An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Researchers in Japan have clocked a new speed record for data transmission -- a blistering 1.02 petabits per second (Pb/s). Better yet, the breakthrough was achieved using optical fiber cables that should be compatible with existing infrastructure. For reference, 1 petabit is equivalent to a million gigabits, meaning this new record is about 100,000 times faster than the absolute fastest home internet speeds available to consumers. Even NASA will "only" get 400 Gb/s when ESnet6 rolls out in 2023. At speeds of 1 Pb/s, you could theoretically broadcast 10 million channels per second of video at 8K resolution, according to the team.

The new record was set by researchers at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), using several emerging technologies. First, the optical fiber contains four cores -- the glass tubes that transmit the signals -- instead of the usual one. The transmission bandwidth is extended to a record-breaking 20 THz, thanks to a technology known as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). That bandwidth is made up of a total of 801 wavelength channels spread across three bands -- the commonly used C- and L-bands, as well as the experimental S-band. With the help of some other new optical amplification and signal modulation technologies, the team achieved the record-breaking speed of 1.02 Pb/s, sending data through 51.7 km (32.1 miles) of optical fiber cables.

Toyota and its subsidiary Woven Planet have unveiled a new portable cartridge prototype for hydrogen. "The idea is that they can be filled up at a dedicated facility, transported where needed, then returned when you receive your next shipment," reports Engadget. From the report: The cartridges would be relatively small at 16 inches long, 7 inches in diameter and about 11 pounds in weight. Toyota calls them "portable, affordable, and convenient energy that makes it possible to bring hydrogen to where people live, work, and play without the use of pipes.. [and] swappable for easy replacement and quick charging."

They could be useful for "mobility [i.e. hydrogen cars], household applications, and many future possibilities we have yet to imagine," Toyota said. It didn't mention any specific uses, but it said that "one hydrogen cartridge is assumed to generate enough electricity to operate a typical household microwave for approximately 3-4 hours."

In its press release, Toyota acknowledges that most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels and so not exactly green. But it thinks that it'll be generated with low carbon emissions in the future, and that the cartridges could help with some of the infrastructure issues. Toyota plans to test that theory by conducting proof of concept trials in various places, including its "human-centered smart city of the future," Woven City in Susono City, Zhizuoka Prefecture in Japan. The company is also "working to build a comprehensive hydrogen-based supply chain aimed at expediting and simplifying production, transport, and daily usage," it said.

Smartphone cameras and DSLRs have been moving in opposite directions for the past few years, and image quality from phones will finally trump that of their single-lens reflex rivals by 2024, according to Sony. From a report: As reported by Nikkei Japan, the President and CEO of Sony Semiconductor Solutions (SSS), Terushi Shimizu, told a business briefing that "we expect that still images [from smartphones] will exceed the image quality of single-lens reflex cameras within the next few years." Some fascinating slides presented during the briefing were even more specific, with one slide showing that, according to Sony, "still images are expected to exceed ILC [interchangeable lens camera] image quality" sometime during 2024. Those are two slightly different claims, with 'ILCs' also including today's mirrorless cameras, alongside the older DSLR tech that most camera manufacturers are now largely abandoning. But the broader conclusion remains -- far from hitting a tech ceiling, smartphones are expected to continue their imaging evolution and, for most people, make standalone cameras redundant.

In early 2020, the distant supergiant star, 700 light-years away known as Betelgeuse experienced an odd uneven dimming, leaving the astronomy community scrambling to explain what happened. In a new study recently published in the journal Nature, a trio of astronomers managed to confirm some of the earlier explanations thanks to a Japanese weather satellite, Himawari-8, which had Betelgeuse lurking in the background of its images. CNET reports: Himawari-8 is, as the name suggests, the eighth version of the Himawari satellite operated by Japan's Meteorological Agency. It operates in geostationary orbit, at a distance of 22,236 miles above the equator. This is more than 90 times further away than the International Space Station. From that position, the satellite snaps optical and infrared images of the whole Earth once every 10 minutes, predominantly to help forecast the weather across Asia and the Western Pacific. For instance, it snapped a ton of images of the Tongan volcano eruption that occurred on Jan. 15. However, looking through images stretching back to 2017, the trio of Japanese researchers went looking for a pinprick of light that would be Betelgeuse, lurking in space behind our brilliant blue and green marble. They found it.

