Starting on Monday, General Motors will temporarily halt production at all but four of its North American factories due to chip supply constraints. Engadget reports: The halt in production will affect many of the automaker's most profitable vehicles, including the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra. "During the downtime, we will repair and ship unfinished vehicles from many impacted plants, including Fort Wayne and Silao, to dealers to help meet the strong customer demand for our products," a spokesperson for GM told the Detroit Free Press. "Although the situation remains complex and very fluid, we remain confident in our team's ability to continue finding creative solutions to minimize the impact on our highest-demand and capacity-constrained vehicles."

The first AR/VR headset that Apple has been in development will need to be wirelessly tethered to an iPhone or another Apple device to unlock full functionality, reports The Information. MacRumors: It will be similar to the WiFi-only version of the Apple Watch, which requires an iPhone connection to work. The headset is meant to wirelessly communicate with another Apple device, which will handle most of the powerful computing. According to The Information, Apple recently completed work on the 5-nanometer custom chips that are set to be used in the headset, and that's where the connectivity detail comes from. Apple has completed the key system on a chip (SoC) that will power the headset, along with two additional chips. All three chips have hit the tape-out stage, so work on the physical design has wrapped up and it's now time for trial production.

ASUS has just four letters to sell you on its latest creator-focused notebooks: OLED. From a report: The company is bringing OLED screens to all of its new models, a move meant to differentiate them in the increasingly crowded PC market. Compared to traditional LCD screens, OLED offers deeper blacks levels, vastly better contrast, and more responsiveness. Even today, as LCDs have evolved to be brighter and faster, OLED offers a more pronounced visual "pop." We've been seeing notebooks with OLED for years, like on the XPS 15 and ZenBook, but they've typically been positioned as a premium feature for select models. Now ASUS is trying to make its name synonymous with OLED, so much so that it's bringing it to new mid-range notebooks like the VivoBook Pro 14X and 16X. It's also touting the first 16-inch 4K OLED HDR screens on notebooks across several models: the ProArt Studiobook Pro, ProArt Studiobook and the Vivobook Pro.

Befitting its name, you can expect to see the fastest hardware on the market in the StudioBook Pro 16 OLED (starting at $2,500). It'll be powered by H-series Ryzen 5000 processors, 3rd-gen Intel Xeon chips and NVIDIA's professional-grade RTX A2000 and A5000 GPUs. And if you don't need all of that power, there's also the Studiobook 16 OLED ($2,000), which has the same Ryzen chips, Intel Core i7 CPUs and either RTX 3070 or 3060 graphics. Both notebooks will be equipped with 4K OLED HDR screens that reach up to 550 nits and cover 100 percent of DCI-P3 color gamut. They'll also sport ASUS Dial, a new rotary accessory located at the top of their trackpads, offering similar functionality to Microsoft's forgotten Surface Dial.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Wooden floors infused with silicon and metal ions can generate enough electrical power from human footsteps to light LED bulbs. Researchers hope that they could provide a green energy source for homes. [...] Guido Panzarasa at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and his colleagues found that although wood sits in the middle of this spectrum and doesn't readily pass electrons, it can be altered to generate larger charges. The team infused one panel of wood with silicon, which picks up electrons on contact with an object. A second panel was infused with nanocrystals of zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8), a compound containing metal ions and organic molecules, and these crystals tend to lose electrons. They called this impregnation process "functionalization."

The team found that this treatment made a device that contained both wooden panels 80 times more efficient than standard wood at transferring electrons, meaning it was powerful enough to light LED bulbs when human footsteps compressed the device and brought the two wooden panels into contact. The engineered wood was fitted with electrodes from which the charge could be directed, and the team found that a 2-centimeter-by-3.5-centimeter sample that was placed under 50 newtons of compression -- an order of magnitude less than the force of a human footstep -- was able to generate 24.3 volts. A larger sample that was around the size of an A4 piece of paper was able to produce enough energy to drive household LED lamps and small electronic devices such as calculators. The findings have been published in the journal Matter.

