Month: October 2018

A prototype Nickel-Hydrogen battery testing cell. (credit: Wei Chen, Yang Jin, Jie Zhao, Nian Liu, and Yi Cui )

Battery technology is extremely important for a world that uses more and more renewable energy. Renewable energy is variable—no electricity can be produced while the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing—so being able to store excess electricity that's made when those renewable sources are producing is key to putting more of it on the grid.

The problem is that very large batteries can be expensive. A lot of research has been devoted to making batteries lighter and smaller, given how focused we've been over the last several decades on consumer technology. But now researchers are relaxing size and weight constraints and trying to find battery chemistries that are cheap and are extremely long-lasting instead.

Researchers from Stanford and the Georgia Institute of Technology (GT) are suggesting a new configuration of a nickel-hydrogen battery that could be cheap enough for mass-adoption on the grid. Traditional nickel-hydrogen batteries can last for up to 30,000 cycles and are extremely reliable and durable, which makes them great for grid use. But they often rely on a platinum catalyst that can make them prohibitively expensive for large installations.

Enlarge / A Soyuz rocket launches with Expedition 57 Flight Engineer Nick Hague of NASA and Flight Engineer Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos, Thursday, October 11, 2018. (credit: NASA)

Although the official report on the cause of a Soyuz rocket failure won't be released until Thursday, a Russian official disclosed its central conclusion a day early, the country's news agency TASS reports.

Sergei Krikalev, the executive director of "manned programs" for Russia's space corporation Roscosmos, said a sensor on board the rocket failed to properly signal the separation of the first and second stages. As a result, one of the side-mounted rocket boosters did not separate properly from the vehicle and collided with the rocket.

This collision triggered an automatic abort of one of the Soyuz's abort systems, pulling the crew of NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin safely away from the rocket and sending them on a ballistic return to Earth.

Enlarge / This is the 2018 MacBook Pro next to the 2017 MacBook Pro. Can you tell the difference? Didn't think so. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Amid the iPad Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini announcements yesterday, Apple also quietly updated its MacBook Pro lineup with more graphics power. Apple will offer new versions of the MacBook Pro with AMD Radeon Pro Vega graphics chips, marking the first time Vega GPUs have been used in Apple's premium laptops.

Apple claims the new GPUs will provide up to 60 percent better graphical performance than the existing offerings. Currently, the best GPU available in a MacBook Pro is the Radeon Pro 560X.

Vega 56 and 64 graphics cards are already available in Apple's iMac Pro, a machine designed for creative professionals and power users. Offering Vega graphics cards (like the Vega 16 and 20 CPUs) in the MacBook Pros brings more consistency to the high-end Mac lineup, as well as the graphics power some users need to complete complex and creative projects.

Enlarge / Waymo CEO John Krafcik in 2017. (credit: Misha Friedman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Last Thursday, Waymo dropped something of a bombshell: it has begun commercial operations of its self-driving taxi service. And it made the announcement in the most anticlimactic way possible. Ruth Porat, CFO of parent company Alphabet, announced the news in answer to a question during Alphabet's quarterly earnings call.

"We moved into very early days of commercialization," in the third quarter, Porat said. "We do now have people paying for rides." The company subsequently confirmed to Ars that it is now charging customers directly for rides—and it has been for a few weeks. Waymo has also earned some revenue from retailers, like Wal-Mart, which offers customers the option to order groceries online and then come pick them up in a Waymo vehicle.

The news comes with important caveats, however. Waymo says that cars with paying customers still have safety drivers behind the wheel (some other vehicles are fully driverless). And the program isn't fully open to the public—you have to be one of Waymo's hand-picked early riders and agree to strict non-disclosure rules.

An alleged hacking conspiracy targeted designs for a turbofan engine similar to this one. (credit: Ashley Dace)

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday unsealed charges that accused two Chinese government intelligence officers and eight alleged co-conspirators of conducting sustained computer intrusions into 13 companies in an attempt to steal designs for a turbofan engine used in commercial jetliners.

A 21-page indictment filed in US District Court in the Southern District of California said the Jiangsu Province Ministry of State Security, an arm of the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of State Security, directed the five-year campaign. According to the indictment, between January 2010 to May 2015, the team allegedly used a wide range of methods to break into the computer networks of companies involved in aerospace and turbine manufacturing and Internet and technology services. Their primary goal was stealing data that would allow a Chinese government-owned company to design its own jetliner. With the exception of Capstone Turbines, a Los Angeles-based gas turbine maker, other targeted companies weren’t identified by name and were referred to only as companies A through L.

"Members of the conspiracy targeted, among other things, data and information related to a turbofan engine used in commercial jetliners,” prosecutors wrote in the superseding indictment. “At the time of the intrusions, a Chinese state-owned aerospace company was working to develop a comparable engine for use in commercial aircraft manufactured in China and elsewhere.” The indictment continued: