document.write("China's CATL Says It Has Overtaken BYD On 5-Minute EV Charging Time
");document.write("CATL has unveiled a second-generation Shenxing battery capable of delivering a 520km range in just five minutes of charging, surpassing BYD\'s recent breakthrough and positioning both Chinese firms ahead of Western rivals in EV battery tech. The battery manufacturer also introduced a sodium-ion battery called Naxtra, offering up to 500km range for EVs and potential to diversify global energy resources. The Financial Times reports: The claims by the Chinese battery groups would put them ahead of major western rivals. At present, Tesla vehicles can be charged up to 200 miles (321km) in added range in 15 minutes, while Germany\'s Mercedes-Benz recently launched its all-electric CLA compact sedan, which can be charged for up to 325km within 10 minutes using a fast-charging station. [...] The second generation of the Shenxing battery, which boasts a range of 800km on one charge, can achieve a peak charging speed of 2.5km per second, the company said at a media event ahead of this week\'s Shanghai auto show. \"We look forward to collaborating with more industry leaders to push the limits of supercharging through true innovation,\" said CATL\'s chief technology officer Gao Huan, adding that he wanted the new batteries to become \"the standard for electric vehicles.\" Analysts at Bernstein said the latest progress meant that charging speeds had more than doubled in the past year and \"increased tenfold over the past 3-4 years.\" Huan said the new Shenxing battery would be installed in more than 67 EV models this year. He later told reporters that energy density would not be sacrificed as a trade-off for fast charging. During its tech day, CATL also unveiled its new sodium-ion battery, which it said would go into mass production in December. The battery brand called Naxtra is able to give a range of about 200km for a hybrid vehicle and 500km for an electric vehicle, according to Huan. [...] At the event, Huan claimed the new sodium-ion battery would enable the industry\'s shift from \"single resource dependence\" to \"energy freedom\" and reshape the global energy landscape. He added that he was in discussions with several companies about using sodium-ion batteries in their vehicles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("WD Launches HDD Recycling Process That Reclaims Rare Earth Elements, Cuts Out China
");document.write("An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom\'s Hardware: While most people enjoy PCs that are powered by SSDs, mechanical hard drives are still king in the datacenter. When these drives reach the end of their useful lives, they are usually shredded, and the key materials they\'re made of -- including several rare earth elements (REE) -- end up as e-waste. At the same time, countries are mining these same materials and emitting a lot of greenhouse gases in the process. And China, a major source of REE, recently announced export restrictions on seven of them, potentially limiting the U.S. tech industry\'s access to materials such as dysprosium, which is necessary for magnetic storage, motors, and generators. [On Thursday], Western Digital announced that it has created a large-scale hard disk drive recycling program in concert with Microsoft and recycling-industry partners CMR (Critical Materials Recycling) and PedalPoint Recycling. The new process reclaims Rare Earth Oxides (REO) containing dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium from hard drives, along with aluminum, steel, gold, palladium, and copper. The REO reclamation takes place completely within the U.S. and those materials go back into the U.S. market. Dubbed the Advanced Recycling and Rare Earth Material Capture Program, WD\'s initiative has already saved 47,000 pounds worth of hard drives, SSDs, and caddies from landfills or less-effective recycling programs. WD was able to achieve a more than 90% reclaim rate for REE and an 80% rate for all of the shredded material. The drives came from Microsoft\'s U.S. data centers where they were first shredded and then sent to PedalPoint for sorting and processing. Magnets and steel were then sent to CMR, which uses its acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technology to extract the rare earth elements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("Famed AI Researcher Launches Controversial Startup to Replace All Human Workers Everywhere
");document.write("TechCrunch looks at Mechanize, an ambitious new startup \"whose founder — and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch — is being skewered on X...\"Mechanize was launched on Thursday via a post on X by its founder, famed AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu. The startup\'s goal, Besiroglu wrote, is \"the full automation of all work\" and \"the full automation of the economy.\" Does that mean Mechanize is working to replace every human worker with an AI agent bot? Essentially, yes. The startup wants to provide the data, evaluations, and digital environments to make worker automation of any job possible. Besiroglu even calculated Mechanize\'s total addressable market by aggregating all the wages humans are currently paid. \"The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year,\" he wrote. Besiroglu did, however, clarify to TechCrunch that \"our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar work\" rather than manual labor jobs that would require robotics... Besiroglu argues to the naysayers that having agents do all the work will actually enrich humans, not impoverish them, through \"explosive economic growth.\" He points to a paper he published on the topic. \"Completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can\'t even imagine today,\" he told TechCrunch. TechCrunch wonders how jobless humans will produce goods — and whether wealth will simply concentrate around whoever owns the agents. But they do concede that Besiroglu may be right that \"If each human worker has a personal crew of agents which helps them produce more work, economic abundance could follow...\"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("Brain Implant Cleared by America's FDA to Help Paralysis Patients
