Canada will ban the sale of fuel-burning new cars and light-duty trucks from 2035 in an effort to reach net-zero emissions across the country by 2050, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government said on Tuesday. Reuters reports: Only zero-emissions cars and trucks can be sold from 2035, according to a statement, adding that a mixture of investments and regulations will help industry transition toward that goal. The government also said it will set interim targets for 2025 and 2030. "We are committed to aligning Canada's zero-emission vehicles sales targets with those of the most ambitious North American jurisdictions," Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said in the statement. "We will work with the United States to harmonize fuel efficiency regulations and we're investing in consumer rebates, charging stations, business tax breaks and industry transition costs," Wilkinson added.

"Canada cannot reach our greenhouse gas targets if emissions from cars, SUVs and pickups, which are currently growing, are not curtailed," said Keith Brooks, programs director at advocacy group Environmental Defence, who welcomed the move. Brooks said only 3.5% of vehicles now sold in Canada are electric and that the government needs to do more to support the market for zero-emissions vehicles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, the University of Naples Federico II, the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences has found that making food from air would be far more efficient than growing crops. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their analysis and comparison of the efficiency of growing crops (soybeans) and using a food-from-air technique. [...] To make their comparisons, the researchers used a food-from-air system that uses solar energy panels to make electricity, which is combined with carbon dioxide from the air to produce food for microbes grown in a bioreactor. The protein the microbes produce is then treated to remove nucleic acids and then dried to produce a powder suitable for consumption by humans and animals.

They compared the efficiency of the system with a 10-square-kilometer soybean field. Their analysis showed that growing food from air was 10 times as efficient as growing soybeans in the ground. Put another way, they suggested that a 10-square-kilometer piece of land in the Amazon used to grow soybeans could be converted to a one-square-kilometer piece of land for growing food from the air, with the other nine square kilometers turned back to wild forest growth. They also note that the protein produced using the food-from-air approach had twice the caloric value as most other crops such as corn, wheat and rice.

This week in America, "continent-spanning winter storms triggered blackouts in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and several other states," reports the New York Times. But that was just the beginning... One-third of oil production in the nation was halted. Drinking-water systems in Ohio were knocked offline. Road networks nationwide were paralyzed and vaccination efforts in 20 states were disrupted.

The crisis carries a profound warning. As climate change brings more frequent and intense storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme events, it is placing growing stress on the foundations of the country's economy: Its network of roads and railways, drinking-water systems, power plants, electrical grids, industrial waste sites and even homes. Failures in just one sector can set off a domino effect of breakdowns in hard-to-predict ways....

Sewer systems are overflowing more often as powerful rainstorms exceed their design capacity. Coastal homes and highways are collapsing as intensified runoff erodes cliffs. Coal ash, the toxic residue produced by coal-burning plants, is spilling into rivers as floods overwhelm barriers meant to hold it back. Homes once beyond the reach of wildfires are burning in blazes they were never designed to withstand... The vulnerabilities show up in power lines, natural-gas plants, nuclear reactors and myriad other systems. Higher storm surges can knock out coastal power infrastructure. Deeper droughts can reduce water supplies for hydroelectric dams. Severe heat waves can reduce the efficiency of fossil-fuel generators, transmission lines and even solar panels at precisely the moment that demand soars because everyone cranks up their air-conditioners...

As freezing temperatures struck Texas, a glitch at one of two reactors at a South Texas nuclear plant, which serves 2 million homes, triggered a shutdown. The cause: Sensing lines connected to the plant's water pumps had frozen, said Victor Dricks, a spokesman for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Agency. It's also common for extreme heat to disrupt nuclear power. The issue is that the water used to cool reactors can become too warm to use, forcing shutdowns. Flooding is another risk. After a tsunami led to several meltdowns at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant in 2011, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission told the 60 or so working nuclear plants in the United States, many decades old, to evaluate their flood risk to account for climate change. Ninety percent showed at least one type of flood risk that exceeded what the plant was designed to handle. The greatest risk came from heavy rain and snowfall exceeding the design parameters at 53 plants.
"All these issues are converging," said Robert D. Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University who studies wealth and racial disparities related to the environment.

"And there's simply no place in this country that's not going to have to deal with climate change."

The rise of cloud computing and AI have popularised face recognition technology globally, but at what cost? From a report: When Anna Kuznetsova saw an ad offering access to Moscow's face recognition cameras, all she had to do was pay 16,000 roubles ($200) and send a photo of the person she wanted spying on. The 20-year-old -- who was acting as a volunteer for a digital rights group investigating leaks in Moscow's pervasive surveillance system -- sent over a picture of herself and waited. Two days later and her phone buzzed. The seller had forwarded the paralegal a detailed list of all the addresses in the Russian capital where she had been spotted by cameras over the previous month, her lawyers said. "It was really incredible," said Sarkis Darbinyan, a lawyer for Roskomsvoboda, the group behind the investigation. "We got a report of all her movements in Moscow." The incident is now under police investigation. Far from an aberration, the incident is at the centre of one of several lawsuits brought in recent months by rights activists against the Russian authorities over their use of face recognition. The rise of cloud computing and AI technologies have popularised the technology globally, with supporters saying it promises greater security and efficiency. But the backlash is growing, too, as critics say benefits come at the cost of lost privacy and increased surveillance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Toilets specially designed to save water are wasting more than they conserve, the UK's largest water firm has warned. Campaigners have warned for years that dual-flush toilets, introduced as more efficient alternatives that were expected to use less than half the amount of water per flush, are more prone to leaks. The problem is said to be so great that the costs are outweighing the benefits.

"Because there's so many loos that continuously flow all through the day and night, collectively that water loss is now exceeding the amount of water the dual-flush design should be saving," said Andrew Tucker, water efficiency manager at Thames Water. "The volume of water loss is getting bigger every day as more people refurbish and retrofit older toilets and as more homes are built, so it's a growing problem." Thames Water said poor design and materials cause water to flow continuously into the bowl. And, according to the BBC, the Bathroom Manufacturers Association has acknowledged that the design of many dual-flush toilets is inherently more prone to leakage. "The majority of them use the drop valve system, which sits at the bottom of the cistern and opens to allow the water to flow out when the flush is pressed," reports The Guardian. "Debris and other issues can cause the mechanism to fail to close, meaning water continually flows from the cistern and into the bowl."

"Older cisterns tend to use a siphon system, which works by pushing water upwards until it reaches a point at which it can flow into the bowl. Because that point is above the waterline when the toilet is not being flushed, the system is less likely to develop the same sort of leak." Jason Parker, the managing director of Thomas Dudley Ltd, one of the UK's largest plumbing manufacturers, told the BBC: "If we're serious about wasting water and we want to stop it, the only way to do that is put a siphon back in."

schwit1 shares a report from VentureBeat: As physical retail struggles amid the global pandemic, storeowners are rapidly trying to adapt to new realities that also include growing competition from Amazon. But a French startup called Storelift believes it can create a new convenience store concept that leans on many of the same AI and computer vision tools used in Amazon Go stores to reinvent the shopping and checkout experience. This week, Storelift announced that it has launched its first two stores under the name "Boxy." The Boxy stores are repurposed shipping containers that can be plopped down in various urban neighborhoods that lack good shopping options. The founders believe their approach demonstrates how businesses can exploit new shopping niches with the help of sensors, data, and AI that allows them to optimize their inventory and reduce costs.

To shop at Boxy, a customer downloads the Boxy app on their smartphone and then scans the QR code to enter the store. When customers take a product, it is identified through the computer vision algorithms and the weight sensors on the shelves. When the customer leaves, they scan their QR code again and checkout happens automatically. The key to improving efficiency is the data the company is collecting as people shop. The shelves that detect weight, along with computer vision cameras, know when a product is picked up, looked at, and then either put in the basket or back on the shelf. In some cases, because the company knows a customer is possibly interested in a product, they can offer a discount on the spot to nudge them along. Internally, the company's machine learning system is analyzing gestures and decisions made by the customer to suggest improvements in product selection, pricing, and placement.

