"An EV motor has been developed that uses no magnets, thus lessening the United States' reliance on Chinese magnets (which make up 97% of the world's supply)," writes Slashdot reader nickwinlund77, adding: "I wonder what the motor's performance is like on high grade roads?" New Atlas reports: German company Mahle has just announced a new electric motor that sounds like it solves a lot of problems in a very tidy manner. The new Mahle design uses no magnets, instead using powered coils in its rotor. Unlike previous efforts, it transfers power to the spinning rotor using contactless induction -- so there are basically no wear surfaces. This should make it extremely durable -- not that electric motors have a reputation for needing much maintenance. The lack of expensive metals should make it cheaper to manufacture than typical permanent-magnet motors. Mahle says the ability to tune and change the parameters of the rotor's magnetism instead of being stuck with what a permanent magnet offers has allowed its engineers to achieve efficiencies above 95 percent right through the range of operating speeds -- "a level that has only been achieved by Formula E racing cars." It's also particularly efficient at high speeds, so it could help squeeze a few extra miles out of a battery in normal use. The company says it'll scale nicely from sizes relevant to compact cars up to commercial vehicles.

"Our magnet-free motor can certainly be described as a breakthrough, because it provides several advantages that have not yet been combined in a product of this type," says Dr. Martin Berger, Mahle's VP of Corporate Research and Advanced Engineering. "As a result, we can offer our customers a product with outstanding efficiency at a comparatively low cost." Mass production is about two and a half years away, according to IEEE Spectrum, and Mahle has not yet nominated which auto manufacturers it's dealing with, but test samples are already starting to circulate.

The country's poorer communities often lack access to tech equipment. Teams that recruit low-income players are providing another path to economic mobility. From a report: On the outskirts of the most diverse cities in Brazil lie neighborhoods that climb steep hills and stretch for miles. These neighborhoods often have a precarious structure -- houses built side by side, with no apparent order, and only small corridors that are poorly lit. It is in these favelas that thousands of Brazil's youth dedicate hours and hours of their days to esports, with the dream of making it big in the industry. Projections point to a market that, in 2023, should surpass $1.5 billion, and in Brazil even traditional football teams such as Vasco da Gama and Flamengo have begun to assemble esports teams in games such as League of Legends and Pro Evolution Soccer. The top athletes win millions of dollars in prizes, while the average salary of a professional League of Legends player exceeds $400,000 per year.

Brazil is an extremely unequal country with an immense social abyss -- about 25 percent of the Brazilian population is considered poor, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Social inequality in Brazil, according to the Gini index (used by the World Bank to measure inequality among countries or groups of people), has increased in recent years. In regions like the northeast, almost half the population lives in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 a day. This inequality is also reflected in the country's esports industry. The basic items an esports athlete or streamer needs -- access to the internet and quality equipment -- is not always available for those living in the favelas. In an extremely competitive environment where fractions of a second can make all the difference and lead to a victory, slow internet and outdated equipment can be fatal to success. There are immense differences between those living in the favela and those in the "asphalt" -- that is, people living outside poor communities, who have access to better schools, health services, and greater purchasing power, and who often frown upon those from the favela.

A user shares a report from Apple Insider: Researchers are working on a cabling system that could provide data transfer speeds multiple times faster than existing USB connections using an extremely thin polymer cable, in a system that echoes the design path of Thunderbolt. Presented at the February IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the research aims to develop a connection type that offers far better connectivity than current methods. In part, it aims to accomplish this by replacing copper wiring with something else.

Copper is typically used for wires like USB and HDMI to handle data transfers, but it requires a lot of power to work for high levels of data transmission. "There's a fundamental tradeoff between the amount of energy burned and the rate of information exchanged," said MIT alumni and lead author Jack Holloway. While the "increasingly bulky and costly" copper could be replaced by fiber optic cables, that introduces its own issues. As silicon chips have difficulty dealing with photons, this makes the interconnection between the cable and the computers more challenging to optimize. Combining the benefits of copper and fiber optic conduits, a plastic polymer is used by the researchers. This makes it cheaper to manufacture than copper wires, which could be an attractive proposition for cable producers.

