"Chinese company Betavolt has announced an atomic energy battery for consumers with a touted 50-year lifespan," reports Tom's Hardware: The Betavolt BV100 will be the first product to launch using the firm's new atomic battery technology, constructed using a nickel -63 isotope and diamond semiconductor material. Betavolt says that its nuclear battery will target aerospace, AI devices, medical, MEMS systems, intelligent sensors, small drones, and robots — and may eventually mean manufacturers can sell smartphones that never need charging...

[T]he BV100, which is in the pilot stage ahead of mass production, doesn't offer a lot of power. This 15 x 15 x 5mm battery delivers 100 microwatts at 3 volts. It is mentioned that multiple BV100 batteries can be used together in series or parallel depending on device requirements. Betavolt also asserts that it has plans to launch a 1-watt version of its atomic battery in 2025. The new BV100 is claimed to be a disruptive product on two counts. Firstly, a safe miniature atomic battery with 50 years of maintenance-free stamina is a breakthrough. Secondly, Betavolt claims it is the only company in the world with the technology to dope large-size diamond semiconductor materials, as used by the BV100. It is using its 4th Gen diamond semiconductor material here...

[T]he Betavolt BV100 is claimed to be safe for consumers and won't leak radiation even if subjected to gunshots or puncture... Betavolt's battery uses a nickel -63 isotope as the energy source, which decays to a stable isotope of copper. This, plus the diamond semiconductor material, helps the BV100 operate stably in environments ranging from -60 to 120 degrees Celsius, according to the firm...

Betavolt will be well aware of devices with a greater thirst for power and teases that it is investigating isotopes such as strontium- 90, promethium- 147, and deuterium to develop atomic energy batteries with higher power levels and even longer service lives — up to 230 years.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.

At CES 2024 this week, Micron demonstrated its next-gen LPCAMM2 memory modules based on LPDDR5X memory. Not only are they smaller and more powerful than traditional SODIMMs, they can be "serviced during the manufacturing process and upgraded by the user," says Micron. Tom's Hardware reports: Micron's LPCAMM2 are industry-standard memory modules that will be available in 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB capacities as well as with speed bins of up to a 9600 MT/s data transfer rate. These modules are designed to replace conventional SODIMMs as well as soldered-down LPDDR5X memory subsystem while offering the best of both worlds: flexibility, repairability, and upgradeability of modular memory solutions as well as high performance and low power consumption of mobile DRAM. Indeed, a Micron LPCAMM2 module is smaller than a traditional SODIMM despite the fact that it has a 128-bit memory interface and up to 64 GB of LPDDR5X memory onboard. Needless to say, the module is massively smaller than two SODIMM memory sticks that offer a 128-bit memory interface both in terms of height and in terms of physical footprint.

Google formally endorsed the concept of right to repair Thursday and is set to testify in favor of a strong right to repair bill in Oregon later Thursday, a massive step forward for the right to repair movement. 404 Media: "Google believes that users should have more control over repair -- including access to the same documentation, parts and tools that original equipment manufacturer (OEM) repair channels have -- which is often referred to as 'Right to Repair,'" Google's Steven Nickel wrote in a white paper published Thursday.

Crucially, Google specifically says that regulators should ban "parts pairing," which is a tactic used by Apple, John Deere, and other major manufacturers to artificially restrict which repair parts can be used with a given device: "Policies should constrain OEMs from imposing unfair anti-repair practices. For example, parts-pairing, the practice of using software barriers to obstruct consumers and independent repair shops from replacing components, or other restrictive impediments to repair should be discouraged," the white paper says.