Saturday the Washington Post (in an article republished in Stars and Stripes) took a closer look at what's known as "superspreading events": Many scientists say such infection bursts — probably sparked by a single, highly infectious individual who may show no signs of illness and unwittingly share an enclosed space with many others — are driving the pandemic. They worry these cases, rather than routine transmission between one infected person and, say, two or three close contacts, are propelling case counts out of control...

Transmission, it turns out, is far more idiosyncratic than previously understood. Scientists say they believe it is dependent on such factors as an individual's infectivity, which can vary person to person by billions of virus particles, whether the particles are contained in large droplets that fall to the ground or in fine vapor that can float much further, and how much the air in a particular space circulates. Donald Milton, a professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland, and other experts have wondered if superspreading events could be the "Achilles' heel" of the virus. If we could pinpoint the conditions under which these clusters occur, Milton argued, we could lower the transmission rate enough to extinguish the spread. "If you could stop these events, you could stop the pandemic," Milton said. "You would crush the curve..."

Some people will not transmit the virus to anyone, contact tracing has shown, while others appear to spread the virus with great efficiency. Overall, researchers have estimated in recent studies that some 10 to 20 percent of the infected may be responsible for 80 percent of all cases... An infected person's viral load can impact how much they "shed"; the differences have been shown to be on a scale of billions of virus particles... A growing body of evidence suggests that SARS-CoV2, like other coronaviruses, expands in a community in fits and starts, rather than more evenly over space and time....

While it's often impossible to identify the person who triggered an outbreak, there have been some commonalities among those who have been pinpointed as the likely source in studies. They tend to be young. Asymptomatic. Social. Scientists suspect these "super-emitters" may have much higher levels of the virus in their bodies than others, or may release them by talking, shouting or singing in a different way from most people... In a study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases by Japan's Hitoshi Oshitani at Tohoku University of 22 superspreading individuals with the coronavirus, about half were under the age of 40, and 41 percent were experiencing no symptoms.

An official at the Interior Department embarked on a campaign that has inserted misleading language about climate change -- including debunked claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial -- into the agency's scientific reports, the New York Times reported Monday, citing internal documents. From the report: The misleading language appears in at least nine reports, including environmental studies and impact statements on major watersheds in the American West that could be used to justify allocating increasingly scarce water to farmers at the expense of wildlife conservation and fisheries. The effort was led by Indur M. Goklany, a longtime Interior Department employee who, in 2017 near the start of the Trump administration, was promoted to the office of the deputy secretary with responsibility for reviewing the agency's climate policies. The Interior Department's scientific work is the basis for critical decisions about water and mineral rights affecting millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of acres of land.

The wording, known internally as the "Goks uncertainty language" based on Mr. Goklany's nickname, inaccurately claims that there is a lack of consensus among scientists that the earth is warming. In Interior Department emails to scientists, Mr. Goklany pushed misleading interpretations of climate science, saying it "may be overestimating the rate of global warming, for whatever reason;" climate modeling has largely predicted global warming accurately. The final language states inaccurately that some studies have found the earth to be warming, while others have not. He also instructed department scientists to add that rising carbon dioxide -- the main force driving global warming -- is beneficial because it "may increase plant water use efficiency" and "lengthen the agricultural growing season." Both assertions misrepresent the scientific consensus that, overall, climate change will result in severe disruptions to global agriculture and significant reductions in crop yields.

Walmart is testing back-of-store automated systems that can collect 800 products an hour, 10 times as many as a store worker. From a report: In the backroom of a Walmart store in Salem, N.H., is a floor-to-ceiling robotic system that the country's largest retailer hopes will help it sell more groceries online. Workers stand on platforms in front of screens assembling online orders of milk, cereal and toilet paper from the hulking automated system. Wheeled robots carrying small baskets move along metal tracks to collect those items. They are bagged for pickup later by shoppers or delivery to homes. Walmart is one of several grocers including Albertsons and Kroger that are using automation to improve efficiency in a fast-growing but costly business that comes with a range of logistical challenges.