The polymer can also use sub-terahertz electromagnetic signals, which is more energy-efficient than copper at high data loads. It is believed this efficiency brings it close to that of fiber optic systems, but crucially with better compatibility with silicon chips. Low-cost chips are paired with the polymer conduit that can generate the high-frequency signals powerful enough to transmit into the conduit directly. As such, the system is expected to be manufactured with standard methods, which also makes it cost-effective to produce. The cables themselves can also be extremely thin, with the cross-sectional area of the interconnect measuring 0.4 millimeters by a quarter millimeter, smaller than typical copper variants. That small hair-like cable can be used to transport data over three different parallel channels, enabling it to achieve a total bandwidth of 105 gigabits per second. Bundling conduits together could bring the cables into the terabit-per-second range, while still remaining at a reasonable cost.

Nvidia has shared its Q4 2021 earnings, and despite the company's GPUs being in extremely low supply, it didn't seem to hurt how much money the company made. From a report: In fact, it reported a record $5 billion in revenue, which is up 61 percent year-over-year. What's more impressive is that Nvidia expects to make another $5 billion in revenue during Q1 2022. This positive outlook is surprising given that Q1 is generally slower than other quarters, even for the biggest tech companies, as it follows the rush of people buying lots of products during the holiday period. It's generally a slower period in general for product releases across tech and gaming. Also, let's not forget the GPU shortage is still happening. Nvidia reiterated that sparse supply will continue through the next quarter, but that's likely factored into its rosy revenue prediction.

Nvidia says it expects most of that $5 billion revenue estimate in Q1 2022 to come from the gaming market, despite being the segment it's currently having the toughest time serving. Since the launch of the RTX 30-series desktop graphics cards, leading with the RTX 3080, 3090, 3070, and followed by other products, Nvidia hasn't been able to meet the demand -- though it's not the only company affected. AMD has also struggled, perhaps more than Nvidia, to keep a steady stock of graphics cards heading to retailers.

China's Chang'e spacecraft has lifted off from Oceanus Procellarum at 10:10 EST Thursday, carrying with it the first fresh lunar samples since 1976. Space.com reports: Six minutes later, the ascent spacecraft achieved lunar orbit, marking a huge milestone in the Chang'e 5 mission to return lunar samples to Earth. The ascent vehicle's job now is to meet up with the Chang'e 5 orbiter while still circling the moon, and then transfer its precious cargo to a return capsule for the journey home. That next stage is an extremely challenging rendezvousing and docking between the small ascent vehicle and the Chang'e 5 orbiter while orbiting the moon. The activity needs to be automated due to the time delay in communicating across the roughly 236,000 miles (380,000 kilometers) between the Earth and the moon.

The two spacecraft will begin a final approach sometime on Saturday (Nov. 5)and complete the docking 3.5 hours later. If all goes well, China will then prepare for the final leg of the journey to deliver the first lunar samples to Earth in 44 years. The lunar samples won't be coming home immediately however. The Chang'e 5 spacecraft will need to wait in lunar orbit for a number of days for a narrow window in which to fire its engines and head for Earth.

The careful timing of this trans-Earth injection maneuver will allow the orbiter to deliver the reentry module to Earth at the precise time in order to land in Siziwang Banner, Inner Mongolia -- the same site used by the China National Space Administration to return astronauts home aboard Shenzhou spacecraft. The journey back to Earth will last 112 hours -- just over four and a half days -- before the reentry attempt. As spacecraft returning from the moon are traveling faster than those reentering from low Earth orbit, such as trips from the International Space Station, the Chang'e 5 reentry module will bounce off the atmosphere once to help it slow down before taking a final, fiery plunge to Earth.

hey! writes: Pfizer's BNT162b2 vaccine must be stored at a constant -100F/-70C temperature, presenting a logistical nightmare for hospitals, which don't normally have freezers that go that low. This is because it is an mRNA vaccine, and mRNA is unstable unless stored at extremely low temperatures. Pfizer will distribute doses in dry-ice packed "suitcase" shipping containers containing 1,000-5000 doses, but these cases only work for ten days, during which they may be opened only twice a day, each time for less than three minutes. This will pose a special challenge for rural hospitals, who can't afford specialized freezers; they'll be forced to distribute hundreds of doses a day from the dry ice packed shipping crates to avoid their stocks going bad. Rural vaccination is further complicated by the fact that the vaccine must be given in two doses spaced three weeks apart.