Brave has introduced CodeLLM, an AI-powered tool integrated into its search engine that offers results for programming queries. TechCrunch reports: The new AI-powered CodeLLM provides code snippets with step-by-step explanations and citations. CodeLLM is free and now integrated into Brave Search so users don't have to switch apps to access it. CodeLLM is available to all Brave Search users on desktop and mobile. If Brave Search is your default search engine then all you need to do to access CodeLLM is start a search in your browser's address bar. If Brave Search isn't your default search engine, then you need to head to search.brave.com to conduct your search. "CodeLLM automatically detects programming-related queries, so there's no need to generate a special search," Brave explained in the blog post. "On top of the search results, if an answer is possible there will be a widget to trigger the CodeLLM response. The detection of programming queries happens outside of the LLM, by other search components (similar to the ones able to detect queries about the weather, queries that lend themselves well to be summarized, queries about stock prices, etc)."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In April, Microsoft announced that it would stop selling Microsoft-branded computer peripherals. Today, Onward Brands announced that it's giving those discarded Microsoft-stamped gadgets a second life under new branding. Products like the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard will become Incase products with "Designed by Microsoft" branding. Beyond the computer accessories saying "Designed by Microsoft," they should be the same keyboards, mice, webcams, headsets, and speakers, Onward, Incase's parent company, said, per The Verge. Onward said its Incase brand will bring back 23 Microsoft-designed products in 2024 and hopes for availability to start in Q2. Incase also plans to launch an ergonomic keyboard that Microsoft designed but never released. Onward CEO Charlie Tebele told The Verge that there's "potential" for Incase to release even more designs Microsoft never let us see.

The return of Microsoft peripheral designs resurrects (albeit in a new form) a line of computer gear started in 1983 when Microsoft released its first mouse, the Microsoft Mouse. Neither Onward nor Microsoft shared the full terms of their licensing agreement, but Onward claims that Incase will leverage the same supply chain and manufacturing components that Microsoft did, The Verge noted. "Microsoft will still retain ownership of its designs, so it could potentially bring back classic mice or keyboards itself in the future or continue to renew its license to Incase," The Verge reported, pointing out that Onward isn't licensing every single one of Microsoft's computer peripherals. Some classics, like the Intellimouse or its modern iterations, for example, don't make the Incase reboot list. For its part, Microsoft is still "convicted on going under one single" Surface brand, Nancie Gaskill, general manager of Surface, told The Verge. Further reading: Microsoft Adding New Key To PC Keyboards For First Time Since 1994

At CES, LG on Monday unveiled the OLED T, or as the firm describes it, "the first wireless transparent OLED TV," with 4K resolution and LG's wireless transmission tech for audio and video. Engadget: The unit also features a contrast screen that rolls down into a box at its base that you can raise or lower with the press of a bottom. The OLED T is powered by LG's new Alpha 11 AI processor with four times the performance of the previous-gen chip. The extra power offers 70 percent greater graphics performance and 30 percent faster processing speeds, according to the company.

The OLED T model works with the company's Zero Connect Box that debuted on last year's M3 OLED that sends video and audio wirelessly to the TV. You connect all of your streaming devices and game consoles to that box rather than the television. The OLED T's base houses down-firing speakers, which sound surprisingly good, as well as some other components. There are backlights as well, but you can turn those on for a fully-transparent look. LG says the TV will come in standalone, against-the-wall and wall-mounted options. No word on when the TV will go on sale, or how much it would cost.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Technology Networks: At about the size of a pinkie nail, the jellyfish species Cladonema can regenerate an amputated tentacle in two to three days -- but how? Regenerating functional tissue across species, including salamanders and insects, relies on the ability to form a blastema, a clump of undifferentiated cells that can repair damage and grow into the missing appendage. Jellyfish, along with other cnidarians such as corals and sea anemones, exhibit high regeneration abilities, but how they form the critical blastema has remained a mystery until now.

A research team based in Japan has revealed that stem-like proliferative cells -- which are actively growing and dividing but not yet differentiating into specific cell types -- appear at the site of injury and help form the blastema. "Importantly, these stem-like proliferative cells in blastema are different from the resident stem cells localized in the tentacle," said corresponding author Yuichiro Nakajima, lecturer in the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tokyo. "Repair-specific proliferative cells mainly contribute to the epithelium -- the thin outer layer -- of the newly formed tentacle."

