In 1975, 23-year-old electrical engineer Steve Sasson joined Kodak. And in a new interview with the BBC, he remembers that he'd found the whole photographic process "really annoying.... I wanted to build a camera with no moving parts. Now that was just to annoy the mechanical engineers..." "You take your picture, you have to wait a long time, you have to fiddle with these chemicals. Well, you know, I was raised on Star Trek, and all the good ideas come from Star Trek. So I said what if we could just do it all electronically...?"

Researchers at Bell Labs in the US had, in 1969, created a type of integrated circuit called a charge-coupled device (CCD). An electric charge could be stored on a metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS), and could be passed from one MOS to another. Its creators believed one of its applications might one day be used as part of an imaging device — though they hadn't worked out how that might happen. The CCD, nevertheless, was quickly developed. By 1974, the US microchip company Fairchild Semiconductors had built the first commercial CCD, measuring just 100 x 100 pixels — the tiny electronic samples taken of an original image. The new device's ability to capture an image was only theoretical — no-one had, as yet, tried to take an image and display it. (NASA, it turned out, was also looking at this technology, but not for consumer cameras....)

The CCD circuit responded to light but could only form an image if Sasson was somehow able to attach a lens to it. He could then convert the light into digital information — a blizzard of 1s and 0s — but there was just one problem: money. "I had no money to build this thing. Nobody told me to build it, and I certainly couldn't demand any money for it," he says. "I basically stole all the parts, I was in Kodak and the apparatus division, which had a lot of parts. I stole the optical assembly from an XL movie camera downstairs in a used parts bin. I was just walking by, you see it, and you take it, you know." He was also able to source an analogue to digital converter from a $12 (about £5 in 1974) digital voltmeter, rather than spending hundreds on the part. I could manage to get all these parts without anybody really noticing," he says....

The bulky device needed a way to store the information the CCD was capturing, so Sasson used an audio cassette deck. But he also needed a way to view the image once it was saved on the magnetic tape. "We had to build a playback unit," Sasson says. "And, again, nobody asked me to do that either. So all I got to do is the reverse of what I did with the camera, and then I have to turn that digital pattern into an NTSC television signal." NTSC (National Television System Committee) was the conversion standard used by American TV sets. Sasson had to turn only 100 lines of digital code captured by the camera into the 400 lines that would form a television signal.
The solution was a Motorola microprocessor, and by December 1975, the camera and its playback unit was complete, the article points out. With his colleague Jim Schueckler, Sasson had spent more than a year putting together the "increasingly bulky" device, that "looked like an oversized toaster." The camera had a shutter that would take an image at about 1/20th of a second, and — if everything worked as it should — the cassette tape would start to move as the camera transferred the stored information from its CCD [which took 23 seconds]. "It took about 23 seconds to play it back, and then about eight seconds to reconfigure it to make it look like a television signal, and send it to the TV set that I stole from another lab...." In 1978, Kodak was granted the first patent for a digital camera. It was Sasson's first invention. The patent is thought to have earned Eastman Kodak billions in licensing and infringement payments by the time they sold the rights to it, fearing bankruptcy, in 2012...

As for Sasson, he never worked on anything other than the digital technology he had helped to create until he retired from Eastman Kodak in 2009.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

Electronic Arts has spent the past year pushing its nearly 15,000 employees to use AI for everything from code generation to scripting difficult conversations about pay. Employees in some areas must complete multiple AI training courses and use tools like the company's in-house chatbot ReefGPT daily.

The tools produce flawed code and hallucinations that employees then spend time correcting. Staff say the AI creates more work rather than less, according to Business Insider. They fix mistakes while simultaneously training the programs on their own work. Creative employees fear the technology will eventually eliminate demand for character artists and level designers. One recently laid-off senior quality-assurance designer says AI performed a key part of his job -- reviewing and summarizing feedback from hundreds of play testers. He suspects this contributed to his termination when about 100 colleagues were let go this past spring from the company's Respawn Entertainment studio.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Something very strange is happening inside Super Nintendo (SNES) consoles as they age: a component you've probably never heard of is running ever so slightly faster as we get further and further away from the time the consoles first hit the market in the early '90s. The discovery started a mild panic in the speedrunning community in late February since one theoretical consequence of a faster-running console is that it could impact how fast games are running and therefore how long they take to complete. This could potentially wreak havoc on decades of speedrunning leaderboards and make tracking the fastest times in the speedrunning scene much more difficult, but that outcome now seems very unlikely. However, the obscure discovery does highlight the fact that old consoles' performance is not frozen at the time of their release date, and that they are made of sensitive components that can age and degrade, or even 'upgrade', over time. The idea that SNESs are running faster in a way that could impact speedrunning started with a Bluesky post from Alan Cecil, known online as dwangoAC and the administrator of TASBot (short for tool-assisted speedrun robot), a robot that's programmed to play games faster and better than a human ever could.

