Clare Watson reports via ScienceAlert: By replacing the hazardous chemical electrolytes used in commercial batteries with water, scientists have developed a recyclable 'water battery' -- and solved key issues with the emerging technology, which could be a safer and greener alternative. 'Water batteries' are formally known as aqueous metal-ion batteries. These devices use metals such as magnesium or zinc, which are cheaper to assemble and less toxic than the materials currently used in other kinds of batteries.

Batteries store energy by creating a flow of electrons that move from the positive end of the battery (the cathode) to the negative end (the anode). They expend energy when electrons flow the opposite way. The fluid in the battery is there to shuttle electrons back and forth between both ends. In a water battery, the electrolytic fluid is water with a few added salts, instead of something like sulfuric acid or lithium salt. Crucially, the team behind this latest advancement came up with a way to prevent these water batteries from short-circuiting. This happens when tiny spiky metallic growths called dendrites form on the metal anode inside a battery, busting through battery compartments. [...]

To inhibit this, the researchers coated the zinc anode of the battery with bismuth metal, which oxidizes to form rust. This creates a protective layer that stops dendrites from forming. The feature also helps the prototype water batteries last longer, retaining more than 85 percent of their capacity after 500 cycles, the researchers' experiments showed. According to Royce Kurmelovs at The Guardian, the team has so far developed water-based prototypes of coin-sized batteries used in clocks, as well as cylindrical batteries similar to AA or AAA batteries. The team is working to improve the energy density of their water batteries, to make them comparable to the compact lithium-ion batteries found inside pocket-sized devices. Magnesium is their preferred material, lighter than zinc with a greater potential energy density. [I]f magnesium-ion batteries can be commercialized, the technology could replace bulky lead-acid batteries within a few years. The study has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Michelle Lewis reports via Electrek: One of the US's largest nuclear power plants will directly power cloud service provider Amazon Web Services' new data center. Power provider Talen Energy sold its data center campus, Cumulus Data Assets, to Amazon Web Services for $650 million. Amazon will develop an up to 960-megawatt (MW) data center at the Salem Township site in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The 1,200-acre campus is directly powered by an adjacent 2.5 gigawatt (GW) nuclear power station also owned by Talen Energy.

The 1,075-acre Susquehanna Steam Electric Station is the sixth-largest nuclear power plant in the US. It's been online since 1983 and produces 63 million kilowatt hours per day. The plant has two General Electric boiling water reactors within a Mark II containment building that are licensed through 2042 and 2044. According to Talen Energy's investor presentation, it will supply fixed-price nuclear power to Amazon's new data center as it's built. Amazon has minimum contractual power commitments that ramp up in 120 MW increments over several years. The cloud service giant has a one-time option to cap commitments at 480 MW and two 10-year extension options tied to nuclear license renewals.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oregon has joined the small but growing list of states that have passed right-to-repair legislation. Oregon's bill stands out for a provision that would prevent companies from requiring that official parts be unlocked with encrypted software checks before they will fully function. Bill SB 1596 passed Oregon's House by a 42 to 13 margin. Gov. Tina Kotek has five days to sign the bill into law. Consumer groups and right-to-repair advocates praised the bill as "the best bill yet," while the bill's chief sponsor, state Sen. Janeen Sollman (D), pointed to potential waste reductions and an improved second-hand market for closing a digital divide.

"Oregon improves on Right to Repair laws in California, Minnesota and New York by making sure that consumers have the choice of buying new parts, used parts, or third-party parts for the gadgets and gizmos," said Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of Repair.org, in a statement. Like bills passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, Oregon's bill requires companies to offer the same parts, tools, and documentation to individual and independent repair shops that are already offered to authorized repair technicians. Unlike other states' bills, however, Oregon's bill doesn't demand a set number of years after device manufacture for such repair implements to be produced. That suggests companies could effectively close their repair channels entirely rather than comply with the new requirements. California's bill mandated seven years of availability.

