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The idea of an inexpensive tag capable of transforming any object into a smart device is not necessarily new. But most cheap smart tags that lack batteries or complicated electronics can only perform simple functions, such as passively storing and sharing identifying information about an object. A new technology promises to change that. From a report: By comparison, new LiveTag technology allows for interactive controls or keypads that can stick onto objects, walls, or even clothing, and let people remotely operate music players or receive hydration reminders based on the amount of liquid remaining in a water bottle. "These tags can sense the status of everyday objects and humans, and also sense human interactions with plain everyday objects," says Xinyu Zhang, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

Zhang and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison developed the LiveTag technology after brainstorming about ways to easily incorporate ordinary objects into the Internet of Things without adding costly hardware and batteries. Their LiveTag designs and early prototypes are detailed in a paper [PDF] posted on the University of Wisconsin website. The basic LiveTag technology seems deceptively simple: copper foil printed onto lightweight paper-like materials without any batteries or discrete electronic components. The key is in the geometric copper foil patterns that are designed to absorb Wi-Fi signals of specific frequencies, even as the overall tag generally reflects 2.4/5 GHz signals from nearby Wi-Fi device transmitters.

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: On August 30, a startup plans to add its "smart pavement" to an intersection in an industrial corner of Denver, Colorado. The company has encased assorted electronics within four slabs of concrete and will wedge those slabs into the road between a Pepsi Co. bottling plant and two parking lots. Integrated Roadways says its product, which can deduce the speed, weight, and direction of a vehicle from the basket of sensors buried in the pavement, will face its first real-world test at that discreet Denver junction. If this trial goes well, the startup "will replace 500 meters of pavement along a dangerous curve in Highway 285, just south of Denver, with its product in early 2019," reports IEEE Spectrum. The sensors will be able to detect when a driver careens off the road's edge and alert authorities. It even has the ability to prompt officials to reconfigure lanes to relieve congestion.

Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have faced growing internal unrest from employees who raise ethical concerns about how the companies deploy their high-tech services and products. That chorus of dissent is now growing louder as outside engineers voice their concerns to recruiters working for those tech companies. An anonymous reader shares a report: The protests of tech workers have proven persuasive because Silicon Valley firms compete fiercely to recruit and retain relatively scarce engineering talent. For example, Google's leadership sought to reassure employees by declaring it would not renew its Pentagon contract and by issuing a set of ethical principles for future uses of Google-developed technologies. By the same logic, engineers who are approached by tech recruiters also have leverage. "I might be a one-off example, but it could be different if Amazon gets a lot of people emailing them saying, 'Hey I won't work for you because of this,'" Geiduschek, a software engineer at Dropbox, who declined a job offer from Amazon, says.

Jackie Luo, a software engineer at Square, took a similar stance with a tech recruiter who sought to interest her in a career with Google. The recruiter happened to contact Luo when she was reading about Google's plans to re-enter the Chinese market with a censored version of the company's Internet search engine. [...] Individual engineers such as Luo and Geiduschek seem to be responding to tech recruiters through their own initiative rather than as part of any larger movement. Meanwhile, some tech employees have joined organized efforts, such as the #TechWontBuildIt movement spearheaded by the labor advocacy group Tech Workers Coalition.

New submitter rfengineer shares a report: Welcome to IEEE Spectrum's fifth annual interactive ranking of the top programming languages. Because no one can peer over the shoulders of every coder out there, anyone attempting to measure the popularity of computer languages must rely on proxy measures of relative popularity. In our case, this means combining metrics from multiple sources to rank 47 languages. But recognizing that different programmers have different needs and domains of interest, we've chosen not to blend all those metrics up into One Ranking to Rule Them All. [...] Python has tightened its grip on the No. 1 spot. Last year it came out on top by just barely beating out C, with Python's score of 100 to C's 99.7. But this year, there's a wider gap between first and second place, with C++ coming in at 98.4 for the No. 2 slot (last year, Java had come third with a score of 99.4, while this year its fallen to 4th place with a score of 97.5). C has fallen to third place, with a score of 98.2.

An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum: [W]hat's so compelling about RISC-V isn't the technology -- it's the economics. The instruction set is open source. Anyone can download it and design a chip based on the architecture without paying a fee. If you wanted to do that with ARM, you'd have to pay its developer, Arm Holding, a few million dollars for a license. If you wanted to use x86, you're out of luck because Intel licenses its instruction set only to Advanced Micro Devices. For manufacturers, the open-source approach could lower the risks associated with building custom chips.

Already, Nvidia and Western Digital Corp. have decided to use RISC-V in their own internally developed silicon. Western Digital's chief technology officer has said that in 2019 or 2020, the company will unveil a new RISC-V processor for the more than 1 billion cores the storage firm ships each year. Likewise, Nvidia is using RISC-V for a governing microcontroller that it places on the board to manage its massively multicore graphics processors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Today, a team of researchers at Stanford, led by materials science and engineering associate professor Alberto Salleo and postdoctoral research fellow Onur Parlak, announced in Science Advances that they've developed a wearable patch that can determine how much cortisol someone is producing in seconds, using sweat drawn from the skin under the patch. [Cortisol, a steroid hormone, goes up when a person is under physical or emotional strain.] The stretchy patch pulls in the sweat through perforations to a reservoir. A membrane on top of the reservoir allows charged ions, like sodium and potassium, to pass through. Cortisol, which has no charge, can't pass, and instead blocks the charged ions. Signals sent from an electrical sensor in the patch can be used to detect these backups and determine how much cortisol is in the sweat.

The prototype cortisol detection patch channels sweat into a reservoir; a membrane selectively lets charged ions through, and the amount of these ions detected can be translated into a reading of cortisol levels in the sweat. Parlak tested the prototype on several runners, and reported that the cortisol levels detected by the wearable sensor patch matched those obtained by running samples of the runners' sweat through an ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) test that takes several hours.

Japan's computer giant Fujitsu and RIKEN, the country's largest research institute, have begun field-testing a prototype CPU for a next-generation supercomputer they believe will take the country back to the leading position in global rankings of supercomputer might. From a report: The next-generation machine, dubbed the Post-K supercomputer, follows the two collaborators' development of the 8 petaflops K supercomputer that commenced operations for RIKEN in 2012, and which has since been upgraded to 11 petaflops in application processing speed. Now the aim is to "create the world's highest performing supercomputer," with "up to one hundred times the application execution performance of the K computer," Fujitsu declared in a press release on 21 June. The plan is to install the souped-up machine at the government-affiliated RIKEN around 2021. If the partners achieve those execution speeds, that would place the Post-K machine in exascale territory (one exaflops being a billion billion floating point operations a second). To do this, they have replaced the SPARC64 VIIIfx CPU powering the K computer with the Arm8A-SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) 512-bit architecture that's been enhanced for supercomputer use, and which both Fujitsu and RIKEN had a hand in developing. The new design runs on CPUs with 48 cores plus 2 assistant cores for the computational nodes, and with 48 cores plus 4 assistant cores for the I/O and computational nodes. The system structure uses 1 CPU per node, and 384 nodes make up one rack.

The new tallest building on the San Francisco skyline -- and the tallest building in America west of the Mississippi -- includes a nine-story electronic sculpture that's been called the tallest piece of public art on Earth. It uses 11,000 LED bulbs reflected off the tower-topping aluminum panels -- each pixel created by a set of red, green, blue and white lights controlled by 8-bit PIC microcontrollers. "On a clear night, the show is visible for 30 miles," reports IEEE Spectrum.

Slashdot reader Tekla Perry shares their article about "the technology involved in the light show at the top of Salesforce Tower. Electrical engineer and artist Jim Campbell explains it all -- and how the window-washer problem stumped him for nearly a year." "[O]n the 62nd floor, a central PC-based computer runs Ubuntu Linux, sending instructions to a communications control system that splits the data and sends it at 11 Mbit to the 32 enclosures using a custom communications protocol... We will capture images throughout the day, sending them to Amazon's cloud, and run some algorithms designed to identify visual interesting-ness. For example, at its simplest, when we look at the sky, if it's all blue, it's boring, if it's all white, it's boring, if it has white and blue it is likely to be interesting. We'll chose the best half hour of the day at each camera, based on movement and color, to display...."

And finally, when the main display shuts down late at night, another system designed by Campbell will kick in. In this static display, a set of 36 white LEDs will create a three-dimensional constellation of lights that will look like stars. "It's quieter, it has a random aspect to it," he says.
"Since construction started, the tower has emerged as an icon of the new San Francisco -- techie, ambitious, perhaps a little grandiose," writes the New Yorker, capturing the moment when Campbell finally unveiled his four-year project -- while fighting stomach flu and a chest cold, on a night which turned out to be prohibitively foggy. The executive vice-president of Boston Properties told him cheerily, "Jim! Look on the brighter side. We've got every night for the rest of our lives."