[...] So what's going on here? The SNES has an audio processing unit (APU) called the SPC700, a coprocessor made by Sony for Nintendo. Documentation given to game developers at the time the SNES was released says that the SPC700 should have a digital signal processing (DSP) rate of 32,000hz, which is set by a ceramic resonator that runs 24.576Mhz on that coprocessor. We're getting pretty technical here as you can see, but basically the composition of this ceramic component and how it resonates when connected to an electronic circuit generates the frequency for the audio processing unit, or how much data it processes in a second. It's well documented that these types of ceramic resonators are sensitive and can run at higher frequencies when subject to heat and other external conditions. For example, the chart [here], taken from an application manual for Murata ceramic resonators, shows changes in the resonators' oscillation under different physical conditions.

As Cecil told me, as early as 2007 people making SNES emulators noticed that, despite documentation by Nintendo that the SPC700 should run at 32,000Hz, some SNESs ran faster. Emulators generally now emulate at the slightly higher frequency of 32,040Hz in order to emulate games more faithfully. Digging through forum posts in the SNES homebrew and emulation communities, Cecil started to put a pattern together: the SPC700 ran faster whenever it was measured further away from the SNES's release. Data Cecil collected since his Bluesky post, which now includes more than 140 responses, also shows that the SPC700 is running faster. There is still a lot of variation, in theory depending on how much an SNES was used, but overall the trend is clear: SNESs are running faster as they age, and the fastest SPC700 ran at 32,182Hz. More research shared by another user in the TASBot Discord has even more detailed technical analysis which appears to support those findings. "We don't yet know how much of an impact it will have on a long speedrun," Cecil told 404 Media. "We only know it has at least some impact on how quickly data can be transferred between the CPU and the APU."

Cecil said minor differences in SNES hardware may not affect human speedrunners but could impact TASBot's frame-precise runs, where inputs need to be precise down to the frame, or "deterministic."

Sophisticated electronic devices used by criminals to steal cars are set to be banned under new laws in England and Wales. From a report: More than 700,000 vehicles were broken into last year -- often with the help of high-tech electronic devices, including so-called signal jammers, which are thought to play a part in four out of 10 vehicle thefts nationwide.

Until now, police could only bring a prosecution if they could prove a device had been used to commit a specific offence, but under new laws in the Crime and Policing Bill the onus will be on someone in possession of a device to show they had it for a legitimate purpose. Making or selling a signal jammer could lead to up to five years in prison or an unlimited fine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Ellen Bagley was delighted when she made her first sale on a popular second-hand clothing app, but just a few minutes later, the thrill turned to shock as the 20-year-old from Linkoping in Sweden discovered she'd been robbed. Everything seemed normal when Bagley received a direct message on the platform, which asked her to verify personal details to complete the deal. She clicked the link, which fired up BankID -- the ubiquitous digital authorization system used by nearly all Swedish adults.After receiving a couple of error messages, she started thinking something was wrong, but it was already too late. Over 10,000 Swedish kronor ($1,000) had been siphoned from her account and the thieves disappeared into the digital shadows. "The fraudsters are so skilled at making things look legitimate," said Bagley, who was born after BankID was created. "It's not easy" to identify scams. Although financial crime has garnered fewer headlines than a surge in gang-related gun violence, it's become a growing risk for the country. Beyond its borders, Sweden is an important test case on fighting cashless crime because it's gone further on ditching paper money than almost any other country in Europe.

Online fraud and digital crime in Sweden have surged, with criminals taking 1.2 billion kronor in 2023 through scams like the one Bagley fell for, doubling from 2021. Law-enforcement agencies estimate that the size of Sweden's criminal economy could amount to as high as 2.5% of the country's gross domestic product. To counter the digital crime spree, Swedish authorities have put pressure on banks to tighten security measures and make it harder on tech-savvy criminals, but it's a delicate balancing act. Going too far could slow down the economy, while doing too little erodes trust and damages legitimate businesses in the process.Using complex webs of fake companies and forging documents to gain access to Sweden's welfare system, sophisticated fraudsters have made Sweden a "Silicon Valley for criminal entrepreneurship," said Daniel Larson, a senior economic crime prosecutor. While the shock of armed violence has grabbed public attention -- the nation's gun-homicide rate tripled between 2012 and 2022 -- economic crime underlies gang activity and needs to be tackled as aggressively, he added. "That has been a strategic mistake," Larson said. "This profit-generating crime is what's fueling organized crime and, in some cases, leads to these conflicts."