If signed, the law's requirements for parts, tools, and documentation would apply to devices sold after 2015, except for phones, which are covered after July 2021. The prohibition against parts pairing only covers devices sold in 2025 and later. Like other repair bills, a number of device categories are exempted, including video game consoles, HVAC and medical gear, solar systems, vehicles, and, very specifically, "Electric toothbrushes."

HP launched a subscription service this week that rents people a printer, allots them a specific amount of printed pages, and sends them ink for a monthly fee. From a report: HP is framing its service as a way to simplify printing for families and small businesses, but the deal also comes with monitoring and a years-long commitment. Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages. The priciest plan includes an HP OfficeJet Pro rental and 700 printed pages for $35.99 per month.

HP says it will provide subscribers with ink deliveries when they're running low and 24/7 support via phone or chat (although it's dubious how much you want to rely on HP support). Support doesn't include on or offsite repairs or part replacements. The subscription's terms of service (TOS) note that the service doesn't cover damage or failure caused by, unsurprisingly, "use of non-HP media supplies and other products" or if you use your printer more than what your plan calls for. HP calls this an All-In-Plan; if you subscribe, the tech company will be all in on your printing activities. One of the most perturbing aspects of the subscription plan is that it requires subscribers to keep their printers connected to the Internet. HP seeks two-year subscriber commitments, charging up to $270 plus taxes if canceled early.

Starting today, Ford electric vehicle owners can use one of Tesla's 2,400+ superchargers, but there's a hitch. "They'll need to get an adapter that Ford will provide for free, although the company won't start shipping those until the end of March," notes the Associated Press. Product Reviewer MKBHD also notes that non-Teslas will need to park in a spot that blocks 2 spots where a Tesla would take up one. "If the charge station fills up the remaining spots with Teslas, the app will show 1 charger as available but the parking spot is blocked by the Mach-E," adds MKBHD. From the report: Last May, Ford became the first automaker to reach an agreement with the Austin, Texas-based Tesla to charge on its network, which is the largest and most well-placed in the U.S. Tesla has more than 26,000 plugs and nearly 2,400 Supercharger stations across the U.S. and Canada. Ford said its owners will have access to about 15,000 Tesla fast-charging plugs that are located strategically along travel corridors. Ford owners won't be able to use some older Tesla plugs.

Most other automakers followed Ford in joining Tesla's network and agreeing to switch to Tesla's plug, called the North American Charging Standard, which is smaller and easier to use than the current plugs on most other EVs sold in the two countries. Ford said adding the Tesla plugs will double the size of the network that can be used by Ford EV owners. There are nearly 166,000 Ford EVs in the U.S.

Ford is offering the adapters for free to the owners, who can sign up on the Ford.com website to reserve them between Thursday and June 30. The company will provide one free adapter per vehicle. Tesla's network was turned on Wednesday morning, and software enabling the Ford vehicles to charge at Tesla stations was to be sent out around the same time. Ford will switch to Tesla's charging connector with its second-generation EVs starting next year.

Intel's previously-unannounced Intel 10A (analogous to 1nm) will enter production/development in late 2027, marking the arrival of the company's first 1nm node, and its 14A (1.4nm) node will enter production in 2026. The company is also working to create fully autonomous AI-powered fabs in the future. Tom's Hardware: Intel's Keyvan Esfarjani, the company's EVP and GM and Foundry Manufacturing and Supply, held a very insightful session that covered the company's latest developments and showed how the roadmap unfolds over the coming years. Here, we can see two charts, with the first outlining the company's K-WSPW (thousands of wafer starts per week) capacity for Intel's various process nodes. Notably, capacity typically indicates how many wafers can be started, but not the total output -- output varies based on yields. You'll notice there isn't a label for the Y-axis, which would give us a direct read on Intel's production volumes. However, this does give us a solid idea of the proportionality of Intel's planned node production over the next several years.