The resident stem cells that exist in and near the tentacle are responsible for generating all cellular lineages during homeostasis and regeneration, meaning they maintain and repair whatever cells are needed during the jellyfish's lifetime, according to Nakajima. Repair-specific proliferative cells only appear at the time of injury. "Together, resident stem cells and repair-specific proliferative cells allow rapid regeneration of the functional tentacle within a few days," Nakajima said, noting that jellyfish use their tentacles to hunt and feed. [...] The cellular origins of the repair-specific proliferative cells observed in the blastema remain unclear, though, and the researchers say the currently available tools to investigate the origins are too limited to elucidate the source of those cells or to identify other, different stem-like cells. "It would be essential to introduce genetic tools that allow the tracing of specific cell lineages and the manipulation in Cladonema," Nakajima said. "Ultimately, understanding blastema formation mechanisms in regenerative animals, including jellyfish, may help us identify cellular and molecular components that improve our own regenerative abilities."

The findings were published in the journal PLOS Biology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Microsoft's MS-DOS (and its IBM-branded counterpart, PC DOS) eventually became software juggernauts, powering the vast majority of PCs throughout the '80s and serving as the underpinnings of Windows throughout the '90s. But the software had humble beginnings, as we've detailed in our history of the IBM PC and elsewhere. It began in mid-1980 as QDOS, or "Quick and Dirty Operating System," the work of developer Tim Paterson at a company called Seattle Computer Products (SCP). It was later renamed 86-DOS, after the Intel 8086 processor, and this was the version that Microsoft licensed and eventually purchased.

Last week, Internet Archive user f15sim discovered and uploaded a new-old version of 86-DOS to the Internet Archive. Version 0.1-C of 86-DOS is available for download here and can be run using the SIMH emulator; before this, the earliest extant version of 86-DOS was version 0.34, also uploaded by f15sim. This version of 86-DOS is rudimentary even by the standards of early-'80s-era DOS builds and includes just a handful of utilities, a text-based chess game, and documentation for said chess game. But as early as it is, it remains essentially recognizable as the DOS that would go on to take over the entire PC business. If you're just interested in screenshots, some have been posted by user NTDEV on the site that used to be Twitter.

According to the version history available on Wikipedia, this build of 86-DOS would date back to roughly August of 1980, shortly after it lost the "QDOS" moniker. By late 1980, SCP was sharing version 0.3x of the software with Microsoft, and by early 1981, it was being developed as the primary operating system of the then-secret IBM Personal Computer. By the middle of 1981, roughly a year after 86-DOS began life as QDOS, Microsoft had purchased the software outright and renamed it MS-DOS. Microsoft and IBM continued to co-develop MS-DOS for many years; the version IBM licensed and sold on its PCs was called PC DOS, though for most of their history the two products were identical. Microsoft also retained the ability to license the software to other computer manufacturers as MS-DOS, which contributed to the rise of a market of mostly interoperable PC clones. The PC market as we know it today still more or less resembles the PC-compatible market of the mid-to-late 1980s, albeit with dramatically faster and more capable components.

After falsified records for spare aircraft parts set off a frantic global search for suspect pieces, the aviation industry now faces another daunting task: adapting the archaic paperwork for 100 million components to the digital age. From a report: Since the middle of the year, maintenance shops and aerospace manufacturers have found thousands of engine parts with falsified records linked to a distributor called AOG Technics. Airlines from China to the US and Europe have had to pull planes from service and extract the dubious components, leaving jets grounded and racking up millions of dollars in costs.

The episode has prodded carriers and maintenance shops to bolster scrutiny of their vendors and the parts they receive. And it's given fresh weight to an ongoing push to digitize the paper-based records still prevalent in the industry to document the lifespan of every piece of an aircraft from the time that it's made to when it lands in a scrap heap. But any structural reforms to thwart would-be copycats of the scheme of which AOG is suspected are likely years away. The industry is accustomed to following standardized methods and only making fundamental changes after a detailed and often lengthy examination of potential safety risks -- and costs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: The 12VO power standard (PDF), developed by Intel, is designed to reduce the number of power cables needed to power a modern PC, ultimately reducing cost. While industry uptake of the standard has been slow, a new slew of products from MSI indicates that 12VO is gaining traction.

