An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A patent lawsuit filed by one of 3D printing's most established firms against a consumer-focused upstart could have a big impact on the wider 3D-printing scene. In two complaints, (1, 2, PDF) filed in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, against six entities related to Bambu Lab, Stratasys alleges that Bambu Lab infringed upon 10 patents that it owns, some through subsidiaries like Makerbot (acquired in 2013). Among the patents cited are US9421713B2, "Additive manufacturing method for printing three-dimensional parts with purge towers," and US9592660B2, "Heated build platform and system for three-dimensional printing methods."

There are not many, if any, 3D printers sold to consumers that do not have a heated bed, which prevents the first layers of a model from cooling during printing and potentially shrinking and warping the model. "Purge towers" (or "prime towers" in Bambu's parlance) allow for multicolor printing by providing a place for the filament remaining in a nozzle to be extracted and prevent bleed-over between colors. Stratasys' infringement claims also target some fundamental technologies around force detection and fused deposition modeling (FDM) that, like purge towers, are used by other 3D-printer makers that target entry-level and intermediate 3D-printing enthusiasts.

Tesla's new Cybertruck is more than their first new model since 2020, reports the Verge: Tesla announced a new "Powershare" vehicle-to-load charging capability, only available on the new Cybertruck. The feature will allow Cybertruck owners to power their camping equipment, power tools, or even their entire home during a blackout, just by using their electric truck as a mobile generator.

The truck also features a 240-volt outlet in the rear bed that can be used to charge other EVs. An image on Tesla's website shows the Cybertruck charging a Model Y.

The Cybertruck can put out as much as 11.5kW, which is more than the Ford F-150 Lightning's 9.6kW of onboard power or the GMC Sierra Denali EV's 10.2kW. Tesla has been talking about manufacturing vehicles with bidirectional charging capabilities for several years now, first teasing the feature at its Battery Day event in 2020. Since then, many of its competitors have adopted the feature for their EVs, including Ford, GM, Hyundai, Kia, and others...

In essence, it treats high-capacity lithium-ion batteries not only as tools to power EVs but also as backup storage cells to charge other electric devices, an entire home, or even to send power to the electrical grid for possible energy savings... Customers who want to take advantage of the Powershare feature in their homes will need a Tesla Powerwall (of course) and a Wall Connector for the most seamless connection.
Tesla held a launch event for the vehicle on Thursday, and demand appears to be high. Jalopnik reports Tesla is now offering people who'd reserved a Cybertruck a $1,000 discount if they'll instead order another Tesla model.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Car and Driver: Canoo, an electric automotive startup based in California, has expanded its lineup of forthcoming electric vehicles by revealing this snub-nosed pickup. The pickup, which sports a design similar to Canoo's passenger van, will offer more than 200 miles of range and as much as 600 horsepower and 550 pound-feet of torque with the dual-motor configuration; a rear motor configuration will also be offered. That power and range, and a full six-to-eight-foot pickup bed, all have to fit into a vehicle with a 112.2-inch wheelbase -- an inch shorter than the Tesla Model 3 -- and an overall length, at 184 inches, that makes it more than two feet shorter than the Ford Ranger pickup.

The pickup rides on Canoo's multi-purpose platform architecture and will be the third Canoo vehicle to do so. [...] The new pickup emphasizes modularity and looks to maximize its utility. It has tables folding down around the vehicle, various hidden storage areas, and numerous charging points on the exterior of the truck. In a video exploring the ins and outs, Tony Aquila, executive chairman of Canoo, said that the goal was to make something that was very functional and could also be personalized. On either side of the six-foot bed, tables fold down to function as a workspace, and there is also a table that folds down from the front of the truck. That table exposes a small storage area as well as various points to charge or power electronics. The pickup bed can also be extended, as well as enclosed, to eight feet long to fit bigger items. Steps with storage within them can be pulled out of the sides of the truck to make it easier to access anything on the roof rack. And to answer the question any truck owner would ask, yes, there's a taillamp setup in the bed extension, so it's okay to drive the truck with the bed extended to fit longer cargo.

The interior of the pickup, shown in the video, shows it fits two people, but Aquila said it could be adapted for a three-person setup. Information such as speed and battery levels appear to be on a broad screen just below the windshield. Canoo's pickup will be available for pre-order beginning in the second quarter of this year, but production isn't slated to begin until 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The city of Carmel, Ind., has trucks for plowing snow, salting streets, and carrying landscaping equipment. But one cherry-red pickup can do something no other vehicle can: produce its own hydrogen. A 45-kilogram metal box sits in the bed of the work truck. When a driver starts the engine, the device automatically begins concocting the colorless, odorless gas, which feeds into the engine's intake manifold. This prevents the truck from guzzling gasoline until the hydrogen supply runs out. The pickup has no fuel cell module, a standard component in most hydrogen vehicles. No high-pressure storage tanks or refueling pumps are needed, either.

