Volvo hat ein Konzeptfahrzeug vorgestellt, das zeigt, wie sich im Autobau CO2 sparen lässt: durch natürliche oder recycelte Materialien. (Volvo, Elektroauto)
Volvo hat ein Konzeptfahrzeug vorgestellt, das zeigt, wie sich im Autobau CO2 sparen lässt: durch natürliche oder recycelte Materialien. (Volvo, Elektroauto)
First-of-its-kind reactor to be built in Wyoming with heavy Dept. of Energy backing.
Enlarge/ In TerraPower's design, the nuclear reactor is separated from the power generation process by molten salt heat storage. (credit: TerraPower)
On Tuesday, TerraPower, the US-based nuclear power company backed by Bill Gates, announced it has chosen a site for what would be its first reactor. Kemmerer, Wyoming, population roughly 2,500, has been the site of the coal-fired Naughton Power Plant, which is being closed. The TerraPower project will see it replaced by a 345 megawatt reactor that would pioneer a number of technologies that haven't been commercially deployed before.
These include a reactor design that needs minimal refueling, cooling by liquid sodium, and a molten-salt heat-storage system that will provide the plant with the flexibility needed to integrate better with renewable energy.
Public-private
While TerraPower is the name clearly attached to the project, plenty of other parties are involved, as well. The company is perhaps best known for being backed by Bill Gates, now chairman of the company board, who has promoted nuclear power as a partial solution for the climate crisis. The company has been selected by the US Department of Energy to build a demonstration reactor, a designation that guarantees at least $180 million toward construction and could see it receive billions of dollars over the next several years.
The Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize booster doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for all adults as early as Thursday, agency insiders told The New York Times Tuesday.
The reported timeline is remarkably fast-paced for the regulatory agency and comes as members of the Biden administration continue to suggest widespread boosting is necessary to bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control.
"I believe... that when we look back on this, we will see that boosters are likely a very critical part of the immunization regimen and not a bonus or a luxury," top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci told Reuters on Tuesday.
Vulnerabilities already patched by Microsoft and Fortinet are being exploited en masse.
Enlarge/ Illustration set of flags made from binary code targets. (credit: Getty Images)
Organizations responsible for critical infrastructure in the US are in the crosshairs of Iranian government hackers, who are exploiting known vulnerabilities in enterprise products from Microsoft and Fortinet, government officials from the US, UK, and Australia warned on Wednesday.
A joint advisory published Wednesday said an advanced-persistent-threat hacking group aligned with the Iranian government is exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange and Fortinet’s FortiOS, which forms the basis for the latter company’s security offerings. All of the identified vulnerabilities have been patched, but not everyone who uses the products has installed the updates. The advisory was released by the FBI, US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the UK’s National Cyber Security Center, and the Australian Cyber Security Center.
A broad range of targets
“The Iranian government-sponsored APT actors are actively targeting a broad range of victims across multiple US critical infrastructure sectors, including the Transportation Sector and the Healthcare and Public Health Sector, as well as Australian organizations,” the advisory stated. “FBI, CISA, ACSC, and NCSC assess the actors are focused on exploiting known vulnerabilities rather than targeting specific sectors. These Iranian government-sponsored APT actors can leverage this access for follow-on operations, such as data exfiltration or encryption, ransomware, and extortion.”
The FBI joined state and local authorities in reportedly raiding the homes of Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and several associates yesterday as law enforcement agencies continue investigating a voting-machine security breach from Peters' office.
"The FBI carried out a court-ordered search of Peters' home in Mesa County early Tuesday morning, leaving her 'terrified,' Peters said Tuesday night in an appearance on Lindell TV, an online channel run by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump supporter and proponent of discredited claims the 2020 election was stolen," Colorado Politics reported yesterday.
Colorado Politics wrote that federal, state, and local authorities searched the homes of "Peters and three of her associates on Tuesday as part of an investigation into accusations the elected official was involved in voting machine security breaches."
