nickwinlund77 shares a report from NPR: Lou Ottens, who put music lovers around the world on a path toward playlists and mixtapes by leading the invention of the first cassette tape, has died at age 94, according to media reports in the Netherlands. Ottens was a talented and influential engineer at Philips, where he also helped develop consumer compact discs. Ottens died last Saturday, according to the Dutch news outlet NRC Handelsblad, which lists his age as 94. The cassette tape was Ottens' answer to the large reel-to-reel tapes that provided high-quality sound but were seen as too clunky and expensive. He took on the challenge of shrinking tape technology in the early 1960s, when he became the head of new product development in Hasselt, Belgium, for the Dutch-based Philips technology company.

"Lou wanted music to be portable and accessible," says documentary filmmaker Zack Taylor, who spent days with Ottens for his film Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape. Ottens' goal was to make something simple and affordable for anyone to use. As Taylor says, "He advocated for Philips to license this new format to other manufacturers for free, paving the way for cassettes to become a worldwide standard."

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that Apple could be launching a folding iPhone in 2023, and that the phone could have a screen between 7.5 and eight inches. The Verge reports: There have been numerous reports about Apple prototyping a folding iPhone, but according to MacRumors, Kuo says that the product has "not yet officially kicked off." According to Kuo, the screen will be iPad Mini-sized when folded out, so it seems as if Apple is going for the Galaxy Fold approach of having a regular-sized phone that folds out into a small tablet, rather than the Z Flip or Razr approach of having a compact folding phone. (This is a bummer to me, but it seems like the folding phablet approach is the most popular at the moment.) It's unclear who would be making those folding displays -- there have been rumors of Apple working with both LG and Samsung.

While the rumors of a prototype and this report from Kuo indicate that Apple is indeed working on a folding phone, it's not something to wait around for just yet. Kuo's 2023 launch date is dependent on Apple being able to figure out "key technology and mass production issues." As we've seen, folding phones can be hard to get right. If Apple can do it, though, it could be in the position to do what it does best: adopt a technology after other companies have figured out the bugs and pitfalls, and release a product that seems polished in comparison.

The U.S. Navy has patents on weird and little understood technology. According to patents filed by the Navy, it is working on a compact fusion reactor that could power cities, an engine that works using "inertial mass reduction," and a "hybrid aerospace-underwater craft." From a report: Dubbed the "UFO patents," The War Zone has reported that the Navy had to build prototypes of some of the outlandish tech to prove it worked. Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais is the man behind the patents and The War Zone has proven the man exists, at least on paper. Pais has worked for a number of different departments in the Navy, including the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAVAIR/NAWCAD) and the Strategic Systems Programs. (SSP) The SSP mission, according to its website, is to "provide credible and affordable strategic solutions to the warfighter." It's responsible for developing the technology behind the Trident class nuclear missiles launched from Submarines. The patents all build on each other, but at their core is something Pais called the "Pais Effect." This is the idea that, "controlled motion of electrically charged matter via accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin subjected to smooth yet rapid acceleration transients, in order to generate extremely high energy/high intensity electromagnetic fields."

Avi Loeb, former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University and who chairs the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies, writing at Scientific American: It is presumptuous to assume that we are worthy of special attention from advanced species in the Milky Way. We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we're walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path. Our sun formed at the tail end of the star formation history [PDF] of the universe. Most stars are billions of years older than ours. So much older, in fact that many sunlike stars have already consumed their nuclear fuel and cooled off to a compact Earth-size remnant known as a white dwarf. We also learned recently that of order half [PDF] of all sunlike stars host an Earth-size planet in their habitable zone, allowing for liquid water and for the chemistry of life.

Since the dice of life were rolled in billions of other locations within the Milky Way under similar conditions to those on Earth, life as we know it is likely common. If that is indeed the case, some intelligent species may well be billions of years ahead of us in their technological development. When weighing the risks involved in interactions with less-developed cultures such as ours, these advanced civilizations may choose to refrain from contact. The silence implied by Fermi's paradox ("Where is everybody?") may mean that we are not the most attention-worthy cookies in the jar.