Intel did not specify the arrival date of its coming 14A node in its previous announcements, but here, the company indicates it will begin production of the Intel 14A node in 2026. Even more importantly, Intel will begin production/development of its as-yet-unannounced 10A node in late 2027, filling out its roster of nodes produced with EUV technology. Intel's 'A' suffix in its node naming convention represents Angstroms, and 10 Angstroms converts to 1nm, meaning this is the company's first 1nm-class node. Intel hasn't shared any details about the 10A/1nm node but has told us that it classifies a new node as at least having a double-digit power/performance improvement. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has told us the cutoff for a new node is around a 14% to 15% improvement, so we can expect that 10A will have at least that level of improvement over the 14A node. (For example, the difference between Intel 7 and Intel 4 was a 15% improvement.)

A federal judge in Texas has granted a temporary order blocking the U.S. government from monitoring the energy usage of cryptocurrency mining operations, stating that the industry had shown it would suffer "irreparable injury" if it was made to comply. The Guardian reports: The US Department of Energy had launched an "eemergency" initiative last month aimed at surveying the energy use of mining operations, which typically use vast amounts of computing power to solve various mathematical puzzles to add new tokens to an online network known as a blockchain, allowing the mining of currency such as bitcoin. The growth of cryptocurrency, and the associated mining of it, has been blamed for a surge in electricity use as data centers have sprung up across the US, even reviving, in some cases, ailing coal plants to help power the mining. [...]

"The massive energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining and its rapid growth in the United States threaten to undermine progress towards achieving climate goals, and threaten grids, communities and ratepayers," said Mandy DeRoche, deputy managing attorney of the clean energy program at Earthjustice. Until now, a lack of publicly available information has only benefited an "industry that has thrived in the shadows," DeRoche added.

The crypto mining industry, however, has claimed it is the victim of a "politically motivated campaign" by Joe Biden's administration and has, for now, succeeded in averting a survey that it contends is unfairly onerous. "This is an attack against legitimate American businesses with the administration feigning an emergency to score political points," said Lee Bratcher, president the Texas Blockchain Council, one of the groups that sued to stop the survey. "The White House has been clear that they desire to 'to limit or eliminate' bitcoin miners from operating in the United States. "Although bitcoin is resilient and cannot be banned, the administration is seeking to make the lives of bitcoin miners, their employees, and their communities too difficult to bear operating in the United States. This is deeply concerning."

Optical discs that can store up to 200 TB of data could be possible with a new technology developed in China. If commercialized, it could revive optical media as an alternative to hard disk or tape for cost-effective long-term storage. The Register: Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST) and Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) say they have demonstrated that optical storage is possible up to the petabit level by using hundreds of layers, while also claiming to have broken the optical diffraction barrier limiting how close together recorded features can be.

In an article published in Nature titled "A 3D nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity," the researchers detail how they developed a novel optical storage medium they call dye-doped photoresist (DDPR) with aggregation-induced emission luminogens (AIE-DDPR). When applied as a recording layer, this is claimed to outperform other optical systems and hard drives in terms of areal density -- the amount of storage per unit of area. To be specific, the researchers claim it to be 125 times that of a multi-layer optical disk based on gold nanorods, and 24 times that of the most advanced hard drives (based on data from 2022). The proposed recording and retrieval processes for this medium calls for two laser beams each. For optical writing, a 515 nm femtosecond Gaussian laser beam and a doughnut-shaped 639 nm continuous wave laser beam are focused on the recording area.