Juliana Barile, the former employee of a New York credit union, pleaded guilty to accessing the financial institution's computer systems without authorization and destroying over 21 gigabytes of data in revenge after being fired. BleepingComputer reports: According to court documents, the defendant worked remotely as a part-time employee for the credit union until May 19, 2021, when she was fired. Even though a credit union employee asked the bank's information technology support firm to disable Barile's remote access credentials, that access was not removed. Two days later, on May 21, Barile logged on for roughly 40 minutes. The defendant deleted over 20,000 files and around 3,500 directories during that time, totaling roughly 21.3 gigabytes of data stored on the bank's share drive. The wiped included files related to customers' mortgage loan applications and the financial institution's anti-ransomware protection software.

Besides deleting documents with customer and company data, Barile also opened various confidential Word documents, including files containing board minutes for the credit union. Five days later, on May 26, she also told a friend via text messages how she was able to destroy thousands of documents on her former employer's servers, saying, "They didn't revoke my access so I deleted p drift lol. [..] I deleted their shared network documents." Although the New York credit union had backups of some of the data deleted by the defendant, it still had to spend more than $10,000 to restore the destroyed data following Barile's unauthorized intrusion.

VanMoof says it's now "the most funded e-bike company in the world," after raising a total of $182 million in the last two years. The Verge reports: The company claims to have almost 200,000 bikes on the road currently, with the goal of getting 10 million people on VanMoof e-bikes in the next five years. Such aggressive expansion goals require significant capital. VanMoof's new funding round has been earmarked to expand production and to "reinvent the way in which hardware and software components are made," according to a blog post announcing the new investment round. More specifically, VanMoof co-founder Taco Carlier tells The Verge in a phone interview that most of the funds will go towards R&D, "having more people on the hardware and software development in order to improve the quality and reliability of the bike."

For comparison, RadPower, the largest e-bike maker in the US, raised $150 million earlier this year, adding to the $25 million it garnered the year prior. Investors are pouring money into electric bike makers in the hope of capitalizing on the global e-bike market which is expected to be worth almost $50 billion by 2028. In March 2021, e-bikes already represented 17 percent of all bicycle sales in Europe, and accounted for more than 50 percent of all new bike sales in countries like Germany and the Netherlands.

Last year, 42% of new electricity generation capacity in the U.S. came from land-based wind energy -- more than from any other source -- according to numbers in a series of reports from the Department of Energy (DOE) this week. By contrast, solar amounted to only 38% of new capacity last year. CNBC reports: While both capacity and electricity generation from wind can vary regionally, land-based wind is now a strong, intermittent energy source across the U.S. According to research by DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a record 16,836 megawatts of new utility-scale land-based wind power capacity was added to U.S. energy infrastructure in 2020, representing about $24.6 billion of investment in new wind power. Last year, the DOE noted, wind energy was able to provide more than half of in-state electricity generation and sales in a few states. Iowa led the pack with wind power providing 57% of its in-state electricity generation. However, Iowa has a lot of wind turbines, and not a very big population.

The growth of land-based wind energy in the U.S. last year was driven partly by production tax credits that are poised for a phaseout, encouraging development before that event horizon. Wind technology improvements also helped encourage land-based wind development. Compared to older wind turbines, the latest models feature taller towers with longer blades that can produce more energy by reaching into higher winds. In addition to land-based wind farms, myriad off-shore wind developments are underway domestically. But last year, off-shore wind farms still weren't operational across most of the U.S. The DOE's 2021 Offshore Wind Market Report instead focuses on the "pipeline" of offshore initiatives. In 2020, the offshore pipeline "grew to a potential generating capacity of 35,324 megawatts (MW)," a 24% increase from the prior year, that report says.

"In 2016, the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated that as much as 78 million tons of solar-panel waste will be generated by 2050," writes a Bloomberg columnist, adding that that's "almost certainly an undercount..." So what will happen to all those used solar panels?