"There was a long silence from the people on the terrace. The fog was thick. At last, someone exclaimed, 'Woo-hoo!,' and a volley of cheers followed." Although the colors they were seeing came from the celebratory fireworks and not from Jim's light sculpture.

Are there any San Francisco-area Slashdotters who want to weigh in on the Salesforce Tower?

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Facebook's plans to beam high-speed Internet from enormous solar-powered drones in the stratosphere appear to be in disarray. Two key engineers behind its Aquila drones have left the company, and it recently cancelled plans for a secret high-altitude flight campaign at Spaceport America, possibly because Facebook no longer has any aircraft available to deploy.

A trove of emails between Facebook and Spaceport America, obtained under New Mexico public records law and first reported by Business Insider, details the painstaking process of turning a site for rockets and spaceplanes into a testbed for some of the largest drones in the world.

Last month IBM, which has staked much of its future on its flagship AI Watson, announced a major round of layoffs in the division. Now the engineers who had been let go allege that the move shows that difficulties IBM is facing in turning its AI into a profitable business. A report on IEEE Spectrum says: "IBM Watson has great AI," one engineer said, who asked to remain anonymous so he wouldn't lose his severance package. "It's like having great shoes, but not knowing how to walk -- they have to figure out how to use it." The layoffs at the end of May cut a swath through the Watson Health division. According to anonymous accounts submitted to the site Watching IBM, the cuts primarily affecting workers from three acquired companies: Phytel, Explorys, and Truven. These companies, acquired between 2015 and 2016, brought with them hefty troves of healthcare data, proprietary analytics systems to mine the data for insights, as well as their customers. The report adds: Two laid-off engineers from Phytel spoke to IEEE Spectrum in depth. They allege that IBM's leadership mismanaged their company since its acquisition, and say the problems at Phytel are emblematic of IBM's struggles to make Watson profitable. Several other Phytel employees corroborated the basic facts of their accounts. Both engineers worked for Phytel since before its 2015 acquisition, and say they were excited to become part of Big Blue. "Everyone expected that we would join IBM and be propelled by their support, that it would be the beginning of great things," says the first engineer.

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers at the U.S. Energy Department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and LCW Supercritical Technologies made use of readily available acrylic fibers to pull five grams of yellowcake -- a powdered form of uranium used to produce fuel for nuclear power reactors -- from seawater. The milestone, announced in mid-June, follows seven years of work and a roughly US $25 million investment by the federal energy agency. Another $1.15 million is being channeled to LCW as it attempts to scale up the technique for commercial use. The effort builds on work by Japanese researchers in the late 1990s and was prompted by interest in finding alternative sources of uranium for a future time when terrestrial sources are depleted. "[U]ranium in seawater shows up in concentrations of around 3.3 parts per billion," the report notes. "With a total volume estimated at more than 4 billion tons, there is around 500 times more uranium in seawater than in land-based sources."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Bouvet Island has little to offer. The most remote island in the world is fewer than 20 square miles in size, and it's almost entirely covered by a glacier. Long ago, it was an active volcano, but those fiery days have long since passed. Now, it's home to hundreds of thousands of seabirds, a Norwegian research station, and its own top-level internet domain.

Top-level domains serve as part of the Internet's architecture. Aside from generic domains like .com and .edu, every country has a specific two-letter domain assigned to it. The United Kingdom, for example, uses .uk; Japan uses .jp. The United States has .us, though it's not widely used. The original idea was that each country could manage the websites registered by individuals and organizations within its borders by issuing them websites that use their country-specific domain.

But here's the weird thing about Bouvet Island having its own top-level domain: It's uninhabited. It's always been uninhabited. Located in the southern Atlantic, the closest land to Bouvet Island is the coast of Antarctica, 1,100 miles to the south. The closest inhabited land is the island Tristan da Cunha, a British overseas territory located 1,400 miles to the north (Interestingly enough, Tristan da Cunha does not have its own top-level domain).

An anonymous reader writes: Netflix's engineering team has an insightful post today that looks at how the industry is handling video coding; the differences in their methodologies; and the challenges new comers face. An excerpt, which sums up where we are:

"MPEG-2, VC1, H.263, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1 -- all of these standards were built on the block-based hybrid video coding structure. Attempts to veer away from this traditional model have been unsuccessful. In some cases (say, distributed video coding), it was because the technology was impractical for the prevalent use case. In most other cases, however, it is likely that not enough resources were invested in the new technology to allow for maturity.

"Unfortunately, new techniques are evaluated against the state-of-the-art codec, for which the coding tools have been refined from decades of investment. It is then easy to drop the new technology as "not at-par." Are we missing on better, more effective techniques by not allowing new tools to mature? How many redundant bits can we squeeze out if we simply stay on the paved path and iterate on the same set of encoding tools?"

As we add computing and radios to more things, we're also adding to the problem of e-waste. The United Nations found that people generated 44.7 million metric tons of e-waste globally in 2016, and expects that to grow to 52.2 million metric tons by 2021. From a report: There are two issues. We're adding semiconductors to products that previously had none, and we're also shortening the life of devices as we add more computing, turning products that might last 15 years into ones that must be replaced every five years. In fact, many small connected devices such as trackers, jewelry, or wearables are designed to fail once the battery dies. At that point, the consumer tosses it out and buys another.

"A former paperboy from Wisconsin passionate about maps led the team in the Air Force responsible for designing the navigation system we use everyday," writes Slashdot reader dkatana. IoT Times reports: At the IEEE honors ceremony today in San Francisco, Bradford Parkinson, a retired Air Force colonel who spent his life between maps and navigation systems, will be awarded the 2018 IEEE Medal of Honor, "For fundamental contributions to and leadership in developing the design and driving the early applications of the Global Positioning System." The current Global Positioning System (GPS) did not exist until 1995, just 22 years ago, and the engineer who led the project for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) was Mr. Parkinson.

Parkinson, whose first job was delivering newspapers, had a passion for maps. He used those maps when canoeing to navigate the lakes and streams of Minnesota, aided by a hand compass. When he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering, he joined the Air Force to study navigation systems. In 1960, when his superiors saw his engineering potential, they sent him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pursue graduate studies. He became a protegee of Charles Stark (Doc) Draper, the father of inertial navigation, who was teaching at MIT at the time. Draper was the lead engineer developing the computer systems for NASA's Apollo program. [...] It was in 1972 when his path on inertial navigation collided with satellite systems. He had been recently promoted to colonel when he received a call from another colonel who was part of the Air Force inertial guidance "mafia." He moved to Los Angeles and joined the group, a bunch of Air Force engineers from MIT. Then Parkinson asked to work on the Air Force 621B program, the genesis of GPS.

Flash is designed to last a decade or more of use. A lot of the gadgets that rely on it, however, are not. Shady recyclers have spotted opportunity in that mismatch, stripping out used chips and selling them as new. But fret not, there is something that can be done to address the issue. From a report: Engineers at the University of Alabama have come up with a straightforward electronic examination that can tell if a flash chip is new or recycled, even if that chip has only seen 5 percent or less of its life. And the technique is so straightforward that a smartphone app could run it on its own memory. [...] A flash memory cell is like an ordinary transistor, it has a source and a drain and a channel through which current flows under the control of voltage on the gate electrode. The difference is that the gate is split into several layers -- the control gate, the blocking oxide, the floating gate, and the tunneling oxide.

[...] Voltage on the control gate causes electrons to tunnel through that bottom oxide and get stuck inside the floating gate. This charge or its absence is the stored bit. It alters how much voltage you need to turn the transistor on in a way that you can easily measure. Erasing the bit is done by reversing the voltage and driving the charge out of the floating gate. Ray and his team took advantage of the rather high voltages -- about plus or minus 20 volts -- needed to program and erase flash. The more you program and erase a cell, the more defects will accumulate in the oxide, he explains.

Public filings suggest the social media giant is quietly developing orbital tech to rival efforts by SpaceX and OneWeb to deliver Internet by satellite. From a report: A filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week revealed details of a multi-million dollar experimental satellite from a stealthy company called PointView Tech LLC. The satellite, named Athena, will deliver data 10 times faster than SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites, the first of which launched in February. However, PointView appears to exist only on paper. In fact, the tiny company seems to be a new subsidiary of Facebook, formed last year to keep secret the social media giant's plans to storm space.

