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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 56 declined, 54 accepted (110 total, 49.09% accepted)

Submission + - When is Tesla's Next Annual Meeting?

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Publicly traded companies generally are required to host a meeting between the board, CEO, and shareholders once per year. It's been over one year since Tesla's last meeting. From the NYTimes:

In Texas, where Tesla is incorporated, the law requires companies to hold annual meetings no later than 13 months since the previous meeting. In Tesla’s case, that would be Sunday, July 13. Tesla has not announced a date for a meeting or filed any proxy statements — the documents that describe the annual meeting’s agenda, the candidates for the board and proposals to be voted on.

The meeting would normally provide shareholders an opportunity to speak directly to Tesla’s board and to Elon Musk, the chief executive, at a critical time for the company. Tesla sales have been plunging, and the stock price has fallen almost 40 percent from a peak in December.

It is unclear whether there would be any consequence for missing the deadline — Texas law does not stipulate any penalties, and there are few legal precedents. In an extreme scenario, Nasdaq could de-list the company. Large shareholders, such as pensions and mutual fund managers, sent a letter to the board in late May practically begging Musk to devote at least 40 hours a week to focusing on the company.

An annual meeting may hardly matter. In May, the SEC allowed Tesla to omit six of eight proposed shareholder resolutions from its upcoming proxy statement. The board of directors has long been seen as acting at Musk's direction, rather than the other way around, leading to a lawsuit over Musk's enormous pay package. “It’s hard for me to imagine any other board of a major corporation allowing the kind of plummeting stock price and deleterious behavior of a C.E.O. as this board has allowed to happen,” Brooke Lierman, the Maryland comptroller, said in an interview.

Submission + - Hundreds of Pagers Explode in Lebanon, Targeting Hezbollah

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Electronic pages haven't been replaced by cellphones everywhere. The terrorist group Hezbollah still uses them to make their communications and movements harder track. Earlier today, however, hundreds of them appear to have exploded simultaneously, killing some and injuring thousands. (Other sources: AP News, Al Jazeera, NYTimes.) Hezbollah and others are pointing the finger at Israel, against whom they have cross-border war and decades of bloody animosity. The mechanism of the explosion is not yet known.

Submission + - Robert Dennard, Inventor of DRAM, Dies at 91

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Robert Dennard was working at IBM in the 1960s when he invented a way to store one bit using a single transistor and capacitor. The technology became dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which when implemented using the emerging technology of silicon integrated circuits, helped catapult computing by leaps and bounds. The first commercial DRAM chips in the late 1960s held just 1024 bits; today's DDR5 modules hold hundreds of billions.

Dr. Robert H. Dennard passed away last month at age 91. (alternate link)

In the 1970s he helped guide technology roadmaps for the ever-shrinking feature size of lithography, enabling the early years of Moore's Law. He wrote a seminal paper in 1974 relating feature size and power consumption that is now referred to as Dennard Scaling. His technological contributions earned him numerous awards, and accolades from the National Academy of Engineering, IEEE, and the National Inventor's Hall of Fame.

Submission + - US regulators approve rule that could speed renewables

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which controls interstate energy infrastructure, approved a rule Monday that should boost new transmission infrastructure and make it easier to connect renewable energy projects. (More coverage here, here, and here

Some 11,000 projects totaling 2,600 GW of capacity are in planning, waiting to break ground, or connect to the grid. But they're stymied by the need for costly upgrades, or simply waiting for review. The frustrations are many. Each proposed project undergoes a lengthy grid-impact study and assessed the cost of necessary upgrades. Each project is considered in isolation, regardless of whether similar projects are happening nearby that could share the upgrade costs or auger different improvements. The planning process tends to be reactive — examining only the applications in front of them — rather than considering trends over the coming years. It's a first-come, first-served queue: if one project is ready to break ground, it must wait behind another project that's still securing funding or permitting.

Two years in development, the dryly-named Improvements to Generator Interconnection Procedures and Agreements directs utility operators to plan infrastructure improvements with a 20-yr forecast of new energy sources and increased demand. Rather than examining each project in isolation, similar projects will be clustered and examined together. Instead of a First-Come, First-Served serial process, operators will instead examine First-Ready, allowing shovel-ready projects to jump the queue. The expectation is that these new rules will speed and streamline the process of developing and connecting new energy projects through more holistic planning, penalties for delays, sensible cost-sharing for upgrades, and justification for long-term investments.