Instead, the "hydrogen-on-tap" device contains six stainless steel canisters. Each contains a 113-gram button of an aluminum and gallium alloy. A small amount of water drips onto the buttons, causing a chemical reaction that splits the oxygen and hydrogen contained in the water. The hydrogen releases, and the rest turns into aluminum oxide, a waste product that can be recycled to create more buttons. Back in the garage, the driver can replace spent canisters with news ones to replenish the hydrogen supply. AlGalCo -- short for Aluminum Gallium Company -- has spent 14 years refining the technology, which is based on a process developed by distinguished engineer Jerry Woodall. In 2013, AlGalCo partnered with the Carmel Street Department to build a prototype for one of the city's Ford F-250 trucks. In tests, the red pickup has seen a 15 percent improvement in gas mileage and a 20 percent drop in carbon dioxide emissions.

Ikea has partnered with American furniture startup Ori Living to develop a new robotic furniture system for people living in small spaces. Called Rognan, the collection includes a large storage unit that can slide across a room via a touchpad to divide a room into two living spaces, a bed, desk, and a couch for people to pull out when needed. It will launch first in Hong Kong and Japan in 2020. The Verge reports: Rognan is built on Ori's robotic platform, and works with Ikea's Platsa line of storage furniture. It's also compatible with Ikea's Tradfri line of cabinet and wardrobe smart lighting. Ikea says the Rognan can save an extra eight square meters (about 86 square feet) of living space. That might not sound like much, but if you live in a tiny home, it could make all the difference. The Verge notes that Ori's line of automated furniture started as a concept from MIT's CityHome concept project in 2014. It launched for real estate developers and Airbnbs for $10,000 as Ori Systems.

In an experiment published today in Nature, IBM researchers have managed to read and write data to a single atom. A previous atomic storage technique, as mentioned by TechCrunch, doesn't actually store data in the atom, but moves them around to form readable patterns. "This means that imbuing individual atoms with a 0 or 1 is the next major step forward and the next major barrier in storing data digitally, both increasing capacity by orders of magnitude and presenting a brand new challenge to engineers and physicists," reports TechCrunch. From the report: It works like this: A single Holmium atom (a large one with many unpaired electrons) is set on a bed of magnesium oxide. In this configuration, the atom has what's called magnetic bistability: It has two stable magnetic states with different spins (just go with it). The researchers use a scanning tunneling microscope (also invented at IBM, in the 1980s) to apply about 150 millivolts at 10 microamps to the atom -- it doesn't sound like a lot, but at that scale, it's like a lightning strike. This huge influx of electrons causes the Holmium atom to switch its magnetic spin state. Because the two states have different conductivity profiles, the STM tip can detect which state the atom is in by applying a lower voltage (about 75 millivolts) and sensing its resistance. In order to be absolutely sure the atom was changing its magnetic state and this wasn't just some interference or effect from the STM's electric storm, the researchers set an iron atom down nearby. This atom is affected by its magnetic neighborhood, and acted differently when probed while the Holmium atom was in its different states. This proves that the experiment truly creates a lasting, stored magnetic state in a single atom that can be detected indirectly. And there you have it: a single atom used to store what amounts to a 0 or a 1. The experimenters made two of them and zapped them independently to form the four binary combinations (00,01,10,11) that two such nodes can form.

szczys writes: Leaded Gas did a great job of keeping engines from knocking thanks to tetra-ethyl lead. Unfortunately the fumes from the chemical are highly poisonous. R-12 is a refrigerant that revolutionized the cold storage of vaccines. It turned out to be the first of the chlorofluorocarbons which are well known (and now banned) for damaging the environment. Both are the creations of one inventor: Thomas Migley, Jr. Two deadly inventions seem like more than enough for one person, but his story ends with a third. Stricken with Polio, he invented a system to help him get in and out of bed on his own. A tragic accident ended his life when he was caught and strangled by the system he created.

Bennett Haselton writes: "In March I asked why Netflix doesn't offer their rental DVD service in 'virtual DVD' form -- where you can 'check out' a fixed number of 'virtual DVDs' per month, just as you would with their physical DVDs by mail, but by accessing the 'virtual DVDs' in streaming format so that you could watch them on a phone or a tablet or a laptop without a DVD drive. My argument was that this is an interesting, non-trivial question, because it seems Netflix and (by proxy) the studios are leaving cash on the table by not offering this as an option to DVD-challenged users. I thought some commenters' responses raised questions that were worth delving into further." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