Many technology companies believe the future of the Internet is orbital. Around half the people on the planet lack a broadband Internet connection, particularly those who live in rural areas and developing nations. SpaceX aims to put nearly 12,000 Starlinks into low Earth orbit (LEO), to deliver gigabit-speed Internet to most of the Earth's surface. Rival OneWeb, funded by Japan's SoftBank, chipmaker Qualcomm, and Richard Branson's Virgin Group, plans similar global coverage using perhaps 2,500 LEO satellites. Further reading: Facebook's free walled-garden internet program ended quietly in Myanmar, several other places last year.

Tekla Perry writes: Are graphics processors a law unto themselves? Nvidia's Jensen Huang says a 25-times speedup over five years is evidence that they are. He calls this the 'supercharged law,' and says it's time to start counting advances on multiple fronts, including architecture, interconnects, memory technology, and algorithms, not just circuits on a chip.

From an Atlantic story, originally titled "The Perfect Selfishness of Mapping Apps": In the pre-mobile-app days, drivers' selfishness was limited by their knowledge of the road network. In those conditions, both simulation and real-world experience showed that most people stuck to the freeways and arterial roads. Sure, there were always people who knew the crazy, back-road route, but the bulk of people just stuck to the routes that transportation planners had designated as the preferred way to get from A to B. Now, however, a new information layer is destroying the nudging infrastructure that traffic planners built into cities. Commuters armed with mobile mapping apps, route-following Lyft and Uber drivers, and software-optimized truckers can all act with a more perfect selfishness.

In some happy universe, this would lead to socially optimal outcomes, too. But a new body of research at the University of California's Institute of Transportation Studies suggests that the reality is far more complicated. In some scenarios, traffic-beating apps might work for an individual, but make congestion worse overall. And autonomous vehicles, touted as an answer to traffic-y streets, could deepen the problem. "This problem has been vastly overlooked," Alexandre Bayen, the director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies, told me. "It is just the beginning of something that is gonna be much worse." Bayen and a team of researchers presented their work earlier this year at the Transportation Research Board's annual meeting and at the Cal Future conference at Berkeley in May 2017. They've also published work examining the negative externalities of high levels of automatic routing.

Back in January, the FCC pulled permission from Silicon Valley startup Swarm Technologies to launch four satellites into space after what it says was an "apparent unauthorized launch." IEEE Spectrum reports that the unauthorized launch consisted of four experimental satellites that the FCC had decided were too small to be noticed in space -- and hence pose an unacceptable risk of collision -- but which the company may have launched anyway, using a rocket based in India. The federal regulator has since issued a letter to Swarm revoking its authorization for a follow-up mission to launch four new, larger versions of its "SpaceBee" satellites. From the report: Swarm was founded in 2016 by one engineer who developed a spacecraft concept for Google and another who sold his previous company to Apple. The SpaceBees were built as technology demonstrators for a new space-based Internet of Things communications network. Swarm believes its network could enable satellite communications for orders of magnitude less cost than existing options. It envisages the worldwide tracking of ships and cars, new agricultural technologies, and low cost connectivity for humanitarian efforts anywhere in the world. The four SpaceBees would be the first practical demonstration of Swarm's prototype hardware and cutting-edge algorithms, swapping data with ground stations for up to eight years.
[...]
The FCC told the startup that the agency would assess "the impact of the applicant's apparent unauthorized launch and operation of four satellites... on its qualifications to be a Commission licensee." If Swarm cannot convince the FCC otherwise, the startup could lose permission to build its revolutionary network before the wider world even knows the company exists. An unauthorized launch would also call into question the ability of secondary satellite "ride-share" companies and foreign launch providers to comply with U.S. space regulations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Last August, reports emerged that U.S. and Canadian diplomats in Cuba had suffered a host of mysterious ailments. Speculation soon arose that a high-frequency sonic weapon was to blame. Acoustics experts, however, were quick to point out the unlikeliness of such an attack. Among other things, ultrasonic frequencies -- from 20 to 200 kilohertz -- don't propagate well in air and don't cause the ear pain, headache, dizziness, and other symptoms reported in Cuba. Also, some victims recalled hearing high-pitched sounds, whereas ultrasound is inaudible to humans. The mystery deepened in October, when the Associated Press (AP) released a 6-second audio clip, reportedly a recording of what U.S. embassy staff heard. The chirping tones, centered around 7 kHz, were indeed audible, but they didn't suggest any kind of weapon. Looking at a spectral plot of the clip on YouTube, Kevin Fu, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, noted some unusual ripples. He thought he might know what they meant.

Fu's lab specializes in analyzing the cybersecurity of devices connected to the Internet of Things, such as sensors, pacemakers, RFIDs, and autonomous vehicles. To Fu, the ripples in the spectral readout suggested some kind of interference. He discussed the AP clip with his frequent collaborator, Wenyuan Xu, a professor at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, China, and her Ph.D. student Chen Yan. Yan and Xu started with a fast Fourier transform of the AP audio, which revealed the signal's exact frequencies and amplitudes. Then, through a series of simulations, Yan showed that an effect known as intermodulation distortion could have produced the AP sound. Intermodulation distortion occurs when two signals having different frequencies combine to produce synthetic signals at the difference, sum, or multiples of the original frequencies. Having reverse engineered the AP audio, Fu, Xu, and Yan then considered what combination of things might have caused the sound at the U.S. embassy in Cuba. "If ultrasound is to blame, then a likely cause was two ultrasonic signals that accidentally interfered with each other, creating an audible side effect," Fu says. "Maybe there was also an ultrasonic jammer in the room and an ultrasonic transmitter," he suggests. "Each device might have been placed there by a different party, completely unaware of the other."

In its annual R&D Open House on February 14, Mitsubishi Electric described the development of what it believes is the industry's highest-performance rendition of mirrorless car technology. From a report: According to the company, today's conventional camera-based systems featuring motion detection technology can detect objects up to about 30 meters away and identify them with a low accuracy of 14 percent. By comparison, Mitsubishi's new mirrorless technology extends the recognition distance to 100 meters with an 81 percent accuracy. "Motion detection can't see objects if they are a long distance away," says Kazuo Sugimoto, Senior Manager, at Mitsubishi Electric's Image Analytics and Processing Technology Group, Information Technology R&D Center in Kamakura, 55 km south of Tokyo. "So we have developed an AI-based object-recognition technology that can instantly detect objects up to about 100 meters away."

To achieve this, the Mitsubishi system uses two technology processes consecutively. A computational visual-cognition model first mimics how humans focus on relevant regions and extract object information from the background even when the objects are distant from the viewer. The extracted object data is then fed to Mitsubishi's compact deep learning AI technology dubbed Maisart. The AI has been taught to classify objects into distinct categories: trucks; cars; and other objects such as lane markings. The detected results are then superimposed onto video that appears on a monitor for the driver to view.

A team of Korean scientists have developed a smart lens that could help diabetics track blood glucose levels while remaining stretchable enough to be comfortable and transparent enough to preserve vision. Engadget reports: The lens achieves its flexibility thanks to a design that puts its electronics into isolated pockets linked by stretchable conductors. There's also an elastic material in between that spreads the strain to prevent the electronics from breaking when you pinch the lens. And when the refractive indices all line up, you should get a lens that's as transparent as possible and largely stays out of your way. The sensor in question is straightforward: an LED light stays on as long as glucose levels are normal, and shuts off when something's wrong. Power comes through a metal nanofiber antenna that draws from a nearby power source coil. That's about the only major drawback -- the low conductivity of the antenna means that you can't just tuck the coil wherever it's convenient. The co-author of the study, Jang-Ung Park, told IEEE Spectrum that a commercial version of the contact lens should arrive within the next five years.

Tekla Perry writes: Historian Marie Hicks, speaking at the Computer History Museum talks about how women computer operators and programmers were driven out of the industry, gives examples of sexual harassment dating back to the days of the Colossus era, and previews her next research. "It's all a matter of power, Hicks pointed out -- and women have never had their share of it," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Women dominated computer programming in its early days because the field wasn't seen as a career, just a something someone could do without a lot of training and would do for only a short period of time. Computer jobs had no room for advancement, so having women 'retire' in their 20s was not seen as a bad thing. And since women, of course, could never supervise men, Hicks said, women who were good at computing ended up training the men who ended up as their managers. But when it became clear that computers -- and computer work -- were important, women were suddenly pushed out of the field."

Hicks has also started looking at the bias baked into algorithms, specifically at when it first crossed from human to computer. The first example she turned up had "something to do with transgender people and the government's main pension computer." She says that when humans were in the loop, petitions to change gender on national insurance cards generally went through, but when the computer came in, the system was "specifically designed to no longer accommodate them, instead, to literally cause an error code to kick out of the processing chain any account of a 'known transsexual.'"