Sweden's switch to electronic cash started after a surge of armed robberies in the 1990s, and by 2022, only 8% of Swedes said they had used cash for their latest purchase, according to a central bank survey. Along with neighboring Norway, Sweden has Europe's lowest number of ATMs per capita, according to the IMF. The prevalence of BankID play a role in Sweden's vulnerability. The system works like an online signature. If used, it's considered a done deal and the transaction gets executed immediately. It was designed by Sweden's banks to make electronic payments even quicker and easier than handing over a stack of bills. Since it's original rollout in 2001, it's become part of the everyday Swedish life. On average, the service -- which requires a six-digit code, a fingerprint or a face scan for authentication -- is used more than twice a day by every adult Swede and is involved in everything from filing tax returns to paying for bus tickets.Originally intended as a product by banks for their customers, its use exploded in 2005 after Sweden's tax agency adopted the technology as an identification for tax returns, giving it the government's official seal of approval. The launch of BankID on mobile phones in 2010 increased usage even further, along with public perception that associated cash with criminality.The country's central bank has acknowledged that some of those connotations may have gone too far. "We have to be very clear that there are still honest people using cash," Riksbank Governor Erik Thedeen told Bloomberg.

In a featured article for The Verge, David Pierce explores the world of competitive Excel, highlighting its rise from a hobbyist activity to a potential esport, showcased during the Excel World Championship in Las Vegas. Top spreadsheet enthusiasts competed at the MGM Grand to solve complex Excel challenges, emphasizing the transformative power and ubiquity of spreadsheets in both business and entertainment. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword -- exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year's competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it's all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It's a game. Now it hopes to become a sport. I've come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing -- a company's sales, a person's lifestyle, a region's political leanings, a race car -- and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.

There is one inescapably weird thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets are not fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful, very interesting, very important, but they are for work. Most of what happens at the FMWC is, in almost every practical way, indistinguishable from the normal work that millions of people do in spreadsheets every day. You can gussy up the format, shorten the timelines, and raise the stakes all you want -- the reality is you're still asking a bunch of people who make spreadsheets for a living to just make more spreadsheets, even if they're doing it in Vegas. You really can't overstate how important and ubiquitous spreadsheets really are, though. "Electronic spreadsheets" actually date back earlier than computers and are maybe the single most important reason computers first became mainstream. In the late 1970s, a Harvard MBA student named Dan Bricklin started to dream up a software program that could automatically do the math he was constantly doing and re-doing in class. "I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers," he said in a 2016 TED Talk. This sounds quaint and obvious now, but it was revolutionary then. [...]

Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword -- exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year's competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it's all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It's a game. Now it hopes to become a sport. I've come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing -- a company's sales, a person's lifestyle, a region's political leanings, a race car -- and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.

Stack Overflow's blog reports on a new programming language called Mariposa.

They call it a "toy" programming language, "created as a way to play around with a novel or odd feature, like variable assignment outside of the normal order of execution — more colloquially, time travel." Computer science has long sought to reason about time in electronic systems, thanks to a consistent interest in concurrency and real-time messaging... Mariposa allows you to manipulate the order of execution by assigning an instant to a variable, then setting the context of that instance. Here's a basic example, taken from the Mariposa readme:

x = 1
t = now()
print(x)
at t:
x = 2

According to the normal order of operations, this code should print "1". But because t is assigned to the instance in the second line, any modifications specified within an at t: block are applied immediately, and this code prints "2"...

While Mariposa caught a fair amount of attention recently, it's not the first implementation of time travel in programming. There is a Haskell package appropriately called tardis, which creates two state transformers: one travels forward in time and one backward. As the docs explain, "The most concise way to explain it is this: getPast retrieves the value from the latest sendFuture, while getFuture retrieves the value from the next sendPast." One function's past is another one's future.
The article explores "the history and future of other programming paradigms" applying logic to time, including interval temporal logic systems as well as "modeling, analysis, and verification languages/tools that allow temporal and state modeling without requiring temporal logic understanding."