"Across the developing world, homeowners, farmers, and businesses are turning to cheap, secondhand solar to fill power gaps left by governments and utilities," reports Bloomberg. To meet that demand, businesses ranging from individual sellers on Facebook Marketplace to specialized brokerages are getting into the trade. Earlier this month, Marubeni Corp., one of Japan's largest trading houses, announced that it's establishing a blockchain-based market for such panels. Collectively, these businesses will likely play a crucial role in bringing renewable energy to the world's emerging markets — and keeping high-tech waste out of the trash...

They may not be good enough for San Francisco homeowners and cutting-edge utilities, but they work perfectly well for anyone in a sunny climate in need of stable, off-grid power who doesn't want to pay full price. That's potentially a huge market. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of people living without electricity declined from 1.2 billion to 759 million worldwide. Some of that gap was closed by new power lines and other transmission facilities. But most of it was achieved by installing small solar systems designed to power a village, farm or even a single home. As of last year, 420 million people got their electricity from off-grid solar systems. By 2030, according to the World Bank, that number could nearly double.
A staffer at the used solar equipment exchange EnergyBin said they sometimes have 5 million pieces of photovoltaic equipment on their site.

And one broker estimated there were 10 million used solar panels on the global market, saying his own customers included Pakistani farmers pumping water for irrigation and Lebanese hoteliers seeking alternatives to an unreliable local grid.

Earlier this month Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin sued NASA over a moon lander contract awarded to SpaceX.

Now Mashable reports that "America's next trip to the moon may suddenly be delayed a bit thanks to...PDFs?" A U.S. federal judge has granted the Department of Justice a week-long extension in its lawsuit with Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin. The reason? Large PDF files...

According to the DOJ, there is more than 7 GB of data related to the case. However, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims' online system allows for only files of up to 50 MB in size to be uploaded. This all amounts to "several hundred" PDFs, including other file formats that would be converted to PDFs. The DOJ says it also sought to convert multiple separate documents into individual PDF batches but explained that those larger files could cause the upload system to crash. "We have tried several different ways to create 50-megabyte files for more efficient filing, all without success thus far," the DOJ said.

Instead of using the online file system, the U.S. government will transfer the documents for the case to DVDs.
Futurism reports the situation was exacerbated "because the agency staff that could have fixed the issue were at the 36th Annual Space Symposium last week."

On Twitter, space reporter Joey Roullete notes the judge's ruling means an additional one-week stay before the awarding of SpaceX's contract..

Or, as Mashable puts it, "Space exploration is currently on hold thanks to a lawsuit and a slew of pesky PDF files."

For a fraction of a second, 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power were produced this month by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet explains what might happen next: The aim of these experiments is — for now — to show proof of principle only: that energy can be generated. The team behind the success are very close to achieving this: they have managed a more than 1,000-fold improvement in energy release between 2011 and today. Prof Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said last month that "The pace of improvement in energy output has been rapid, suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kickstart the process...."

Many recent advances have been made with a different type of fusion device, the tokamak: a doughnut-shaped machine that uses a tube of magnetic fields to confine its fuel for as long as possible. China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (East) set another world record in May by keeping fuel stable for 100 seconds at a temperature of 120m degrees celsius — eight times hotter than the sun's core. The world's largest ever magnetic fusion machine, Iter, is under construction in the south of France and many experts think it will have the scale needed to reach net energy gain. The UK-based Joint European Torus (Jet), which holds the current magnetic fusion record for power of 67%, is about to attempt to produce the largest total amount of energy of any fusion machine in history. Alternative designs are also being explored: the UK government has announced plans for an advanced tokamak with an innovative spherical geometry, and "stellarators", a type of fusion device that had been consigned to the history books, are enjoying a revival having been enabled by new technologies such as superconducting magnets.