Submission + - Henrietta Leavitt, Cosmology Pioneer, Receives Belated Obituary (nytimes.com)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: The NYTimes has an occasional series called "Overlooked", whereby notable people whose deaths were overlooked at the time receive the obituary they deserve.

Their latest installment eulogizes Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who passed away in 1921 at age 53.

In the early 20th century, when Henrietta Leavitt began studying photographs of distant stars at the Harvard College Observatory, astronomers had no idea how big the universe was....Leavitt, working as a poorly paid member of a team of mostly women [computers] who cataloged data for the scientists at the observatory, found a way to peer out into the great unknown and measure it.

Leavitt discovered the period-luminosity relationship for Cepheid variable stars. The relationship, now known as Leavitt's Law, is a crucial rung in the cosmic distance ladder, the methods for measuring the distance to stars, galaxies, and across the visible universe.

[Leavitt's Law] underpinned the research of other pioneering astronomers, including Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley, whose work in the years after World War I demolished long-held ideas about our solar system’s place in the cosmos. Leavitt’s Law has been used on the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope in making new calculations about the rate of expansion of the universe and the proximity of stars billions of light years from earth.

“She cracked into something that was not only impressive scientifically but shifted an entire paradigm of thinking....”


Submission + - Vulcan Rocket has Successful First Launch 1

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: ULA's Vulcan rocket, many years in development, had a successful first launch this morning from Cape Canaveral. The expendable rocket, which uses two methane-fueled BE-4 engines from Blue Origin in its first stage, is the successor to the Delta and Atlas-V launch vehicles. Years overdue, and with a packed manifest for future launches, Vulcan is critical to the ULA's continued existence. The payload on this first mission is called Peregrine — a lunar lander from Astrobotic. Unfortunately, Peregrine has suffered an anomaly some hours into flight; it is unclear whether the mission can recover.

Submission + - Neptune is Less Blue than Depictions

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: The popular vision of Neptune is azure blue. This comes mostly from the publicly released images from Voyager 2's flyby in 1989 — humanity's only visit to this icy giant at the edge of the solar system. But it turns out that view is a bit distorted — the result of color-enhancing choices made by NASA at the time. A new report from Oxford depicts Neptune's blue color as more muted, with a touch of green, not much different than Uranus. The truer-to-life view comes from re-analyzing the Voyager data, combined with ground-based observations going back decades. (Add'l links here, here, and here.)

This is nothing new: most publicity images released by space agencies — of planets, nebulae, or the surface of Mars — have undergone some color-enhancement for visual effect. (They'll also release "true-color" images, which try to best mimic what the human eye would see.) Many images — such as those from the infrared-seeing JWST — need wholesale coloration of their otherwise invisible wavelengths. The new report is a good reminder, though, to remember that scientific cameras are pretty much always black and white; color images come from combining filters in various ways.

Submission + - Soyuz at ISS Springs a Leak

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: A Soyuz spacecraft (MS-22) docked at the International Space Station appears to have developed a coolant leak, according to NASA and various news sources. Youtuber Scott Manley has further background and explanation.

The cause and severity are presently not known. There is no immediate danger to the crew. The leak was discovered during preparations for a planned spacewalk, which has since been cancelled. This Soyuz is the return spacecraft for three of the ISS' residents, but after this failure a replacement spacecraft may need to sent up.

Submission + - JWST Sunshield Deployment Starts Critical Phase (nasa.gov) 1

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Over the past few days, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has successfully completed several milestone in getting ready to deploy its massive sunshield. Starting today and through the weekend come the trickiest parts: extending the telescoping mid-booms on either side of the spacecraft, which spreads the sunshield out, then separating each 50-um thick layer. "Webb's sunshield assembly includes 140 release mechanisms, approximately 70 hinge assemblies, eight deployment motors, bearings, springs, gears, about 400 pulleys and 90 cables," according to Webb spacecraft systems engineer Krystal Puga.

Follow each milestone here. Unlike other nail-biting JWST events like the rocket launch, something of this size and complexity has never been attempted in space. After this, the telescope's optics will be in the shade forevermore, and can begin cooling to the frigid operating temperature needed to detect infrared light.

Submission + - NASA to regain radio link to Voyager 2 (nytimes.com)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Back in March 2020, NASA shut down the Australia dish in its Deep Space Network for repairs and upgrades. For the duration of the outage, NASA had no means for communicating with Voyager 2. From the NYTimes:

On Friday, Earth’s haunting silence will come to an end as NASA switches that communications channel back on, restoring humanity’s ability to say hello to its distant explorer.