Slashdot reader Beeftopia shares "a detailed history of WebAssembly...from one of the developers." IEEE Spectrum reports that "Like a lot of stories about tech innovation, this one started with video games." [Mozilla's Alon Zakai] wanted to take a game he had helped write in C++ and convert it to JavaScript code that would run well on the Web. This was in 2010, and back then, converting C++ to JavaScript was unthinkable... so he started working to adapt an open-source tool that could translate C++ code into JavaScript automatically. He called his project Emscripten... we were able to formalize the permitted JavaScript patterns, to make the contract between Emscripten and the browser completely clear. We named the resulting subset of JavaScript asm.js... I would optimize the JavaScript engine in Firefox to run the resulting code even faster...

This brings us to the present... Emscripten can take code written in C++ and convert it directly into WebAssembly. And there will be ways in time to run other languages as well, including Rust, Lua, Python, Java, and C#. With WebAssembly, multimillion-line code bases can now load in a few seconds and then run at 80 percent of the speed of native programs. And both load time and execution speed are expected to improve as the browser engines that run the code are made better.
They'd started with a C++ game because "If we could make games run well on the Web, other computationally intensive applications would soon follow."

The article -- by Mozilla software engineer Luke Wagner -- remembers that the name Emscripten was a "a mash-up of 'script' from JavaScript and 'embiggen' from the TV show The Simpsons."

Michael Byrne, writing for Motherboard: According to a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems by researchers at Notre Dame University, some 73 percent of posts on Reddit are voted on by users that haven't actually clicked through to view the content being rated. This is according to a newly released dataset consisting of all Reddit activity of 309 site users for a one year period. In the process, the researchers identified signs of "cognitive fatigue" in Reddit users most likely to vote on content. Online aggregation is then somewhat a function of mental exhaustion.

Reader necro81 writes: IEEE Spectrum has an amusing piece on how App Stores, and the frequent updates to those apps, have given release notes new prominence to average users. Unfortunately, most release notes are hum drum and uninformative: "bug fixes, performance improvements." That may be accurate, but isn't useful for determining if the new version is worth downloading. The article highlights counterexamples that weave humor and creativity into the narrative, even if it still just boils down to "bug fixes". For instance, when was the last time your release notes included ASCII art?
Although a bit old, TechCrunch also has a commentary on the highs and lows of App Store release notes.

What is the opinion of /. readers? How much information is appropriate in release notes? Should one make any attempts at levity, or keep it strictly to business? For those of you who actually write release notes, what guidelines do you use?

Reader necro81 writes: IEEE Spectrum has an amusing piece on how App Stores, and the frequent updates to those apps, have given release notes new prominence to average users. Unfortunately, most release notes are hum drum and uninformative: "bug fixes, performance improvements." That may be accurate, but isn't useful for determining if the new version is worth downloading. The article highlights counterexamples that weave humor and creativity into the narrative, even if it still just boils down to "bug fixes". For instance, when was the last time your release notes included ASCII art?
Although a bit old, TechCrunch also has a commentary on the highs and lows of App Store release notes.

What is the opinion of /. readers? How much information is appropriate in release notes? Should one make any attempts at levity, or keep it strictly to business? For those of you who actually write release notes, what guidelines do you use?

Kyle Wiens and Gay Gordon-Byrne explain via IEEE Spectrum how people in the United States can preserve their right to repair electronics, and why people must fight for the right in the first place. Here's an excerpt from their report: So how can people in the United States preserve their right to repair electronics? The answer is now apparent: through right-to-repair legislation enacted at the state level. Popular support on this issue has been clear since 2012, when 86 percent of the voters in Massachusetts endorsed a ballot initiative that would "[require] motor vehicle manufacturers to allow vehicle owners and independent repair facilities in Massachusetts to have access to the same vehicle diagnostic and repair information made available to the manufacturers' Massachusetts dealers and authorized repair facilities." Carmakers howled in protest, but after the law passed, they decided not to fight independent repair. Indeed, in January 2014 they entered into a national memorandum of understanding [PDF], voluntarily extending the terms of the Massachusetts law to the entire country. The commercial vehicle industry followed suit in October 2015. Now we need right-to-repair legislation for other kinds of equipment, too, particularly electronic equipment, which is the focus of "digital right to repair" initiatives in many states.

Similar to the Massachusetts legislation for automobiles, these digital-right-to-repair proposals would require manufacturers to provide access to service documentation, tools, firmware, and diagnostic programs. They also would require manufacturers to sell replacement parts to consumers and independent repair facilities at reasonable prices. The bills introduced this year in a dozen states have some variations. The ones in Kansas and Wyoming, for example, are limited to farm equipment. The one most likely to be adopted soon is in Massachusetts, which seeks to outlaw the monopoly on repair parts and information within the state. If it passes, electronics manufacturers will probably change their practices nationwide. Consumers would then have more choices when something breaks. The next time your smartphone screen cracks, your microwave oven gets busted, or your TV dies, you may be able to get it fixed quickly, affordably, and fairly. And you, not the manufacturer, would decide where your equipment is repaired: at home, with the manufacturer, or at a local repair shop that you trust.

Tekla Perry writes: Researchers at Stanford have demonstrated that they can use ordinary, underground fiber optic cables to monitor for earthquakes, by using innate impurities in the fiber as virtual sensors. "People didn't believe this would work," said one of the researchers. "They always assumed that an uncoupled optical fiber would generate too much signal noise to be useful." They plan a larger test installation in 2018. Their biggest challenge, they say, will not be perfecting the algorithms but rather convincing telcos to allow the technology to piggyback on existing telecommunications lines. Meanwhile, the same data is being used for an art project that visualizes the activity of pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and fountains on the surface above the cables.

schwit1 writes about a new mass-market Broadcom chip designed for the next generation of smartphones: It'll know where you are to within 30 centimeters (11.8 inches), rather than five meters. At least that's the claim chip maker Broadcom is making. It says that some of its next-generation smartphone chips will use new global positioning satellite signals to boost accuracy. In a detailed report on the announcement and how the new signals work, IEEE Spectrum says that the new chips, which are expected to appear in some phones as soon as next year, will also use half the power of today's chips and even work in cities where tower blocks often interfere with existing systems. All told, it sounds like a massive change for those who rely on their phones to find their way.

"It's not about an undo button," writes Slashdot reader marcle, sharing an article by a senior member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories who's studying advanced technologies for computation. "Just reading this story bends my mind." From IEEE Spectrum: [F]or several decades now, we have known that it's possible in principle to carry out any desired computation without losing information -- that is, in such a way that the computation could always be reversed to recover its earlier state. This idea of reversible computing goes to the very heart of thermodynamics and information theory, and indeed it is the only possible way within the laws of physics that we might be able to keep improving the cost and energy efficiency of general-purpose computing far into the future... Today's computers rely on erasing information all the time -- so much so that every single active logic gate in conventional designs destructively overwrites its previous output on every clock cycle, wasting the associated energy. A conventional computer is, essentially, an expensive electric heater that happens to perform a small amount of computation as a side effect...

[I]t's really hard to engineer a system that does something computationally interesting without inadvertently incurring a significant amount of entropy increase with each operation. But technology has improved, and the need to minimize energy use is now acute... In 2004 Krishna Natarajan (a student I was advising at the University of Florida) and I showed in detailed simulations that a new and simplified family of circuits for reversible computing called two-level adiabatic logic, or 2LAL, could dissipate as little as 1 eV of energy per transistor per cycle -- about 0.001 percent of the energy normally used by logic signals in that generation of CMOS. Still, a practical reversible computer has yet to be built using this or other approaches.
The article predicts "if we decide to blaze this new trail of reversible computing, we may continue to find ways to keep improving computation far into the future. Physics knows no upper limit on the amount of reversible computation that can be performed using a fixed amount of energy."

But it also predicts that "conventional semiconductor technology could grind to a halt soon. And if it does, the industry could stagnate... Even a quantum-computing breakthrough would only help to significantly speed up a few highly specialized classes of computations, not computing in general."

An anonymous reader writes: The invention of the atomic clock fundamentally altered the way that time is measured and kept. The clock helped redefine the duration of a single second, and its groundbreaking accuracy contributed to technologies we rely on today, including cellphones and GPS receivers. Building on the accomplishments of previous researchers, Harold Lyons and his colleagues at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), in Washington, D.C., began working in 1947 on developing an atomic clock and demonstrated it to the public two years later. Its design was based on atomic physics. The clock kept time by tracking the microwave signals that electrons in atoms emit when they change energy levels. This month the atomic clock received an IEEE Milestone. Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world.