Long-time Slashdot reader couchslug shares a report from Ars Technica, writing: "A new attack on the right to do with one's property as the owner sees fit. First step, threaten without providing evidence." From the report: Before last week, owners of certain Mazda vehicles who also had a Home Assistant setup could create some handy connections for their car. One CX60 driver had a charger that would only power on when it confirmed his car was plugged in and would alert him if he left the trunk open. Another used Home Assistant to control their charger based on the dynamic prices of an Agile Octopus energy plan. Yet another had really thought it through, using Home Assistant to check the gas before their morning commute, alert them if their windows were down before rain was forecast, and remotely unlock and start the car in cold conditions. The possibilities were vast, and purportedly beyond what Mazda's official app offered.

Mazda, however, had issues with the project, which was largely the free-time work of one software developer, Brandon Rothweiler. In a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent to GitHub, Mazda (or an authorized agent) alleges that Rothweiler's integration: contains code that "is violating [Mazda's] copyright ownership"; used "certain Mazda information, including proprietary API information," to "create code and information"; and contained code that "provides functionality same as what is currently" in Mazda's apps posted to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store for Android.

One day later, Rothweiler made a pull request to the Home Assistant core project: "I'm removing the Mazda integration due to a legal notice sent to me by Mazda." The Home Assistant project pushed an update to remove the integration, posted about the removal, and noted that they were "disappointed that Mazda has decided to take this position" and that "Mazda's first recourse was not to reach out to us and the maintainer but to send a cease and desist letter instead." One of the many commenters confused by Mazda's code claims said they couldn't find any of the copyrighted code the company referenced. Additionally, Ars Technica suggests the project "could be considered a fair use exception to the DMCA, as explained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

"When Mazda contacted me, my options were to either comply or open myself up to potential legal risk," said Rothweiler. "Even if I believe that what I'm doing is morally correct and legally protected, legal processes still have a financial cost. I can't afford to take on that financial risk for something that I do in my spare time to help others."

Hugh Morris writes via the New York Times: When the musician and artist Paul Purgas was invited in 2017 by the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, to play some of the music he'd found in its archives that year, he was initially very keen. These were tapes that had been hidden from the public for decades; they proved the existence of a fertile avenue for electronic music in 1960s and '70s India, and he was determined for people to hear them. But as he went to use the institute's aging reel-to-reel machine, he got a nasty surprise: an electric shock. "I think that sobered me up," he said in an interview. The project, he realized, was about to become "a bit of a lifetime journey."

Purgas, 43, is a London-based sound artist and curator, and half of the electronic music duo Emptyset. Initially, he had been on the trail of the lost Moog synthesizer that the American experimentalist David Tudor used while in India, which led him to the library of the NID. In "a victory for good record keeping," Purgas found details of some unknown Tudor recordings noted in a handwritten logbook by a diligent archivist in the 1960s. He requested them from the archives, and was presented with box after box of carefully annotated tapes, all taken from a neglected cupboard. Purgas returned to England to undertake training in tape restoration to properly conserve what he'd found: music from a group of Indian composers who, aided initially by Tudor, had used the Moog and some accompanying homemade modular devices between 1969 and 1972 to create some of India's earliest electronic music.

Following a 2020 BBC radio documentary, "Electronic India," in which Purgas situated the music in its cultural context, a new compilation -- "The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972," out Friday -- presents the restored pieces in their full variety. There are manipulated field recordings, pieces linked to birds and nature, compositions inspired by Indian classical music, imagined voyages to outer space, and tracks reminiscent of bleep techno or Aphex Twin. What the recordings demonstrate, Purgas said, is "electronic sound and music existing free from any baggage," away from "any vestiges of what could be conceived as a kind of Western continuum."

Kitty Oppenheimer: Can you explain quantum mechanics to me?

J. Robert Oppenheimer: Well, this glass, this drink, this counter top, uhh.. our bodies, all of it. It's mostly empty space. Groupings of tiny energy waves bound together.

Kitty Oppenheimer: By what?

J. Robert Oppenheimer: Forces of attraction strong enough to convince us [that] matter is solid, to stop my body passing through yours.

— IMDB quote from Oppenheimer


Flash forward to 2023, where Mario Barbatti is a theoretical chemist and physicist researching light and molecule interactions. He's also a professor of chemistry at Aix Marseille University in France. Writing this week for Aeon, Barbatti argues that "there are no empty spaces within the atom.

