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Comment Re:The Power Inverters are coming for us! (Score 5, Interesting) 148

by j0se_p0inter0 (#66262734) Attached to: Trump Administration Bans New Chinese Humanoid Robots
"In November 2024, PRC company Deye disabled inverters in the United States, United Kingdom, Puerto Rico, and Pakistan following a dispute with a U.S. distributor. This episode demonstrated that PRC manufacturers retain operational control over installed systems".
https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/power-inverter-fcc-determination.pdf
https://content.striderintel.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Strider-Report-In-Broad-Daylight-2025.pdf

Submission + - Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose (worseonpurpose.com)

Submitted by hwstar
hwstar writes: Six companies, eighty-one brands own most of the cookware Americans can purchase. These brands are: Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, owns Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Snapware, Visions, Chicago Cutlery, Instant Pot, Anchor Hocking, Lenox, Oneida, and Reed & Barton. That is almost all of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof.

All Clad

A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn’t think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.

All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.

What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words "dishwasher safe" just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.

Pyrex

Pyrex was materials science before it was a brand. Corning invented it in 1915: borosilicate glass that shrugged off thermal shock. It is the reason three generations learned to take a dish from the freezer to the oven without a second thought.

The American Pyrex on shelves today is tempered soda-lime glass, a different material with a thermal safety margin an American Ceramic Society analysis described as borderline, roughly 55C of headroom against 183C for borosilicate. Consumer Reports collected 163 shattering incident reports, 42 of them involving injuries. European Pyrex, made by an unrelated company, is still borosilicate. The switch happened under Corning itself, decades before the buyouts. That is exactly what made the brand such a perfect acquisition: the glass had already been downgraded, the reputation had not.

In 1998 Corning sold the consumer business to an affiliate of Borden, then a KKR portfolio company, in a deal worth about $603 million. The new company borrowed $471.6 million on day one and paid Corning a $472.6 million dividend, which means it was born owing more than it had. It renamed itself World Kitchen, bought more brands with more debt, and went bankrupt by 2002. To dig out, it sold the one thing in the portfolio still growing, OXO, for $273 million.

Cornell Capital, a private equity firm founded by a former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, bought the company in 2017 and renamed it Corelle Brands. In 2019 it merged with the Canadian company behind the Instant Pot, valuing the combination at $615 million. What it actually bought is disputed to this day. More than 98 percent of the price was booked as goodwill and intangibles, and within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???"

The suspicion, later spelled out in court filings, was that Instant Pot's sales had been pumped up with discounts and channel stuffing before the sale. The CEO's own verdict was that he was running "the most poorly operated 'successful' business on the planet."

Cornell held on to the asset anyway, and two years later, it got its money out. On April 12, 2021, Instant Brands borrowed $450 million. On April 21, it paid a $345 million dividend, roughly $200 million of that to Cornell Capital and its co-investors. The solvency memo blessing the payout assumed new product sales would grow more than 900 percent. In the end, actual sales missed that year's projections by $157 million. In June 2023 the company filed for Chapter 11, and the lenders that were collectively owed $391 million recovered between seven and nine cents on the dollar.

The bankruptcy is how we know all of this. The court appointed a litigation trustee to claw money back for the people left holding the bag. In November 2024 he sued Cornell Capital and its founder for more than $400 million, laying out the fraud email, the solvency memo, and the dividend math in an 88-page complaint. Cornell calls the suit baseless, and the case is grinding through a New York bankruptcy court right now.

Centre Lane bought the wreckage out of the bankruptcy and folded it into Anchor Hocking, the Ohio glassmaker it already owned. Two names matter from here. Anchor Hocking is the glassmaker: the plant in Lancaster, the name on the bakeware. Centre Lane is the owner: the New York firm that decides what happens to it.

Within six months of the purchase, Anchor Hocking announced that Pyrex production would leave Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the plant that had made it since 1893, and consolidate in Lancaster. Roughly 300 people worked at Charleroi.

Submission + - Inside the dystopian world of Germany's free speech crackdown (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dr Rainer Zitelmann doesn't even remember posting the meme on social media that nearly landed him in prison.

"When I opened the letter from police, I thought it was a misunderstanding," Dr Zitelmann, a German historian and author of about 30 books, told The Telegraph.

Berlin police told Dr Zitelmann he had been accused of violating a post-Second World War law that bans the display of Nazi symbols, slogans and imagery – and could now face three years in prison if found guilty.

The 69-year-old found out the offending social media post was a meme about Adolf Hitler. But it was one in which he criticised the Nazi dictator and compared his invasion of Czechoslovakia to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

"It was crystal clear the post was negative ... I was saying that Putin is so bad he is like Hitler," he explains from his study in Berlin, surrounded by hundreds of books about the rise of fascism, including his own doctoral thesis. "The comparison only works if you think Hitler was evil."