Studying that pinprick of light, the researchers came to the same conclusion as their predecessors: Betelgeuse dimmed because of both dust and some natural variability in its light. That's not all that exciting, but it's good confirmation we're all on the right track, and it's exactly what the process of science is all about. What is intriguing is the fact a weather satellite was able to provide this data in the first place. It could be a big deal for astronomers. Building and launching new space telescopes isn't a cheap or easy endeavor and you have to book yourself a rocket. But... there are already satellites orbiting the Earth that might be able to do a similar job.

Itochu, Mitsubishi and other companies are investing in Evering (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), a chip-embedded smart ring that can act as a wallet and a key [...]. Bloomberg reports: Evering is backed by MTG, a listed Japanese health and beauty company. MTG struck a contract with Visa last year and began selling rings in Japan, which cost about 20,000 yen ($158) apiece, including tax. As retailers around the world seek ways to make it easier for consumers to shop seamlessly without touching anything, Evering and MTG are betting that their smart ring will resonate with early adopters. Made out of zirconia, the finger-worn gadget lets people do things such as lock and unlock doors, as well as pay for drinks in stores. More than 10 investors are considering investing a total of around 1 billion yen in Evering, which may eventually seek a public listing [...]. Potential backers include Daiwa House Industry and Toppan, with an announcement due soon.

Alarmed by the declining stature of its universities, Japan is planning to shower up to $2.3 billion a year on a handful of schools in hopes of boosting their prominence. From a report: The scheme was approved by the Japanese legislature on 18 May, although many details, including how to pick the favored universities, are still up in the air. But the move, under study for more than a year, has rekindled a debate among academics over how to reverse Japan's sinking research fortunes. Several previous schemes have yielded mixed results.

The new plan "aims to provide young promising scholars with the research environment that the world's top universities are supposed to offer, to dramatically enhance international collaborations, and to promote the brain circulation both domestically and internationally," says Takahiro Ueyama, a science policy specialist on the Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (CSTI), Japan's highest science advisory body, which was heavily involved in crafting the scheme. But Guojun Sheng, a Chinese developmental biologist at Kumamoto University in Japan, is skeptical. "I am not very optimistic that this [plan] will do much to curb the slide in the ranking of Japanese research activities or international competitiveness," he says. Sheng, who previously studied and worked in China, the United States, and the United Kingdom, says the new plan does not address fundamental problems at Japanese research institutes: too few women and foreign scientists, a fear of change, and lack of support for young scientists. To get better results, "Japan has to change its research culture," he says.

The United States is on top of the supercomputing world in the Top500 ranking of the most powerful systems. From a report: The Frontier system from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) running on AMD EPYC CPUs took first place from last year's champ, Japan's ARM A64X Fugaku system. It's still in the integration and testing process at the ORNL in Tennessee, but will eventually be operated by the US Air Force and US Department of Energy. Frontier, powered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) Cray EX platform, was the top machine by a wide margin, too. It's the first (known) true exascale system, hitting a peak 1.1 exaflops on the Linmark benchmark. Fugaku, meanwhile, managed less than half that at 442 petaflops, which was still enough to keep it in first place for the previous two years. Frontier was also the most efficient supercomputer, too. Running at just 52.23 gigaflops per watt, it beat out Japan's MN-3 system to grab first place on the Green500 list. "The fact that the world's fastest machine is also the most energy efficient is just simply amazing," ORNL lab director Thomas Zacharia said at a press conference.

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S. — a federal holiday honoring military personnel who died serving their country.

After the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, 389 unidentified sailors had been interred in a volcanic crater in Honolulu officially designated as the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. After more than 70 years, the U.S government's Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency began the "USS Oklahoma Project." It continued its work for five years, eventually identifying 355 of the 389 unknown sailors.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that "After more than 80 years gone, Paul Boemer finally returned from Hawaii."

"And Vince Boemer — who gently accepted the folded American flag that had covered his brother's casket — was happy to welcome him back." "He was a good man," Boemer said. "He was a good older brother."

Earlier this month, Paul Boemer was laid to rest at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, in a ceremony scored by the playing of taps and a 21-gun salute. Family, friends, a Navy honor guard in dress whites and several dozen Freedom Rider veterans stood with reverence on a sunny, humid St. Louis day.

"It's a great honor to be part of this," said Vince Boemer, who soon will turn 98. "It's wonderful to see the U.S. government go to these lengths to honor its veterans."