The Moderna MRNA-1273 vaccine candidate is also an mRNA vaccine, but can be stored at -4F/-20C. This is because Moderna has experience in stabilizing mRNA. MRNA-1273 can be stored in a regular hospital freezer, making it a better candidate for smaller hospitals and clinics, although nationwide distribution in the volumes of doses needed is still going to take an unprecedented effort. If both vaccines are approved at the same time, we'll likely see both rolled out in parallel, with smaller hospitals and clinics getting the Moderna vaccine and higher volume facilities getting the Pfizer vaccine.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via VICE: Like other gig work giants, DoorDash has admitted in its IPO documents that its own business model -- and the way it treats and pays workers -- are major "risks" to its business. In its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchanges Commission, there's little to no evidence DoorDash can achieve let alone sustain profitability (in fact, that it may never be profitable is another "risk"), and lots of evidence that its business model is largely based on taking advantage of both restaurants and drivers.

Included in "risks" are the two following statements, which are wonders to behold: "Our success, or perceived success, and increased visibility may also drive some businesses that perceive our business model negatively to raise their concerns to local policymakers and regulators. These businesses and their trade association groups or other organizations may take actions and employ significant resources to shape the legal and regulatory regimes in jurisdictions where we may have, or seek to have, a market presence in an effort to change such legal and regulatory regimes in ways intended to adversely affect or impede our business and the ability of merchants, consumers, and Dashers to use our platform." What this means is that restaurants might want DoorDash to take less of a cut from their commission, which is understandable. Even with cuts to DoorDash's commission rates during the pandemic, many restaurants are still struggling to scrape by.

And then there's this, which explicitly says the company's own pay model for drivers is a risk to its further existence: "Our ability to provide a cost-effective local logistics platform is also dependent on Dasher pay, which is a significant cost and subject to a number of risks..." That's a mouthful, but says that DoorDash's pay model for delivery drivers is algorithmic, which leads to an "inconsistency in earnings" which is likely to piss off both its workforce and its customers to the point where it may be challenged both in court and by regulators, and reported on in the media. This problem is even worse when you consider the labor patterns of gig companies: they require a large reserve of idle labor to keep wait times low and to fight extremely high turnover rates, but they also rely on a core of full-time gig workers to do the vast majority of work. As a result, the workers hurt the most by this "inconsistency in earnings" are the most precarious and vulnerable workers who rely on DoorDash to make ends meet.

"Singapore will be the first country in the world to use facial verification in its national identity scheme," reports the BBC: The biometric check will give Singaporeans secure access to both private and government services. The government's technology agency says it will be "fundamental" to the country's digital economy. It has been trialled with a bank and is now being rolled out nationwide. It not only identifies a person but ensures they are genuinely present. "You have to make sure that the person is genuinely present when they authenticate, that you're not looking at a photograph or a video or a replayed recording or a deepfake," said Andrew Bud, founder and chief executive of iProov, the UK company that is providing the technology...

"Face recognition has all sorts of social implications. Face verification is extremely benign," said Mr Bud. Privacy advocates, however, contend that consent is a low threshold when dealing with sensitive biometric data. "Consent does not work when there is an imbalance of power between controllers and data subjects, such as the one observed in citizen-state relationships," said Ioannis Kouvakas, legal officer with London-based Privacy International....

GovTech Singapore thinks the technology will be good for businesses, because they can use it without having to build the infrastructure themselves. Additionally, Kwok Quek Sin, senior director of national digital identity at GovTech Singapore, said it is better for privacy because companies won't need to collect any biometric data. In fact, they would only see a score indicating how close the scan is to the image the government has on file.
In 1993 William Gibson called Singapore "Disneyland with the death penalty... a relentlessly G-rated experience, micromanaged by a state that has the look and feel of a very large corporation. If IBM had ever bothered to actually possess a physical country, that country might have had a lot in common with Singapore."