Wave723 writes: IEEE Spectrum reports on a true random number generator that was created with single-walled semiconducting carbon nanotubes. Researchers at Northwestern University printed a SRAM cell with special nanotube ink, and used it to generate random bits based on thermal noise. This method could be used to improve the security of flexible or printed electronics. From the report: "Once Mark Hersam, an expert in nanomaterials at Northwestern University, and his team had printed their SRAM cell, they needed to actually generate a string of random bits with it. To do this, they exploited a pair of inverters found in every SRAM cell. During normal functioning, the job of an inverter is to flip any input it is given to be the opposite, so from 0 to 1, or from 1 to 0. Typically, two inverters are lined up so the results of the first inverter are fed into the second. So, if the first inverter flips a 0 into a 1, the second inverter would take that result and flip it back into a 0. To manipulate this process, Hersam's group shut off power to the inverters and applied external voltages to force the inverters to both record 1s. Then, as soon as the SRAM cell was powered again and the external voltages were turned off, one inverter randomly switched its digit to be opposite its twin again. 'In other words, we put [the inverter] in a state where it's going to want to flip to either a 1 or 0,' Hersam says. Under these conditions, Hersam's group had no control over the actual nature of this switch, such as which inverter would flip, and whether that inverter would represent a 1 or a 0 when it did. Those factors hinged on a phenomenon thought to be truly random -- fluctuations in thermal noise, which is a type of atomic jitter intrinsic to circuits." Hersam and his team recently described their work in the journal Nano Letters.

According to an instructor at Stanford, eight universities in addition to Stanford will offer a Hacking for Defense class this year: Boise State, Columbia, Georgetown, James Madison, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Southern California, and the University of Southern Mississippi. IEEE Spectrum reports: The class has spun out Hacking for Diplomacy, Hacking for Energy, and other targeted classes that use the same methodology. The snowballing effort is now poised to get a big push. This month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment originated by Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) to support development of curriculum, best practices, and recruitment materials for the program to the tune of $15 million (a drop in the $700 billion defense budget but a big deal for a university program). In arguing for the amendment, Lipinski said, "Rapid, low-cost technological innovation is what makes Silicon Valley revolutionary, but the DOD hasn't historically had the mechanisms in place to harness this American advantage. Hacking for Defense creates ways for talented scientists and engineers to work alongside veterans, military leaders, and business mentors to innovate solutions that make America safer."

An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum's annual report on the top programming languages: As with all attempts to rank the usage of different languages, we have to rely on various proxies for popularity. In our case, this means having data journalist Nick Diakopoulos mine and combine 12 metrics from 10 carefully chosen online sources to rank 48 languages. But where we really differ from other rankings is that our interactive allows you choose how those metrics are weighted when they are combined, letting you personalize the rankings to your needs. We have a few preset weightings -- a default setting that's designed with the typical Spectrum reader in mind, as well as settings that emphasize emerging languages, what employers are looking for, and what's hot in open source...

Python has continued its upward trajectory from last year and jumped two places to the No. 1 slot, though the top four -- Python, C, Java, and C++ -- all remain very close in popularity. Indeed, in Diakopoulos's analysis of what the underlying metrics have to say about the languages currently in demand by recruiting companies, C comes out ahead of Python by a good margin... Ruby has fallen all the way down to 12th position, but in doing so it has given Apple's Swift the chance to join Google's Go in the Top Ten... Outside the Top Ten, Apple's Objective-C mirrors the ascent of Swift, dropping down to 26th place. However, for the second year in a row, no new languages have entered the rankings. We seem to have entered a period of consolidation in coding as programmers digest the tools created to cater to the explosion of cloud, mobile, and big data applications.
"Speaking of stabilized programming tools and languages," the article concludes, "it's worth noting Fortran's continued presence right in the middle of the rankings (sitting still in 28th place), along with Lisp in 35th place and Cobol hanging in at 40th."

An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum's annual report on the top programming languages: As with all attempts to rank the usage of different languages, we have to rely on various proxies for popularity. In our case, this means having data journalist Nick Diakopoulos mine and combine 12 metrics from 10 carefully chosen online sources to rank 48 languages. But where we really differ from other rankings is that our interactive allows you choose how those metrics are weighted when they are combined, letting you personalize the rankings to your needs. We have a few preset weightings -- a default setting that's designed with the typical Spectrum reader in mind, as well as settings that emphasize emerging languages, what employers are looking for, and what's hot in open source...

Python has continued its upward trajectory from last year and jumped two places to the No. 1 slot, though the top four -- Python, C, Java, and C++ -- all remain very close in popularity. Indeed, in Diakopoulos's analysis of what the underlying metrics have to say about the languages currently in demand by recruiting companies, C comes out ahead of Python by a good margin... Ruby has fallen all the way down to 12th position, but in doing so it has given Apple's Swift the chance to join Google's Go in the Top Ten... Outside the Top Ten, Apple's Objective-C mirrors the ascent of Swift, dropping down to 26th place. However, for the second year in a row, no new languages have entered the rankings. We seem to have entered a period of consolidation in coding as programmers digest the tools created to cater to the explosion of cloud, mobile, and big data applications.
"Speaking of stabilized programming tools and languages," the article concludes, "it's worth noting Fortran's continued presence right in the middle of the rankings (sitting still in 28th place), along with Lisp in 35th place and Cobol hanging in at 40th."

schwit1 quotes a report from Defense One: Even if the cop who pulls you over doesn't recognize you, the body camera on his chest eventually just might. Device-maker Motorola will work with artificial intelligence software startup Neurala to build "real-time learning for a person of interest search" on products such as the Si500 body camera for police, the firm announced Monday. Italian-born neuroscientist and Neurala founder Massimiliano Versace has created patent-pending image recognition and machine learning technology. It's similar to other machine learning methods but far more scalable, so a device carried by that cop on his shoulder can learn to recognize shapes and -- potentially faces -- as quickly and reliably as a much larger and more powerful computer. It works by mimicking the mammalian brain, rather than the way computers have worked traditionally.

Versace's research was funded, in part, by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA under a program called SyNAPSE. In a 2010 paper for IEEE Spectrum, he describes the breakthrough. Basically, a tiny constellation of processors do the work of different parts of the brain -- which is sometimes called neuromorphic computation -- or "computation that can be divided up between hardware that processes like the body of a neuron and hardware that processes the way dendrites and axons do." Versace's research shows that AIs can learn in that environment using a lot less code.

schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: The 2018 Audi A8, just unveiled in Barcelona, counts as the world's first production car to offer Level 3 autonomy. Level 3 means the driver needn't supervise things at all, so long as the car stays within guidelines. Here that involves driving no faster than 60 kilometers per hour (37 mph), which is why Audi calls the feature AI Traffic Jam Pilot. Go ahead, Audi's saying, read your newspaper or just zone out while traffic creeps along. To be sure, the A8 also monitors the driver, even while the traffic jam persists, and continues to do so as the speed edges up over the limit. If the driver falls asleep, it'll wake him up; if it can't get his attention, it will stop the car. If you want to buy the new A8, you'll have to check whether your jurisdiction will accept it as a Level 3 car. Audi said in a statement that it will follow "a step-by-step approach" to introducing the traffic jam pilot. It plans to sell the base model in Europe this fall for 90,600 euros, or about $103,000, and to enter the United States market shortly afterwards. A model having a longer wheelbase will cost a few percent more.

the_newsbeagle writes: Many of today's fanciest artificial intelligence systems are some type of artificial neural network, but they bear only the roughest resemblance to a biological brain's real networks of neurons. That could change thanks to a $100M program from IARPA. The intelligence agency is funding neuroscience teams to map 1 cubic millimeter of rodent brain, looking at activity in the visual cortex while the rodent is engaged in a complex visual recognition task. By discovering how the neural circuits in that brain cube get activated to process information, IARPA hopes to find inspiration for better artificial neural networks. And an AI that performs better on visual recognition tasks could certainly be useful to intelligence agencies.

Tekla Perry writes: HBO's fictional Silicon Valley character Richard Hendricks sets out to reinvent the Internet into something decentralized. ["What if we used all those phones to build a massive network...we could build a completely decentralized version of our current Internet with no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. Information would be totally free in every sense of the word."] That sound a lot like what Brewster Kahle, Tim Berners-Lee, and Vint Cerf have been calling the decentralized web. Kahle tells IEEE Spectrum about how closely HBO's vision matches his own, and why he's happy to have this light shined on the movement.
In 2015 Kahle pointed out the current web isn't private. "People, corporations, countries can spy on what you are reading. And they do." But in a decentralized web, "the bits will be distributed -- across the net -- so no one can track the readers of a site from a single point or connection."