Mozilla is "investigating" a design refresh for its Firefox browser. Ghacks reports that the refresh is referred to internally as "Photon." Information about the design refresh is limited at this point in time. Mozilla created a meta bug on Bugzilla as a reference to keep track of the changes. While there are not any mockups or screenshots posted on the site, the names of the bugs provide information on the elements that will get a refresh. These are:

- The Firefox address bar and tabs bar.
- The main Firefox menu.
- Infobars.
- Doorhangers.
- Context Menus.
- Modals.
Most user interface elements are listed in the meta bug. Mozilla plans to release the new design in Firefox 89; the browser is scheduled for a mid-2021 release. Its release date is set to May 18, 2021...

[Developer/Firefox extension author] Sören Hentzschel revealed that he saw some of the Firefox Proton mockups... He notes that Firefox will look more modern when the designs land and that Mozilla plans to introduce useful improvements, especially in regards to the user experience. Hentzschel mentions two examples of potential improvements to the user experience: a mockup that displays vertical tabs in a compact mode, and another that shows the grouping of tabs on the tab bar.

Connecticut-based company LiquidPiston is developing a portable generator for the US Army that uses its X-Engine, a fresh and extremely powerful take on the rotary engine that'll deliver as much power as the Army's current-gen-set at one-fifth the size. New Atlas reports: We've written a few times before about the fascinating LiquidPiston rotary engine. It's not a Wankel -- indeed, it's closer to an inside-out Wankel -- and with only two moving parts, it's able to deliver extraordinary power density at up to 1.5 horsepower per pound (0.45 kg). According to co-founder and CEO Alec Schkolnik, the X Engine design combines the high compression ratio and direct injection of a diesel engine with the constant volume combustion process of an Otto cycle engine and the over-expansion abilities of an Atkinson cycle engine, while solving the lubrication and sealing issues of the Wankel rotary engine and delivering huge power and efficiency. Check out the design being used in a go-kart and an unmanned aircraft in the video below.

LiquidPiston demonstrated the technology for the US Army by building a Compact Artillery Power System (CAPS) generator unit designed to power the digital fire control system on an M777 Howitzer artillery piece. It replaced a generator that needed a truck to move it around with something 20 percent the size: a 41-lb (18.6-kg), 1.5-cubic foot (28.3-L) box about the size of a gaming PC that can easily be carried by two men. Smartly designed to work in conjunction with a battery in a hybrid system, the 2-kW CAPS generator impressed the Army enough that LiquidPiston has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research contract to develop it further as a 2-5 kW Small Tactical Generator for a range of military use cases, running on diesel with compression ignition.

Samsung may discontinue its premium Galaxy Note phone next year, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing sources with knowledge of the matter, a move that would reflect the sharp drop in demand for high-end smartphones due to the coronavirus pandemic. From the report: The Galaxy Note, known for its large screen and a stylus for note-taking, is one of two Samsung premium phone series -- the other being the more compact Galaxy S which draws in consumers with its state-of-the-art parts. At present, the South Korean tech giant does not have plans to develop a new version of the Galaxy Note for 2021, three sources said, declining to be identified as the plans were not public. Instead, the Galaxy S series' top model, the S21, will have a stylus and the next version of Samsung's foldable phone will be compatible with a stylus, which will be sold separately, one of the sources said.

Elon Musk made rare comments about a new Tesla vehicle to be designed in Berlin, adding that the reason behind the new vehicle program is to attract new talent from Europe: "I think there's a lot of talent, talented designers and engineers, in Europe. And a lot of the best people, they want to work somewhere where they are doing original design work. They don't want to just be doing the European version of something that was designed in California. So, I think it's important in order to attract the best talent to do original design." Electrek reports: Tesla has been putting a lot of efforts into attracting top talent and it has been successful at it in its home country. Furthermore, Musk commented on the vehicle segment that Tesla plans to address with a locally designed vehicle: "In Europe, I think it would make sense to do I guess a compact car -- perhaps a hatchback or something like that. Something that answers "what do most people want?' in a given region. In the US, cars tend to be bigger for personal taste reasons and in Europe, it tends to be smaller. If you try to park in dense urban environments, having a car that fits in tight parking spaces is important."