Because of the direction in which it is flying out of the solar system, Voyager 2 can only receive commands from Earth via one antenna in the entire world. It’s called DSS 43 and it is in Canberra, Australia. It is part of the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which along with stations in California and Spain, is how NASA and allied space agencies stay in touch with the armada of robotic spacecraft exploring everything from the sun’s corona to the regions of the Kuiper belt beyond the orbit of Pluto. (Voyager 2’s twin, Voyager 1, is able to communicate with the other two stations.)

A round-trip communication with Voyager 2 takes about 35 hours — 17 hours and 35 minutes each way....

While Voyager 2 was able to call home on the Canberra site’s smaller dishes during the shutdown, none of them could send commands to the probe....

NASA ... did send one test message to the spacecraft at the end of October when the antenna was mostly reassembled.


Submission + - Autonomous Delivery Planes Being Tested in U.S.

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: For several years, Zipline has deployed autonomous, fixed-wing airplane drones for medical supply deliveries in Rwanda. Now they have received permission to test their aircraft in the U.S., ferrying COVID-19 supplies from a depot to a hospital in North Carolina. The practical benefit is small: the cargo is modest amounts of PPE that could have been delivered by truck in about 20 minutes. But this is a big deal, because it required a waiver from the FAA for the planes to operate fully autonomously and beyond visual line-of-sight — just launch and forget. It is happening in proximity to an airport no less.

Submission + - Phytomining: extracting metals from plants 1

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: From The NYTimes: "Some of Earth’s plants have fallen in love with metal. With roots that act practically like magnets, these organisms — about 700 are known — flourish in metal-rich soils that make hundreds of thousands of other plant species flee or die....

"On a plot of land rented from a rural village on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo, the [investigators have] proved it at small scale. Every six to 12 months, a farmer shaves off one foot of growth from these nickel-hyper-accumulating plants and either burns or squeezes the metal out. After a short purification, farmers could hold in their hands roughly 500 pounds of nickel citrate, potentially worth thousands of dollars on international markets."

This process, called phytomining, cannot supplant the scale of traditional mining, but could make a dent in the world's demand for nickel, cobalt, and zinc. Small-holding farmers could earn more from phytomining than from coaxing food crops from metal-laden soils. Using these plants could also help clean brownfields left over from prior industrial use.

Submission + - A Restart for the Aptera Electric Car?

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: The Aptera 2e was a head-turning 3-wheeled electric vehicle when it debuted a decade ago. With a body more like an aircraft than a car, it was designed for maximum efficiency. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt and liquidated before it hit production. Now IEEE Spectrum reports the founders are having another crack at it, taking advantage of a decade of improvement in batteries, computation, and EV component supply chains. By utilizing sandwich composite body panels, lightweight 3D-printed metal components, and speedier fluid dynamics simulations, their aim is a maximum efficiency, low-volume production vehicle that, with its largest battery configuration, could achieve a range of 1000 miles (1600 km).

Submission + - Alan Turing receives a (late) obituary from the NYTimes

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: In recent years, the NYTimes has been publishing obituaries of people long dead but who, but today's journalistic standards, nevertheless would have been deserving of one when they died. They call it their "Overlooked" series. Today, their overlooked figure is British mathematician and proto computer scientist Alan Turing. From the obit:

On June 7, 1954, Alan Turing, a British mathematician who has since been acknowledged as one the most innovative and powerful thinkers of the 20th century — sometimes called the progenitor of modern computing — died as a criminal, having been convicted under Victorian laws as a homosexual and forced to endure chemical castration. Britain didn’t take its first steps toward decriminalizing homosexuality until 1967.

Only in 2009 did the government apologize for his treatment.

Submission + - Rechargeable Zinc-Air Battery nears commercial release 2

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Reported in the NYTimes and in Phys.org: NantEnergy, a company backed by California billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, announced Wednesday that it has developed a rechargeable zinc-air battery that can store energy at far less cost than lithium-ion. The technology avoids some of the downsides of li-ion, like flammability and the use of cobalt. Unlike many battery-related announcements, this one is backed by real-world use. Over the past several years, NantEnergy has deployed their batteries for stationary, micro-grid and cell-tower use in nine countries — about 55 MWh of capacity so far. They claim they can now take commercial orders, for delivery next year, at less than $100/kWh of capacity, which is one-half to one-fifth the cost of available lithium-ion grid storage.

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