Nerval's Lobster writes "The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin is going to get a major speed boost this summer, and it won't come from new CPUs. Internet2, the research project that acts as a test bed for new Internet technologies, will take TACC's massive computing system from 10GB to 100GB of Ethernet throughput. TACC supercomputers are regularly found near the top of the Top 500 supercomputer list, which ranks the world's fastest supercomputers. But while the supercomputers were fast, the connectivity wasn't quite up to snuff. So TACC began the emigration to the Internet2 network. TACC is a key partner in the UT Research Cyberinfrastructure, which provides a combination of advanced computing, high-bandwidth network connectivity, and large data storage to all 15 of the UT system schools. So not only is TACC upgraded to Internet2s 100GB and 8.8 terabit-per-second optical network, platform, services and technologies, so is the entire UT system. 'This Internet2 bandwidth upgrade will enable researchers to achieve a tenfold increase in moving data to/from TACC's supercomputing, visualization and data storage systems, greatly increasing their productivity and their ability to make new discoveries,' TACC director Jay Boisseau wrote in a statement."

Bennett Haselton writes "Recently I wrote an article about what I considered to be the sorry state of cooking instructions on the web (and how-to instructions in general), using as a jumping-off point a passage from Evgeny Morozov's new book To Save Everything, Click Here. My point was that most "newbie" instructions never seemed to get judged by the basic criteria by which all instructions should be judged: If you give these instructions to a group of beginners, and have them attempt to follow the instructions without any additional help from the author, what kind of results do they get? The original title of my article was "Better Cooking Through Algorithms," but due to some confusion in the submission process the title got changed to "Book Review: To Save Everything, Click Here" even though, as multiple commenters pointed out, it didn't make much sense as a "book review" since it only mentioned a short passage from the actual book. This article, on the other hand, really is intended as a review of The 4-Hour Chef, even though the article only covers a similarly tiny fraction of the book's 671-page length. That's because even before buying the book, I was determined to review it according to a simple process: Try three recipes from the book. Follow the directions step by step. (If any direction is ambiguous, then follow what could be a plausible interpretation of the directions.) My estimation of the quality of the book, as an instructional cooking guide for beginners, is then determined by the quality of the food produced by my attempt to follow the directions. (I've done this so many times for so many "beginner cookbooks," that I've probably lost my true "beginner" cook status in the process — which means that the results obtained by a real beginner using The 4-Hour Chef, would probably be a little worse than what I achieved.)" Read on for the rest of Bennett's Thoughts

MrSeb writes "There have been plenty of rumors about how the Nexus program was going to grow and change with this year's announcement. Now that we have all the details, it looks like almost none of them were right. There is no Nexus certification program, and the dream of multiple Nexus phones seems well and truly dead. What we do have is a range of device sizes with the Nexus 4, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10. However, the Nexus program has been altered in one important way: we know what Nexus means now. There can no longer be any doubt: a Nexus device is about openness first and foremost. Last year the technology sphere was busily discussing whether or not the Verizon Galaxy Nexus was a 'true' Nexus device. This year we have an answer: a Nexus controlled by a carrier is no Nexus. Rather than get in bed with Verizon, Sprint, or AT&T to produce an LTE version of the Nexus 4, we have HSPA+ only. Even the new Nexus 7 with mobile data is limited to this enhanced 3G standard. And then there's the pricing: The super high-resolution (2560×1600) Nexus 10 tablet starts at just $399; The Nexus 7 is dropping in price to $199 for a 16GB tablet; The Nexus 4 with 16GB of storage is going to sell for $349, exactly the same as the old Galaxy Nexus was until yesterday. To put this into perspective, the LG Optimus G, which the Nexus 4 is based on, sells for $550 without subsidy. Google is pushing the idea of openness with the Nexus devices, but it's not an entirely altruistic endeavor. By giving us cheap and open devices, Google is making sure it's in control — not the carriers. That's better for the consumers, but it's also better for Google."

Fifteen years from now, your alarm goes off at 7:30 AM, pulling you out of a dead sleep. You roll over, grumbling a command, and the alarm obediently shuts up. You drift off again, but ten minutes later the alarm returns, more insistent. It won't be so easily pacified this time; the loose sensory netting inside your pillow will keep the noise going until it detects alpha waves in drastically higher numbers than theta waves. Or until it gets the automated password from the shower. Sighing, you roll out of bed, pull your Computing ID (CID) card from the alarm unit, and stumble out of the bedroom. Pausing briefly to drop your CID into your desktop computer, you make your way to the shower and begin washing. Your alarm triggered the shower's heating unit, so the water comes out at a pleasant 108 degrees, exactly your preference. (42 degrees, you remind yourself — the transition to metric still isn't second nature, after almost two full years.) You wash quickly to avoid exceeding your water quota, and step out refreshed, ready to meet the day. (Read on for more.)