Musk didn't offer a timeline for Tesla to design and build the new electric car in Germany, but it's not expected to hit the market for at least a few more years as Tesla focuses on bringing the European Model Y to production at Gigafactory Berlin next year. You can watch the interview where Musk makes the new comments here.

szczys writes: When the Raspberry Pi 400 (a keyboard form-factor single board computer) was released last week, the company hinted at overclocking. Testing has now shown that the heat spreader used in that design does an excellent job. The chip was already clocked at 1.8 GHz, versus the stock 1.5 GHz in the original Raspberry Pi 4 Model B board. But it can be safely overclocked to 2.15 GHz, as can the Compute Module 4 with an adequate heat sink.

At 2.0 GHz, the Pi 400 got up above 60 C and showed signs of continuing to warm up even after 50 minutes, but it was nowhere near throttling. So I tried 2.2 GHz, at which speed the CPU refused to boot entirely. Backing down to 2.15 GHz, it ran just fine, so I left it for three hours. It settled in at a cozy 62.5 C, which is warm, but well within specs.

I ran the CM4 with the larger heatsink at 1.8 GHz to give some basis for comparison to the cheap heatsinks. What a big difference a big hunk of aluminum makes! It settled in at a comfortable 68 C or so. Even pushing it up to 2.15 GHz and leaving it for a couple hours, it stayed just a hair below 70C (158F) -- a safe margin on the throttling threshold -- and only a few degrees warmer than that huge heat spreader in the Pi 400.

Further reading: The Verdict After Hackaday's Teardown of a Raspberry Pi 400: 'Very, Very Slick'.

Today, researchers are announcing they've solved one of the questions that's been nagging them over the past decade: what exactly produces the weird phenomena known as fast radio bursts (FRBs)? From a report: As their name implies, FRBs involve a sudden blast of radio-frequency radiation that lasts just a few microseconds. We didn't even know that FRBs existed until 2007 but have since cataloged hundreds of them; some come from sources that repeatedly emit them, while others seem to burst once and go silent. Obviously, you can produce this sort of sudden surge of energy by destroying something. But the existence of repeating sources suggests that at least some of them are produced by an object that survives the event. That's led to a focus on compact objects, like neutron stars and black holes, with a class of neutron stars called magnetars being viewed very suspiciously. Those suspicions have now been borne out, as astronomers have watched a magnetar in our own galaxy sending out an FRB at the same time it emitted pulses of high-energy gamma rays. This doesn't answer all our questions, as we're still not sure how the FRBs are produced or why only some of the gamma-ray outbursts from this magnetar are associated with FRBs. But the confirmation will give us a chance to look more carefully at the extreme physics of magnetars as we try to understand what's going on.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced the Raspberry Pi 400, a compact keyboard with an ARM-based computer built in. Just plug it into a TV or monitor using one of its two micro HDMI ports, insert a microSD card, attach a power cord and mouse, and you've got yourself a basic computer for day-to-day tasks, coding, or media playback. It's available starting today as a standalone machine for $70 or in a bundle including a mouse, power supply, microSD card, HDMI cable, and beginner's guide for $100. From a report: The hope is the Pi 400's form factor, plus these optional bundled items, makes it more approachable and user-friendly. That's important when you're selling an affordable computer, and it's especially important when you're selling an accessible device to help children learn to code. It looks more like a piece of consumer electronics than the basis for a DIY project. [...] Aside from its keyboard and form factor, the Raspberry Pi 400 is a very similar computer to last year's Raspberry Pi 4. It's got a slightly faster quad-core 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A72 CPU, up from 1.5GHz in the Pi 4, 4GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 5.0, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. There are a pair of micro HDMI ports that can each output up to 4K / 60Hz, two USB 3.0 ports, and a single USB 2.0 port. Power is provided via a USB-C port, there's a microSD card slot for storage, and there's a GPIO header for attaching a variety of more niche devices.