A team of scientists from the Singapore University of Technology and Design discovered that, using simple chemistry, the organic polymer chitin -- contained in the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans -- can easily be transformed into a viable building material for basic tools and habitats. The findings have been published in the journal PLOS ONE. Ars Technica reports: "The technology was originally developed to create circular ecosystems in urban environments," said co-author Javier Fernandez. "But due to its efficiency, it is also the most efficient and scalable method to produce materials in a closed artificial ecosystem in the extremely scarce environment of a lifeless planet or satellite." [T]he authors of the current paper point out that most terrestrial manufacturing strategies that could fit the bill typically require specialized equipment and a hefty amount of energy. However, "Nature presents successful strategies of life adapting to harsh environments," the authors wrote. "In biological organisms, rigid structures are formed by integrating inorganic filler proceed from the environment at a low energy cost (e.g., calcium carbonate) and incorporated into an organic matrix (e.g., chitin) produced at a relatively high metabolic cost."

Fernandez and his colleagues maintain that chitin is likely to be part of any planned artificial ecosystem because it is so plentiful in nature. It's the primary component of fish scales and fungal cell walls, for example, as well as the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects. In fact, insects have already been targeted as a key source of protein for a possible Martian base. And since the chitin component of insects has limited nutritional value for humans, extracting it to make building materials "does not hamper or compete with the food supply," the authors wrote. "Rather, it is a byproduct of it."

A reader shares some news from Sweden's Linköping University: The Earth receives many times more energy from the sun than we humans can use. This energy is absorbed by solar energy facilities, but one of the challenges of solar energy is to store it efficiently, such that the energy is available when the sun is not shining. This led scientists at Linköping University to investigate the possibility of capturing and storing solar energy in a new molecule.

"Our molecule can take on two different forms: a parent form that can absorb energy from sunlight, and an alternative form in which the structure of the parent form has been changed and become much more energy-rich, while remaining stable. This makes it possible to store the energy in sunlight in the molecule efficiently", says Bo Durbeej, professor of computational physics in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology at LinkÃping University, and leader of the study...

It's common in research that experiments are done first and theoretical work subsequently confirms the experimental results, but in this case the procedure was reversed. Bo Durbeej and his group work in theoretical chemistry, and conduct calculations and simulations of chemical reactions. This involves advanced computer simulations, which are performed on supercomputers at the National Supercomputer Centre, NSC, in Linköping. The calculations showed that the molecule the researchers had developed would undergo the chemical reaction they required, and that it would take place extremely fast, within 200 femtoseconds. Their colleagues at the Research Centre for Natural Sciences in Hungary were then able to build the molecule, and perform experiments that confirmed the theoretical prediction...

"Most chemical reactions start in a condition where a molecule has high energy and subsequently passes to one with a low energy. Here, we do the opposite — a molecule that has low energy becomes one with high energy. We would expect this to be difficult, but we have shown that it is possible for such a reaction to take place both rapidly and efficiently", says Bo Durbeej.

The researchers will now examine how the stored energy can be released from the energy-rich form of the molecule in the best way...

The international R&D hub Imec has made a millimetre-wave motion detection radar integrated in a standard 28nm CMOS chip, reports Electronics Weekly, adding that it consumes just 62 mW,"making the sensor integrable into small, battery-powered devices..." The radar operates in the frequency band around 60 GHz, a license-free ISM band that can be used for new IoT applications for industrial and medical purposes... "Being extremely compact and energy efficient, the 60 GHz radar system can be integrated in smart health devices such as smartphones, health monitoring systems or wearables", says Barend van Liempd, program manager radar at imec.

"The radar enables such devices to sense their surroundings, which will shape the way in which we control and use these devices. For instance, a phone with integrated radar on your bedside table can monitor sleep quality by contactless tracking of breathing rate and heart rate variability. The radar is as well suited for classification of other physical activities, which will open a new range of smart applications in the context of personalized health, baby monitoring, sports, elderly care, patient monitoring, nurse efficiency or worker safety."