MSI is gearing up with two 12VO-compliant motherboards, covering both Intel and AMD platforms, and a 12VO Power Supply that it's releasing simultaneously: The Pro B650 12VO WiFi, Pro H610M 12VO, and MSI 12VO PSU power supply are all 'coming soon,' which presumably means they'll officially launch at CES 2024. HardwareLux got a pretty good look at MSI's offerings during its EHA (European Hardware Awards) tech tour, including the 'Project Zero' we covered earlier. One of the noticeable changes is the absence of a 24-pin ATX connector, as the ATX12VO connectors use only ten-pin connectors. The publications also saw a 12VO-compliant FSP power supply in a compact system with a thick graphics card.

A couple of years ago, we reported on FSP 650-watt and 750-watt SFX 12VO power supply. Apart from that, there is a 1x 6-pin ATX12VO termed 'extra board connector' according to its manual and a 1x 8-pin 12V power connector for the CPU. There are two smaller 4-pin connectors that will provide the 5V power needed for SATA drives. It is likely each of these connectors provides power to two SATA-based drives. Intel proposed the ATX12VO standard several years ago, but adoption has been slow until now. This standard is designed to provide 12v exclusively, completely removing a direct 3.3v and 5v supply. The success of the new standard will depend on the wide availability of the motherboard and power supplies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and flew to the edge of space on Tuesday with a package of scientific research and technology demonstration experiments. This was the first flight of Blue Origin's 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle's pressurized capsule. There were no passengers aboard for that mission, and the capsule safely separated from the failed booster and parachuted to a controlled landing.

The flight on Tuesday also didn't carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, lofted 33 payloads from NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday's launch after failing to reach space on the failed New Shepard mission last year. Among these payloads were an experiment to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity and an investigation studying the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions. Blue Origin's capsule, mounted on top of the rocket, also flew 38,000 postcards submitted by students through Club for the Future, the company's nonprofit.

For Tuesday's return-to-flight mission, the New Shepard rocket ignited its BE-3PM engine and climbed away from Blue Origin's remote launch site near Van Horn, Texas, at 10:42 am CST (16:42 UTC). The hydrogen-fueled engine fired for more than two minutes, then shut down as scheduled as the rocket continued coasting upward, reaching an altitude of more than 347,000 feet (106 kilometers). The booster returned for a precision propulsive landing a short distance from the launch pad, and Blue Origin's capsule deployed three parachutes to settle onto the desert floor, completing a 10-minute up-and-down flight. Blue Origin has launched 24 missions with its reusable New Shepard rocket, including six flights carrying people just over the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers above Earth.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Russian troops poured into Ukraine at the start of Vladimir Putin's invasion in February last year, alarm was rising at a flagship Kremlin nuclear project in neighboring Belarus, just a short distance from the European Union's border. Engineers at Rosatom preparing a new 1,200-megawatt reactor, which was not yet connected to the power grid, to generate electricity at the Astravets Nuclear Power Plant detected a mysterious and exceedingly rare problem. Resin was seeping into the primary circuit, threatening to seize up critical components, according to internal documents of the Russian state nuclear corporation seen by Bloomberg.

Control rods and fuel assemblies risked being damaged or broken if the problem persisted when uranium atoms began fissioning. In the worst case, according to people familiar with the problem, accumulation of so-called ion-exchange resin, which regulates the purity of water flowing through plant channels and pipes, could impede reactor control, elevating the risk of a meltdown if something went wrong once it was online. So on February 25, 2022, Rosatom pulled the plug temporarily on its freshly fueled unit in northwest Belarus, delaying its launch.

Nuclear engineers said Rosatom followed safety procedures by interrupting physical startup of the reactor in order to investigate. Still, the problem compounded delays that pushed back commercial operations more than a year. When the reactor was turned on for the first time in March, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed there were problems to state media. "There were certain shortcomings in the construction," he said. "The delay is due to our determination to stick to very high safety standards." The water contamination incident, which was previously flagged by Lithuanian intelligence, is among a series of problems, including shortages of skilled labor, delayed shipments, and defective supplies, that Rosatom faced in recent years and which have continued in the wake of Putin's war against Ukraine, according to the documents and interviews with European officials familiar with the assessments.