He lets out an ironic chuckle at the absurdity of it all: after decades of excoriating the Nazis in his books, a mere click of a mouse led to accusations of him being one.

Dr Zitelmann is one of thousands of Germans who have been threatened with fines or prison sentences for social media posts that fall foul of the country's political speech laws, which are unusually stringent for an EU member state.

Some of the cases are sinister and farcical in equal measure.

One German had his home raided for calling a minister a "Schwachkopf [dummy]" while another was fined €2,000 for calling Friedrich Merz a "lying Fritz" under a law that, critics claim, makes it effectively illegal to make fun of politicians.

The number of investigations under Section 86a, the Nazi symbols ban that Dr Zitelmann was investigated for, has more than doubled over the past decade according to official police statistics. Investigations into the "political insult" law also reached record levels in 2025.

The surge in cases is so vast that the UN has launched an investigation into free speech violations in Germany, a step typically reserved for dictatorships and banana republics.

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 + - Why is China building so many coal plants despite its solar and wind boom (yahoo.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Even as China's expansion of solar and wind power raced ahead in 2025, the Asian giant opened many more coal power plants than it had in recent years — raising concern about whether the world's largest emitter will reduce carbon emissions enough to limit climate change.

More than 50 large coal units — individual boiler and turbine sets with generating capacity of 1 gigawatt or more — were commissioned in 2025, up from fewer than 20 a year over the previous decade, a research report released Tuesday said. Depending on energy use, 1 gigawatt can power from several hundred thousand to more than 2 million homes.

Overall, China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online, a sharp uptick from previous years, according to the joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which studies air pollution and its impacts, and Global Energy Monitor, which develops databases tracking energy trends.

“The scale of the buildout is staggering,” said report co-author Christine Shearer of Global Energy Monitor. “In 2025 alone, China commissioned more coal power capacity than India did over the entire past decade.”

Submission + - Chinese biolab found inside Las Vegas home. (go.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Local and federal investigators in Las Vegas are actively working to determine what substances were found inside a home described as a possible biological lab, with over 1,000 samples sent for testing, authorities said.

In the garage, investigators found multiple refrigerators with vials of unknown liquids, unknown liquids in gallon-size containers, a centrifuge and other laboratory equipment, authorities said.

In an open refrigerator and freezer, investigators saw a "significant volume of material," including vials and storage containers "with liquids of different colors and compositions," McMahill said.

The person arrested on Saturday — identified as Ori Solomon, 55 — is believed to be the property manager at the location, according to McMahill.

Solomon has been charged with felony disposal/ discharge of hazardous waste in an unauthorized manner and remains in custody, according to court records.

The owner of the property was arrested and charged in 2023 in connection with an investigation into an illegal bio lab in Reedley, California, authorities said. The owner, a Chinese national, remains in federal custody and has pleaded not guilty.

Submission + - Havana Syndrome device may have been found (newsweek.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Since the United States reopened its embassy in Cuba in 2015, a number of personnel have reported a series of debilitating medical ailments which include dizziness, fatigue, problems with memory, and impaired vision. For ten years these sudden and unexplained onsets have been studied with no conclusive evidence one way or the other. Now comes word a device, purchased by the Pentagon, has been tested which may be linked to what is known as Havana Syndrome.

Two unnamed sources said officials in the previous administration, under former President Joe Biden, had purchased the device for an eight-figure sum. The funding was provided by the Department of Defense, according to the report.

Speculation had swirled some form of directed-energy weapon could have been behind the baffling illness, and that Russian technology could be behind the symptoms. Moscow has denied any involvement.

The device acquired by Homeland Security Investigations—part of DHS—produces pulsed radio waves, one source told CNN. It contains Russian components but is not entirely Russian-made, they added.

Submission + - Chinese Fusion Reactor Breaks Plasma Density Limit (futurism.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Scientists at China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) program rang in the new year with a stunning accomplishment: empirical evidence that they used the device to achieve nuclear plasma densities once thought to be beyond human capabilities. To reach a point where fusion reactor can power itself — a sustainable fusion reaction — requires that gnarly plasma to stay hot, dense, and stable for long stretches of time. For years, it was understood that higher plasma densities would inevitably result in instability, collapsing the fuel before it could ignite, a threshold known as the Greenwald limit. In deuterium-tritium fusion, the fuel must be heated to about 13 keV (150 million kelvin) to reach optimal conditions. At such temperatures, the amount of fusion power produced increases with the square of the plasma density. This new research seemingly flips all that on its head. As the EAST team explains, the method basically involves creating a high gas pressure environment in the reactor prior to plasma formation, which allows the plasma to interact with the reactor wall in a much less destructive way than it would otherwise. Scientists also manually pump extra energy into the plasma as it heats, allowing an even rise in density. The result is a plasma that remains stable even as its internal density rises, resulting in fuel densities “far exceeding empirical limits.” While there are still plenty of breakthroughs left before humanity achieves practical power production with fusion, shattering the Greenwald represents a major item on the to-do list — and another notch on China’s lengthy green energy belt.

