Month: October 2024

It’s the Enterprise vs. the Gorn in Strange New Worlds clip

Also: a new clip for Lower Decks and premiere date for Section 31 with Michelle Yeoh.

Sneak peek at S3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

The Star Trek franchise made its presence known with a special panel during New York City Comic-Con this past weekend. Among the highlights: Paramount unveiled a three-minute preview clip from the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and a clip from the upcoming final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks.

In other news, while the first season of new series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is still in production, Paramount has already renewed it for a second season and revealed that Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany will be a recurring guest on the series. Tig Notaro, Oded Fehr, and Mary Wiseman will reprise their Discovery roles as Jett Reno, Admiral Vance, and Sylvia Tilly, respectively. And Robert Picardo of Star Trek: Voyager will be back as The Doctor—in a show set 900 years after the hologram physician first appeared.

The studio also announced an official premiere date and poster art for the Star Trek: Discovery spinoff film Section 31 starring Michelle Yeoh: January 24, 2025. Miku Martineau plays a young Phillipa Georgiou in the film, which will give us the backstory for Georgiou's evil Mirror Universe counterpart, where she was a despotic emperor who murdered millions of her own people. Meanwhile, Yeoh's older Georgiou is tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets as part of a black ops group called Section 31 while dealing with all the blood she's spilled in her past.

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ByteDance intern fired for planting malicious code in AI models

Sabotage supposedly cost tens of millions, but TikTok owner ByteDance denies it.

After rumors swirled that TikTok owner ByteDance had lost tens of millions after an intern sabotaged its AI models, ByteDance issued a statement this weekend hoping to silence all the social media chatter in China.

In a social media post translated and reviewed by Ars, ByteDance clarified "facts" about "interns destroying large model training" and confirmed that one intern was fired in August.

According to ByteDance, the intern had held a position in the company's commercial technology team but was fired for committing "serious disciplinary violations." Most notably, the intern allegedly "maliciously interfered with the model training tasks" for a ByteDance research project, ByteDance said.

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Mercedes-Benz opens its own recycling facility for EV batteries

Making new EV batteries from old EV batteries is a no-brainer.

Today, Mercedes-Benz opened its first battery-recycling plant in Germany. The new plant will use an "integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical" approach to recycling electric vehicle batteries and expects to recover more than 96 percent of the valuable minerals and metals used in EV batteries.

"Mercedes-Benz has set itself the goal of building the most desirable cars in a sustainable way. As a pioneer in automotive engineering, Europe's first integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical battery recycling factory marks a key milestone toward enhancing raw-materials sustainability," said Ola Källenius, chairman of the board of management Mercedes-Benz Group. "Together with our partners from industry and science, we are sending a strong signal of innovative strength for sustainable electric mobility and value creation in Germany and Europe."

The plant, which is located in Kuppenheim, Germany, shreds the battery modules then uses a mechanical process to separate plastics, copper, aluminum, and iron. The resulting "black mass" is then subjected to a hydrometallurgical process that extracts the cobalt, nickel, and lithium. The plant runs entirely on electricity generated by solar panels and has an annual capacity of 2,756 tons (2,500 tonnes). While this is not especially high, Mercedes says it will use the knowledge it gains to scale up volumes over time.

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Solar power from space? Actually, it might happen in a couple of years.

From Robinhood to slinging photons.

Like nuclear fusion, the idea of space-based solar power has always seemed like a futuristic technology with an actual deployment into communities ever remaining a couple of decades away.

The concept of harvesting solar power continuously from large satellites in space—where there are no nights, no clouds, and no atmosphere to interfere with the collection of photons—is fairly simple. Large solar arrays in geostationary orbit collect solar energy and beam it back to Earth via microwaves a continuous source of clean energy.

But implementing this technology is not so simple. In recent years, in search of long-term power solutions and concerned about climate change, the European Space Agency has been studying space-based solar power. Some initial studies found that a plan to meet one-third of Europe's energy needs would require massive amounts of infrastructure and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. At best, such a system of very large satellites in geostationary space might come online by the middle of this century.

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Squadron 42’s new 2026 launch date will miss its original target by 11 years

RSI said single-player Star Citizen campaign was “feature complete” a year ago.

It's been almost exactly a year now since we reported on the announcement that Squadron 42—the single-player campaign portion of the now 12-year-old crowdfunding boondoggle Star Citizen—was "feature complete" and in the "polish phase." Now, many years after the game's original 2015 release target, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) says that, with just a year or two of additional "polish," the game will finally launch sometime in 2026.

The announcement came during this weekend's CitizenCon, per IGN, where RSI founder and CEO Chris Roberts showed off a roughly hour-long prologue of the game's promised 30- to 40-hour storyline. IGN also reported that the live on-stage demo suffered "a number of crashes, bugs, and graphical problems," which helps explain why a little more time is needed to get from "feature complete" to "actual release."

"We did say we were doing it live, risking the demo gods, and they brought their wrath down on us," Roberts said on stage, according to the IGN report. "Both the team and I are confident of giving you this game in 2026. Obviously, you can see it’s not going to be tomorrow because you saw a few crashes there."

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SiFive HiFive Premiere P550 RISC-V board is now available for developers (in very limited quantities)

The SiFive HiFive Premiere P550 is a development board built around an Eswin EIC7700 system-on-a-chip with four SiFive Performance P550 RISC-V processor cores, support for up to 32GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory, 128GB of eMMC storage, an on-board GPU, and an…

The SiFive HiFive Premiere P550 is a development board built around an Eswin EIC7700 system-on-a-chip with four SiFive Performance P550 RISC-V processor cores, support for up to 32GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory, 128GB of eMMC storage, an on-board GPU, and an NPU with up to 19.95 TOPS of AI performance. First unveiled in April, SiFive says the […]

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