Month: August 2022

Enlarge / Old wind turbine blades are usually sent to landfills, which rather undercuts the concept of sustainable energy production. (credit: Imagevixen/Getty Images)

Wind power is a rapidly growing industry, with a 53 percent increase in new installations in 2020 alone, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. The massive fiberglass blades can be as long as half of a football field and keep getting larger— the bigger the blade, the more electricity is produced. That poses a problem when the blades outlive the mechanical parts of the turbines. They're usually sent to landfills, which undercuts the whole concept of sustainable energy production.

Fortunately, John Dorgan, a chemical engineer at Michigan State University, has come up with a new polymer resin that can not only be recycled into a new generation of turbine blades but also materials for a wide range of commercial applications. These include the manufacture of car taillights, diapers, kitchen sinks—even edible gummy bears. He described his research at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago this week.

Dorgan terms his approach "molecular flexibility," inspired in part by an article he once read by Isaac Asimov, describing a future where people would be able to resynthesize raw protons, neutrons, and electrons into anything they wanted. "It's almost like the replicator from Star Trek, where they can just sort of make atoms into anything that they want—ice cream floats, or new clothing, or what have you," said Dorgan during a press conference at the ACS meeting. "Of course, we're a long way from the replicator idea, but we did draw some inspiration from those sorts of things."

Enlarge / A Wendy's old-fashion burger. Romaine lettuce on Wendy's burgers is thought to be the cause of the outbreak. (credit: Getty | Francis Dean)

A multistate outbreak of E. coli O157 infections linked to romaine lettuce on Wendy's burgers has more than doubled since last week, according to an update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The case count now stands at 84 and spans four states: Indiana (6), Michigan (53), Ohio (23), and Pennsylvania (2). That's up from last week's case tally of 37 from the same four states. Currently, at least 38 of the people sickened have been hospitalized. Eight of those people, all in Michigan, have developed a serious and potentially life-threatening type of kidney failure called hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), the CDC reports. No deaths have been reported. So far, the people sickened range in age from 5 to 94 years, with a median age of 24.

Because of reporting lags, the CDC warns that "the true number of sick people in this outbreak is likely higher than the number reported, and the outbreak may not be limited to the states with known illnesses."

If someone tries to sell you 30TB of solid-state storage for less than $40, consider turning around and running away, no matter how many clip-art rockets they use in their pictures.

It feels like high-capacity SSDs are getting cheaper all the time, but in the words of a security researcher known as Ray Redacted on Twitter, there are still some deals that are too good to be true. In the spirit of discovery, he bought a "30TB" external SSD from AliExpress for $31.40, which also happens to be listed on Walmart's website for $39 (I am linking it for educational and entertainment value, please do not buy it).

On the inside, this "SSD" looks like two small-capacity microSD cards hot glued to a USB 2.0-capable board. This board's firmware has been modified so that each of these cards reports its capacity as "15.0TB" to the operating system, for a total of 30TB, even though the actual capacity of the cards is much lower. This is another giveaway; Windows reports drive capacities in gibibytes (1,024 megabytes) or tebibytes (1,024 gigabytes), while drive manufacturers use gigabytes (1,000 megabytes) and terabytes (1,000 gigabytes). This is why a 1TB drive normally only has a reported capacity of 930-ish GB, rather than a nice round number.

Enlarge / Moderna states that it doesn't want to halt production or distribution of Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine, but it does want to be paid a license for its claimed patents. (credit: Getty Images)

Now that the vaccine race is over and shots are broadly available, Moderna has filed suit against Pfizer and BioNTech, claiming they infringed on Moderna's mRNA patents from 2010-2016.

Moderna, a Massachusetts-based firm, filed suit against New York-based Pfizer and BioNTech in Düsseldorf, Germany, related to the firms' joint Comirnaty vaccine and its similarities to Moderna's Spikevax. Moderna claims in the suit that it doesn't want to halt vaccine production. The suit also doesn't seek damages for sales before March 8, 2022, sales in lower or middle-income AMC 92 nations, or sales where "the US Government would be responsible for any damages."

In a statement announcing the suit, Moderna stated that it expected Pfizer and BioNTech to "respect its intellectual property rights" and "consider a commercially reasonable license" to sell vaccines outside those accepted conditions, but the firms failed to do so.

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg discusses Meta's VR ambitions on The Joe Rogan Experience. (credit: Spotify)

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly pinned a launch window for the company's next major VR headset. In an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Zuckerberg said the device is coming at Meta's Connect conference in October.

Zuckerberg described some key features of the new headset—most notably the ability to track your facial expressions and represent them on your virtual avatar. He again explained that his focus is on using VR as the ultimate expression of technology connecting people—for example, by facilitating eye contact within VR.

"When you're on a video call, you don't actually feel like you're there with the person. To me, what virtual reality unlocks is that it really convinces your brain that you're there," he said.

Enlarge / Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Dell's XPS 13 has been the pace car for the Windows side of the thin-and-light laptop race for years now, ever since it adopted the now-ubiquitous ultra-thin display bezel back in 2015. Dell was also a step ahead of the competition a couple of years ago when it moved to a slightly taller screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio, further improving the design's usability without increasing its size.

But for power users who can afford to spend a few hundred extra dollars, Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon has always been an appealing upsell. It's a little lighter than Dell's ultraportable, but it nevertheless manages to fit in a bigger screen and a better port selection. Lenovo's laptop keyboards and trackpads are almost always best in class. And the ThinkPad's pedigree as a business laptop means that the Carbon's design still makes nods to repairability and upgradability, even if many of its internal components have still been soldered down to save space.

This year's version of the X1 Carbon—we're up to Gen 10, if anyone's counting—doesn't change much on the outside. But it includes new 12th-generation Intel Core processors, which, as we've seen in other laptops, can be a blessing and a curse. Performance in CPU-heavy tasks can be faster, sometimes dramatically so. But it comes at the expense of extra heat and less battery life, and that's a tough trade-off to recommend for a general-use ultraportable.