Month: April 2018

BMW

On Wednesday at the Auto China 2018 show in Beijing, BMW gave the world a preview of its newest electric vehicle. It's called the iX3, and it will be the first long-range battery EV from the German automaker. Based on the current X3 crossover, the iX3 will ditch that car's internal combustion engines for a 200kW (270hp) electric motor-generator unit (MGU), coupled to a 70kWh lithium-ion battery. That should be sufficient for a range of 250 miles (400km) according to BMW, although that's according to the WLTP cycle; the EPA testing cycle is closer to real-world performance and is therefore more conservative. Additionally, it will be able to charge at 150kW.

There are a number of notable things about the iX3. First, it will use the fifth-generation of BMW's eDrive powertrain, which now groups the MGU, the transmission, and the control electronics into a single unit. What's more, BMW says that the MGU does not use any rare Earth elements in its production, presumably indicating it's an induction and not brushless design. The availability of these minerals is of increasing concern to automakers given China's control of these resources, and in the past couple of years we've seen both Honda and Toyota develop MGUs with a reduced need for some rare Earth elements. Tesla has also been using rare Earth-free AC-induction MGUs in the Model S and Model X EVs, but that company has switched to a brushless design for the Model 3.

Enlarge / A fan dressed as President Donald Trump keeps his fingers moving on his iPhone during the Carolina Panthers against Tampa Bay Buccaneers game on Sunday, Oct. 29, 2017 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla. (credit: Jeff Siner/Charlotte Observer/TNS via Getty Images)

Two congressional Democrats have sent a formal letter to top White House and law enforcement officials, seeking more information about the president’s use of an unsecured cell phone.

The letter, which was sent Wednesday by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona), comes after recent media reports that Donald Trump is making "increased use" of his personal phone.

Last year, Trump reportedly had an iPhone with just one app on it: Twitter.

Philips

EPI this week announced a new 4K monitor under the Philips brand called the Philips Momentum 436M6, which will arrive in mid-to-late June for $999.99. At 43 inches, it’s big, but most notably it’s the first PC monitor to gain DisplayHDR 1000 certification from the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), the organization that sets standards for displays and other electronics.

VESA introduced the DisplayHDR spec last December to create a consistent and open standard for high dynamic range (HDR) performance on LCD displays, most prominently PC monitors. There are three tiers to the benchmark: DisplayHDR 400 for low-end HDR panels, DisplayHDR 600 for those in the mid-range, and DisplayHDR 1000 for higher-end screens. We’ve seen a handful of monitors sporting the first two classifications in recent months, but this is the first to officially claim the top-level spec.

Enlarge / Don Pedro Reservoir was down to 61 percent of its normal level in 2015 but filled to 134 percent by early 2017 after a very wet winter. (credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

As the last few years have reminded us, California weather means you have to be prepared for anything. From 2012 to 2016, the Golden State saw a historic drought that led to water restrictions—and saw land areas sinking as groundwater use increased to compensate. But the winter of 2016 brought too much rain, producing flooding and evacuations below the Oroville Dam.

Variable rainfall is a natural component of California’s climate, but what will happen as climate change continues to play out? That’s the question a team led by UCLA’s Daniel Swain recently set out to answer.

Sim California

Though climate change projections show a warmer California, total rainfall isn’t expected to change much. But in this case, the researchers used climate model simulations to analyze precipitation variability, specifically, rather than just annual totals. They compared historical weather records, an 1,800-year-long simulation of the climate pre-Industrial-Revolution, and 40 simulations of climate change from 1920 to 2100 (assuming high future greenhouse gas emissions). These long simulations allowed them to accumulate meaningful statistics for different weather patterns.

Enlarge (credit: Ana Ulin)

Azure Container Instances (ACI), which let you create Linux and Windows containers without having to manage the virtual machines they run on, are now generally available.

ACI brings serverless principles to containerized applications. Serverless computing, pioneered by Amazon's Lambda and found on Azure as Functions, is designed to defer all system management (physical and virtual machine deployment and patching) and load-based scaling decisions to the platform provider. Developers just write their application code; they no longer have to care about spinning up virtual machines, updating operating systems, cutting over to new hardware, or anything else.

Traditional container deployments require virtual machines to run on. With ACI's serverless containers, the management of those virtual machines goes away. ACI containers can be deployed using Microsoft's own Azure interface, or with Kubernetes, without needing any VMs to be spun up first. The containers are billed according to how much processor time and memory they use on a per second basis: $0.000012 per CPU-second, $0.000004 per MB of memory-second.