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have discovered that "gravitational redshift" exists in two stars orbiting each other in our galaxy about 29,000 light years (200,000 trillion miles) away from Earth. Gravitational redshifts, where light is shifted to redder colors because of gravity, "have tangible impacts on modern life, as scientists and engineers must take them into account to enable accurate positions for GPS," reports Phys.Org. From the report: The intriguing system known as 4U 1916-053 contains two stars in a remarkably close orbit. One is the core of a star that has had its outer layers stripped away, leaving a star that is much denser than the Sun. The other is a neutron star, an even denser object created when a massive star collapses in a supernova explosion. The neutron star (grey) is shown in this artist's impression at the center of a disk of hot gas pulled away from its companion (white star on left). These two compact stars are only about 215,000 miles apart, roughly the distance between the Earth and the Moon. While the Moon orbits our planet once a month, the dense companion star in 4U 1916-053 whips around the neutron star and completes a full orbit in only 50 minutes.

In the new work on 4U 1916-053, the team analyzed X-ray spectra -- that is, the amounts of X-rays at different wavelengths -- from Chandra. They found the characteristic signature of the absorption of X-ray light by iron and silicon in the spectra. In three separate observations with Chandra, the data show a sharp drop in the detected amount of X-rays close to the wavelengths where the iron or silicon atoms are expected to absorb the X-rays. One of the spectra showing absorption by iron -- the dips on the left and right -- is included in the main graphic. An additional graphic shows a spectrum with absorption by silicon. In both spectra the data are shown in grey and a computer model in red.

However, the wavelengths of these characteristic signatures of iron and silicon were shifted to longer, or redder wavelengths compared to the laboratory values found here on Earth (shown with the blue, vertical line for each absorption signature). The researchers found that the shift of the absorption features was the same in each of the three Chandra observations, and that it was too large to be explained by motion away from us. Instead they concluded it was caused by gravitational redshift. The article goes on to explain how gravitational redshifts connect with Einstein's General Theory Relativity: "As predicted by Einstein's theory, clocks under the force of gravity run at a slower rate than clocks viewed from a distant region experiencing weaker gravity. This means that clocks on Earth observed from orbiting satellites run at a slower rate. To have the high precision needed for GPS, this effect needs to be taken into account or there will be small differences in time that would add up quickly, calculating inaccurate positions..."

The findings have been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

With competition among Earth's telecoms providers as fierce as ever, equipment maker Nokia has announced its expansion into a new market, winning a deal to install the first cellular network on the moon. From a report: The Finnish equipment manufacturer said it was selected by NASA to deploy an "ultra-compact, low-power, space-hardened" wireless 4G network on the lunar surface, as part of the US space agency's plan to establish a long-term human presence on the moon by 2030. The $14.1m contract, awarded to Nokia's US subsidiary, is part of Nasa's Artemis programme which aims to send the first woman, and next man, to the moon by 2024. The astronauts will begin carrying out detailed experiments and explorations which the agency hopes will help it develop its first human mission to Mars. Nokia's network equipment will be installed remotely on the moon's surface using a lunar hopper built by Intuitive Machines in late 2022, Nokia said. "The network will self-configure upon deployment," the firm said in a statement, adding that the wireless technology will allow for "vital command and control functions, remote control of lunar rovers, real-time navigation and streaming of high definition video."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: It's about the size of Tesla Inc.'s Powerwall, but can store up to three times as much energy over a longer period. That's the promise of a new hydrogen-based energy-storage system for homes and businesses being developed by Australian startup Lavo Hydrogen Technology Ltd. The technology, developed with scientists at the University of New South Wales, uses power from rooftop solar panels to produce hydrogen from water by electrolysis. The gas is stored in a metal hydride container and converted back into electricity when needed using a fuel cell.