The backroom robots could help Walmart cut labor costs and fill orders faster and more accurately. It also could address another problem: unclogging aisles that these days can get crowded with clerks picking products for online orders. A store worker can collect around 80 products from store shelves an hour, estimated John Lert, founder and chief executive of Alert Innovation, the startup that has worked with Walmart to design the system dubbed Alphabot. It is designed to collect 800 products an hour per workstation, operated by a single individual, Mr. Lert said. Workers stock the 24-foot-high machine each day with the products most often ordered online, including refrigerated and frozen foods. Fresh produce is still picked by hand in store aisles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Growing demand for SUVs was the second largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2018, an analysis has found. In that period, SUVs doubled their global market share from 17% to 39% and their annual emissions rose to more than 700 megatons of CO2, more than the yearly total emissions of the UK and the Netherlands combined. No energy sector except power drove a larger increase in carbon emissions, putting SUVs ahead of heavy industry (including iron, steel, cement and aluminum), aviation and shipping.

The recent dramatic shift towards heavier SUVs has offset both efficiency improvements in smaller cars and carbon savings from electric vehicles. As the global fleet of SUVs has grown, emissions from the vehicles have increased more than fourfold in eight years. If SUV drivers were a nation, they would rank seventh in the world for carbon emissions. T&E figures show the average mass of new cars rose 10% between 2000 and 2016, which the group suggested could be down to a trend towards SUVs, heavier automatic and dual-clutch gearboxes and the inclusion of other equipment including cameras and sensors.

Tinder has joined a growing backlash against app store taxes by bypassing Google Play in a move that could shake up the billion-dollar industry dominated by Google and Apple. From a report: The online dating site launched a new default payment process that skips Google Play and forces users to enter their credit card details straight into Tinder's app, according to new research by Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter. Once a user has entered their payment information, the app not only remembers it, but also removes the choice to swap back to Google Play for future purchases, he wrote. "This is a huge difference," Schachter said in an interview. "It's an incredibly high-margin business for Google bringing in billions of dollars," he said.

Apple and Google launched their app stores in 2008, and they soon grew into powerful marketplaces that matched the creations of millions of independent developers with billions of smartphone users. In exchange, the companies take as much as 30% of revenue. The app economy is expected to grow to $157 billion in 2022, according to App Annie projections. As the market expands, a growing revolt has been gaining steam over the past year. Spotify Technology filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission earlier this year, claiming the cut Apple takes amounts to a tax on competitors. Netflix has recently stopped letting Apple users subscribe via the App Store and Epic Games said last year it wouldn't distribute Fortnite, one of the world's most popular video games, through Google Play.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered a new method for delivering key nutrients to plant roots -- without having to ensure they're present in the soil where the plants are growing. This method, described by researchers in detail in a new academic paper, would manage to improve efficiency to nearly 100% absorption of nutrients and pesticides delivered as nanoparticles (particles smaller than 50 nanometers across -- a human hair is about 75,000 nanometers wide, for context) sprayed onto the leaves of plants, which then make their way through the plant's internal vascular system all the way down into the root system. Agricultural professionals could also use this method to greatly improve delivery of plant antibiotics, making it easier and more cost-effective to treat plant diseases affecting crop yields. "It would be cheaper to delivery all nutrients and pesticides, too, because the big bump in efficiency of uptake by the plants means you can use much less of anything you want to deliver to achieve your desired effect," the report adds.

schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: A team at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, or KU Leuven, says it has developed a solar panel that converts sunlight directly into hydrogen using moisture in the air. The prototype takes the water vapor and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. If it scales successfully, the technology could help address a major challenge facing the hydrogen economy. A small but growing number of facilities are producing "green" hydrogen using electrolysis, which splits water molecules using electricity -- ideally from renewable sources such as wind and solar. Other researchers, including the team in Belgium, are developing what's called direct solar water-splitting technologies. These use chemical and biological components to split water directly on the solar panel, forgoing the need for large, expensive electrolysis plants.

KU Leuven sits on a grassy campus in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern region of Belgium. Earlier this month, professor Johan Martens and his team at the Center for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis announced their prototype could produce 250 liters of hydrogen per day on average over a full year, which they claim is a world record. A family living in a well-insulated Belgian house could use about 20 of these panels to meet their power and heating needs during an entire year, they predict. The solar panel measures 1.65 meters long -- roughly the height of a kitchen refrigerator, or this reporter -- and has a rated power output of about 210 watts. The system can convert 15 percent of the solar energy it receives into hydrogen, the team says. That's a significant leap from 0.1 percent efficiency they first achieved 10 years ago.