To be sure, Paul Boemer did not plan to be gone so long when he enlisted in the Navy in late 1938. After growing up in south St. Louis, the eighth of 10 children, and graduating from Cleveland High School, the lanky 18-year-old decided on a stint in the military.

He completed basic training, and the Navy assigned the new coxswain — a sailor who helps steer a ship — to the USS Oklahoma. So Boemer boarded a troop transport in Norfolk, Virginia, and sailed to the ship's home port, Ford Island in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

That's where Boemer was stationed in 1939 — and on Dec. 7, 1941.

On that day, Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet; the USS Oklahoma was struck by two torpedoes. The battleship quickly capsized, claiming the lives of 429 crewmen.

Paul Boemer was a month shy of turning 22.

In all, 2,403 U.S. personnel died that Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor and 19 vessels were destroyed or damaged.

But because of "these lengths" taken by the U.S. government, Vince Boemer finally got to see his big brother buried in his hometown.
Thank you for your service.

Dr. Sola Talabi, an adjunct assistant professor of nuclear engineering, believes nuclear power "has the ability to solve" the world's two biggest problems: global energy poverty and global warming.

He tells the Daily Beast, "Nuclear can uniquely address those issues." While novel in the civilian energy sector, SMRs have powered naval warships and submarines for almost 70 years. U.S. naval nuclear reactors have logged more than 5,400 reactor years, and steamed more than 130 million miles without a single radiological incident or radiation-related fatality. This sterling safety record allows the U.S. Navy to operate its reactors largely without controversy even in Japan, a country that has a strong anti-nuclear movement birthed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and amplified by Fukushima...

[T]he plant can remove heat generated by its fuel even if electrical power is lost. Next-generation SMRs are also designed such that they don't require a pressurizing system like the one that failed at Three Mile Island. Even in the extraordinarily improbable event of a core meltdown, Talabi said that SMRs are still remarkably safe. Unlike their large-scale predecessors, the diminutive size of SMRs eliminates the need for active safety systems backed by human operators. If radionuclide particles — an unstable element that's harmful to humans — are released from the core, gravity and other natural phenomena such as thermal and steam concentration will force them to settle safely within the confines of the plant's containment vessel.

In the yet more unlikely case that radionuclide particles breach the containment vessel, Talabi's research indicates they will settle over a much smaller area than if they were released from a large-scale reactor, posing far less of a health and environmental hazard and simplifying cleanup... [E]conomists don't realize that many of the systems required by large-scale reactors, such as the ones that maintain pressure and coolant flow in the plant's core, won't be miniaturized in the smaller plants. They'll be eliminated. SMRs should also be less expensive because they can be factory-fabricated, and their smaller parts will be easier for more manufacturers to produce....

Despite his optimism for SMRs' potential, Talabi acknowledges that they have some drawbacks. Widespread use may slash carbon emissions, but will necessitate increased uranium mining. They also create a security risk, as nuclear fuel will need to be transported between thousands of locations, and reactor sites may be targeted by warring states and terrorists. Government statutes also fail to account for differences between SMRs and large-scale reactors, inhibiting their construction....

That said, Talabi believes that SMRs' potential in solving climate change and global energy poverty far outweighs their risks, and makes overcoming their obstacles well worth it.... "It's not a technology challenge," Talabi said. With public and government support, SMRs could soon be powering the globe with carbon-free electricity. To Talabi, it's just a matter of awareness and understanding.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader WindBourne for sharing the article

Inside of hard disk drives are platters which hold all your data; these are all manufactured by one company in Japan called Showa Denko which has announced it expects to "realize near-line HDD having storage capacity of more than 30TB" by the end of 2023. From a report: Deciphering that statement, we'd assume it will provide platters with a storage capacity of more than 3TB, sometime in 2023, to partners such as Toshiba, Seagate and Western Digital, who will then produce the hard disk drives, targeting hyperscalers and data centers operators. We'd expect some of them to end up in NAS and 3.5-inch external hard drives, but that won't be the main target markets, as performance is likely to be optimized for nearline usage.