Australia's world-beating rooftop-solar take-up rates make it an ideal early market, said Lavo Chief Executive Officer Alan Yu. The unit will go on sale from November, with installations starting in June 2021, subject to final approvals. The company plans to sell 10,000 units a year by 2022. At about triple the price of a Powerwall, the Lavo unit's main selling point will be its ability to store more energy for longer. Each system will initially cost A$34,750 ($24,620) and will be able to hold 40 kilowatt-hours of power -- enough to supply an average household for more than two days, according to the company. Tesla's Powerwall holds about 13.5 kilowatt-hours. Lavo's Yu acknowledged that the higher cost of the system might initially limit interest to energy-technology enthusiasts initially, but he also sees it as a solution for small off-grid rural villages to replace diesel generators or a compact solution for communities and homes cut off from the main grid by natural disasters such as bushfires.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is launching a new product today -- the Compute Module 4. From a report: If you've been keeping an eye on the Raspberry Pi releases, you know that the flagship Raspberry Pi 4 was released in June 2019. The Compute Module 4 features the same processor, but packed in a compute module for industrial use cases. A traditional Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer with a ton of ports sticking out. Compute Modules are somewhat different. Those system-on-module variants are more compact single-board computers without any traditional port. It lets you create a prototype using a traditional Raspberry Pi, and then order a bunch of Compute Modules to embed in your commercial products. "Over half of the seven million Raspberry Pi units we sell each year go into industrial and commercial applications, from digital signage to thin clients to process automation," Eben Upton wrote on the Raspberry Pi blog. Some things are strictly similar between the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Compute Module 4, such as the 64-bit ARM-based processor with VideoCore VI graphics. This is going to represent a huge upgrade for previous Compute Module customers. In particular, you get much better video performance with 4Kp60 hardware decode for H.265 videos, 1080p60 hardware decode for H.264 videos, 1080p30 hardware encode of H.264 videos. You can also take advantage of the dual HDMI interfaces to connect up to two 4K displays at 60 frames per second.

Apple has announced a new version of its HomePod smart speaker, the $99 HomePod mini -- a smaller version of the speaker that shrinks down the original model into a more compact size. The Verge reports: Like the full-size HomePod, the HomePod mini still features a mesh fabric exterior in both black and white colors, along with a small display on top to show the Siri waveform and volume controls. The new model is more of a short, spherical shape, however, instead of the oblong design of the original. The HomePod mini features one main driver, two passive radiators, and an "acoustic waveguide" on the bottom. The new HomePod mini also features an Apple S5 chip, which Apple says allows for "computational audio" processing to adjust how your music sounds 180 times per second. Multiple HomePod mini speakers can play music in sync and "intelligently" create stereo pairing when placed in the same room. Apple is also using the U1 chips that it debuted in last year's iPhones to create a better Handoff experience later this year. Apple said third-party support is coming later this year for Pandora, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

There's also a new "Intercom" feature that allows for customers with multiple HomePod devices in different rooms to communicate throughout the house. "Intercom messages will also appear on connected iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches (although they won't immediately play out loud like they do on the HomePod mini)," adds The Verge. Preorders for the HomePod Mini start on November 6th and shipping begins on November 16th.

"The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music's previous eras," argues Kyle Devine, in his recent book, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music."

The New Yorker's music critic writes: He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions — some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000... Exploitative regimes of labor enable the production of smartphone and computer components. Conditions at Foxconn factories in China have long been notorious; recent reports suggest that the brutally abused Uighur minority has been pressed into the production of Apple devices. Child laborers are involved in the mining of cobalt, which is used in iPhone batteries. Spotify, the dominant streaming service, needs huge quantities of energy to power its servers. No less problematic are the streaming services' own exploitative practices, including their notoriously stingy royalty payments to working musicians...