");document.write("An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:Neurotech startup Precision Neuroscience on Thursday announced that a core component of its brain implant system has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a major win for the four-year-old company... The company\'s brain-computer interface will initially be used to help patients with severe paralysis restore functions such as speech and movement, according to its website. Only part of Precision\'s system was approved by the FDA on Thursday, but it marks the first full regulatory clearance granted to a company developing a wireless BCI, Precision said in a release. Other prominent startups in the space include Elon Musk\'s Neuralink, and Synchron, which is backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.... The piece of Precision\'s system that the FDA approved is called the Layer 7 Cortical Interface. The microelectrode array is thinner than a human hair and resembles a piece of yellow scotch tape. Each array is made up of 1,024 electrodes that can record, monitor and stimulate electrical activity on the brain\'s surface. When it is placed on the brain, Precision says it can conform to the surface without damaging any tissue. The FDA authorized Layer 7 to be implanted in patients for up to 30 days, and Precision will be able to market the technology for use in clinical settings. This means surgeons will be able to use the array during procedures to map brain signals, for instance. It is not Precision\'s end goal for the technology, but it will help the company generate revenue in the near term. Precision\'s co-founder and chief science officer also helped co-found Musk\'s Neuralink in 2017 before departing the following year, according to the article. He nows says this regulatory clearance \"will exponentially increase our access to diverse, high-quality data, which will help us to build BCI systems that work more effectively.\"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("China Pits Humanoid Robots Against Humans In Half-Marathon
");document.write("An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twenty-one humanoid robots joined thousands of runners at the Yizhuang half-marathon in Beijing on Saturday, the first time these machines have raced alongside humans over a 21-km (13-mile) course. The robots from Chinese manufacturers such as DroidVP and Noetix Robotics came in all shapes and sizes, some shorter than 120 cm (3.9 ft), others as tall as 1.8 m (5.9 ft). One company boasted that its robot looked almost human, with feminine features and the ability to wink and smile. Some firms tested their robots for weeks before the race. Beijing officials have described the event as more akin to a race car competition, given the need for engineering and navigation teams. \"The robots are running very well, very stable ... I feel I\'m witnessing the evolution of robots and AI,\" said spectator He Sishu, who works in artificial intelligence. The robots were accompanied by human trainers, some of whom had to physically support the machines during the race. A few of the robots wore running shoes, with one donning boxing gloves and another wearing a red headband with the words \"Bound to Win\" in Chinese. The winning robot was Tiangong Ultra, from the Beijing Innovation Center of Human Robotics, with a time of 2 hours and 40 minutes. The men\'s winner of the race had a time of 1 hour and 2 minutes. [...] Some robots, like Tiangong Ultra, completed the race, while others struggled from the beginning. One robot fell at the starting line and lay flat for a few minutes before getting up and taking off. One crashed into a railing after running a few metres, causing its human operator to fall over. You can watch a recording of the race in its entirety on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("China Develops Flash Memory 10,000x Faster With 400-Picosecond Speed
");document.write("Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear shares a report from Interesting Engineering: A research team at Fudan University in Shanghai, China has built the fastest semiconductor storage device ever reported, a nonvolatile flash memory dubbed \"PoX\" that programs a single bit in 400 picoseconds (0.0000000004 s) -- roughly 25 billion operations per second. Conventional static and dynamic RAM (SRAM, DRAM) write data in 1-10 nanoseconds but lose everything when power is cut while current flash chips typically need micro to milliseconds per write -- far too slow for modern AI accelerators that shunt terabytes of parameters in real time. The Fudan group, led by Prof. Zhou Peng at the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Chips and Systems, re-engineered flash physics by replacing silicon channels with two dimensional Dirac graphene and exploiting its ballistic charge transport. Combining ultralow energy with picosecond write speeds could eliminate separate highspeed SRAM caches and remove the longstanding memory bottleneck in AI inference and training hardware, where data shuttling, not arithmetic, now dominates power budgets. The team [which is now scaling the cell architecture and pursuing arraylevel demonstrations] did not disclose endurance figures or fabrication yield, but the graphene channel suggests compatibility with existing 2Dmaterial processes that global fabs are already exploring. The result is published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("Hard Drives Have Less Environmental Impact Than SSDs, Seagate Says
");document.write("A new Seagate report reveals that hard drives significantly outperform solid-state drives in environmental sustainability metrics, particularly when accounting for manufacturing processes. According to the storage-maker\'s \"\"Decarbonizing Data\">Decarbonizing Data\" [PDF] study, the embodied carbon from manufacturing a 30TB SSD reaches 4,915 kg of CO2 -- approximately 160 times higher than the 29.7 kg produced in creating a comparable hard drive. The analysis measures the full manufacturing footprint, including \"upstream extraction, production, transport, bill of material, manufacturing, packaging, and distribution stages\" of each technology\'s lifecycle. When calculated per terabyte annually, the difference remains stark: less than 0.2 kg CO2/TB/year for hard drives versus 32 kg for SSDs. Operational efficiency follows similar patterns, with hard drives consuming 9.6 watts during use versus 20 watts for SSDs, translating to 0.32 and 0.5 watts per terabyte respectively.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("US Halts $5 Billion New York Offshore Wind Project Mid-Build