This is a lot of progress, but it's not even the biggest change: that would be the emergence of private sector fusion firms. The recently formed Fusion Industry Association estimates that more than $2bn of investment has flooded into fusion startups. The construction of experimental reactors by these firms is proceeding at a phenomenal rate: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which has its origins in MIT research, has begun building a demonstration reactor in Massachusetts; TAE Technologies has just raised $280m to build its next device; and Canadian-based General Fusion has opted to house its new $400m plant in the UK. This will be constructed in Oxfordshire, an emerging hotspot for the industry that is home to private ventures First Light Fusion and Tokamak Energy as well as the publicly funded Jet and Mast (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) Upgrade devices run by the UK Atomic Energy Authority...

For now, publicly funded labs are producing results a long way ahead of the private firms — but this could change.
"Whether commercial fusion energy is ready in time to help with global warming or not depends on us as a society and how badly we want — no, need — star power on our side," the author concludes.

He also calls fusion energy "the only feasible way we can explore space beyond Earth's immediate vicinity."

"When residents of an affluent estate community in Alberta started hearing noise from a nearby power plant, they didn't expect their complaints of sleepless nights would lead to a months-long investigation that would find a bitcoin mining operation had set up shop without approval," reports the CBC: Now, Link Global, the company behind the site, is being ordered by the province's utility commission to shut down two plants until it can prove it's allowed to operate — a move the company says will cost jobs and cause the oil and gas infrastructure in which it operates to sit dormant....

Vancouver-based Link Global had set up four 1.25 MW gas generators at the site, pulling power from a dormant natural gas well owned by Calgary-based company MAGA Energy. The natural gas powers thousands of computer servers that run programs to "mine" digital currency... Work on the plant began in August 2020, and by fall — when neighbours started to get annoyed — it was operating at full capacity. There was just one problem: The company hadn't notified neighbours of its plans. Or the county. Or the provincial utilities commission — which allows power plants to be set up without approval if they meet several conditions, including only generating power for the company's own use and proving the plant has no adverse effects on people or the environment...

Alberta is littered with nearly 200,000 dormant or abandoned oil and gas wells, often because they're no longer economically viable. It has raised the spectre that landowners and taxpayers could be on the hook for the cleanup costs, which the province estimates could be up to $30 billion, as well as prompted a push to find other uses for the facilities, such as powering cryptocurrency operations. Stephen Jenkins, Link Global's CEO, said some of that abandoned energy infrastructure, is at risk of leaking methane — a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. "We look at, OK, what can we do to use this in a beneficial way ... I don't want to say we're in the business of methane destruction, but we're in the business of beneficial use of that potential methane-generating source. You combust it properly. You don't flare it, and you control those emissions," Jenkins said...

And though the facility employs only four people, Jenkins said it's important to him to employ locally and give former oil and gas workers a path into other careers. The Sturgeon County plant's supervisor is a former pipefitter; he's now a bitcoin pro and an expert at keeping the plant online, Jenkins said. "It's a perfect use of people's skills," he said.

Of course, it's not all altruism. The company has said for every 10 MW of power, it can generate about 1.2 bitcoins per day.
Last Friday the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) ruled that the plant had indeed been violating their regulatory requirements, and would now also have to suffer a financial penalty which the CBC reported as "a $50,000 to $75,000 fine, reduced by up to 50% because Link Global admitted to breaking the rules..."

"More penalties could be on the way. The AUC will now review whether specific sanctions should be imposed against Link Global for operating without approval — a decision on that is expected this fall."

The CBC adds that another Link Global plant was also found to be "set up without the AUC's prior approval."