Hackers unbricked a train in Poland that had been deliberately disabled by its manufacturer. Now the manufacturer is threatening legal action against the hackers despite evidence it sabotaged the trains. From a report: The manufacturer is also now demanding that the repaired trains immediately be removed from service because they have been "hacked," and thus might now be unsafe, a claim they also cannot substantiate.

The situation is a heavy machinery example of something that happens across most categories of electronics, from phones, laptops, health devices, and wearables to tractors and, apparently, trains. In this case, NEWAG, the manufacturer of the Impuls family of trains, put code in the train's control systems that prevented them from running if a GPS tracker detected that it spent a certain number of days in an independent repair company's maintenance center, and also prevented it from running if certain components had been replaced without a manufacturer-approved serial number.

This anti-repair mechanism is called "parts pairing," and is a common frustration for farmers who want to repair their John Deere tractors without authorization from the company. It's also used by Apple to prevent independent repair of iPhones.

Overclocking AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series blows a fuse, indicating modification. However, AMD has told Tom's Hardware that this does not automatically invalidate the warranty of these top-tier workstation CPUs. From the report: "Threadripper 7000 Series processors do contain a fuse that is blown when overclocking is enabled. To be clear, blowing this fuse does not void your warranty. Statements that enabling an overclocking/overvolting feature will 'void' the processor warranty are not correct. Per AMD's standard Terms of Sale, the warranty excludes any damage that results from overclocking/overvolting the processor. However, other unrelated issues could still qualify for warranty repair/replacement," an AMD representative told Tom's Hardware.

In summation, overclocking your Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7000 or non-Pro processor will not void the warranty -- only damages directly resulting from overclocking will. As always, AMD isn't against overclocking. If it was, the chipmaker wouldn't advertise overclocking support as one of the features of the WRX90 and TRX50 platforms. Only OEM systems lack overclocking support.

Anna Demming reports via Scientific American: [A]lthough so far there's no way to unscramble an egg, in certain carefully controlled scenarios within relatively simple systems, researchers have managed to turn back time. The trick is to create a certain kind of reflection. First, imagine a regular spatial reflection, like one you see in a silver-backed glass mirror. Here reflection occurs because for a ray of light, silver is a very different transmission medium than air; the sudden change in optical properties causes the light to bounce back, like a Ping-Pong ball hitting a wall. Now imagine that instead of changing at particular points in space, the optical properties all along the ray's path change sharply at a specific moment in time. Rather than recoiling in space, the light would recoil in time, precisely retracing its tracks, like the Ping-Pong ball returning to the player who last hit it. This is a "time reflection." Time reflections have fascinated theorists for decades but have proved devilishly tricky to pull off in practice because rapidly and sufficiently changing a material's optical properties is no small task. Now, however, researchers at the City University of New York have demonstrated a breakthrough: the creation of light-based time reflections. To do so, physicist Andrea Alu and his colleagues devised a "metamaterial" with adjustable optical properties that they could tweak within fractions of a nanosecond to halve or double how quickly light passes through. Metamaterials have properties determined by their structures; many are composed of arrays of microscopic rods or rings that can be tuned to interact with and manipulate light in ways that no natural material can. Bringing their power to bear on time reflections, Alu says, revealed some surprises. "Now we are realizing that [time reflections] can be much richer than we thought because of the way that we implement them," he adds. [...]

The device Alu and his collaborators developed is essentially a waveguide that channels microwave-frequency light. A densely spaced array of switches along the waveguide connects it to capacitor circuits, which can dynamically add or remove material for the light to encounter. This can radically shift the waveguide's effective properties, such as how easily it allows light to pass through. "We are not changing the material; we are adding or subtracting material," Alu says. "That is why the process can be so fast." Time reflections come with a range of counterintuitive effects that have been theoretically predicted but never demonstrated with light. For instance, what is at the beginning of the original signal will be at the end of the reflected signal -- a situation akin to looking at yourself in a mirror and seeing the back of your head. In addition, whereas a standard reflection alters how light traverses space, a time reflection alters light's temporal components -- that is, its frequencies. As a result, in a time-reflected view, the back of your head is also a different color. Alu and his colleagues observed both of these effects in the team's device. Together they hold promise for fueling further advances in signal processing and communications -- two domains that are vital for the function of, say, your smartphone, which relies on effects such as shifting frequencies.