Submission + - New Raymarching GPU Benchmark brings Tim Sweeney's vision to life (gaming67.com)

Submitted by GhostX9
GhostX9 writes: In 1999, Tim Sweeney talked about the death of fixed pipeline graphics cards and predicted a future of all software based rendering. A new benchmark has been released that takes the classic game of breakout and imagines this concept by implementing the game with full raymarching. It brings even a RTX5090 to its knees above 480p. It looks gorgeous at 4K, but no hardware today can handle it.

While the website just shows the DirectX12 version by default, if you click the slider for Advanced, it will show the download links for Linux/Vulkan port as well as Apple/Metal.

Submission + - James Webb Space Telescope confirms 1st 'runaway' supermassive black hole (space.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second).

That not only makes this the first confirmed runaway supermassive black hole, but this object is also one of the fastest-moving bodies ever detected, rocketing through its home, a pair of galaxies named the "Cosmic Owl," at 3,000 times the speed of sound at sea level here on Earth. If that isn't astounding enough, the black hole is pushing forward a literal galaxy-sized "bow-shock" of matter in front of it, while simultaneously dragging a 200,000 light-year-long tail behind it, within which gas is accumulating and triggering star formation.

Submission + - Texas makes clean power breakthrough as solar output overtakes coal (reuters.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: For the first time, Texas' main power system looks set to generate more power from solar farms than coal plants during a calendar year in 2025, marking a key new energy transition milestone for the largest power network in the U.S.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) generated 2.64 million megawatt hours (MWh) of power from solar assets, compared with 2.44 million MWh of power from coal plants for the January-to-November period, according to data compiled by LSEG.

Submission + - Over 10,000 Docker Hub images found leaking credentials, auth keys (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: More than 10,000 Docker Hub container images expose data that should be protected, including live credentials to production systems, CI/CD databases, or LLM model keys. After scanning container images uploaded to Docker Hub in November, security researchers at threat intelligence company Flare found that 10,456 of them exposed one or more keys.The most frequent secrets were access tokens for various AI models (OpenAI, HuggingFace, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq). In total, the researchers found 4,000 such keys.

"These multi-secret exposures represent critical risks, as they often provide full access to cloud environments, Git repositories, CI/CD systems, payment integrations, and other core infrastructure components," Flare notes

Additionally, they found hardcoded API tokens for AI services being hardcoded in Python application files, config.json files, YAML configs, GitHub tokens, and credentials for multiple internal environments.

Some of the sensitive data was present in the manifest of Docker images, a file that provides details about the image.Flare notes that roughly 25% of developers who accidentally exposed secrets on Docker Hub realized the mistake and removed the leaked secret from the container or manifest file within 48 hours.

However, in 75% of these cases, the leaked key was not revoked, meaning that anyone who stole it during the exposure period could still use it later to mount attacks.

Flare suggests that developers avoid storing secrets in container images, stop using static, long-lived credentials, and centralize their secrets management using a dedicated vault or secrets manager.

Organizations should implement active scanning across the entire software development life cycle and revoke exposed secrets and invalidate old sessions immediately.

Submission + - Cats Meow More Than Twice as Much at Men, And We Can Only Guess Why (sciencealert.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: "Our results showed that cats vocalized more frequently toward male caregivers, while no other demographic factor had a discernible effect on the frequency or duration of greetings," write the researchers in their published paper.

A total of 22 different behavior types were looked at by the researchers, including yawning (often a sign of cat stress) and food-related behaviors (including heading to their food bowl). The vocalizations were the only behaviors that changed based on the owners' sex.

Submission + - Why GPS fails in cities. And how it was fixed (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Our everyday GPS struggles in “urban canyons,” where skyscrapers bounce satellite signals, confusing even advanced navigation systems. NTNU scientists created SmartNav, combining satellite corrections, wave analysis, and Google’s 3D building data for remarkable precision. Their method achieved accuracy within 10 centimeters during testing. The breakthrough could make reliable urban navigation accessible and affordable worldwide.

Submission + - Most Earth-Like Planet Yet May Have Been Found Just 40 Light Years Away (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: One of the worlds in the TRAPPIST-1 system, a mere 40 light-years away, just might be clad in a life-supporting atmosphere.

In exciting new JWST observations, the Earth-sized exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e shows hints of a gaseous envelope similar to our own, one that could facilitate liquid water on the surface.

Although the detection is ambiguous and needs extensive follow-up to find out what the deal is, it's the closest astronomers have come yet in their quest to find a second Earth.

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