Month: January 2022

Enlarge / All those supports require a lot of aluminum. (credit: Longhua Liao)

Once solar panels are operative, they produce electricity without carbon emissions. But making and installing them does involve some emissions. Most of the worries there have focused on elements that go into the panels themselves, like gallium, cadmium, germanium, indium, selenium, and tellurium. But, according to new research, the massive amount of aluminum needed to house the solar rigs of the future could create its own problems.

“I hadn’t realized just how much aluminum was required for the frames, and the modules, mountings, and inverters,” Alison Lennon, a researcher at UNSW Sydney’s School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering, told Ars. She added that aluminum is often used because it is lightweight and corrosion-resistant.

In 2020, the World Bank released an oft-cited analysis called "Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition.” In this report, the authors identified aluminum as one of the minerals that would need to have its production scale by a huge amount for the world to meet its climate goals. “PV was a large contributor,” Lennon said. “[This] made me think about the problem a bit more.”

Enlarge / Intel's 12th-generation Core chips are coming to laptops. (credit: Intel)

We came away impressed when we tested Intel's top-tier 12th-generation desktop chips. Though still power-hungry compared to competing AMD Ryzen processors, their combination of big performance cores (P-cores) and clusters of small efficiency cores (E-cores) helped them shine under all kinds of workloads, including games that favor fewer, faster cores and video encoding and rendering tasks that benefit from every core you can throw at them.

The laptop versions of those chips, which Intel announced at CES earlier this month, don't have the luxury of a desktop computer's huge power supply or beefy cooling systems. They also don't benefit from being compared to mediocre predecessors—11th-generation Core desktop processors backported a new CPU architecture to Intel's decrepit 14nm manufacturing process with unimpressive results, while 11th-generation Core laptop chips benefitted from the newer 10nm process and correspondingly lower heat and power consumption. The 12th-generation chips use the same process, though it has been re-dubbed "Intel 7" to close the PR gap between Intel's 10nm process and TSMC's 7nm process.

The first Alder Lake laptop processor to find its way into our hands is the tippy-top-end Core i9-12900HK, the fastest of the bunch. In our testing, we tried to see whether the laptop version of Alder Lake strikes the same performance balance as the desktop version—fast cores when you need fast cores, and lots of cores when you need lots of cores.

The James Webb Space Telescope as it will appear in orbit. (credit: NASA)

I met John Grunsfeld outside a coffee shop in Houston, across the street from Johnson Space Center, a little more than five years ago.

He had only recently retired from NASA after a long and storied career. Over the course of nearly two decades, Grunsfeld had flown into space five times, the latter three of which were missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope. A physicist by training, Grunsfeld had become affectionately known as a "Hubble Hugger" for his work on the venerable instrument in space.

He had then left the astronaut corps and gone on to lead NASA's science missions as associate administrator of the agency's science directorate. When we met late in the fall of 2016, Grunsfeld had just returned to private life. Now that he could speak more freely, I wanted to know what Grunsfeld really thought about the space agency's science priorities. He was in Houston for his annual astronaut physical, and we enjoyed the pleasant late November sunshine as cars zipped by on NASA Road 1.