Just a few months after developing the device, Alu and his colleagues observed more surprising behavior when they tried creating a time reflection in that waveguide while shooting two beams of light at each other inside it. Normally colliding beams of light behave as waves, producing interference patterns where their overlapping peaks and troughs add up or cancel out like ripples on water (in "constructive" or "destructive" interference, respectively). But light can, in fact, act as a pointlike projectile, a photon, as well as a wavelike oscillating field -- that is, it has "wave-particle duality." Generally a particular scenario will distinctly elicit just one behavior or the other, however. For instance, colliding beams of light don't bounce off each other like billiard balls! But according to Alu and his team's experiments, when a time reflection occurs, it seems that they do. The researchers achieved this curious effect by controlling whether the colliding waves were interfering constructively or destructively -- whether they were adding or subtracting from each other -- when the time reflection occurred. By controlling the specific instant when the time reflection took place, the scientists demonstrated that the two waves bounce off each other with the same wave amplitudes that they started with, like colliding billiard balls. Alternatively they could end up with less energy, like recoiling spongy balls, or even gain energy, as would be the case for balls at either end of a stretched spring. "We can make these interactions energy-conserving, energy-supplying or energy-suppressing," Alu says, highlighting how time reflections could provide a new control knob for applications that involve energy conversion and pulse shaping, in which the shape of a wave is changed to optimize a pulse's signal.

Aaron Klotz, reporting for Tom's Hardware: Intel recently published a new playbook titled "Core Truths" that put AMD under direct fire for utilizing its older Zen 2 CPU architecture in its latest Ryzen 7000 mobile series CPU product stack. Intel later removed the document, but we have the slides below. The playbook is designed to educate customers about AMD's product stack and even calls it "snake oil."

Intel's playbook specifically talks about AMD's latest Ryzen 5 7520U, criticizing the fact it features AMD's Zen 2 architecture from 2019 even though it sports a Ryzen 7000 series model name. Further on in the playbook, the company accuses AMD of selling "half-truths" to unsuspecting customers, stressing that the future of younger kid's education needs the best CPU performance from the latest and greatest CPU technologies made today. To make its point clear, Intel used images in its playbook referencing "snake oil" and images of used car salesmen.

The playbook also criticizes AMD's new naming scheme for its Ryzen 7000 series mobile products, quoting ArsTechnica: "As a consumer, you're still intended to see the number 7 and think, 'Oh, this is new.'" Intel also published CPU benchmark comparisons of the 7520U against its 13th Gen Core i5-1335U to back up its points. Unsurprisingly, the 1335U was substantially faster than the Zen 2 counterpart.

For circuit-based quantum computations, the achievable circuit complexity is limited by the quality of timekeeping. That's according to a new analysis published in the journal Physical Review Letters exploring "the effect of imperfect timekeeping on controlled quantum dynamics."

An announcement from the Vienna University of Technology explains its significance. "The research team was able to show that since no clock has an infinite amount of energy available (or generates an infinite amount of entropy), it can never have perfect resolution and perfect precision at the same time. This sets fundamental limits to the possibilities of quantum computers."

ScienceAlert writes: While the issue isn't exactly pressing, our ability to grow systems based on quantum operations from backroom prototypes into practical number-crunching behemoths will depend on how well we can reliably dissect the days into ever finer portions. This is a feat the researchers say will become increasingly more challenging...

"Time measurement always has to do with entropy," says senior author Marcus Huber, a systems engineer who leads a research group in the intersection of Quantum Information and Quantum Thermodynamics at the Vienna University of Technology. In their recently published theorem, Huber and his team lay out the logic that connects entropy as a thermodynamic phenomenon with resolution, demonstrating that unless you've got infinite energy at your fingertips, your fast-ticking clock will eventually run into precision problems. Or as the study's first author, theoretical physicist Florian Meier puts it, "That means: Either the clock works quickly or it works precisely — both are not possible at the same time...."

