Month: April 2023

Enlarge / A German nuclear power plant, which is currently partially closed. (credit: Getty Images)

In 2011, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Germany decided to shut down all of its nuclear power. The process was supposed to have ended last year, but it has been extended in response to energy uncertainties caused by the war in Ukraine. As a result, even though renewable generation in Germany continues to climb, the country's carbon emissions have only trended down slowly.

While there's no indication that the US will follow Germany down this path—the Biden administration is actively subsidizing nuclear plants to keep them open—the economics of nuclear power have led to a number of plant shutdowns. It's currently the second-most expensive major source of power, just ahead of offshore wind, with the costs of wind continuing to drop. So there's a significant chance that nuclear's contribution to the US grid will shrink.

A new analysis shows that a drop in nuclear power on the current US grid will mean enough additional pollution to cause over 5,000 deaths each year, and the burden of those deaths will fall disproportionately on Black Americans. But on a future grid where renewables are present at sufficient levels to offset the loss of nuclear, almost all of these additional deaths can be avoided.

Enlarge / Artist's rendering of a Terran R rocket launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Relativity Space made a flurry of announcements on Wednesday about its past and future. The company is going bigger, and it has already started to do so.

In an interview with Ars, the company's chief executive, Tim Ellis, discussed the cause of its Terran 1 launch failure and lessons learned for the future and looked ahead to big changes planned for the company's next launch vehicle.

Foremost among these changes is the plan to move directly into development of the Terran R rocket. In response to customer demand, Ellis said, this rocket is getting even bigger than before. A fully expendable version will now be able to lift a staggering 33.5 metric tons. This sets up Relativity to compete directly with the largest players in the global launch industry.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images via Getty)

Universal Music Group has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times.

UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists.

AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services, and UMG has been sending takedown requests “left and right,” said a person familiar with the matter. The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalog for developers using it to train AI technology.

Enlarge / Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition is dwarfed by the 4090 and 4080 design, though third-party GPU makers can make bigger cards if they want. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Its specs have been thoroughly leaked for anyone paying close attention, but today Nvidia is making it official: It's launching its GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card for a starting price of $599. This GPU will be the cheapest way to buy into Nvidia's Ada Lovelace GPU family, which, in addition to better performance and power efficiency, gets you access to Nvidia's DLSS 3 upscaling and frame-generation features and hardware acceleration for AV1 video encoding. Cards will be available from Nvidia and other partners starting on April 13th.

Nvidia's Founders Edition card is significantly smaller than its RTX 4090 and 4080 GPUs, with a relatively svelte dual-slot cooler that will easily fit into most PC cases. GPUs made by Nvidia's partners can (and will) be more expensive and physically larger, and some of them will also come with 8-pin PCI Express power connectors rather than the newer but somewhat controversial 12VHPWR power connector that Nvidia uses.

The RTX 4070 is $100 more expensive than the $499 starting price of the RTX 3070 and RTX 2070, which were $120 more expensive than the $379 starting price of the GTX 1070. Even accounting for inflation since 2016 ($379 in 2016 is roughly $475 now), it continues a tradition of bumping up the price for GPUs with the same relative position in Nvidia's lineup, something Nvidia partially (and not untruthfully) justifies by pointing out how much faster its modern graphics cards are.