"Our prototype shows that radar technology is becoming ready for the next big step: the use in battery-powered devices. Now, we are looking for companies that want to exploit these ideas to enter the market by realizing new radar solutions", says Kathleen Philips, Director IoT at imec.
"It is thought to be useful for detecting finger and hand motion, heartbeat and a person's speed and position..." writes Joe2020, "but I'm sure Slashdot readers can think of a variety of other uses for it."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Researchers at the University of York traced the source of underarm odor to a particular enzyme in a certain microbe that lives in the human armpit. To prove the enzyme was the chemical culprit, the scientists transferred it to an innocent member of the underarm microbe community and noted -- to their delight -- that it too began to emanate bad smells. The work paves the way for more effective deodorants and antiperspirants, the scientists believe, and suggests that humans may have inherited the mephitic microbes from our ancient primate ancestors.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, the York scientists describe how they delved inside Staphylococcus hominis to learn how it made thioalcohols. They discovered an enzyme that converts Cys-Gly-3M3SH released by apocrine glands into the pungent thioalcohol, 3M3SH. The bacteria take up the molecule and eat some of it, but the rest they spit out, and that is one of the key molecules we recognize as body odor. Having discovered the "BO enzyme", the researchers confirmed its role by transferring it into Staphylococcus aureus, a common relative that normally has no role in body odor. "Just by moving the gene in, we got Staphylococcus aureus that made body odor," one of the researchers said. "Our noses are extremely good at detecting these thioalcohols at extremely low thresholds, which is why they are really important for body odor. They have a very characteristic cheesy, oniony smell that you would recognize. They are incredibly pungent."

Having launched preliminary 5G services using millimeter wave hardware in late 2018, AT&T has technically been operating a 5G network for a year and a half -- but between the "5G+" network's few connection points and extremely limited hardware support, most people in the U.S. couldn't actually use it. Today, AT&T says its low band 5G network is officially available nationwide, reaching a potential 205 million customers across 395 coverage markets. From a report: The carrier is also making 5G service available to a wider range of customers at no additional charge. On a positive note, AT&T is now the second U.S. carrier with a nationwide 5G network, joining T-Mobile, which launched a similarly large offering in December 2019 using long distance but slow low band towers. But T-Mobile's low band 5G peaks at speeds around 225Mbps, nowhere near the 2Gbps peaks seen in Verizon's all but unusably small 5G network, while promising only a 20% improvement over 4G speeds on average. AT&T's low band 5G network is expected to deliver comparable performance but is using a technology called DSS to dynamically split prior 4G spectrum between 4G and 5G phones as user demand fluctuates.

Scott K. Johnson writes via Ars Technica: One of the most important numbers in climate science is 3C. This isn't about a projection of future warming or the impacts that come with it, though. It's about how much warming you get if you double the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. That value can be made more general as a metric known as "climate sensitivity," which describes how much warming you get for a given amount of emissions. If the number is small, we can burn a lot of fossil fuels with minimal consequences. If the number is extremely high, emissions are extraordinarily dangerous. This number is commonly defined against a doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the air, in part because CO2's effect is logarithmic and each doubling is roughly equivalent. Calculations of this value go back to the turn of the 20th century, when the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius came up with numbers in the 4-6C range. But a major milestone was reached in 1979, when a group of scientists released a climate report that included this value. The scientists wrote, "We estimate the most probable global warming for a doubling of CO2 to be near 3C with a probable error of +/-1.5C."

Despite all the scientific progress since then, that answer (1.5-4.5ÂC) has held up. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report tightened it up a bit to 2.0-4.5C, but then a handful of studies released just before their 2013 report caused confusion that led to a return to the old 1.5-4.5C range. Shrinking that range has been a goal of climate scientists, though the problem has proved stubborn. In a notable step forward, a group of 25 climate scientists published a study this week that presents a new synthesis of the evidence. And they conclude that a narrower range is warranted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: In new guidance for mathematical modelers and public health officials, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is estimating that about a third of coronavirus infections are asymptomatic. The CDC also says its "best estimate" is that 0.4% of people who show symptoms and have Covid-19 will die, and the agency estimates that 40% of coronavirus transmission is occurring before people feel sick.

The numbers are part of five planning scenarios that "are being used by mathematical modelers throughout the federal government," according to the CDC. Four of those scenarios represent "the lower and upper bounds of disease severity and viral transmissibility." The fifth scenario is the CDC's "current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States." In that scenario, the agency described its estimate that 0.4% of people who feel sick with Covid-19 will die. For people age 65 and older, the CDC puts that number at 1.3%. For people 49 and under, the agency estimated that 0.05% of symptomatic people will die. The CDC cautions that these numbers are based on real data collected by the agency before April 29 and are subject to change. Still, the "current best estimate" number of 0.4% is significantly lower than the 3.4% mortality rate the World Health Organization warned in early March.