[F]or technologies like quantum computing, which rely on the temperamental nature of particles hovering on the edge of existence, timing is everything. This isn't a big problem when the number of particles is small. As they increase in number, the risk any one of them could be knocked out of their quantum critical state rises, leaving less and less time to carry out the necessary computations... This appears to be the first time researchers have looked at the physics of timekeeping itself as a potential obstacle. "Currently, the accuracy of quantum computers is still limited by other factors, for example the precision of the components used or electromagnetic fields," says Huber. "But our calculations also show that today we are not far from the regime in which the fundamental limits of time measurement play the decisive role."

Long-time Slashdot reader nmb3000 writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a new white paper, Privacy First: A Better Way to Address Online Harms , to propose an alternative to the "often ill-conceived, bills written by state, federal, and international regulators to tackle a broad set of digital topics ranging from child safety to artificial intelligence." According to the EFF, "these scattershot proposals to correct online harm are often based on censorship and news cycles. Instead of this chaotic approach that rarely leads to the passage of good laws, we propose another solution."
The EFF writes:

Tuesday the New York Times reported that while hosting the global climate summit, the United Arab Emirates also hoped to lobby for oil and gas deals around the world.

But Friday the United Arab Emirates announced that they'd also started a $30 billion climate fund, reports Reuters, and that fund "aims to attract $250 billion of investment by the end of the decade."

The New York Times notes the fund started just months ago, and "at least 20 percent of the funds, would be earmarked for projects in the developing world, where it is especially difficult to finance clean energy projects because interest rates are high and lenders shy away from what they perceive as risky investments."

The Washington Post notes that "It immediately becomes one of the world's largest climate-focused investment funds." "This is a big deal," said Mona Dajani, global head of renewables, energy and infrastructure at the law firm Shearman and Sterling. "We have seen other programs previously, but not at this level. They were too scattered, too small, not aligned to the broader financial sector."

The lack of cash feeds into other challenges that can make it impossible to scale up clean energy in some countries. Without a steady pipeline of projects, there are no established supply chains, and nations find themselves locked out of markets for key components that are in high demand elsewhere, such as solar cells and critical minerals used to make giant batteries that store renewable power. The Global South will need an immense amount of such battery storage by the end of the decade, according to the Rockefeller Foundation, enough to store about as much power as is produced by 90 large nuclear plants. The storage is used to bottle wind and solar power and distribute it back into grids after dark and when the wind dies down.
The Post also reports that "the money to fund the projects will come largely from oil revenue." While the UAE framed its initiative as a call to global action, it is at least partly geared toward generating returns. It is one of several forays the UAE is making into clean-energy finance as it seeks to diversify its economy amid predictions the demand for oil will slump in coming years... The new initiative puts a spotlight on the UAE's evolving role in the fight against climate change. The country is at once one of the world's biggest contributors to warming, pumping massive amounts of oil into the global economy, while also using its fossil fuel wealth to put itself on the vanguard of energy innovation.

"Two articles from Electrek and InsideEVs describe Hyundai and Kia's new 'Uni Wheel' drive system that could revolutionize EV design," writes longtime Slashdot reader Uncle_Meataxe. From a report: Described by its makers as a "paradigm-shifting vehicle drive system," the Uni Wheel moves the main drive system components to the vacant space within an EVs wheel hubs. The approach utilizes a planetary gear configuration consisting of a sun gear in the center, four pinion gears on each side, and a ring gear surrounding everything. Traditional ICE vehicles utilize CV joints, but by moving them closer to the wheels requires a short drive train length and as a result, a decrease in efficiency and durability -- especially over bumpy terrain. Hyundai and Kia's Uni Wheel system on the other hand, can transmit power with almost zero changes to efficiency, regardless of wheel movement. "Advantages include more platform space and more room within an EV's interior," adds Uncle_Meataxe. "When this system may be integrated into an actual EV remains unclear, but Kia and Hyundai have already registered eight patents related to the technology." You can learn more about the new drive system via an instructional video on YouTube.