Joshua S. Goldstein, a professor emeritus of international relations at American University, and Staffan A. Qvist, an energy engineer and consultant, writing for The Wall Street Journal: Climate scientists tell us that the world must drastically cut its fossil fuel use in the next 30 years to stave off a potentially catastrophic tipping point for the planet. Confronting this challenge is a moral issue, but it's also a math problem -- and a big part of the solution has to be nuclear power. Today, more than 80% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, which are used to generate electricity, to heat buildings and to power car and airplane engines. Worse for the planet, the consumption of fossil fuels is growing quickly as poorer countries climb out of poverty and increase their energy use. Improving energy efficiency can reduce some of the burden, but it's not nearly enough to offset growing demand.

Any serious effort to decarbonize the world economy will require, then, a great deal more clean energy, on the order of 100 trillion kilowatt-hours per year, by our calculations -- roughly equivalent to today's entire annual fossil-fuel usage. A key variable is speed. To reach the target within three decades, the world would have to add about 3.3 trillion more kilowatt-hours of clean energy every year. Solar and wind power alone can't scale up fast enough to generate the vast amounts of electricity that will be needed by midcentury, especially as we convert car engines and the like from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources. Even Germany's concerted recent effort to add renewables -- the most ambitious national effort so far -- was nowhere near fast enough. A global increase in renewables at a rate matching Germany's peak success would add about 0.7 trillion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year. That's just over a fifth of the necessary 3.3 trillion annual target.

"General Motors is partnering with DoorDash to enable on-demand food deliveries via driverless cars," reports VentureBeat.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: The duo announced that a pilot delivery program will kick off in San Francisco in "early 2019," and will involve both meals from restaurants and groceries.... Back in 2016, GM splashed out more than $1 billion to buy Cruise Automation, a startup that developed an autopilot system for existing cars. In the intervening months, the company has been doubling down on its autonomous car efforts, last year announcing a driverless car with no steering wheel or pedals, with plans to launch the vehicle sometime in 2019. Elsewhere, GM also revealed that it is investing $100 million into facilities for building self-driving cars, while Honda recently put $2 billion into GM's Cruise for a 5.7 percent stake....

GM and DoorDash haven't revealed the full extent of the pilot or what the next stage will be, but it did say that "select merchants" that are already using DoorDash in the San Francisco area are on board. The underlying purpose, it said, is to "test and improve" the efficiency of autonomous deliveries in the area. "We see autonomous vehicles playing a major role in the future of delivery as consumer behaviors continue to shift online, and we are confident Cruise's leading technology will help us scale to meet growing consumer demand," noted DoorDash CEO Tony Xu.

IBM has devised materials and processes that could help improve the efficiency of chip production at the 7nm node and beyond. From a report: The company's researchers are working on challenges in the emerging field of 'area-selective deposition', a technology that could help overcome limitations on lithographic techniques to create patterns on silicon in 7nm processes. Semi Engineering has a neat account of lithographic patterning and why at 7nm there's growing interest in area-selective deposition. Techniques such as 'multiple patterning' helped ensure integrated circuits kept scaling, but as chips have shrunk from 28nm to 7nm processes, chipmakers have needed to process more layers with ever-smaller features that need more precise placement on patterns. Those features need to align between layers. When they don't, it leads to 'edge placement error' (EPE), a challenge that Intel lithography expert Yan Borodovsky believed lithography couldn't solve and which would ultimately impede Moore's Law.

A backlash against the app stores of Apple and Google is gaining steam, with a growing number of companies saying the tech giants are collecting too high a tax for connecting consumers to developers' wares. From a report: Netflix and video game makers Epic Games and Valve are among companies that have recently tried to bypass the app stores or complained about the cost of the tolls Apple and Google charge. Grumbling about app store economics isn't new. But the number of complaints, combined with new ways of reaching users, regulatory scrutiny and competitive pressure are threatening to undermine what have become digital goldmines for Apple and Google. "It feels like something bubbling up here," said Ben Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie. "The dollars are just getting so big. They just don't want to be paying Apple and Google billions." Apple and Google launched their app stores in 2008, and they soon grew into powerful marketplaces that matched the creations of millions of independent developers with billions of smartphone users. In exchange, the companies take up to 30 percent of the money consumers pay developers.