Showa Denko has now started shipment of the platters that will go into new 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR hard disk drives announced by Western Digital only a few days ago. A 2.6TB platter -- which uses energy-assisted magnetic recording and shingled magnetic recording -- also marks an important milestone as it hits the symbolic 1TB/in^2 density. Showa Denko's announcement comes as a surprise as Toshiba recently suggested 30TB drives (rather than higher capacities) would not come until 2024. A 30TB model would comprise of 11 platters with 2.73TB capacities each, a slight improvement on the 2.6TB capacity that are on the way. Given the fact that 26TB HDDs have now been announced in the first half of 2022, there's a remote chance that we could see 30TB drives before the end of the year or (as the saying goes), depending on market conditions.

We all need great internet service, but it doesn't happen by accident. From a report: Let's talk about internet policy! In Canada! Wheee! I'm serious that there are useful lessons from a saga over home internet service in Canada. What has been a promising, albeit imperfect, system that increased choices and improved internet service for Canadians is poised to fall apart. Barring a last-minute government intervention today or Friday, many smaller internet providers in Canada are likely to significantly increase their prices and lose customers or shut down. The dream of more competition leading to better internet service for Canadians is on life support. What's happening in Canada reveals why we need smart internet policy to be paired with strong government oversight to have better and more affordable internet for all -- and it shows what happens when we lose that.

The U.S. has botched it for years, and that's one reason America's internet service stinks. Canada may be a real-world experiment in what happens when muddled government regulation undermines internet policy that has mostly been effective. Bear with me for a lesson in Canada's home internet service. The bottom line is that Canadians have something that is relatively novel to Americans: Many people have options to pick a home internet provider that they don't hate. That's because in Canada -- similar to many countries including Britain, Australia and Japan -- the companies that own internet pipelines are required to rent access to businesses that then sell internet service to homes. Regulators keep a close watch to make sure those rental costs and terms are fair.

The Spanish government on Tuesday announced plans to invest $13.2 billion to build microchips in the country and "help reduce the dependence of Span and the European Union on other suppliers," reports the Associated Press. From the report: Speaking in Madrid, Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Nadia Calvino said the five-year plan is aimed at enabling Spain to cover every area in the design and production of microchips, which are now considered key to all areas of modern industry. She said the plan was among the most ambitious of the Spanish government's projects to reboot the economy after the COVID-19 pandemic and that it would have an effect on other sectors.

The project was directed at boosting the EU's weak position in microchip production, which Calvino said represented some 10% of the world total. She said this led to a great dependence on a small number of major producers such as Taiwan, the United States, South Korea, Japan and China. Calvino added that "the war in Ukraine makes it a priority to reinforce strategic autonomy in energy, technology, food production as well as cyber security."

As states race to keep plants open, California becomes a test case of how much the tide has shifted. From a report: Charles Komanoff was for decades an expert witness for groups working against nuclear plants, delivering blistering critiques so effective that he earned a spot at the podium when tens of thousands of protesters descended on Washington in 1979 over the Three Mile Island meltdown. Komanoff would go on to become an unrelenting adversary of Diablo Canyon, the hulking 37-year-old nuclear facility perched on a pristine stretch of California's Central Coast that had been the focal point of anti-nuclear activism in America. But his last letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in February, was one Komanoff never expected to write. He implored Newsom to scrap state plans to close the coastal plant. "We're going to have to give up some of our long-held beliefs if we are going to deal with climate," Komanoff said in an interview. "I am still a solar and wind optimist. But I am a climate pessimist. The climate is losing."

Komanoff's conversion is emblematic of the rapidly shifting politics of nuclear energy. The long controversial power source is gaining backers amid worries that shutting U.S. plants, which emit almost no emissions, makes little sense as governments race to end their dependence on fossil fuels and the war in Ukraine heightens worries about energy security and costs. The momentum is driven in large part by longtime nuclear skeptics who remain unsettled by the technology but are now pushing to keep existing reactors running as they face increasingly alarming news about the climate.

The latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in April, warned that the world is so dangerously behind on climate action that within a decade it could blow past the targets crucial to containing warming to a manageable level. Emissions analysts are increasingly critical of retirements of existing nuclear reactors as they take large amounts of low-emissions power off the grid, undermining the gains made as sources such as wind and solar come online. The movement to keep plants open comes despite persistent worries about toxic waste and just a decade after the nuclear disaster at Japan's Fukushima plant. It has been boosted by growing public acceptance of nuclear power and has nurtured an unlikely coalition of industry players, erstwhile anti-nukers, and legions of young grass-roots environmental activists more worried about climate change than nuclear accidents.