Maker Roni Bandini developed a Raspberry Pi project to address his neighbors' loud reggaeton music by creating an AI-driven system that distorts audio on nearby Bluetooth speakers when reggaeton is detected. Tom's Hardware reports: Powering this Bluetooth jamming device is a Raspberry Pi 3 B+. It's connected to a DFRobot OLED display panel, which has a resolution of 128 x 32px. Audio is observed using a USB microphone, while a push button handles when the system will perform a check to listen for any potential reggaeton. According to Bandini, the Pi is running Raspberry Pi OS. The AI system driving the machine learning aspects of the design is Edge Impulse. With this, Bandini was able to train the Pi to listen for music and more specifically identify whether the song playing is classifiable as reggaeton or not. The official project page is available at Hackster.

During a briefing at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Meghana Patwardhan, VP of Commercial Mobility at Dell Technology, told The Register that while the immediate future would consist of two worlds -- one with AI hardware and one without -- "every PC is going to be an AI PC in the longer term." From the report: In terms of new hardware, Dell used the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona to show off new versions of its Surface-baiting Latitude 7350 convertible -- "the world's most serviceable commercial detachable," according to the company -- and its workstation-class Precision 3680 tower. Other devices in the Precision range include mobile workstations and the 3280 Compact Form Factor PC. Dell was also determined to present itself as a leader in hybrid working with the Premier Wireless ANC headset, replete with AI-based noise cancellation.

Duringt our talk, AI was never far from the lips of Dell's spokespeople as the company talked up the energy efficiency and future-proofing it saw in dedicated AI hardware, such as Neural Processing Units (NPUs) that are increasingly cropping up in CPUs. To illustrate the point, Dell boatsed about how much more efficient background blurring is on video calls when AI hardware is running compared to when it isn't. Hopefully, Microsoft will soon deliver a version of Windows capable of demonstrating a use for AI hardware that is more than hiding distractions in the background. Further reading: AI PCs To Account for Nearly 60% of All PC Shipments by 2027, IDC Says

OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos are all part of a pack of investors in a business "developing human-like robots," reports Bloomberg, "according to people with knowledge of the situation..."

At the startup — which is named "Figure" — engineers "are working on a robot that looks and moves like a human. The company has said it hopes its machine, called Figure 01, will be able to perform dangerous jobs that are unsuitable for people and that its technology will help alleviate labor shortages." Figure is raising about $675 million in a funding round that carries a pre-money valuation of roughly $2 billion, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. Through his firm Explore Investments LLC, Bezos has committed $100 million. Microsoft is investing $95 million, while Nvidia and an Amazon.com Inc.-affiliated fund are each providing $50 million... Other technology companies are involved as well. Intel Corp.'s venture capital arm is pouring in $25 million, and LG Innotek is providing $8.5 million. Samsung's investment group, meanwhile, committed $5 million. Backers also include venture firms Parkway Venture Capital, which is investing $100 million, and Align Ventures, which is providing $90 million...

The AI robotics industry has been busy lately. Earlier this year, OpenAI-backed Norwegian robotics startup 1X Technologies AS raised $100 million. Vancouver-based Sanctuary AI is developing a humanoid robot called Phoenix. And Tesla Inc. is working on a robot called Optimus, with Elon Musk calling it one of his most important projects. Agility Robotics, which Amazon backed in 2022, has bots in testing at one of the retailer's warehouses. Bloomberg calls the investments in Figure "part of a scramble to find new applications for artificial intelligence."

At CNN's product review site, one electronics reporter wrote they were "dumbfounded", "surprised," and "shocked" by the transparent screen on Lenovo's ThinkBook Transparent Display prototype. "This Micro LED screen is no slouch, either; a Full HD panel with up to 1,000 nits of brightness..." Let's get the big issue out of the way early: Lenovo is merely boasting what it can do, not what it will do. That's what a "concept" product means, of course. That said, it's still the most exciting thing I've seen in laptops in quite some time...