Also: the Roman emperor Nero was quite fiscally responsible about his coinage
Enlarge/ Nuclear physicists used micro-XRF scanning to produce elemental maps for Roman denarii coins and their color overlays. (credit: K.V. Manukyan et al., 2019)
Most people associate nuclear physics with the atomic bomb or nuclear power plants, and those associations are often negative. Michael Wiescher, a nuclear physicist at the University of Notre Dame, wants to change that perception by applying his expertise—and some of his sophisticated imaging hardware—to research that bridges science, history, and culture. His work in this area has included collaborations to analyze a rare medieval manuscript and unearth currency fraud and forgery throughout history, most notably in ancient Rome and Colonial America. He recently described those efforts at a virtual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Nuclear Physics.
Much of this work was conducted in conjunction with undergraduate students in physics, chemistry, art restoration, history, and anthropology as part of a course Wiescher teaches at Notre Dame on physics-based methods and techniques in art and archaeology. In the process, students can get certified as operators of a broad range of advanced physics-based instruments and techniques. These include Raman spectrometers, transmission electron microscopes (TEM), a 3MV tandem accelerator, handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanners, micro-XRF scanners, and X-ray diffractometers, among others.
Microsoft has introduced a new Media Player app for Windows 11. The new app has a modern design and support for managing and playing music, movies, and playlists. But Microsoft isn’t completely replacing the classic Windows Media Player, so you can also keep using that if you prefer. The new Media Player is available now for […]
Microsoft has introduced a new Media Player app for Windows 11. The new app has a modern design and support for managing and playing music, movies, and playlists. But Microsoft isn’t completely replacing the classic Windows Media Player, so you can also keep using that if you prefer.
Microsoft says its new Media Player functions as a music library for browsing, searching, and playing music and creating and managing playlists. There’s support for full-screen and mini-player views. And anyone who’s still using the discontinued Groove Music app can migrate their data to the new Media Player automatically (the new app will replace Groove Music).
In terms of video, the app will automatically find any local content stored in your Video folder, but you can also manually add additional folders to your library and there’s support for keyboard shortcuts and accessibility features including support for access keys.
Folks who’d prefer to use the classic Windows Media Player app (which first debuted with Windows 3.0 in 1991 and has received numerous updates over the years, but no really big changes in the past decade or so), can do that though. Microsoft says Windows 11 users can enable it from the Windows Tools settings.
Incidentally, I was just looking for Windows Media Player on my Windows 10 PC and realized that it’s available, but not enabled by default. I hadn’t really noticed. Microsoft says Windows Media Player 12 is included on clean installs of Windows 7 or later, but if you’re not seeing it, you may need to enable the app from the Windows Optional Features settings.
Or you could just use a third-party app like VLC or Kodi.
Technique uses less water to bring battery temps down to normal.
Enlarge/ To put out an EV blaze, a firefighter operates the nozzle from a remote control box. (credit: Rosenbauer)
In April, a Tesla Model S crashed in The Woodlands, Texas, after the speeding driver failed to negotiate a turn and jumped the curb. The car then hit a drainage culvert and a raised maintenance hole before being stopped by a tree, according to an investigation report by the National Transportation Safety Board. At that point, the Tesla promptly burst into flames.
Firefighters needed four hours to douse the flames, in part because the battery kept reigniting. When the blaze was finally over, about 30,000 gallons of water had been poured on it—what the department normally uses in a month.
Electric vehicle fires aren’t common, but they’re different enough from fossil-fuel-vehicle fires that firefighters need new approaches. One firm in Europe has developed a shipping container-like box in which a blazing EV can be deposited and blasted with water from all sides. But it requires a dedicated truck, making it a costly addition for a fire department.
The sixth and final season of The Expanse is heading to Amazon Prime video soon, and the ninth and final book in the series that inspired the TV show is coming November 30th. But if you haven’t started yet, now’s as good a time as any: Leviathan Falls, the first book in the series, is […]
The sixth and final season of The Expanse is heading to Amazon Prime video soon, and the ninth and final book in the series that inspired the TV show is coming November 30th. But if you haven’t started yet, now’s as good a time as any: Leviathan Falls, the first book in the series, is now on sale for $3 as an eBook from multiple retailers including Amazon, Kobo, B&N, Google Play.
Volvo hat ein Konzeptfahrzeug vorgestellt, das zeigt, wie sich im Autobau CO2 sparen lässt: durch natürliche oder recycelte Materialien. (Volvo, Elektroauto) 
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