He tells IEEE Spectrum that though the idea is hard to execute, a lot of people are already working on it. "I recently talked to a couple of engineers working for Mozilla, and brought up the idea of decentralizing the web. They said, 'Oh, we have a group working on that, are you thinking about that as well?'"

the_newsbeagle writes: Yesterday, Facebook announced that it's working on a "typing by brain" project, promising a non-invasive technology that can decode signals from the brain's speech center and translate them directly to text (see the video beginning at 1:18:00). What's more, Facebook exec Regina Dugan said, the technology will achieve a typing rate of 100 words per minute. Here, a few neuroscientists are asked: Is such a thing remotely feasible? One neuroscientist points out that his team set the current speed record for brain-typing earlier this year: They enabled a paralyzed man to type 8 words per minute, and that was using an invasive brain implant that could get high-fidelity signals from neurons. To date, all non-invasive methods that read brain signals through the scalp and skull have performed much worse. Thomas Naselaris, an assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, says, "Our understanding of the way the words and their phonological and semantic attributes are encoded in brain activity is actually pretty good currently, but much of this understanding has been enabled by fMRI, which is noninvasive but very slow and not at all portable," he said. "So I think that the bottleneck will be the [optical] imaging technology," which is what Facebook's gear will be using.

You asked, he answered!

Lithium-ion battery inventor John B. Goodenough has responded to questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Read on for his answers. Ready for mass production?
by hduff

There are several innovative ideas for better batteries that never make it to market. The problem is that you can make a few by hand in the lab, but production of useful numbers does not scale well at all or it scales, but is horribly expensive. Will your development reasonably scale? If not, what stands in your way.

JBG: At the present time, we do not envision any problems with scale up. Although we have demonstrated with coin cells and a jelly-roll cell how to make novel cathodes, we have not optimized the cathode capacity, voltage, and discharge/charge rates. The anode problem is solved, but battery manufacturers will need to work with Li or Na anodes, which means dry-room assembly.

Critics
by Anonymous Coward

How do you respond to critics of the new battery technology? When can we expect to see them hit the street?

JBG: We respond by demonstrating the concepts in individual coin cells. We do not do the development work. We believe that practical batteries can be marketed in about 3 years.

Electrode material?
by Razed By TV

There seems to be some confusion about whether or not your battery has the same material or differing material on the two electrodes. Can you elaborate on this and, if the electrodes are the same material, how the battery works?

JBG: We have made zero-voltage symmetric cells Li/Li+-glass/Li that are still cycling after more than 2000 cycles at 3 mA/cm2. The key to the concept of a battery voltage that takes metallic lithium from the anode and plates it on the cathode is that a thin lithium (order of a micron thick) current collector is plated on a copper (or other) cathode lithium having a chemical potential over 3.5 V below that of metallic.

Li-ion battery fires
by Anonymous Coward

Could you speculate on the reasons behind the increasing frequency of Li-ion battery fires? Cheaper parts, smaller tolerances, higher energy density, or all of the above?

JBG: The origin of the Li-ion battery fires is the flammable organic-liquid electrolyte and the graphite anode. If the battery is charged too rapidly, metallic lithium is plated on the graphite, and lithium does not wet or is not wet by the electrolyte. As a result, on repeated charging, lithium dendrites (whiskers) form and grow across the liquid electrolyte to the cathode and create a short-circuit, which heats the battery and ignites the electrolyte. If the battery manufacturer does not incorporate a control of the rate of charge, fires follow.

Energy density
by JoshuaZ

Over time battery energy density has improved by approximately 5-10% a year. Do you expect this trend to continue? If not, what do you expect will happen in the long-term? Are there other metrics by which you expect batteries to continue to improve?

JBG: Energy density needs to be coupled to the charge/discharge cycle life; with the organic-liquid electrolytes now in use, batteries of high volumetric and/or specific energy density undergo a poor cycle life. The ability to plate a metallic-lithium anode dendrite-free from a solid electrolyte that is not reduced on contact with metallic lithium solves the safety problem, allows a long cycle life, and maximizes the energy density for a given cathode. However, the cathode strategies to optimize the density of stored energy in a full cell are yet to be determined for three different types of cathodes.

Time to market
by MondoGordo

Assuming your new battery tech scales easily and economically for mass production and given the intensifying demand for such tech, when would you expect to see it supplant lithium-ion as the battery technology of choice for manufacturers?

JBG: It will take competent battery manufacturers about two to three years to develop a marketable product. Once the technology is demonstrated by one, others will fall into line very rapidly.

Why?
by Bodhammer

Why is every technology breakthrough I read about "five to ten years away from commercial viability?"

JBG: There is a large difference between a laboratory experiment and a workable battery product. The potential market is huge, but incremental steps will not get us there. But without a demonstration of a novel approach, the estimate of 10 years away is an expression of hope for a true breakthrough. I believe that in two to three years our novel batteries will be marketed.

Will there always be a demand for lithium?
by Michael Woodhams

Will there always be a demand for lithium? Demand for lithium is soaring and supply is scrabbling to keep up. If I was contemplating constructing a lithium mine/extraction facility, I would be worried that my investment might do fine for five years and then suddenly become worthless when some new battery chemistry came along. Is this fear justifiable? Is it reducing current or near-future lithium supply?

JBG: The lithium battery will give 0.3 V higher discharge voltage than sodium, and sodium cathodes are less easy to design than lithium cathodes. However, we have demonstrated good sodium batteries; and people are working on recycling of lithium, which may reduce our vulnerability to finite lithium reserves. Lithium batteries will be marketed for a long time, but sodium batteries can be expected to enter the market within 5 years.

Where to next?
by Anonymous Coward

I am an electrical engineer and developing a battery pack for a light electric aircraft. What do you think is the next big application for batteries after EVs and home energy storage? Into what specific area of batteries should engineers focus their work on when developing battery systems? What is your ultimate vision for battery technology? Could you elaborate?

JBG: Inexpensive batteries that are safe, have a long cycle life, a higher energy density, and a satisfactory charge/discharge rate can be expected to be on the market in about 2 to 3 years. They will have multiple applications, small and large.

Limit of energy density
by Eloking

John, is it (theoretically) possible for a battery to reach the same energy density as fossil fuel? Gasoline has an energy density of 46MJ/kg while a lithium based battery has an energy density of around 1MJ/kg. This would mean that an electric car, boat or airplane would have the same potential range as their oil powered brethren.

JBG: Fossil fuels will always have a higher density of stored energy, but the efficiency of electric-power storage in a battery is greater than the efficiency of a combustion engine. I believe that electric power stored in electrochemical cells can compete relatively soon in convenience and performance with the internal combustion engine without the hidden losses to society by the burning of fossil fuel.

Why aren't 12 V lithium car batteries more popular?
by brad3378

I've noticed that replacement lithium polymer battery packs for hybrid cars often sell for less than $1,000 on eBay, while much smaller lithium based 12 V batteries for conventional cars (with starter motors) often sell for more. As an example, here is a battery suitable for starting a small V8 that sells for $1,600.00. I would assume that it would be much easier to manufacture conventional 12 V starter batteries in volume due to the ability to put them in many more different models of vehicles. The ability to shave off 30+ pounds of weight from race cars would be enormous, so the demand is there, but why not the supply?

JBG: The lead-acid battery is here and is safe. The present Li-ion battery has safety problems and is too expensive. We need a step improvement from the lithium-ion battery to a safe metallic-lithium battery that is cheap to manufacture and to recycle. We believe we have demonstrated this is possible.

What were the problems along the way?
by Anonymous Coward

I'm curious about the development path leading to the recent announcement. What changed to make this battery possible now, versus a decade ago? Was it analytical techniques (better math, faster computers)? Measurement and observation tools (fast/fine X-Ray, femto-second pulsed lasers)? Overall progress in the physical, chemical and electro-chemical sciences? Assembling the right team and lab? Or was it more about waiting for a spark of insight or inspiration? Which factors dominated the development path? And what about the path forward to commercialization?

JBG: What has changed is the ability to plate dendrite-free lithium from a non-flammable solid electrolyte that has a cation conductivity nearly as high as that of the flammable liquid electrolyte of the lithium-ion battery.

Patents
by Gravis Zero

1) Is there any reason these batteries cannot be used for grid-scale energy storage? 2) Who own the patents to the battery technology and will they license it cheaply or hold back the market for 20 years like the overly greedy venture capitalists behind Aquion Energy?

JBG: 1) Our technology can provide competitive grid energy storage and 2) we plan to license the technology to many manufacturers; we want to avoid an exclusive license.