"As I see it, the 'best estimate' is extremely optimistic, and the 'worst case' scenario is fairly optimistic even as a best estimate. One certainly wants to consider worse scenarios," biologist Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington told CNN. "By introducing these as the official parameter sets for modeling efforts, CDC is influencing the models produced by federal agencies, but also the broader scientific discourse because there will be some pressure to use the CDC standard parameter sets in modeling papers going forward," he said. "Given that these parameter sets underestimate fatality by a substantial margin compared to current scientific consensus, this is deeply problematic."

UPDATE (5/28): An epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security also contradict the CDC's low numbers, saying that after reviewing new widespread testing, "The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%," according to NPR.

"But even a virus with a fatality rate less than 1% presents a formidable threat, Rivers says."

Further reading: Many Scientists Warn CDC's New Death Rate Estimates Far Too Low.

The mystery of some lava-like flows on Mars has been solved by scientists who say they are caused not by lava but by mud. Phys.Org reports: There are tens of thousands of these landforms on the Martian surface, often situated where there are massive channels scoured into the surface by ancient liquids flowing downstream. These channels are extremely long, extending many hundreds of kilometers in length and usually more than dozens of kilometers wide. They are believed to be the result of massive floods involving huge bodies of water comparable to the largest floods ever known to have occurred on Earth. When the water seeps into the subsurface it can emerge again as mud.

A European team of researchers has now simulated the movement of mud on the surface of Mars, with the results published in Nature Geoscience. [...] Using the Mars Chamber at the Open University, the scientists recreated the surface temperature and atmospheric pressure on Mars as part of a simulation of conditions on both Earth and Mars. The scientists performed experiments at low pressure and at extremely cold temperatures (-20C) to recreate the Martian environment. They found that free flowing mud under Martian conditions behaves differently from on Earth, because of rapid freezing and the formation of an icy crust. This is because water is not stable and begins to boil and evaporate. The evaporation removes latent heat from the mud, eventually causing it to freeze.

Under Martian conditions, the experimental mud flows formed similar shapes to "pahoehoe" lava frequently occurring on Hawaii or Iceland on Earth, which cools down to form smooth undulating surfaces. In the experiment, this happened when liquid mud spilled from ruptures in the frozen crust, then refroze. However, under terrestrial atmospheric pressure, the experimental mud flows did not form lava shapes, did not expand, and had no icy crust, even under very cold conditions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As many as a billion mobile phone owners around the world will be unable to use the smartphone-based system proposed by Apple and Google to track whether they have come into contact with people infected with the coronavirus, industry researchers estimate. The figure includes many poorer and older people -- who are also among the most vulnerable to COVID-19 -- demonstrating a "digital divide" within a system that the two tech firms have designed to reach the largest possible number of people while also protecting individuals' privacy.

The particular kind of Bluetooth "low energy" chips that are used to detect proximity between devices without running down the phone's battery are absent from a quarter of smartphones in active use globally today, according to analysts at Counterpoint Research. A further 1.5 billion people still use basic or "feature" phones that do not run iOS or Android at all. "In all, close to 2 billion [mobile users] will not be benefiting from this initiative globally," said Neil Shah, analyst at Counterpoint. "And most of these users with the incompatible devices hail from the lower-income segment or from the senior segment which actually are more vulnerable to the virus." Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight, estimates that only around two-thirds of adults would have a compatible phone. "And that's the UK, which is an extremely advanced smartphone market," he said. "In India, you could have 60-70 percent of the population that is ruled out immediately."

The report adds: "Counterpoint Research is more optimistic, estimating that 88 percent compatibility in developed markets such as the US, UK, and Japan, while about half of people in India would own the necessary handset."

