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Submission + - First Sodium-ion Batteries in Commercial EVs (insideevs.com) 1

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: While lithium-ion chemistry is currently ubiquitous in commercial batteries, an alternative chemistry, the sodium-ion battery, has projected advantages by using a lower-cost, more abundant material, with potentially a lower fire hazard. Chinese battery manufacturer CATL and automaker Changan Automobile are preparing to put the world’s first passenger car powered by sodium-ion batteries on public roads by mid-2026. The CATL Naxtra sodium-ion battery will debut in the Changan Nevo A06 sedan, delivering an estimated range of around 400 kilometers (249 miles) on the China Light-Duty Test Cycle. “The launch represents a major step in the industry’s transition toward a dual-chemistry ecosystem, where sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries complement each other to meet diverse customer needs,” CATL said in a press release. Studies show that sodium-ion batteries carry no risk of thermal runaway and are far less sensitive to extreme temperatures. From an energy density standpoint, the Naxtra battery is competitive but not revolutionary, at 175 watt-hours per kilogram, lower than nickel-rich Lithium-ion chemistries but roughly on par with LFP. That makes it more suitable for low-cost and low-range EVs as well as stationary energy storage. It reportedly operates well at cold temperatures, retaining more than 90% of its range at -40 degrees C (-40 degrees F).

Submission + - Walmart Commits to Electric Vehicle Charging

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is making a big change to some of its parking lots: they plan to add spaces for electric vehicle charging at select locations in 19 states. (non-paywalled site here). The move follows up on a plan announced in 2023 to build a network of charging stations at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores throughout the U.S. While the company has charging stations at some locations already, it recently updated its website to indicate stations are coming soon to dozens of locations. Walmart said "With a store or club located within 10 miles of approximately 90% of Americans, we are uniquely positioned to deliver a convenient charging option that will help make EV ownership possible whether people live in rural, suburban or urban areas," according to Walmart Senior Vice President of Energy Transformation, Vishal Kapadia.
Walmart plans to have the nationwide network operating by 2030. Customers who want to use the charging stations must use the Walmart App to sign in and pay. The full list of Walmart locations that have recently opened or soon to open EV charging stations is here.

Submission + - Could new clocks keep airplanes safe from GPS jamming? (bbc.com)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Over the last three months of 2024, more than 800 cases of GPS interference were recorded in Lithuanian airspace. Estonia and Finland have also raised concerns, accusing Russia of deploying technology to jam satellite navigation signals near Nato's eastern flank. A group of British scientists – dubbed the "Time Lords" – are working on a solution: to develop portable atomic clocks. By carrying a group of atoms cooled to -273C on the plane itself, rather than relying on an external signal, the technology can't be interfered with by jamming. But the problem is that the equipment is still too large to be used routinely on planes. The UK Hub for Quantum Enabled Position Navigation and Timing (QEPNT) was set up last December by the government to shrink the devices on to a chip, making them robust enough for everyday life and affordable for everyone. Henry White, part of the team from BAE Systems that worked on the test flight, told BBC News that he thought the first application could be aboard ships, "where there's a bit more space".

Submission + - Economist says: EVs should go with slow Level 1 charging (cleantechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Economist Phillip Kobernick makes the case that the emphasis on fast-charging stations for electric vehicles in the US is misplaced. According to an article in cleantechnica, he argues that from an economic standpoint, what we should be doing is making more slow chargers. All thing equal, who wouldn’t choose a 10-minute charge over a 3-hour charge or a 10-hour charge? But all things are not equal. Superfast chargers are far more expensive than Level 2 chargers, and Level 2 chargers are also significantly more expensive than Level 1 charging infrastructure, which are normal electricity outlets. He points out that we get 4–7 times more charging capability installed for the same cost by going with Level 1 charging instead of Level 2. And given that people often just plug in their electric vehicles overnight, Level 1 charging can more than adequately provide what you need in that time. The case is examined in a podcast on the site.

Submission + - China unveils Haolong space shuttle (space.com)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: The Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute, part of the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), has unveiled their design for a reusable uncrewed spaceplane for delivering and returning cargo from the Chinese Tiangong space station. Like the Sierra Space "Dream Chaser," the vehicle is to be launched as a payload on a separate launch vehicle, and land horizontally on Earth on a runway. The design is aerodynamically a hybrid, incorporating features of both winged and lifting-body designs. A model of the Haolong will make its debut at the 15th "Airshow China", November 12 to 17 in Zhuhai. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Submission + - Generative AI doesn't have a coherent understanding of the world (mit.edu)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Despite its impressive output, a recent study from MI suggests generative AI doesn’t have a coherent understanding of the world. While the best-performing large language models have surprising capabilities that make it seem like the models are implicitly learning some general truths about the world, that isn’t necessarily the case. The recent paper showed that Large Language Models and game-playing AI implicitly model the world, but the models are flawed and incomplete. An example study showed that a popular type of generative AI model accurately provided turn-by-turn driving directions in New York City, without having formed an accurate internal map of the city. Despite the model can navigating effectively, when the researchers closed some streets and added detours, its performance plummeted. When they dug deeper, the researchers found that the New York maps the model implicitly generated had many nonexistent streets curving between the grid and connecting far away intersections.

Submission + - The World population is projected to peak at 10.3 billion in 2080s

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: According to a new report from the United Nations, the world population is expected to grow to an estimated peak of 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, an increase over the current global population of 8.2 billion people. The estimated world population at the end of the century (2100) is now expected to be 6% less than estimates from a decade ago. However, calculating the number of future people is not a perfect science, with “many sources of uncertainty in estimating the global population,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It estimated the world reached 8 billion people last September, while the U.N. timed the milestone nearly one year earlier.