What are the downsides to your sodium batteries
by tempest69

I am very excited about sodium batteries. As sodium is a much more environmentally friendly element to produce at large scale (my conjecture, I didn't look it up). What were the roadblocks of using sodium in previous batteries? I suspect whisker growth, but am not familiar with batteries enough to know other possibilities. With the glass version, what are the big drawbacks to using sodium instead of lithium (if any)? Thank you for your kind reply in advance!

JBG: Sodium is cheaper than lithium and widely available from the ocean. The principal drawbacks include a loss of 0.3 volts relative to lithium, fewer number of cathode materials that can serve as traditional insertion compounds, and a somewhat greater difficulty to handle in a manufacturing process. However, we have demonstrated a new battery strategy that promises to allow sodium batteries to enter the market competitively.

It's the economics
by marcle

Prof. Goodenough, right now, electric cars are only for the well-to-do. In my rural area, not only do people have to drive long miles, but many of them couldn't afford a new car anyway, let alone an electric one. Do you envision battery prices coming down to the point where an electric vehicle can compete with a gas-powered car at the low end of the income scale as well as at the high end?

JBG: Yes, I do envision that within 5 years electric cars that can compete in price and performance with those powered by gasoline will become available.

What do you watch?
by ihaveamo

What other developments in the field of energy storage do you keep a close eye on? Do you foresee breakthroughs coming from other technologies such as gyroscopes or even organic hydrogen production?

JBG:I have no crystal ball on other technologies, but I would not bet on the room-temperature fuel cell powered by hydrogen gas.

Viability
by OneHundredAndTen

We keep hearing about breakthroughs in the battery technology world to the tune of several per year. After many years in this forum, the empirical observation is that such breakthroughs are forgotten after a few months, quietly buried, practically never having a measurable impact on our lives. Please explain why your latest claim about a battery breakthrough is not going to end up following that route.

JBG:We have done many tests with laboratory cells. Manufacturing a marketable battery cell will take about 2 years of development by a competent battery company, but we have over 50 companies showing interest to be able to perform tests of our results. I am optimistic that our tests will be verified and that product development will begin soon.

How do you feel about UT patent management?
by MyFirstNameIsPaul

Somewhere around the mid- to late 2000s, I was researching LiFePO4 patents, and came across the University of Texas (UT) patent for which you are listed as an inventor. When I investigated licensing the patent, it was so expensive that it was not profitable to bother with the license at all. The factory partner I worked with was in China, and they were mass-producing the same LiFePO4 for jurisdictions not impacted by the patent. As I understand it, the law firm that UT chose to manage the patent set a price that was incredibly high. Then, invariably, some company would build a market for a LiFePO4 product that violated the patent, and then the law firm would step in after the company had actually done some business and sue them for all they were worth. I have to admit that this last bit was told to me by some battery industry veterans, but it seems plausible based on how the battery industry works. Nonetheless, the decision of UT to exclusively grant permission to the law firm to manage the patent kept the invention out of the market and likely cost UT some incredible amount (billions?) in royalties. How do you feel about your invention, which clearly made mass-production of the chemistry viable, being effectively kept off the market for so long? (BTW, when UT lowered their prices with, like, 5 years or so left on the patent, the factory I worked with immediately purchased the licensed material for selling their batteries in the U.S.)

JBG:UT has now developed an Office of Technology Commercialization that is much more competent. We are building a patent portfolio that I hope will prove successful, and we will not offer an exclusive license. I cannot comment on pirating by the Chinese, but I believe they are learning it is better to play by the international rules. However, where billions of dollars are at stake, the vultures are circling.

Why are they not especially robust?
by serviscope_minor

Rechargeable lithium cells are clearly excellent and power the majority of battery powered things I own. However, by comparison to older, less energy dense techs, they don't seem especially robust, for instance they degrade fast if deep discharged or left at very low charge levels. By comparison, say, NiCd batteries are very robust: while they do lose life, they do it in a pretty slowly and predictable way, you don't get it going off a cliff edge. I've noticed with some (though not all) devices, the battery life drops from hours to minutes in a relatively short timespan. The battery meter also ceases working, which I assume means that the internal resistance spikes way up suddenly and at higher voltages than fresh cells. Can you offer any good insight as to why this happens, and do you think there are going to developments in the pipeline which will introduce the tolerance of the cells? Or are we going to have to rely on better quality active protection circuitry instead?

JBG:The present lithium-ion batteries have many drawbacks because they use a flammable liquid electrolyte that has a small window for a stable voltage range. We have a nonflammable solid electrolyte with a comparable cation conductivity and a large energy window to allow plating a lithium anode dendrite free; a lithium anode is still cycling after more than 2000 charge/discharge cycles and it is not oxidized by the cathode up to a 5 V discharge.

A lithium powered energy economy
by kyubre

Mr. Goodenough, it seems that the world's reserves of lithium are far more centralized than nearly any other energy source. Do you foresee a way to avoid the geopolitical struggles for lithium ore that we experience with oil reserves? Do you see an upper limit on the ability to recycle and reuse existing lithium batteries (those that have avoided a landfill)?

JBG:You raise an important point. We have demonstrated we can make sodium cells with only a loss of 0.3 V compared to lithium cells, and sodium is available from the oceans. However, it is important to develop the means to recycle the lithium batteries to reduce vulnerability to the situation you cite.

Too many ways to skin the cat
by skids

With so many different research approaches to improving batteries, investment in bringing new technology to production scale is often viewed as a hazardous endeavor... there's a pretty good chance the tech you pick will end up getting surpassed by another before financials break even. Obviously the free market helps foster a spirit of competition, but its brutal darwinism also serves as a disincentive. Planned market solutions can spread out risk, but also have to be wary of funding completely unworthy endeavors... if everyone working on batteries, win or lose, got a small but guaranteed "compensation prize," lots of people would jump in and claim without merit to be working on batteries. Subdividing the technology so that different phases of a manufacturing process are developed by different entities seems a promising idea for those parts of the technology that may have wider applications or may apply to multiple competing designs -- but that would require a lot of advocacy which just does not seem to be there. Have you seen any interesting proposals for business/market/public-funding models to address the "too many ways to skin a cat" problem?

JBG:True, the large prize has stimulated a world-wide competition for a solution. We have introduced the first all-solid-state technology that can operate below room temperature, is inexpensive for up to a 3-volt discharge, and can use a conventional cathode to over 4.2 V discharge with a long cycle life. Over 50 battery companies have shown interest in validating our findings and marketing products.

Battery structure and capacity
by gantry

How thick is the initial anode foil of Li or Na? This determines the capacity of the battery. All quantities in the paper are expressed per gram of lithium. The cathode has particles of glass electrolyte, carbon, and sulphur, with a copper collector. When the lithium is plated onto the cathode, upon which of these components is it plated, and how thick is the plating?

JBG:You are correct to imply that plating on the cathode from the anode can only give a voltage for a finite thickness of the plated material on the cathode side. We have not yet obtained a good measure of the thickness of the cathode plating that is viable, but it appears to be micro not nanometers thick. Optimizing the capacity will involve the ability to optimize the surface area of the cathode material. This optimization has yet to be performed, but we can plate sodium as well as lithium.

Cathode problem?
by bayduv1n

In the IEEE article, it was stated that the cathode problem has not yet been solved. Can you elaborate on this? Were the lab experiments conducted without a cathode?

JBG:We have demonstrated two approaches to the cathode of a rechargeable battery: plating of the alkali-metal anode onto a cathode current collector of lower chemical potential to a limited thickness over a large surface area and a conventional high-voltage insertion compound with a plasticizer contacting the cathode. Both work.