"The empty atom picture is likely the most repeated mistake in popular science." It is unclear who created this myth, but it is sure that Carl Sagan, in his classic TV series Cosmos (1980), was crucial in popularising it. After wondering how small the nuclei are compared with the atom, Sagan concluded that "[M]ost of the mass of an atom is in its nucleus; the electrons are by comparison just clouds of moving fluff. Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing." I still remember how deeply these words spoke to me when I heard them as a kid in the early 1980s. Today, as a professional theoretical chemist, I know that Sagan's statements failed to recognise some fundamental features of atoms and molecules...

Misconceptions feeding the idea of the empty atom can be dismantled by carefully interpreting quantum theory, which describes the physics of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. According to quantum theory, the building blocks of matter — like electrons, nuclei and the molecules they form — can be portrayed either as waves or particles. Leave them to evolve by themselves without human interference, and they act like delocalised waves in the shape of continuous clouds. On the other hand, when we attempt to observe these systems, they appear to be localised particles, something like bullets in the classical realm. But accepting the quantum predictions that nuclei and electrons fill space as continuous clouds has a daring conceptual price: it implies that these particles do not vibrate, spin or orbit. They inhabit a motionless microcosmos where time only occasionally plays a role...

A molecule is a static object without any internal motion. The quantum clouds of all nuclei and electrons remain absolutely still for a molecule with a well-defined energy. Time is irrelevant... Time, however, comes into play when a molecule collides with another one, triggering a chemical reaction. Then, a storm strikes. The quantum steadiness bursts when the sections of the electronic cloud pour from one molecule upon another. The clouds mix, reshape, merge, and split. The nuclear clouds rearrange to accommodate themselves within the new electronic configuration, sometimes even migrating between molecules. For a fraction of a picosecond (10-12 seconds or a billionth of a millisecond), the tempest rages and reshapes the molecular landscape until stillness is restored in the newly formed compounds.

"This week, social media has been aflutter over a claim for a new superconductor that works not only well above room temperatures, but also at ambient pressure," writes Science magazine. If true, the discovery would be one of the biggest ever in condensed matter physics and could usher in all sorts of technological marvels, such as levitating vehicles and perfectly efficient electrical grids. However, the two related papers, posted to the arXiv preprint server by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of South Korea's Quantum Energy Research Centre and colleagues on 22 July, are short on detail and have left many physicists skeptical... "They come off as real amateurs," says Michael Norman, a theorist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They don't know much about superconductivity and the way they've presented some of the data is fishy." On the other hand, he says, researchers at Argonne and elsewhere are already trying to replicate the experiment. "People here are taking it seriously and trying to grow this stuff." Nadya Mason, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign says, "I appreciate that the authors took appropriate data and were clear about their fabrication techniques." Still, she cautions, "The data seems a bit sloppy...."

What are the reasons for skepticism? There are several, Norman says. First, the undoped material, lead apatite, isn't a metal but rather a nonconducting mineral. And that's an unpromising starting point for making a superconductor. What's more, lead and copper atoms have similar electronic structures, so substituting copper atoms for some of the lead atoms shouldn't greatly affect the electrical properties of the material, Norman says. "You have a rock, and you should still end up with a rock." On top of that, lead atoms are very heavy, which should suppress the vibrations and make it harder for electrons to pair, Norman explains.

The papers don't provide a solid explanation of the physics at play. But the researchers speculate that within their material, the doping slightly distorts long, naturally occurring chains of lead atoms... [Mason] notes that Lee and Kim also suggest that a kind of undulation of charge might exist in the chains and that similar charge patterns have been seen in high-temperature superconductors. "Maybe this material really just hits the sweet spot of a strongly interacting unconventional superconductor," she says.

The big question will be whether anybody can reproduce the observations...
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A team of researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Milan recently created a fully rechargeable battery using nontoxic edible components. This is probably the world's first battery that is safe to ingest and entirely made of food-grade materials. "Given the level of safety of these batteries, they could be used in children's toys, where there is a high risk of ingestion," said Mario Caironi, a senior researcher at IIT. However, this isn't the only solution the edible battery could provide. Apart from serving as an alternative to conventional toxic toy batteries, the edible battery from IIT could also play a key role in making health care applications safer than ever. For instance, doctors have to be cautious regarding the use of miniature electronic devices (such as drug-delivery robots, biosensors, etc.) inside the human body, as they come equipped with batteries made of toxic substances. An edible battery could solve this problem. There are also more mundane applications, like replacing batteries in pet toys.