Mastercard is launching a "controversial" biometric payments programme in stores, as the card company tries to keep pace with nimble fintechs and bigger competitors such as Amazon. From a report: Retailers that sign up to its pilot scheme can allow customers to pay in-store with a gesture such as a smile or a wave. The system, which requires customers to enrol first, could also be connected to loyalty programmes and purchase history. "Payments is a wide space, and we are trying to offer what customers want," Ajay Bhalla, Mastercard's president of cyber and intelligence, told the Financial Times. He said that Mastercard could act as the "enabler of the ecosystem," setting unified privacy and security standards for a technology that has raised the hackles of privacy and data protection campaigners. "It's important that we make sure that data is handled properly and the transaction is safe," said Bhalla. "Everything is done with consumer consent." The facial recognition software itself will come from companies including Japan's NEC, Brazil's Payface and California-based PopID. The first pilots are launching this week at five supermarkets run by the St Marche chain in Brazil. The ambition is to eventually allow consumers to use a single enrolment to pay across different stores, says Bhalla, with further pilots planned across regions including Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

Sony has announced the initial lineup of games for its revamped, multi-tier PlayStation Plus subscription service, and firmed up its launch dates over the next five weeks. From a report: The service will launch in Asia on May 24, Japan on June 2, North and South America on June 13, and Europe, Australia, and New Zealand on June 23. Games coming to the subscription service include Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, the Demon's Souls remake, Insomniac's Spider-Man games, and Red Dead Redemption 2. But the structure of the deal is confusing, there's nothing more recent than the director's cut editions of Ghosts of Tsushima and Death Stranding (both released in mid-2021), and the classic games offering for the service's top tier appears extremely thin at present -- even lacking any PlayStation 2 games under emulation.

The number of titles from third-party developers and publishers is dwarfed by the offering from internal studios. It's important to note, however, that Sony characterized this list as "an early look at some of the games that will be included during the launch time frame." So there is room for the offering to improve in the coming weeks. The lowest-priced Essential tier remains the same as the current PlayStation Plus, offering a handful of free PS4 and PS5 games every month alongside access to multiplayer online gaming. Sony has yet to announce the Essential tier games for the service's relaunch in June.

Onkyo, one of the best-known Japanese manufacturers of home theater equipment, has "filed for bankruptcy at Osaka District Court on Friday, with total liabilities of around 3.1 billion yen ($24 million)," reports Nikkei Asia. The report is sparse on details but attributes the bankruptcy to a "market shift to streaming and smartphones."

In mid-2020, Onkyo USA Corporation ended a 45-year run as Onkyo's exclusive sales, marketing and distribution division for the Americas, according to Audioholics.

Onkyo has appeared in a few stories on Slashdot over the years. Our personal favorite was a story in 2003 about a new use of embedded Linux in Onkyo's home music server.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Two minutes after the world's biggest tectonic plate shuddered off the coast of Japan, the country's meteorological agency issued its final warning to about 50 million residents: A magnitude 8.1 earthquake had generated a tsunami that was headed for shore. But it wasn't until hours after the waves arrived that experts gauged the true size of the 11 March 2011 Tohoku quake. Ultimately, it rang in at a magnitude 9 -- releasing more than 22 times the energy experts predicted and leaving at least 18,000 dead, some in areas that never received the alert. Now, scientists have found a way to get more accurate size estimates faster, by using computer algorithms to identify the wake from gravitational waves that shoot from the fault at the speed of light.

Recently, researchers involved in the hunt for gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time created by the movement of massive objects -- realized that those gravity signals, traveling at the speed of light, might also be used to monitor earthquakes. "The idea is that as soon as mass moves anywhere, the gravitational field changes, and ... everything feels it," says Bernard Whiting, a physicist at the University of Florida who worked on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. "What was amazing was that the signal would be present even in seismometers." Sure enough, in 2016, Whiting and his colleagues reported that regular seismometers could detect these gravity signals. Earthquakes result in large shifts in mass; those shifts give off gravitational effects that deform both existing gravitational fields and the ground beneath seismometers. By measuring the difference between these two, the scientists concluded they could create a new kind of earthquake early warning system. Gravitational signals show up on seismometers before the arrival of the first seismic waves, in a portion of the seismogram that's traditionally ignored. By combining signals from dozens of seismometers on top of one another, scientists can identify patterns to interpret the size and location of large events, Whiting says.