");document.write("An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York\'s coast. Norwegian developer Equinor announced yesterday that it received notice from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) ordering Empire Wind 1 to halt all activities on the outer continental shelf until BOEM has completed its review. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted this tweet yesterday: \".@Interior, in consultation with @HowardLutnick, is directing @BOEM to immediately halt all construction activities on the Empire Wind Project until further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis.\" Burgum gave no indication of what insufficiencies there were in the approval process for the fully permitted offshore wind project, despite Trump\'s recent declaration of a national energy emergency that speeds up permitting processes. The commercial lease for the 810-megawatt (MW) Empire Wind 1\'s federal offshore wind area was signed in March 2017 during the first Trump administration. It was approved by the Biden administration in November 2023 and began construction in 2024. The project is being developed under contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). Empire Wind 1, which was due to come online in 2027, has the potential to power 500,000 New York homes. Equinor says it\'s considering appealing the order. New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued a statement: \"Every single day, I\'m working to make energy more affordable, reliable and abundant in New York and the federal government should be supporting those efforts rather than undermining them. Empire Wind 1 is already employing hundreds of New Yorkers, including 1,000 good-paying union jobs as part of a growing sector that has already spurred significant economic development and private investment throughout the state and beyond. As Governor, I will not allow this federal overreach to stand. I will fight this every step of the way to protect union jobs, affordable energy and New York\'s economic future.\"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("Harvard's RoboBee Masters Landing, Paving Way For Agricultural Pollination
");document.write("After more than a decade of development, Harvard\'s insect-sized flying robot, RoboBee, has successfully learned to land using dragonfly-inspired legs and improved flight controls. The researchers see RoboBee as a potential substitute for endangered bees, assisting in the pollination of plants. From a report: RoboBee is a micro flying robot that Harvard has been developing since 2013. As the name suggests, it is the size of a bee, capable of flying like a bee and hovering in mid-air. Its wings are 3 cm long and it weighs only 0.08 g. The weight was reduced by using light piezoelectric elements instead of motors. Piezoelectric elements change shape when an electric current flows through them. The researchers were able to make RoboBee flap its wings 120 times per second by turning the current on and off, which is similar to actual insects. While RoboBee exhibited flight capabilities comparable to those of a bee, the real problem was landing. Being too light and having short wings, it could not withstand the air turbulence generated during landing. It is easy to understand if you think about the strong winds generated when a helicopter approaches the ground. Christian Chan, a graduate student at Harvard who participated in the research, said, \"Until now, it was a matter of shutting off the robot while it attempted to land and praying for a proper touchdown.\" To ensure RoboBee\'s safe landing, it was important to dissipate energy just before touchdown. Hyun Nak-Seung, a professor at Purdue University who participated in the development of RoboBee, explained, \"For any flying object, the success of landing depends on minimizing speed just before impact and rapidly dissipating energy afterward. Even for tiny flapping like RoboBee\'s, the ground effect cannot be ignored, and after landing, the risk of bouncing or rolling makes the situation more complex.\" The findings have been published in the journal Science Robotics.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("Can AI Help Manage Nuclear Reactors?
");document.write("America\'s Department of Energy launched a federally funded R&D center in 1946 called the Argonne National Laboratory, and its research became the basis for all of the world\'s commercial nuclear reactors. But it\'s now developed an AI-based tool that can \"help operators run nuclear plants,\" reports the Wall Street Journal, citing comments from a senior nuclear engineer in the lab\'s nuclear science and engineering division:Argonne\'s plan is to offer the Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Automated Identification and Diagnosis, or PRO-AID, to new, tech-forward nuclear builds, but it\'s also eyeing the so-called dinosaurs, some of which are being resurrected by companies like Amazon and Microsoft to help power their AI data centers. The global push for AI is poised to fuel a sharp rise in electricity demand, with consumption from data centers expected to more than double by the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency said Thursday. The owners of roughly a third of U.S. nuclear plants are in talks with tech companies to provide electricity for those data centers, the Wall Street Journal has reported. PRO-AID performs real-time monitoring and diagnostics using generative AI combined with large language models that notify and explain to staff when something seems amiss at a plant. It also uses a form of automated reasoning — which uses mathematical logic to encode knowledge in AI systems — to mimic the way a human operator asks questions and comes to understand how the plant is operating [according to Richard Vilim, a senior nuclear engineer within the lab\'s nuclear science and engineering division]. The tool can also help improve the efficiency of the personnel needed to operate a nuclear plant, Vilim said. That\'s especially important as older employees leave the workforce. \"If we can hand off some of these lower-level capabilities to a machine, when someone retires, you don\'t need to replace him or her,\" he said... Part of the efficiency in updating technology will come from consolidating the monitoring staff at a utility\'s nuclear plants at a single, centralized location — much as gas-powered plants already do. It hasn\'t found its way into a commercial nuclear plant yet, the article acknowledges. But the senior nuclear engineer points out that America\'s newer gas-powered plants ended up being more automated with digital monitoring tools. Meanwhile the average age of America\'s 94 operating nuclear reactors is 42 years old, and \"nearly all\" of them have had their licenses extended, according to the article. (Those nuclear plants still provide almost 20% of America\'s electricity.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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