Thinking of major use cases for such a laptop, I basically considered any time you're out in public and want a more complete world view. While websites with white backgrounds look more opaque than transparent, the black backgrounds of a Notepad document and animations of space and fish fit the experience much better, as I could see the plants that Lenovo had placed behind the screen. The more websites use dark modes, the better this will go, too. Admittedly, I can also imagine some will blanch at the fact that such a laptop completely removes your privacy as a user. From those shopping for loved ones in the same room to those working on important business documents, the ThinkBook Transparent Display laptop could use a non-transparent mode, just like the LG OLED T offers. That said, I'm sure teachers would love to see what their kids are working on in the classroom.
The Verge calls it "an exceptionally cool-looking device that's capable of some fun novelties." The key draw is its bezel-less 17.3-inch MicroLED display, which offers up to 55 percent transparency when its pixels are set to black and turned off. But as its pixels light up, the display becomes less and less see-through, until eventually, you're looking at a completely opaque white surface with a peak brightness of 1,000 nits... How often, of course, do you actually want to see the empty desk behind your laptop? Would it be beneficial to be able to see your colleague sitting across from you, or would it be distracting? One of Lenovo's big ideas is that the form factor could be useful for digital artists, helping them to see the world behind the laptop's screen while sketching it on the lower half of the laptop where the keyboard is (more on this later).... 720p still feels like a very work-in-progress spec on a 17.3-inch laptop like this, but at least text shown on the screen during my demo was perfectly readable... Lenovo's transparent laptop concept feels like a collection of cool technologies in search of a killer app.
And yet Lenovo's executive director of ThinkPad portfolio and product Tom Butler tells the Verge he has "very high confidence" this will be in a real laptop within the next five years. (The Verge add that he "hopes that revealing this proof of concept will start a public conversation about what it could be useful for, setting a target for Lenovo to work toward.")

But would you use a laptop with a transparent screen?

Long-time Slashdot reader BishopBerkeley writes: Though it does not come as much of a surprise, a new study highlighted in IEEE Spectrum delves into how corporate profit motives are preventing the upgrading and the expansion of the U.S. electrical grid. The full report can be downloaded here from the source [the nonprofit economic research group NBER].

Besides opening up the market to competition, utilities don't want to lose control over regional infrastructure, writes IEEE Spectrum. "[I]nterregional lines threaten utility companies' dominance over the nation's power supply. In the power industry, asset ownership provides control over rules that govern energy markets and transmission service and expansion. When upstart entities build power plants and transmission lines, they may be able to dilute utility companies' control over power-industry rules and prevent utilities from dictating decisions about transmission expansion."
The article begins by noting that "The United States is not building enough transmission lines to connect regional power networks. The deficit is driving up electricity prices, reducing grid reliability, and hobbling renewable-energy deployment. " Utilities can stall transmission expansion because out-of-date laws sanction these companies' sweeping control over transmission development... One of the main values of connecting regional networks is that it enablesâ"and is in fact critical forâ"incorporating renewable energy... Plus, adding interregional transmission for renewables can significantly reduce costs for consumers. Such connections allow excess wind and solar power to flow to neighboring regions when weather conditions are favorable and allow the import of energy from elsewhere when renewables are less productive.

Even without renewables, better integrated networks generally lower costs for consumers because they reduce the amount of generation capacity needed overall and decrease energy market prices. Interregional transmission also enhances reliability,particularly during extreme weather...

Addressing the transmission shortage is on the agenda in Washington, but utility companies are lobbying against reforms.
The article points out that now investors and entrepreneurs "are developing long-distance direct-current lines, which are more efficient at moving large amounts of energy over long distances, compared with AC," and also "sidestep the utility-dominated transmission-expansion planning processes."

They're already in use in China, and are also becoming Europe's preferred choice...

Popular Science points out that for encoding data, "optical disks almost always offer just a single, 2D layer — that reflective, silver underside."

"If you could boost a disk's number of available, encodable layers, however, you could hypothetically gain a massive amount of extra space..." Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology recently set out to do just that, and published the results earlier this week in the journal, Nature. Using a 54-nanometer laser, the team managed to record a 100 layers of data onto an optical disk, with each tier separated by just 1 micrometer. The final result is an optical disk with a three-dimensional stack of data layers capable of holding a whopping 1 petabit (Pb) of information — that's equivalent to 125,000 gigabytes of data...