After years of development and hype, Google's long-rumored push into video games arrived last November, with the launch of Google Stadia. Google Stadia isn't a game console, nor is it a game platform, really -- it's a digital storefront run by Google where you can buy individual games. It's a hugely ambitious new platform, and it aimed to be the Netflix of gaming. What makes Stadia so ambitious? Rather than downloading games or playing them off a Blu-ray disc, Stadia streams games to you wherever you are, like Netflix streams movies and TV shows. However, four months after Stadia's launch, the service is still extremely light on games: Just 28 titles are available as of this week. From a report: We spoke with game developers and publishers who said there are two main reasons their games aren't on Stadia: Google didn't offer them enough money, and they don't trust the mercurial company to stick with gaming in the long term. "We were approached by the Stadia team," one prominent indie developer told me. "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent," they said. "That's the short of it." It's a statement we heard echoed by several prominent indie developers and two publishing executives we spoke with for this piece. "It's that there isn't enough money there," one of the publishing executives we spoke with said. The offer was apparently "so low that it wasn't even part of the conversation." The "incentive" isn't solely financial, but it's the main part of the equation. "When we're looking at these types of deals," another prominent indie developer said, "We're looking at 'Is this enough money where we have the resources to make what we want, or is this an exclusivity deal that gives us security?'" they said.

Lambda School claims 86% of grads get jobs paying over $50,000 a year. In a new report, Lambda's founder admits the real number is much lower. Additionally, internal documents show Lambda can be profitable if even 1 in 4 grads get a job. Lambda plans to enroll 10,000 students in 2020. From the report: The point of a coding boot camp, obviously, is to help you get a better job. Lambda's claim, reproduced on its website, that "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year" is an understandably attractive proposition for students -- and a key pillar of Lambda's marketing. Students I talked to confirmed that the feeling that it was likely that they would be able to land high-paying jobs was a key part of deciding to attend. However, a May 2019 Lambda School investment memo -- entitled "Human Capital: The Last Unoptimized Asset Class" -- written for Y Combinator and obtained by Intelligencer, tells a very different story. In a section warning that student-debt collections may prove too low, it matter-of-factly states that, "We're at roughly 50% placement for cohorts that are 6 months graduated." A recent interviewee for work at Lambda School also confirmed to me that the company's own internal numbers, which the interviewee was provided as part of their interview process, seem to indicate a roughly 50 percent or lower placement rate.

So where does that 86 percent figure come from? Lambda has reported graduate-outcome statistics at the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR), a voluntary trade organization of coding boot camps whose purpose is to ensure that participating schools publish truthful information about student outcomes. Lambda School founder Austen Allred has often used this report to defend his company online. But where other boot camps have multiple reports spanning many student cohorts, Lambda has only reported statistics for its first 71 graduates -- 86 percent of who, the school claims, found jobs. Sheree Speakman, the CEO of CIRR, told me that Lambda has not undergone the standard independent auditing for the sole report it has submitted, and that her communications to Lambda School regarding further reporting and auditing have gone unanswered. Lambda's former director of career readiness, Sabrina Baez, told me that placing Lambda's first batch of students was extremely difficult, largely owing to how underdeveloped the curriculum was at the time. When asked about Lambda's claim that 86 percent of its first graduates were placed within six months, she told me, "I would say out of that 71 students, within six months of them graduating it was probably a 50-60 percent placement rate," and added that Allred sometimes exaggerated student-placement progress on Twitter -- recalling, as an example, an instance in which she told Allred that a student might receive an offer soon, only to find out later that he had tweeted that the student had already received an offer. Further reading: The High Cost of a Free Coding Bootcamp.

Slashdot readers fahrbot-bot and operator_error share a report from Phys.Org: Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a device that uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air, a new technology they say could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and in the future of medicine. As reported today in Nature, the laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley at UMass Amherst have created a device they call an "Air-gen," or air-powered generator, with electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter. The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere.

The new technology developed in Yao's lab is non-polluting, renewable and low-cost. It can generate power even in areas with extremely low humidity such as the Sahara Desert. It has significant advantages over other forms of renewable energy including solar and wind, Lovley says, because unlike these other renewable energy sources, the Air-gen does not require sunlight or wind, and "it even works indoors." The Air-gen device requires only a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick, the researchers explain. The bottom of the film rests on an electrode, while a smaller electrode that covers only part of the nanowire film sits on top. The film adsorbs water vapor from the atmosphere. A combination of the electrical conductivity and surface chemistry of the protein nanowires, coupled with the fine pores between the nanowires within the film, establishes the conditions that generate an electrical current between the two electrodes. "We are literally making electricity out of thin air," says Yao. "The Air-gen generates clean energy 24/7." Lovely adds, "It's the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet."

The current generation of Air-gen devices can power small electronics, and they are expected to be brought to commercial scale soon.