Month: September 2023

Enlarge / Hyundai's well-rated Ioniq 6 could go into production in the US, which would make it eligible for a $7,500 tax credit. (credit: Hyundai)

Hyundai Motor Group is pushing the accelerator pedal when it comes to its newest North American factory. The company broke ground on the multibillion-dollar site in Bryan County, Georgia, last October with the aim of beginning production of electric vehicles in 2025. But on Tuesday, Hyundai president and CEO Jose Munoz revealed that timeline has been brought forward.

"We try to accelerate as much as possible, the project. And we are confident that the original date of January 2025 would be probably pulled ahead maybe three months or so. If we can, even more," Munoz said.

The main motivation for building EVs locally in the US is the new clean vehicle tax incentives. Created as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, these came into effect at the beginning of this year and address criticisms of the previous EV tax credit by adding income and price caps, allowing dealers to claim the credit if they immediately apply it to the price of the car and creating a tax credit for buying a used EV.

Enlarge (credit: wera Rodsawang)

A decade ago, our present renewable energy situation was unimaginable. Most projections had wind and solar as niche players on the electric grid due to their relatively high cost. In the US, the reality is anything but. Combined, wind and solar have now passed coal; throw in hydro, and they've passed nuclear, too. In most areas of the country, they're now far and away the cheapest means to generate electricity; the same holds true for most locations around the world.

Despite the changed economics, most countries have fallen behind on their climate pledges, and fossil fuels aren't being pushed off the grid fast enough to get us back on track. While the entire globe is suffering the consequences of climate change, the factors that are keeping renewables from reaching their full potential vary from country to country. What should we be doing to get past these roadblocks?

Today, I'll be at the United Nations with the chance to get some answers to that question. The UN, as part of its General Assembly meeting, is hosting a series of events called Climate Week, which includes a Sustainable Development Goals Summit. Associated with that will be a series of talks and panels on relevant topics. I'll be hosting one called "Clean Energy Trends to Power the World" that will happen at 2:25 pm Eastern Time.

Enlarge / The fish in question, with the ammonite located just below its spine. (credit: Cooper, et. al.)

Some extinct species left copious fossil remnants of their existence. Ammonites—an extinct type of cephalopod—are one such example. From the Devonian through the Paleocene, wherever ancient seas once covered Earth, one can usually find their coiled shells. So one more exquisitely preserved ammonite isn’t necessarily a big deal.

With the exception, perhaps, of one intact example found in the Posidonienschiefer Formation in Germany, where most ammonite shells are flattened and fragmentary. Now, decades after its original discovery, scientists have taken a more careful look at the well-preserved ammonite and the fossil fish it was seemingly nestled against. What they found surprised them: the fish had actually swallowed the large ammonite—something we’ve never seen before, even in fossils of much larger marine species that we know attempted to feed on ammonites.

It didn’t work out well for the fish. The size of the ammonite may have caused the fish to drown, or it may have blocked its digestive tract, causing internal bleeding. Drifting down to the seafloor, the fish was eventually buried and fossilized, preserving that ammonite—along with information about the ecosystem it and the fish inhabited—for over 170 million years.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The Signal Foundation, maker of the Signal Protocol that encrypts messages sent by more than a billion people, has rolled out an update designed to prepare for a very real prospect that’s never far from the thoughts of just about every security engineer on the planet: the catastrophic fall of cryptographic protocols that secure some of the most sensitive secrets today.

The Signal Protocol is a key ingredient in the Signal, Google RCS, and WhatsApp messengers, which collectively have more than 1 billion users. It’s the engine that provides end-to-end encryption, meaning messages encrypted with the apps can be decrypted only by the recipients and no one else, including the platforms enabling the service. Until now, the Signal Protocol encrypted messages and voice calls with X3DH, a specification based on a form of cryptography known as Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman.

A brief detour: WTF is ECDH?

Often abbreviated as ECDH, Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman is a protocol unto its own. It combines two main building blocks. The first involves the use of elliptic curves to form asymmetric key pairs, each of which is unique to each user. One key in the pair is public and available to anyone to use for encrypting messages sent to the person who owns it. The corresponding private key is closely guarded by the user. It allows the user to decrypt the messages. Cryptography relying on a public-private key pair is often known as asymmetric encryption.