As Gizmodo offers for reference, that same petabit of information would require roughly a six-and-a-half foot tall stack of HHD drives — if you tried to encode the same amount of data onto Blu-rays, you'd need around 10,000 blank ones to complete your (extremely inefficient) challenge.

To pull off their accomplishment, engineers needed to create an entirely new material for their optical disk's film... AIE-DDPR film utilizes a combination of specialized, photosensitive molecules capable of absorbing photonic data at a nanoscale level, which is then encoded using a high-tech dual-laser array. Because AIE-DDPR is so incredibly transparent, designers could apply layer-upon-layer to an optical disk without worrying about degrading the overall data. This basically generated a 3D "box" for digitized information, thus exponentially raising the normal-sized disk's capacity.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: Renewable developer Clearway Energy Group has completed a 452-megawatt (MW) solar farm in West Texas — and it's huge... It's built on around 5,000 acres of land and features over 1.1 million solar panels... Texas Solar Nova will generate enough electricity to power over 190,000 homes annually.

It's got an offtake agreement with telecoms giant Verizon, and agreements with auto component maker Toyota Boshoku and Swedish bearing and seal maker SKF to purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs). Both Toyota Boshoku and SKF have 12-year agreements for RECs.
The $660 million facility will "contribute significantly to the local tax base," the company said in a statement, "starting with an estimated $5.4 million in property taxes and wages to be paid in the first year."

"Crypto mines will have to start reporting their energy use in the U.S.," wrote the Verge in January, saying America's Energy department would "begin collecting data on crypto mines' electricity use, following criticism from environmental advocates over how energy-hungry those operations are."

But then "constitutional freedoms" group New Civil Liberties Alliance (founded with seed money from the Charles Koch Foundation) objected. And "on behalf of its clients" — the Texas Blockchain Council and Colorado bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms — the group said it "looks forward to derailing the Department of Energy's unlawful data collection effort once and for all."

While America's Energy department said the survey would take 30 minutes to complete, the complaint argued it would take 40 hours. According to the judge, the complaint "alleged three main sources of irreparable injury..."

- Nonrecoverable costs of compliance with the Survey
- A credible threat of prosecution if they do not comply with the Survey
- The disclosure of proprietary information requested by the Survey, thus risking disclosure of sensitive business strategy

But more importantly, the survey was implemented under "emergency" provisions, which the judge said is only appropriate when "public harm is reasonably likely to result if normal clearance procedures are followed."

Or, as Semafor.com puts it, the complaint was "seeking to push off the reporting deadline, on the grounds that the survey was rushed through...without a public comment period." The judge, Alan Albright, granted the request late Friday night, blocking the [Department of Energy's Information Administration] from collecting survey data or requiring bitcoin companies to respond to it, at least until a more comprehensive injunction hearing scheduled for Feb. 28. The ruling also concludes that the plaintiffs are "likely to succeed in showing that the facts alleged by the U.S. Energy Information Administration to support an emergency request fall far short of justifying such an action."
The U.S. Department of Energy is now...

• Restrained from requiring Plaintiffs or their members to respond to the Survey
• Restrained from collecting data required by the Survey
• "...and shall sequester and not share any such data that Defendants have already received from Survey respondents."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Dynabook Americas, the company formerly known as Toshiba, has recalled 15.5 million Toshiba laptop AC adapters over potential burn and fire hazards.

The company said it received 679 reports of the recalled AC adapters overheating or catching on fire, melting and burning, including 43 reports of minor burn injuries. Consumers should stop using the adapters immediately and contact them for a free replacement, Dynabook Americas said.