Crucial and Western Digital have recently been caught swapping the TLC NAND used for certain products with inferior QLC NAND without updating product SKUs or informing reviewers of this change. Now, Samsung was caught doing something similar. Samsung is "swapping the drive controller + TLC for a different, inferior drive controller," according to ExtremeTech. "The net effect is still a steep performance decline in certain tests." From the report: The other beats of this story are familiar. Computerbase.de reports on a YouTube Channel, which compared two different versions of the Samsung 970 Plus. Both drives are labeled with the same sticker declaring them to be a 970EVO Plus, but the part numbers are different. One drive is labeled the MZVLB1T0HBLR (older, good) and one is the MZVL21T0HBLU (newer, inferior). Peel the sticker back, and the chips underneath are rather different. The Phoenix drive (top) is older than the Elpis drive on the bottom. Computerbase claims a production date of April 2021 for the Phoenix, but if the 2110 and 2123 codes are production dates, this would seem to indicate March and June. It's possible that Samsung uses specific numerical codes for each month. Either way, the Phoenix drive is older and faster and the Elpis drive is newer and slower.

And -- just as we've seen from Crucial and Western Digital -- performance in some benchmarks after the swap is just fine, while other benchmarks crater. [...] The original 970 Plus starts with solid performance and holds it for the entire 200GB test. The right-hand SSD is even faster than the OG 970 Plus until we hit the 120GB mark, at which point performance drops to 50 percent of what it was. Real-world file copies also bear this out, with one drive holding 1.58GB/s and one at 830MB/s. TLC hasn't been swapped for QLC, but the 50 percent performance hit in some tests is as bad as what we see when it has been.

Tesla wants to sell electricity directly to customers in Texas, according to an application filed by the company this month with the Public Utility Commission there. From a report: The application follows the start of a big battery build out by Tesla in Angleton, Texas (near Houston), where it aims to connect a 100 megawatt energy storage system to the grid. Texas Monthly first reported on the application, submitted by a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesla called Tesla Energy Ventures. Tesla has also built several utility-scale energy storage systems around the world, including one east of Los Angeles, another underway in Monterey, California, and two in Australia -- one in Geelong, Victoria, and another in Adelaide, South Australia.

Scientists from Osaka University have manufactured the world's first 3D-printed Wagyu beef by using stem cells isolated from Japanese cattle, according to a press release. The product looks like a realistic steak piece containing muscle, fat, and blood vessels. Interesting Engineering reports: Because of its high marble content, Wagyu (Japanese cow) beef is one of the most sought-after and expensive meats in the world. Marbling, or sashi in Jaoan, refers to the visible layers of intramuscular fat that give the beef its rich flavors and distinctive texture, and because most cultured meats produced thus far resemble mince composed of simple muscle fibers rather than the complex structure of real beef steaks, 3D printing Wagyu is an extremely difficult feat.

The researchers used two types of stem cells, bovine satellite cells and adipose-derived stem cells, insulated from Wagyu cows, according to the paper published in the journal Nature Communications. Then, they incubated and coaxed the cells into becoming the various cell types required to generate individual fibers for muscle, fat, and blood vessels. These were piled into a 3D stack to resemble the marbling of Wagyu. Then, the researchers adapted a technique inspired by the one used to produce Japanese Kintaro candy, an old traditional sweet formed in a long pipe and cut into slices. The stacks were sliced perpendicularly to form lab-grown beef slices, which allowed a great degree of customization within the complex meat structure. This was how they were able to mimic the famous texture of Wagyu. According to the researchers, the synthetic meat "looks more like the real thing" and the process can be used to create other complex structures.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech, written by Joel Hruska: According to a report from Chinese tech site Expreview, the WD SN550 Blue -- which is currently one of the best-reviewed budget SSDs on the market -- has undergone a NAND lobotomy. While the new SSD variant performs on-par with the old drive that WD actually sampled for review, once you exhaust the SLC NAND cache, performance craters from 610MB/s to 390MB/s. The new drive offers just 64 percent of the performance of the old drive.

This is unacceptable. It is unethical for any company to sample and launch a product to strong reviews only to turn around and sell an inferior version of that hardware at a later date without changing the product SKU or telling customers that they're buying garbage. I do not use the term "garbage" lightly, but let me be clear: If you silently change the hardware components you use in a way that makes your product lose performance, and you do not disclose that information prominently to the customer (ideally through a separate SKU), you are selling garbage. There's nothing wrong with selling a slower SSD at a good price, and there's nothing right about abusing the goodwill of reviewers and enthusiasts to kick bad hardware out the door.

