."

Express.co.uk gives the device a 3.5 out of 5 score in their review: "Overall, the Amiga 500 Mini is a strong addition to the crowded classic console market that will appeal mostly to those that have a lot of nostalgia for this iconic PC gaming machine. And the ability to add extra games is a great little bonus which will add plenty of extra life to the system."

Furthermore, various YouTubers have reviewed the A500 Mini, including Retro Recipes, which gives the device a perfect 5 out of 5 score while stating it beats expectations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: [R]esearchers are now finding vulnerabilities in newer hospital technologies that weren't as ubiquitous a decade ago. Enter autonomous hospital robots, the supposed-to-be-friendly self-controlled digital workhorses that can transport medications, bed linens, food, medications and laboratory specimens across a hospital campus. These robots, such as the ones built by robot maker Aethon, are equipped with the space to transport critical goods and security access to enter restricted parts of the hospital and ride elevators, all while cutting labor costs. But researchers at Cynerio, a cybersecurity startup focused on securing hospital and healthcare systems, discovered a set of five never-before-seen vulnerabilities in Aethon robots, which they say allowed malicious hackers to remotely hijack and control these autonomous robots -- and in some cases over the internet.

The five vulnerabilities, which Cynerio collectively call JekyllBot:5, aren't with the robots themselves but with the base servers that are used to communicate with and control the robots that traverse the hallways of the hospitals and hotels. The bugs range from allowing hackers to create new users with high-level access in order to then log in and remotely control the robots and access restricted areas, snoop on patients or guests using the robot's in-built cameras, or otherwise cause mayhem. Asher Brass, the lead researcher on the Aethon vulnerabilities, warned that the flaws required a "very low skill set for exploitation."

Cynerio said the base servers have a web interface that could be accessed from inside the hospital's network, allowing "guest" users to view real-time robot camera feeds and their upcoming schedules and tasks for the day without needing a password. But although the robots' functionality were protected by an "admin" account, the researchers said the vulnerabilities in the web interface could have allowed a hacker to interact with the robots without needing an admin password to log in. One of the five bugs, the researchers said, exposed robots to remote control using a joystick-style controller in the web interface, while exploiting another one of the bugs to interact with door locks, call and ride elevators, and open and close medication drawers. "The bugs were fixed in a batch of software and firmware updates released by Aethon, after Cynerio alerted the company to the issues," notes TechCrunch. "Aethon is said to have restricted internet-exposed servers to isolate the robots from potential remote attacks, and fixed other web-related vulnerabilities that affected the base station."

How much energy does it take to have a good and healthy life? A new Stanford University study has found that the answer is far less than the average American is using. From a report: Comparing energy use and quality of life across 140 countries, researchers found that the magic number is 75 gigajoules a year, or less. For context, one gigajoule of energy is equal to about 8 gallons of gasoline. Americans use 284 gigajoules a year per capita, nearly four times that much energy, according to the new research. "That suggests to me that we could nudge energy use downwards in a bunch of hyper-consuming countries and not just make a more equitable world, but perhaps make ourselves healthier and happier," said lead author and professor of earth system science Rob Jackson. The link between more energy and better quality of life is established. Globally, around 759 million people lived without electricity and 2.6 billion without clean cooking fuel in 2019, according to the World Bank.

Russia is adapting to a world where it no longer has access to many technologies abroad with the development of a new supercomputer platform that can use foreign x86 processors such as Intel's in combination with the country's homegrown Elbrus processors. The Register reports: The new supercomputer reference system, dubbed "RSK Tornado," was developed on behalf of the Russian government by HPC system integrator RSC Group, according to an English translation of a Russian-language press release published March 30. RSC said it created RSK Tornado as a "unified interoperable" platform to "accelerate the pace of important substitution" for HPC systems, data processing centers and data storage systems in Russia. In other words, the HPC system architecture is meant to help Russia quickly adjust to the fact that major chip companies such as Intel, AMD and TSMC -- plus several other technology vendors, like Dell and Lenovo -- have suspended product shipments to the country as a result of sanctions by the US and other countries in reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

RSK Tornado supports up to 104 servers in a rack, with the idea being to support foreign x86 processors (should they come available) as well as Russia's Elbrus processors, which debuted in 2015. The hope appears to be the ability for Russian developers to port HPC, AI and big data applications from x86 architectures to the Elbrus architecture, which, in theory, will make it easier for Russia to rely on its own supply chain and better cope with continued sanctions from abroad. RSK Tornado systems software is RSC proprietary and is currently used to orchestrate supercomputer resources at the Interdepartmental Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg Polytechnic University and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. RSC claims to have also developed its own liquid-cooling system for supercomputers and data storage systems, the latter of which can use Elbrus CPUs too.

After years of trouble and delay, Intel's chipmaking business finally has some good news to report. The most advanced manufacturing process the company has committed to will arrive in the second half of 2024, six months earlier than planned. From a report: Intel fell behind rivals Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung because of problems modernizing its manufacturing, and it convinced chip designer Pat Gelsinger to return to the company as chief executive in 2021. Shortly afterward, Intel laid out a road map that meant five improvements to its manufacturing processes in four years, with manufacturing processes named Intel 7, Intel 4, Intel 8, Intel 20A and Intel 18A. Each step improves a chip's performance relative to its power consumption. Those steps are the foundation of a plan to catch up to rivals in 2024 and surpass them in 2025.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this article from Science magazine: Robots can be programmed to lift a car and even help perform some surgeries, but when it comes to picking up an object they have not touched before, such as an egg, they often fail miserably. Now, engineers have come up with an artificial fingertip that overcomes that limitation. The advance enables machines to sense the textures of these surfaces a lot like a human fingertip does....

[W]hen researchers at the University of Bristol began designing an artificial fingertip in 2009, they used human skin as a guide. Their first fingertip — assembled by hand — was about the size of a soda can. By 2018, they had switched to 3D printing. That made it possible to make the tip and all its components about the size of an adult's big toe and more easily create a series of layers approximating the multilayered structure of human skin. More recently, the scientists have incorporated neural networks into the fingertip, which they call TacTip. The neural networks help a robot quickly process what it's sensing and react accordingly — seemingly just like a real finger.

In our fingertips, a layer of nerve endings deforms when skin contacts an object and tells the brain what's happening. These nerves send "fast" signals to help us avoid dropping something and "slow" signals to convey an object's shape. TacTip's equivalent signals come from an array of pinlike projections underneath a rubbery surface layer that move when the surface is touched. The array's pins are like a hairbrush's bristles: stiff but bendable. Beneath that array is, among other things, a camera that detects when and how the pins move. The amount of bending of the pins provides the slow signal and the speed of bending provides the fast signal. The neural network translates those signals into the fingertip's actions, making it grip more tightly for example, or adjust the angle of the fingertip....

In a second project, Lepora's team added more pins and a microphone to TacTip. The microphone mimics another set of nerve endings deep within our skin that sense vibrations felt as we run our fingers across a surface. These nerve endings enhance our ability to feel how rough a surface is. The microphone did likewise when the researchers tested the enhanced fingertip's ability to differentiate among 13 fabrics.
The article points out that in testing, the artificial fingertip's output "closely matched the neuronal signaling patterns of human fingertips undergoing the same tests."