Submission + - Japan SLIM lands on moon... but may be short mission (space.com)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: The Japan SLIM spacecraft has successfully landed on moon... but power problems mean it may be short mission. The good news is that the landing was successful, making Japan only the fifth nation to successfully make a lunar landing, and the ultra-miniature rover and the hopper both deployed. The bad news is that the solar arrays aren't producing power, and unless they can fix the problem in the next few hours, the batteries will be depleted and it will die. But, short mission or long, hurrah for Japan for being the fifth country to successfully land a mission on the surface of the moon. (On their third try- two previous missions didn't make it). It's a rather amazing mission. I've never seen a spacecraft concept that lands under rocket power vertically but then rotates over to rest horizontally on the surface.

Submission + - Electric vehicles fail at a lower rate than gas cars in extreme cold (electrek.co)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Electric vehicles often get bad press about their performance in the cold. Now, Electrek presents actual data comparing failure rates of EVs versus ICE cars, thanks to our friends in Norway. Everywhere in the world, internal combustion engine vehicles fail in the cold a lot more often than electric vehicles, but that’s mostly due to the fact that there are a lot more of them. In Norway, almost 1 in 4 cars on the road is electric, which makes it easy to adjust per capita. The country has been experiencing extreme cold conditions since the beginning of the year, and Viking, a road assistance company (think AAA), says that it responded to 34,000 assistance requests in the first 9 days of the year. Viking says that only 13% of the cases were coming from electric vehicles. This means that electric cars are almost twice as good as fossil cars in the cold. To be fair, this data doesn’t adjust for the age of the vehicles. Older gas-powered cars fail at a higher rate than the new ones and electric vehicles are obviously much more recent on average.

Submission + - Chandrayaan mission sleeps for the night

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: The sun has set in the south polar region of the moon where India's Chandrayaan-3 mission has landed, and the rover has switched off for the night. With luck from the moon gods, it will wake up with the sunrise in 14 days. But, even if not, mission accomplished! It was designed for fourteen days of operation, the daylight period. In that time the rover accomplished just over a hundred meters (American units: one football field) of traverse, examining and chemically analyzing the surface. Good work, India!

Submission + - The untold history of today's Russian-speaking hackers (ft.com)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Financial Times outlines the complicated geopolitical background of the Russian-speaking hacker gangs that are responsible for malware and ransomware, starting with "one of the most remarkable if little-known events in post-cold war history: the first and, to my knowledge, the last publicly organised conference of avowed criminals" in May, 2002. The First Worldwide Carders Conference was the brainchild of the administrators of a landmark website,carderplanet.com. Known as “the family”, this was a mixed group of young men, both Ukrainians and Russians, who had spent the previous 10 years growing up in a lively atmosphere of gangster capitalism. During the 1990s, conventional law and order in the former Soviet Union had broken down. The collapse of the communist system had left a vacuum in which new forms of economic activity were emerging. The young criminals who signed up for the Odesa conference were no gun wielders. They boasted a different talent: advanced computing ability. They were honing their skills at the same time as western businesses had begun experimenting with buying and selling stuff over the internet. In this brave new world of internet commerce, security occupied only a small territory. Founded a year before the conference, CarderPlanet revolutionised web-based criminal activity, especially the lucrative trade in stolen or cloned credit card data, by solving the conundrum that until then had faced every bad guy on the web: how can I do business with this person, as I know he’s a criminal, so he must be untrustworthy by definition?

Submission + - Guardian of the Vote (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: The Atlantic profiles a computer scientist: Barbara Simons, who has been on the forefront of the pushback against electronic voting as a technology susceptible to fraud and hacking. When she first started writing articles about the dangers of electronic voting with no paper trail, the idea that software could be manipulated to rig elections was considered a fringe preoccupation, but Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election have reversed Simons’s fortunes. According to the Department of Homeland Security, those efforts included attempts to meddle with the electoral process in 21 states; while a series of highly publicized hacks—at Sony, Equifax, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management—has driven home the reality that very few computerized systems are truly secure. Simons is a former President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); and the group she helps run, Verified Voting, has been active in educating the public about the dangers of unverified voting since 2003.

Submission + - 32 states offer online voting, but experts warn it isn't secure (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: According to the Washington Post, 32 states have implemented some form of online voting for the 2016 U.S. presidential election-- even though multiple experts warn that internet voting is not secure. In many cases, the online voting options are for absentee ballots, overseas citizens or military members deployed overseas.

According to Verified voting, "voted ballots sent via Internet simply cannot be made secure and make easy and inviting targets for attackers ranging from lone hackers to foreign governments seeking to undermine US elections."

Submission + - Israel meets with Google and Youtube to discuss censoring videos (middleeastmonitor.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Various sources report Israel’s Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Tzipi Hotovely meeting with representatives of Google and YouTube to discuss censoring Palestinian videos believed to incite violence. Original aricle (in Hebrew) from Maariv

The open question is how Google and Youtube will define "inciting violence".

Currently, all foreign journalists in the Palestinian territories are required to register with the Israeli military, and all footage must be approved through the Israeli Military Censor’s office before being released. However, according to the article in alternet individual Palestinians have been uploading videos showing violence by Israeli soldiers, including execution-style killings, and highlighting the living conditions in the territories, which Israeli authorities consider inflammatory.

Submission + - Blue Origin "New Shepherd" makes it to space... and back again

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Blue Origin's "New Shepherd" suborbital vehicle made its first flight into space (defined as 100 km altitude)... and successfully landed both the capsule (by parachute) and the booster rocket (vertical landing under rocket power). This is the first time that a vehicle has made it into space and had all components fully recovered for reuse since the NASA flights of the X-15 in the 1960s.
Check out the videos at various places on the web

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