As a reviewer of some twenty years, I do not care at all about the fact that SLC cache performance is identical. While I didn't realize it at the time I wrote up the Crucial bait-and-switch on August 16, I've actually been affected by this problem personally. The 2TB Crucial SSD I purchased for my own video editing work is one of the bait-and-switched units, and it's always had a massive performance problem -- as soon as it empties the SLC cache, it falls to what I'd charitably call hard drive-level performance. Performance can drop as low as 60MB/s via USB3.2 (and ~150MB/s when directly connected via NVMe) and it stays there until the copy task is done. The video upscaling projects I work on regularly generate between 300-500GB of image data per episode, per encode. Achieving ideal results can require weaving the output of 3-5 models together. That means I generate up to 1.5TB of data to create a single episode. God help you if you need to copy that much information to or from one of these broken SSDs. It's not literally as bad as a spinning disk from circa 2003, but it's nowhere near acceptable performance.

Contract chipmaking giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing told has told that it plans to raise prices on products by as much as 20%, in what would be the company's steepest single increase. From a report: The price increases and the time frames for the hikes differ depending on the client, according to reports by Taiwan's Liberty Times newspaper and other media outlets. For some companies that received TSMC's notice, the hikes took effect immediately. TSMC and other Taiwanese semiconductor companies raised chip prices by more than 10% between last fall and this spring. But with strong demand continuing to outstrip supply, TSMC decided to sharply increase prices again. The increased costs tied to ramping up production are being passed downstream, with the company enjoying better bargaining power amid the global chip crunch as well. This move likely will impact the sticker prices of end products. A TSMC spokesperson declined to comment to Nikkei about the higher chip prices. Concerns over lower profitability are another reason behind the price hikes. The company has said it will make $100 billion in capital investments over three years through 2023. That commitment has fueled qualms about a potential decline in profits as TSMC prepares to boost its overseas expansion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics, written by Laura Rider: After four long years of planning, the world's first 3D-printed steel bridge debuted in Amsterdam last month. If it stands up to the elements, the bridge could be a blueprint for fixing our own structurally deficient infrastructure in the U.S. -- and we sorely need the help. Dutch Company MX3D built the almost 40-foot-long bridge for pedestrians and cyclists to cross the city's Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal. It relied on four robots, fit with welding torches, to 3D-print the structure. To do it, the machines laid out 10,000 pounds of steel, heated to 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit, in an intricate layering process. The result? An award-winning design, pushing the boundaries of what steel can do.

Designers first came up with the concept for the bridge in 2015, with the goal of making an exceptionally efficient structure. To do so, they had to emphasize two things: simplicity and safety. To monitor the efficiency of their design, scientists at Imperial College London engineered the bridge to be a "living laboratory." A team of structural engineers, computer scientists, and statisticians developed a system of over one dozen embedded sensors for the bridge, which send live data to the university for further analysis of the bridge's performance. They monitor the bridge's movement, vibration, temperature, strain (the change in shape and size of materials under applied forces), and displacement (the amount an object shifts in a specific direction) over time. From that data, scientists built a "digital twin" -- computer science parlance for an identical, virtual rendering -- of the bridge that gets more accurate over time. With machine learning, they can now look for trends that might suggest modifications are in order.

For this bridge, designers utilized two methods of 3D printing -- Direct Energy Deposit (DED) and Powder Bed Fusion (PBF). With DED, the printer feeds material (typically in powder or wire form) through a pen-like nozzle, and an intense heat source (typically a laser, but sometimes an electron beam) melts the metal on contact. PBF works similarly in that a laser or electron beam melts powder down to build each layer. The main advantage of PBF, though, is that it operates with much smaller (and more expensive) parts, resulting in a higher-resolution project than DED could accomplish on its own. This allows designers to take their visions a step further.