Now, Andrea Licciardi, a postdoc at Cote d'Azur University, and his colleagues have built a machine-learning algorithm to do that pattern recognition. They trained the model on hundreds of thousands of simulated earthquakes before testing it on the real data set from Tohoku. The model accurately predicted the earthquake's magnitude in about 50 seconds -- faster than other state-of-the-art early warning systems, researchers report today in Nature. "It's more than the seed of an idea -- they've shown that it can be done," Whiting says. "What we showed was a proof of principle. What they're showing is a proof of implementation."

Since Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming launched two years ago, more than 10 million people worldwide have streamed games through the service. That number's likely to jump a bit higher as a result of a partnership Microsoft struck with Epic Games to offer Epic's hit title Fortnite for free through Xbox Cloud Gaming. From a report: The move will effectively let people play Fortnite in a way similar to how they stream videos from companies like Netflix, regardless of how beefy their gaming device is. Unlike previous efforts, Microsoft said this agreement applies to anyone who wants to play, with or without a subscription. Gamers will be able to play on an iPhone or iPad or a device powered by Google's Android software, even though both Apple and Google have banned Fortnite from their respective app stores amid an ongoing legal dispute. "This is just the beginning for us -- we're going to learn, implement feedback, and in time look to bring even more free-to-play titles to players through the cloud," Microsoft said in a statement. The service will be available for free in 26 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico and the US.

New data shared by tracking company MUSO shows that the number of visits to pirate sites has increased by nearly 30% compared to last year. The publishing category is growing particularly hard, mostly driven by manga piracy. The United States continues to harbor the most pirates in absolute numbers. TorrentFreak reports: During the first quarter of 2022, pirate site visits increased by more than 29% compared to a year earlier, which is good for a dazzling 52.5 billion visits. Nearly half of this traffic (48%) goes to TV-related content. The publishing category takes second spot with 27%, followed by the film (12%), music (7%), and software (6%) categories. The traffic increase is noticeable across all types of piracy but the publishing category stands out. Compared to the first quarter of 2021, the number of visits in this category has grown explosively. Software piracy is lagging behind, but the category still continues to grow. The strong growth in the publishing category is largely driven by manga, comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Some of the pirate sites dedicated to this 'niche', such as Manganato.com, attract well over 100 million 'visits' per month. That's more than iconic pirate sites such as The Pirate Bay and Fmovies.to.

The United States is the country that sends most visitors to pirate sites. With well over 5.7 billion 'visits' in the first three months of the year, the U.S. is good for more than 10% of all piracy traffic. With a 39% increase compared to last year, pirate audience growth exceeds the global average. Russia and India follow at a respectable distance with just over 3 billion visits to pirate sites, followed by China and France, with 1.8 and 1.7 billion visits, respectively. There is no single explanation for the apparent piracy boom. However, MUSO sees the upward trend as an alarming signal and expects that the 'streaming wars' and growing subscription fatigue may play a role.

Researchers in Japan have developed a new method for making 5-cm (2-in) wafers of diamond that could be used for quantum memory. The ultra-high purity of the diamond allows it to store a staggering amount of data -- the equivalent of one billion Blu-Ray discs. New Atlas reports: [R]esearchers at Saga University and Adamant Namiki Precision Jewelery Co. in Japan have developed a new method for manufacturing ultra-high purity diamond wafers that are big enough for practical use. With this technique, the team says the resulting diamond wafers measure 5 cm across, and have such immense data density that they can theoretically store the equivalent of a billion Blu-Ray discs. One Blu-Ray can store up to 25 GB (assuming it's single-layered), which would mean this diamond wafer should be able to store a whopping 25 exabytes (EB) of data. The company calls these wafers Kenzan Diamond. The key is that these diamonds have a nitrogen concentration of under three parts per billion (ppb), making them incredibly pure. The researchers say that these are the largest wafers with that level of purity -- most others only get to 4 mm2 (0.006 in2) at most.

Achieving this requires a new manufacturing technique. Diamond wafers are made by growing the crystals on a substrate material, and that material is usually a flat surface. The problem is, the diamond can crack under the strain, degrading the quality. In the new process, the team made a relatively simple change -- the substrate surface was shaped like steps, which spreads the strain horizontally and prevents cracking. This allows them to make larger diamond wafers with higher purity. The team hopes to commercialize these diamond wafers in 2023, and in the meantime are already working towards doubling the diameter to 10 cm (4 in).