When the compact disk entered circulation, in the nineteen-eighties, audio snobs attacked it as a degradation of listening culture — a descent from soulful analog sound to soulless digital. In environmental terms, however, the CD turned out to be somewhat less deleterious [than vinyl records]. Devine observes that polycarbonate, the medium's principal ingredient, is not as toxic as polyvinyl chloride. Early on, the widespread use of polystyrene for CD packaging wiped out that advantage, but a turn toward recyclable materials in recent years has made the lowly CD perhaps the least environmentally harmful format on the market.

In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: "The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like." This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless. In much the same way, it has convinced us not to think too hard about the regime of mass surveillance on which the economics of the industry rests.... At the end of "Decomposed," Devine incorporates his ecology of music into a more comprehensive vision of anthropogenic crisis. "Musically, we may need to question our expectations of infinite access and infinite storage," he writes. Our demand that all of musical history should be available at the touch of a finger has become gluttonous. It may seem a harmless form of consumer desire, but it leaves real scars on the face of the Earth.

JoshuaZ writes: Recent research into the Sparc fusion reactor design make it seem likely to work. Unlike some other fusion reactor designs, Sparc uses high-temperature superconductors which are capable of much stronger magnetic fields in a more closely-confined location. Sparc will be much smaller than large-scale international project ITER, which after multiple delays is now not scheduled to even start fusion reactions by 2035 at the earliest. The Sparc researchers hope that their reactor design will be completed soon enough to have an impact on climate change. The new research on Sparc consists of seven different papers, all of which have favorable estimates for the likelihood of the project succeeding. Some physicists, including Cary Forest, at the University of Wisconsin, were more skeptical. Forest told the New York Times that Sparc's estimates for when their reactor would be ready were probably off by at least a factor of two. "Reading these papers gives me the sense that they're going to have the controlled thermonuclear fusion plasma that we all dream about," said Cary Forest, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin who is not involved in the project. "But if I were to estimate where they're going to be, I'd give them a factor of two that I give to all my grad students when they say how long something is going to take."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Stomach ulcers and other gastric wounds afflict one in eight people worldwide, but common conventional therapies have drawbacks. Now scientists aim to treat such problems by exploring a new frontier in 3-D printing: depositing living cells directly inside the human body. [...] In their effort to treat stomach lesions less invasively, scientists in China wanted to develop a miniature bioprinting robot that could enter the human body with relative ease. The researchers used existing techniques for creating dexterous electronic devices, such as mechanical bees and cockroach-inspired robots, says the study's senior author Tao Xu, a bioengineer at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The resulting micro robot is just 30 millimeters wide -- less than half the width of a credit card -- and can fold to a length of 43 millimeters. Once inside a patient's body, it unfolds to become 59 millimeters long and can start bioprinting. "The team has constructed clever mechanisms that make the system compact when entering the body yet unfurl to provide a large working area once past the tight constrictions at entry," says David Hoelzle, a mechanical engineer at the Ohio State University, who did not take part in the study. In their experiments, the researchers in China fitted the micro robot onto an endoscope (a long tube that can be inserted through bodily openings) and successfully snaked it through a curved pipe into a transparent plastic model of a stomach. There, they used it to print gels loaded with human stomach lining and stomach muscle cells (which were grown in culture by a commercial laboratory) onto a lab dish. The printed cells remained viable and steadily proliferated over the course of 10 days. "This study is the first attempt to combine micro robots and bioprinting together," Xu says. The study has been published in the journal Biofabrication.

The PlayStation 5 will cost $499 for the standard version of Sony's next-gen console and $399 for the PS5 Digital Edition -- the system without an optical disc drive -- when it launches Nov. 12, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced Wednesday during its PlayStation 5 Showcase livestream. From a report: The Nov. 12 release date is for the consoles' launches in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. They'll become available on Nov. 19 for the rest of the world, Sony said. Sony's PS5 price announcement follows similar news from Microsoft, which announced the release date of its $499 Xbox Series X and $299 Xbox Series S earlier in September.