The recall applies to AC adapters sold both alongside Toshiba personal laptop computers and sold separately, with date codes ranging between April 2008 through December 2012. The adapters were manufactured in China. More than 60 models are part of the recall. The company published a webpage listing the impacted model numbers and serial numbers for the adapters.
Gatner points out the adapters are for "very old models," so "it's only a very small percentage of the population that is still using them."

The article cites figures from Gartner showing that while Toshiba once led the laptop market, it now makes up about 1%. "Nowadays, Lenovo dominates the category with 25%, followed by HP (22%), Dell (17%) and Apple (9%)."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: India's plan to let a moratorium on imposing customs duties on cross-border digital e-commerce transactions expire may end up hurting India's more ambitious plans to become a global chip leader in the next five years, Reuters reported. It could also worsen the global chip shortage by spiking semiconductor industry costs at a time when many governments worldwide are investing heavily in expanding domestic chip supplies in efforts to keep up with rapidly advancing technologies.

Early next week, world leaders will convene at a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting, just before the deadline to extend the moratorium hits in March. In place since 1998, the moratorium has been renewed every two years since -- but India has grown concerned that it's losing significant revenues from not imposing taxes as demand rises for its digital goods, like movies, e-books, or games. Hoping to change India's mind, a global consortium of semiconductor industry associations known as the World Semiconductor Council (WSC) sent a letter to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday. Reuters reviewed the letter, reporting that the WSC warned Modi that ending the moratorium "would mean tariffs on digital e-commerce and an innumerable number of transfers of chip design data across countries, raising costs and worsening chip shortages."

Pointing to Modi's $10 billion semiconductor incentive package -- which Modi has said is designed to advance India's industry through "giant leaps" in its mission to become a technology superpower -- the WSC cautioned Modi that pushing for customs duties may dash those global chip leader dreams. Studies suggest that India should be offering tax incentives, not potentially threatening to impose duties on chip design data. That includes a study from earlier this year, released after the Semiconductor Industry Association and the India Electronics and Semiconductor Association commissioned a report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). [...] It's possible that India and other developing nations may seek to narrow the moratorium rather than end it. An Indian government official told Reuters that "these issues need to be discussed and settled" before India can make a decision on whether to extend the moratorium.

Humane announced that its AI Pin would start shipping in March, but there's been a small delay. From a report: Early adopters are now being told orders will arrive in mid-April at the earliest, according to a video update from Humane staffer Sam Sheffer and emails we saw in Humane's official Discord channel. On the plus side, the company says it'll now throw in three months of its pricy $24-a-month subscription for free with the $699 pin -- and will do so for any other customers who buy one before March 31st, too.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Princeton Engineering: In the blink of an eye, the unruly, superheated plasma that drives a fusion reaction can lose its stability and escape the strong magnetic fields confining it within the donut-shaped fusion reactor. These getaways frequently spell the end of the reaction, posing a core challenge to developing fusion as a non-polluting, virtually limitless energy source. But a Princeton-led team composed of engineers, physicists, and data scientists from the University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to predict -- and then avoid -- the formation of a specific plasma problem in real time.

In experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, the researchers demonstrated their model, trained only on past experimental data, could forecast potential plasma instabilities known as tearing mode instabilities up to 300 milliseconds in advance. While that leaves no more than enough time for a slow blink in humans, it was plenty of time for the AI controller to change certain operating parameters to avoid what would have developed into a tear within the plasma's magnetic field lines, upsetting its equilibrium and opening the door for a reaction-ending escape.

"By learning from past experiments, rather than incorporating information from physics-based models, the AI could develop a final control policy that supported a stable, high-powered plasma regime in real time, at a real reactor," said research leader Egemen Kolemen, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, as well as staff research physicist at PPPL. The research opens the door for more dynamic control of a fusion reaction than current approaches, and it provides a foundation for using artificial intelligence to solve a broad range of plasma instabilities, which have long been obstacles to achieving a sustained fusion reaction. The team published their findings in the journal Nature.