Julie188 writes "One of the more interesting aspects of Red Hat's acquisition of virtual storage vendor Gluster on Tuesday is how it drags Red Hat into bed with its cloud competitor OpenStack. Red Hat made waves over the summer in the open source community when one of its executives threw punches at OpenStack's community, saying the community amounted to not much more than a bunch of press releases. In July, Gluster contributed its Connector for OpenStack. It enables features such as live migration of VMs, instant boot of VMs, and movement of VMs between clouds on a GlusterFS environment. While Fedora has already said that its upcoming Fedora 16 would support OpenStack, Fedora is a community distro and not beholden to Red Hat. However, Red Hat today promised that it would continue to support and maintain Gluster's contribution to OpenStack. It didn't, however, to promise to quit the smack talk."

Earlier this month, an expedition fertilized 300 square kilometers of the Atlantic Ocean with six metric tons of dissolved iron. This triggered a bloom of phytoplankton, which doubled their biomass within two weeks by taking in carbon dioxide from the seawater. The dead phytoplankton were then expected to sink to the ocean bed, dragging carbon along with them. Instead, the experiment turned into an example of how the food chain works, as the bloom was eaten by a swarm of hungry copepods. The huge swarm of copepods were in turn eaten by larger crustaceans called amphipods, which are often eaten by squid and whales. "I think we are seeing the last gasps of ocean iron fertilization as a carbon storage strategy," says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University. While the experiment failed to show ocean fertilization as a viable carbon storage strategy, it has pushed the old "My dog ate my homework" excuse to an unprecedented level.

If you can imagine working in the office of a school for gifted, troubled, and criminally insane children, inside an international airport, you can get a taste of what it is like to do support for Slashdot. I've worked here around 5 years now and have seen some crazy things. From a guy showing up at the office and offering me a car if I let him "reverse engineer Rob Malda's life", to people shaking and on the verge of tears because they got a Slashdot sticker. I was really tempted to take the car by the way but the thought of Rob spending his last few weeks in a hole, while this guy lowered a bucket of lotion and water down to him once a day, made me feel bad. Most of my time is spent answering email. Most days I receive about 50. When it's busy I can get well over a hundred. As everyone knows, people are precisely 500% more rude and angry online than they are in real life. Something about not having to see the tears or dodge the fist of the person you are swearing at brings out the worst in some people. We decided it would be fun to go through some of the more 'interesting' mails we've got through the years as part of our 10 year anniversary. Below you'll find some of my favorite rants, conspiracy theories and tantrums. (CT: Don't forget to put in your charity bid for the EFF- time is almost up.)

Several hundred readers commented on yesterday's Slashdot post about citizens arrested for photographing police either in public or in the photographer's own property. Read on for some of the comments which defined the conversation in today's Backslash summary.

patiwat writes "Recalling Ghost in the Shell, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried have coupled living brain tissue to a semiconductor chip. This technique involves culturing razor-thin slices of the hippocampus region on the chip, enabling them to record neural communication between thousands of nerve cells in the brain tissue slice. The hippocampus is associated with temporary storage of memory. Employing the new technique, the scientists working under the direction of Peter Fromherz were able to visualize the influence of pharmaceutical compounds on the neural network, making the 'brainchip' an exciting test bed for neuropharmaceutical research, with potential for further development in neurochip prosthetics and neurocomputation. The researchers reported this news in the online edition of the Journal of Neurophysiology (May 10, 2006)."

Daniel Holmes writes "In addition to using PHP to 'just get the job done' for years now, I've been running a humble user group here in the Midwest. As such, I have read numerous books on and around the subject, always looking for something great to inspire my colleagues, group members and myself alike. There are a metric ton of books out there that will walk you through PHP syntax -- this is not one of them. If you are looking for a book on rapidly developing prototype sites, or writing lots of HTML-embedded PHP, just keep looking. But if you have read even one of those books, or just felt like your programming style itself could use a little upgrade, then go get yourself a copy of PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra." Read on for the rest of Holmes's review.

Poomah writes: "I started my LEGO building career in the late 60s with the basic bricks of that time. I built anything that came to mind. There was no end to the wonders I created with those basic bricks. As I grew up I strayed from the LEGO path to do things like going to college, getting a job, and getting married so I could start a family. When LEGO Mindstorms was released, I was one of the first in line to get one." Now he's discovered a book to help people get the most out of these toys, so here's Poomah's review of LEGO Mindstorms: The Master's Technique.

On November 10th 1999, Ramsey Electronics of Victor, New York, was raided by the United States Customs Service for allegedly manufacturing and distributing 'Electronic Surreptitious Intercept Devices' as defined by Title 18 USC, Section 2512. We spoke to both Ramsey Electronics President John Ramsey and Joel Violanti, the federal prosecutor on the case, to find out exactly what happened, and why. (Click below for more.)