According to analysts at Canalys, the PC market in the United States is booming. Sales in Q2 2021 have grown 17% with 36.8 million units shipped. "Notebooks and desktops led the way with a growth in shipments of 27% and 23% respectively compared to last year," reports ZDNet. From the report: HP was the leading company in the US, delivering more than 8 million devices to customers and dominating the Chromebook sector with a 42% market share. Apple suffered a 3% decline in devices shipped but still held on to the second place slot behind HP. Canalys noted that Apple was the only major PC manufacturer to see negative growth in Q2, due in no small part to waning consumer interest in iPads, according to the report. The company did see a 24% increase in notebook shipments thanks to recent success with the M1 chip.

The rest of the list is rounded out by Samsung, which saw a 51% growth in shipments year over year while Lenovo and Dell posted 25% and 11% growth respectively in Q2. Canalys attributed Lenovo's success to its growing influence over the Chromebook market while Samsung solidified its place in the tablet market, seeing a growth of 19% in the US for Q2 even as the overall tablet market shrank. [Tablet shipments were down 1% in Q2.] Following a spike in tablet interest in Q2 2020, there has been a slowdown as the COVID-19 pandemic has waned and more people spent the summer outdoors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Tim De Chant: GM announced last Friday that it was recalling every Chevrolet Bolt it had ever made, including the new electric utility vehicle model that debuted this year. After a string of fires affected Bolt models, the company traced the problem to two simultaneously occurring defects in the cars' LG Chem-made batteries. The automaker initially discovered the problem in batteries from one of LG's Korean plants, and it recalled cars with those cells last November. But then more Bolts caught fire, and other LG plants were ensnared in the investigation, spurring two expansions of the recall. The problem, GM said, has been traced to a torn anode tab and a folded separator.

That's all GM has said so far. It hasn't said how widespread the defects are, nor has it said how, exactly, the fires started. But in what little information has been released, and in the timing of GM's recalls, there are clues. To decipher them, Ars spoke with Greg Less, technical director of the University of Michigan's Battery Lab. "What we're looking at is a perfect storm," Less said. The Bolt's battery packs are made up of pouch-type cells, which are essentially layers of cathodes, anodes, and separators that are flooded with liquid electrolyte and encased in a flexible polymer pouch. The torn anode tab, he said, would create a projection in what should be an otherwise flat battery. The projection brings the anode closer to the cathode. "And that would probably be OK if the separator was where it was supposed to be," he said.

But in problematic Bolt batteries, the separator wasn't where it was supposed to be. Separators are placed between the anode and cathode to prevent the two electrodes from touching. A torn tab wouldn't necessarily be an issue on its own because the separator would prevent any projection from bridging the anode-cathode gap. In cells with a folded separator, though, the gap would be missing from at least part of the battery. If the anode bridges the gap, Less said, "you have a short, and it's all downhill from there." "It wouldn't surprise me if both defects are caused by the same thing," he added. "I would imagine that the separator must be folded at the edge near where the anode tab is at. What I'm guessing is that at some point during the handling of the cell, before it's fully packaged, some part of the robot machine is catching. The tab is catching, the separator is catching -- something is catching very infrequently so that it hasn't been noticed, and it's causing this damage."

Western Digital is in advanced talks for a potential $20 billion stock merger with Japanese semiconductor firm Kioxia Holdings, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters: The companies could reach an agreement as early as mid-September, and Western Digital Chief Executive Officer David Goeckeler would run the combined firm, the report said. The news sent Western Digital's shares up as much as 15% in afternoon trading to a market cap of $21.45 billion. Kioxia Holdings, the world's second-largest maker of flash memory chips, last year shelved plans for what would have been Japan's largest initial public offering in 2020. In June, however, financial magazine Diamond said the company was planning an IPO as early as September.