Ivan K. Ilic, first author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at IIT, told Ars Technica, "Two main ways a battery damages human tissue when it's inside the body is by doing water electrolysis and by the toxicity of its materials. Water electrolysis is a phenomenon where electricity with a voltage higher than 1.2 V (virtually all commercial batteries) breaks water into oxygen and hydrogen (an explosive gas), and it is very dangerous if it occurs in the stomach. Our battery is way below this voltage, around 0.65 V, so water electrolysis cannot occur. On the other hand, we used only food materials, so nothing is toxic!" Before the battery is useful, however, the researchers will need to first enhance the battery's power capacity. Currently, the edible battery can supply 48 microamperes of current for a bit over 10 minutes. So it can easily meet the power demand of a miniature medical device or a small LED. "These batteries are no competition to ordinary batteries -- they will not power electric cars -- but they are meant to power edible electronics and maybe some other niche applications, so their main advantage is non-toxicity," said Ilic. Here's a list of what makes these edible batteries work, as mentioned by Ars:

- "Quercetin, a pigment found in almonds and capers, serves as the battery cathode, whereas riboflavin (vitamin B2) makes up the battery anode.
- The researchers used nori (edible seaweed that is used in the wrapping of sushi rolls) as the separator and a water-based solution (aqueous NaHSO4) as the electrolyte.
- Activated charcoal is employed to achieve high electrical conductivity in the battery.
The battery electrodes come covered in beeswax and connect to a gold foil (used to cover pastries) that laminates a supporting structure made of ethyl cellulose."

The research has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Electronic Arts announced it is canceling its Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile games. And as a result, it is shutting down its Industrial Toys game studio. From a report: Apex Legends Mobile debuted last year, bringing Respawn Entertainment's hot Apex Legends shooter game to mobile devices. It won Apple's Game of the Year for 2022 as well as the same for Google Play. Now the game will shut down in 90 days. Battlefield Mobile was in soft launch, but it will also end. In a blog post, Respawn Entertainment cited slipping quality for Apex Legends Mobile's updates as a reason for shutting down the title. EA made the announcement as it released earnings for the third fiscal quarter ended December 31.

A new draft of the Dungeons & Dragons Open Gaming License, dubbed OGL 1.2 by publisher Wizards of the Coast, is now available for download. Polygon reports: The announcement was made Thursday by Kyle Brink, executive producer of D&D, on the D&D Beyond website. According to Wizards, this draft could place the OGL outside of the publisher's control -- which should sound good to fans enraged by recent events. Time will tell, but public comment will be accepted beginning Jan. 20 and will continue through Feb. 3. [...] Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that, by its own description, "helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world's most pressing challenges." As such, a Creative Commons license once enacted could ultimately put the OGL 1.2 outside of Wizards' control in perpetuity.

"We're giving the core D&D mechanics to the community through a Creative Commons license, which means that they are fully in your hands," Brink said in the blog post. "If you want to use quintessentially D&D content from the SRD such as owlbears and magic missile, OGL 1.2 will provide you a perpetual, irrevocable license to do so." So much trust has been lost over the last several weeks that it will no doubt take a while for legal experts -- armchair and otherwise -- to pour over the details of the new OGL. These are the bullet points that Wizards is promoting in this official statement: - Protecting D&D's inclusive play experience. As I said above, content more clearly associated with D&D (like the classes, spells, and monsters) is what falls under the OGL. You'll see that OGL 1.2 lets us act when offensive or hurtful content is published using the covered D&D stuff. We want an inclusive, safe play experience for everyone. This is deeply important to us, and OGL 1.0a didn't give us any ability to ensure it

- TTRPGs and VTTs. OGL 1.2 will only apply to TTRPG content, whether published as books, as electronic publications, or on virtual tabletops (VTTs). Nobody needs to wonder or worry if it applies to anything else. It doesn't.

- Deauthorizing OGL 1.0a. We know this is a big concern. The Creative Commons license and the open terms of 1.2 are intended to help with that. One key reason why we have to deauthorize: We can't use the protective options in 1.2 if someone can just choose to publish harmful, discriminatory, or illegal content under 1.0a. And again, any content you have already published under OGL 1.0a will still always be licensed under OGL 1.0a.

- Very limited license changes allowed. Only two sections can be changed once OGL 1.2 is live: how you cite Wizards in your work and how we can contact each other. We don't know what the future holds or what technologies we will use to communicate with each other, so we thought these two sections needed to be future-proofed. A revised version of this draft will be presented to the community again "on or before February 17."