Researchers at New York University and Michigan State University have recently found that the fingerprint sensor on your phone is not as safe as you think. "The team has developed a set of fake fingerprints that are digital composites of common features found in many people's fingerprints," reports Digital Trends. "Through computer simulations, they were able to achieve matches 65 percent of the time, though they estimate the scheme would be less successful in real life, on an actual phone." From the report: Nasir Memon, a computer science and engineering professor at New York University, explained the value of the study to The New York Times. Modern smartphones, tablets, and other computing devices that utilize biometric authentication typically only take a snapshots of sections of a user's finger, to compose a model of one fingerprint. But the chances of faking your way into someone else's phone are much higher if there are multiple fingerprints recorded on that device. "It's as if you have 30 passwords and the attacker only has to match one," Memon said. The professor, who was one of three authors on the study, theorized that if it were possible to create a glove with five different composite fingerprints, the attacker would likely be successful with about half of their attempts. For the record, Apple reported to the Times that the chance of a false match through the iPhone's TouchID system is 1 in 50,000 with only one fingerprint recorded.

the_newsbeagle writes: Elon Musk has set out to change the world with SpaceX's reusable rockets and Tesla's electric cars, and now he plans to change your brain. His new company, Neuralink, will reportedly build delicate brain implants called "neural lace" to help people with neuropsychiatric disorders and to give healthy people strange new mental abilities. But the news announcements about the company contained scant details about what kind of hardware Neuralink might actually build, and what engineering challenges the company will have to overcome in pursuit of miniaturized and safe brain implants. Here, five neuroscience experts describe those challenges, and give hints on what to expect from Musk's neural dust. One of the neuroscientists is Mary Lou Jepsen, founder of the Openwater startup, which is looking for ways to develop a noninvasive BCI for imaging and telepathy. Jepsen was also "an engineering executive at Facebook working on its Oculus virtual reality gear; before that she spent three years at Google X, running advanced projects on display technology," reports IEEE Spectrum. She says that Neuralink will likely face many medical hurdles, even if their process doesn't require splitting open patients' skulls. "The approach as I understand it (not much is published) involves implanting silicon particles (so called "neural lace") into the bloodstream. One concern is that implanting anything in the body can cause unintended consequences," says Jepsen. "For example, even red blood cells can clog capillaries in the brain when the red blood cells are made more stiff by diseases like malaria. This clogging can reduce or even cut off the flow of oxygen to the parts of the brain. Indeed, clogging of cerebral capillaries has been shown to be a major cause of Alzheimer's progression. Back to neural lace: One concern I would have is whether the silicon particles could lead to any clogging."

the_newsbeagle writes: Elon Musk has set out to change the world with SpaceX's reusable rockets and Tesla's electric cars, and now he plans to change your brain. His new company, Neuralink, will reportedly build delicate brain implants called "neural lace" to help people with neuropsychiatric disorders and to give healthy people strange new mental abilities. But the news announcements about the company contained scant details about what kind of hardware Neuralink might actually build, and what engineering challenges the company will have to overcome in pursuit of miniaturized and safe brain implants. Here, five neuroscience experts describe those challenges, and give hints on what to expect from Musk's neural dust. One of the neuroscientists is Mary Lou Jepsen, founder of the Openwater startup, which is looking for ways to develop a noninvasive BCI for imaging and telepathy. Jepsen was also "an engineering executive at Facebook working on its Oculus virtual reality gear; before that she spent three years at Google X, running advanced projects on display technology," reports IEEE Spectrum. She says that Neuralink will likely face many medical hurdles, even if their process doesn't require splitting open patients' skulls. "The approach as I understand it (not much is published) involves implanting silicon particles (so called "neural lace") into the bloodstream. One concern is that implanting anything in the body can cause unintended consequences," says Jepsen. "For example, even red blood cells can clog capillaries in the brain when the red blood cells are made more stiff by diseases like malaria. This clogging can reduce or even cut off the flow of oxygen to the parts of the brain. Indeed, clogging of cerebral capillaries has been shown to be a major cause of Alzheimer's progression. Back to neural lace: One concern I would have is whether the silicon particles could lead to any clogging."

schwit1 quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The IBM 1460, which went on sale in 1963, was an upgrade of the 1401 [which was one of the first transistorized computers ever sold commercially]. Twice as fast, with a 6-microsecond cycle time, it came with a high-speed 1403 Model 3 line printer. The 1403 printer was incredibly fast. It had five identical sets of 48 embossed metal characters like the kind you'd find on a typewriter, all connected together on a horizontal chain loop that revolved at 5.2 meters per second behind the face of a continuous ream of paper. Between the paper and the character chain was a strip of ink tape, again just like a typewriter's. But rather than pressing the character to the paper through the ink tape, the 1403 did it backward, pressing the paper against the high-speed character chain through the ink tape with the aid of tiny hammers. Over the years, IBM came out with eight models of the 1403. Some versions had 132 hammers, one for each printable column, and each was individually actuated with an electromagnet. When a character on the character chain aligned with a column that was supposed to contain that character, the electromagnetic hammer for that column would actuate, pounding the paper through the ink tape and into the character in 11 microseconds. With all 132 hammers actuating and the chain blasting along, the 1403 was stupendously noisy [...] The Model 3, which replaced the character chain with slugs sliding in a track driven by gears, took just 55 milliseconds to print a single line. When printing a subset of characters, its speed rose from 1,100 lines per minute to 1,400 lines per minute.

"Computer scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have developed a new intelligent routing algorithm that attempts to minimize the occurrence of spontaneous traffic jams -- those sudden snarls caused by greedy merges and other isolated disruptions -- throughout a roadway network," reports Motherboard. "It's both computationally distributed and fast, requirements for any real-world traffic management system. Their work is described in the April issue of IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence." From the report: The Nanyang researchers' algorithm starts off by just assuming that, given enough traffic density, shit is going to happen. Someone is going to make a greedy merge -- something is going to cause enough of a traffic perturbation to result in a network breakdown. Breakdown in this context is a technical-ish term indicating that for some period of time the traffic outflow from a segment of roadway is going to be less than the traffic inflow. "We assume that the traffic breakdown model has already been given, and the probability of traffic breakdown occurrence is larger than zero (meaning that traffic breakdowns would occur), and our goal is to direct the traffic flow so that the overall traffic breakdown probability is minimized," Hongliang Guo and colleagues write. Put differently, "our objective is to maximize the probability that none of the network links encounters a traffic breakdown." So, the goal of the algorithm is this maximization, which reduces to a fairly tidy equation. It then becomes a machine learning problem. Things get pretty messy at this point, but just understand that we're taking the current traffic load, adding an unknown additional load that might enter the network at any time, and then coming up with probabilities of network breakdown at each of the network's nodes or intersections. Crunch some linear algebra and we wind up with optimal routes through the network. Crucially, Guo and co. were able to come up with some mathematical optimizations that make this kind of calculation feasible in real-time. They were able to demonstrate their algorithm in simulations and are currently working on a further analysis with BMW, which is providing a vast trove of data from its Munich car-sharing fleet. This may not be as distant a technology as it might seem. As it turns out, only 10 percent of cars in a network need to be driving according to the optimizations for those optimizations to have a positive effect on the entire network.

Slashdot reader Tekla Perry writes: IEEE USA says H-1B visas are a tool used to avoid paying U.S. wages. "For every visa used by Google to hire a talented non-American for $126,000, ten Americans are replaced by outsourcing companies paying their H-1B workers $65,000," says the current IEEE USA president, writing with the past president and president-elect. The outsourcing companies, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy in 2014 "used 21,695 visas, or more than 25 percent of all private-sector H-1B visas used that year. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Uber, for comparison, used only 1,763 visas, or 2 percent," they say.
On Friday, IEEE-USA also issued a new criticism about the lack of progress in reforming the H-1B program, saying "At least 50,000 Americans will lose their jobs this year because the president has yet to fulfill the promise he made to millions who voted for him."

A study published in the journal eLife describes three participants that broke new ground in the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) by people with paralysis. One of the participants, a 64-year-old man paralyzed by a spinal cord injury, "set a new record for speed in a 'copy typing' task," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Copying sentences like 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,' he typed at a relatively blistering rate of eight words per minute." From the report: This experimental gear is far from being ready for clinical use: To send data from their implanted brain chips, the participants wear head-mounted components with wires that connect to the computer. But Henderson's team, part of the multiuniversity BrainGate consortium, is contributing to the development of devices that can be used by people in their everyday lives, not just in the lab. "All our research is based on helping people with disabilities," Henderson tells IEEE Spectrum. Here's how the system works: The tiny implant, about the size of a baby aspirin, is inserted into the motor cortex, the part of the brain responsible for voluntary movement. The implant's array of electrodes record electrical signals from neurons that "fire" as the person thinks of making a motion like moving their right hand -- even if they're paralyzed and can't actually move it. The BrainGate decoding software interprets the signal and converts it into a command for the computer cursor. Interestingly, the system worked best when the researchers customized it for each participant. To train the decoder, each person would imagine a series of different movements (like moving their whole right arm or wiggling their left thumb) while the researchers looked at the data coming from the electrodes and tried to find the most obvious and reliable signal. Each participant ended up imagining a different movement to control the cursor. The woman with ALS imagined moving her index finger and thumb to control the cursor's left-right and up-down motions. Henderson says that after a while, she didn't have to think about moving the two digits independently. "When she became facile with this, she said it wasn't anything conscious; she felt like she was controlling a joystick," he says. The man with the spinal cord injury imagined moving his whole arm as if he were sliding a puck across a table. "Each participant settled on control modality that worked best," Henderson says. You can watch a video about the study here.