InfoQ got some interesting insights from their interview with Christophe de Hauwer, the chief strategy and development officer at the communications satellite company SES: According to Morgan Stanly, the global space economy is predicted to grow from $350 billion in revenues today to more than $1.1 trillion by 2040. This impressive growth is driven by an exploding demand for connectivity... On one hand, satellite will be key to satisfy consumers' demand for always-on, high-performance connectivity. On the other hand, it will play an essential role in providing connectivity to populations in underserved and unserved areas...

[A]irlines are facing growing demands for inflight connectivity: market studies have shown that 63% of travelers think more flights should offer Wi-Fi, and 48% think Wi-Fi in the air should be as fast as it is on the ground. We are shaping and scaling our satellite fleet in order to deliver both the performance and economics needed to take these services mainstream. Whether a plane is travelling along densely populated routes or vast areas of deserts, we want to have them covered with the right kind of connectivity, always on, everywhere.
He also points out that SpaceX's re-usable rockets are just one of the ways space technology is making telecommunications cheaper.

"Electric propulsion means satellites can achieve a 40-50% reduction in their mass; high-throughput spot beams deliver a significantly higher amount of bandwidth than traditional satellites and can reduce cost per bit; fully new digitized payloads enable increased efficiency, full flexibility in global coverage and further optimization of spectrum use."

Qualcomm is now challenging rival Intel in the rapidly changing data center market. From a report: The company is now selling its long-awaited Centriq 2400 Arm-based server processor that is aimed at the fast-growing cloud market and that Qualcomm officials say beats Intel in such crucial areas as power efficiency and cost. Officials from Arm and its manufacturing partners have for several years talked about pushing the Arm architecture into the data center as an alternative to Intel, and some manufacturers like Cavium and Applied Micro in recent years have rolled out systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) based on the 64-bit Armv8-A design. However, Qualcomm represents the most significant Arm chip maker in terms of scale and resources to challenge Intel, which holds more than 90 percent of the global server chip market. Qualcomm's Centriq chips offer up to 48 single-threaded cores running up to 2.6GHz and are manufactured on Samsung's 10-nanometer FinFET process. The processors sport a bidirectional segmented ring bus with as much as 250G bps of aggregate bandwidth to avoid performance bottlenecks, 512KB of shared L2 cache for every two cores and 60MB of unified L3 cache. There also are six channels of DDR4 memory and support for up to 768GB of total DRAM with 32 PCIe Gen 3 lanes and six PCIe controllers. They also support Arm's TrustZone security technology and hypervisors for virtualization.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For the last 10 years, H.264/AVC has been the dominant video codec used for streaming but with Apple adopting H.265/HEVC in iOS 11 and Google heavily supporting VP9 in Android, a change is on the horizon. Next year the Alliance for Open Media will release their AV1 codec which will again improve video compression efficiency even further. But the end result is that the codec market is about to get very fragmented, with content owners soon having to decide if they need to support three codecs (H.264, H.265, and VP9) instead of just H.264 and with AV1 expected to be released in 2019. As a result of what's take place in the codec market, and with better quality video being demanded by consumers, content owners, broadcasters and OTT providers are starting to see a massive increase in encoding costs. New codecs like H.265 and VP9 need 5x the servers costs because of their complexity. Currently, AV1 needs over 20x the server costs. The mix of SD, HD and UHD continues to move to better quality: e.g. HDR, 10-bit and higher frame rates. Server encoding cost to move from 1080p SDR to 4K HDR is 5x. 360 and Facebook's 6DoF video are also growing in consumption by consumers which again increases encoding costs by at least 4x. If you add up all these variables, it's not hard to do the math and see that for some, encoding costs could increase by 500x over the next few years as new codecs, higher quality video, 360 video and general demand increases.