"The process will extend as long as it needs to," Brink said. "We'll keep iterating and getting your feedback until we get it right."

Video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA) is actively seeking a potential buyer or merger. Apple has reportedly been in talks with the company about buying EA out according to Puck. Disney and Amazon have also been in talks about purchasing the video game company. 9to5Mac reports: The Redwood City-based firm has published hits like Apex Legends, Madden, and The Sims franchise. According to Puck, EA ideally would like a merger so Andrew Wilson can remain CEO of the combined company. [...] EA's roots actually go back to Apple. Back in 1982, Apple's then Director of Strategy and Marketing, Trip Hawkins, left the company to start EA. A buyout wouldn't be Apple's first venture into gaming, however. The Cupertino company unveiled its gaming service Apple Arcade back in 2019. Through Apple Arcade, users can play ad-free games on their iOS, macOS, and tvOS devices.

E Ink has unveiled a new version of its "Kaleido" color e-paper color display capable of playing animations and videos. It can also support displays up to 13.3-inches. Gizmodo reports: Kaleido was followed by Kaleido Plus which offered some key improvements, but it is now being replaced by the freshly announced Kaleido 3. We haven't had a chance to go eyes-on with Kaleido 3 just yet, but according to E Ink, "by optimizing the design of the ePaper module structure, E Ink Kaleido 3 has increased its color saturation by 30 percent compared to the previous generation." That's not a stark contrast on paper (pun intended) and Kaleido 3 still only supports 4,096 colors, but in person, the improvements between versions are usually far more obvious.

E Ink also claims that Kaleido 3, which will be available in three sizes (7.8-inch, 10.3-inch, and 13.3-inch) for everything from e-readers to larger tablets, employs a new front light technology that reduces the amount of blue light bouncing off the screen to make reading easier at night without resorting to warmer color temperature options for the LEDs which would throw off the accuracy of the colors being displayed. The most interesting upgrade with Kaleido 3 is that E Ink claims the responsiveness of the display has been improved which "enables the module to play animations and videos, providing new options for digital reading and writing in educational and professional applications."

LibrePlanet, the annual conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation, will be happening online this weekend. The event "provides an opportunity for community activists, domain experts, and people seeking solutions for themselves to come together in order to discuss current issues in technology and ethics," according to its web page. This year's LibrePlanet theme is "Living Liberation".

And while you're listening to the presentations, you can apparently also interact with the rest of the community: Each LibrePlanet room has its own IRC channel on the Libera.Chat network... Want to interact with other conference-goers in a virtual space? Join us on LibreAdventure, where you'll be able to video chat with fellow free software users, journey to the stars, and walk around a replica of the FSF office!

Our Minetest server is back by popular demand, and now running version 5.x of everyone's favorite free software, voxel sandbox game. You can install Minetest through your GNU/Linux distro's package manager, and point your client to minetest.libreplanet.org with the default port 30000.
Sunday's presentations include "Living in freedom with GNU Emacs" and "Hacking my brain: Free virtual reality implementations and their potential for therapeutic use."

And Sunday will also include a talk from Seth Schoen, the first staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who helped develop the Let's Encrypt certificate authority) titled "Reducing Internet address waste: The IPv4 unicast extensions project."

View the complete schedule here.

Samsung Electronics this week announced plans to give plastic waste a second life as a new material for use in its electronic devices -- starting with the latest Galaxy gadgets, set to be revealed on Wednesday. PC Magazine reports: "These devices will reflect our ongoing effort to eliminate single-use plastics and expand the use of other eco-conscious materials, such as recycled post-consumer material (PCM) and recycled paper," Samsung said in a news release. "With this transformation, the future of Galaxy technology will bring leading product design and deliver better environmental impact." Water bottles and grocery bags usually spring to mind when people hear "ocean-bound plastic," but they're not the only things littering the world's waterways. According to Samsung, a "more hidden threat" is the 640,000 tons of fishing nets abandoned and discarded every year.

The so-called "ghost nets" are responsible for trapping and entangling marine life, damaging coral reefs and natural habitats, and eventually ending up in our food and water sources. "Collecting and repurposing these nets are vital first steps in keeping our oceans clean," Samsung said, "as well as preserving the planet and our collective future." It's unclear exactly what part the repurposed plastics play in the upcoming handsets. We'll have to wait until this week's virtual Unpacked event, where Samsung is expected to unveil the Galaxy S22 series and Tab S8. Watch the event online at Samsung.com from 10 a.m. ET on Feb. 9. The news comes just weeks after Samsung stopped a 106-day toxic spill in Austin, Texas, that resulted in the release of as much as 736,000 gallons of sulfuric acid waste into a Northeast Austin creek.

Politico reports: When Ford announced that starting in 2023 its cars and trucks would come with Google Maps, Assistant and Play Store preinstalled, CEO Jim Farley called the partnership between his iconic U.S. automaker and the search giant a chance to "reinvent" the automobile — making it an office-on-wheels, with more connectivity than any phone or laptop. "We were spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions every year, keeping up with basically a generic experience that was not competitive to your cellphone," Farley crowed on CNBC, announcing the six-year deal with the tech giant.... But many tech-industry watchdogs looked at the Ford-Google car of the future with different eyes. They fear that tech companies will soon be doing to cars what they did to phones: Tying their exclusive operating systems to specific products to force out competitors and dominate a huge swath of the global economy.

Indeed, the smartphone wars are over, and Google and Apple won. Now they — and Amazon — are battling to control how you operate within your car. All three see autos as the next great opportunity to reach American consumers, who spend more time in the driver's seat than anywhere outside their home or workplace. And automakers, after years of floundering to incorporate cutting-edge technologies into cars on their own, are increasingly eager for Silicon Valley's help — hoping to adopt both its tech and its lucrative business models where consumers pay monthly for ongoing services instead of shelling out for a product just once. Now, having missed the boat as the tech giants cornered the market on smartphones, some policymakers and regulators believe the battle over connected cars represents a chance to block potential monopolies before they form.

State attorneys general who sued Google in 2020 for monopolizing online search highlighted concerns about the company's move into autonomous cars in their federal antitrust complaint. Meanwhile, in Europe, the EU's competition authority has opened a probe into Google's contracts related to connected cars... While Silicon Valley and automakers are thrilled about the future of connected and autonomous cars, regulators and privacy advocates are less so. "These companies have an amount of data on us that they shouldn't have, and they have a history of not using it in responsible ways," said Katharine Trendacosta of the digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "They have a history of going back on promises they have made about that data."

She cited Google's pledge during the DoubleClick acquisition in 2008 — which it later reneged on — not to combine data from its consumer products with that from its advertising services.
The article quotes Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III, who last December complained that "When smartphones took off, Google made sure they controlled search on Apple's iPhone. They are doing the same thing on voice and connected cars. It's a similar playbook." And an executive at an automotive supplier that competes with Google tells Politico that Google is already "corralling everything through their system and controls what information is released downstream."

And Jim Heffner, a vice president at Cox Automotive Mobility, adds that "The ride is no longer the point. Data is the cornerstone. ... Apple and Google and others want to be at the epicenter of that."

Game makers are increasingly selling virtual weapons and gear as NFTs, extending the trendy digital deeds' reach but rankling some players. From a report: More videogame makers are selling virtual guns, helmets and other gear in the form of NFTs, a move that is increasingly pushing the trendy digital deeds into the average household. Players have been paying for virtual goods in games like "Grand Theft Auto Online" and "World of Warcraft" for years, but turning those items into nonfungible tokens would let gamers trade and resell them, making them into potentially valuable assets. The change also could mean that players who buy an NFT in one game could use it later in other games, on social media and in other corners of the internet -- an important step in developing an economy for the so-called metaverse. "FarmVille" maker Zynga and "Assassin's Creed" creator Ubisoft Entertainment are among the first big, publicly traded gaming companies to say they are experimenting with the strategy. Electronic Arts, Playtika and others are also looking into NFTs' potential use for engaging players.

"We're doing this because this may be part of the future of gaming," said Matt Wolf, Zynga's new vice president of blockchain gaming. "This is all about community building." Nonfungible tokens are essentially digital deeds that verify the authenticity of the items they represent as unique. They are the latest internet-based collecting craze, and so far they have come in forms ranging from digital artwork and trading cards to virtual real estate and sneakers, as well as concert tickets and even sports highlights. The tokens are stored on a blockchain, a digital ledger that shows when they were purchased and for how much, and ensures NFTs can't be duplicated or changed. Amid all that activity, NFTs' advent in videogames holds particular significance because gamers spend so much time in virtual worlds. That makes them potential early adopters in the metaverse -- a virtual realm where proponents say people will work, play and shop and where technology experts say the ability to buy and sell NFTs will be key.