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532 Articles

Crab Shells Massively Improve Zinc-Ion Batteries

July 18, 2023 by 32 Comments

In the fast-moving world of battery research, scientists are constantly on the lookout for innovative materials with the right properties to help improve energy storage. Meanwhile, batteries are in greater demand than ever as production of EVs and renewable energy projects ramp up to new heights.

In the hunt for new and better battery materials, scientists found an unexpected hero: crab shells.Researchers at the University of Maryland have uncovered a remarkable breakthrough by exploring their use in battery production.

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Miners Vs NASA: It’s A Nevada Showdown

July 6, 2023 by 74 Comments

Mining projects are approved or disapproved based on all kinds of reasons. There are economic concerns, logistical matters, and environmental considerations to be made. Mining operations can be highly polluting, or they can have outsized effects on a given area by sheer virtue of the material they remove or the byproducts they leave behind.

For a proposed lithium mining operation north of Las Vegas, though, an altogether stranger objection has arisen. NASA has been using the plot of land as a calibration tool, and it doesn’t want any upstart miners messing with its work. 

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Remote Driving Controversial In UK, But It’s Already Here

July 5, 2023 by 46 Comments

The automotive industry is rushing towards autonomous vehicles as a futuristic ideal. They haven’t got the autonomous part sorted just yet. However, as part of this push, the technology to drive vehicles remotely via video link has become mature.

In the United Kingdom, there has been great controversy on whether this should be allowed, particularly for vehicles piloted by individuals outside the country’s borders. That came to a head with a Law Commission repot published earlier this year, but since then, innovative companies have continued to work on remote driving regardless. Let’s dive in to the current state of play.

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Earth’s Final Frontier: Exploring The Alien Depths Of The Earth’s Oceans

June 28, 2023 by 29 Comments

Despite how hostile to life some parts of the Earth’s continents are, humanity has enthusiastically endeavored over the course of millennia to establish at least a toehold on each of them. Yet humanity has barely ventured beyond the surface of the oceans which cover around three-quarters of the planet, with human activity in these bodies of water dropping off quickly along with the fading of light from the surface.

Effectively, this means for all intents and purposes we have to this day not explored the vast majority of the Earth’s surface, due to over 70% of it being covered by water. As an ocean planet, much of Earth’s surface is covered by watery depths of multiple kilometers, with each 10 meters of water increasing the pressure by one atmosphere (1.013 bar), so that at a depth of one kilometer we’re talking about an intense 101 atmospheres.

Over the past decades, the 1985 discovery of Titanic’s wreck approximately 3.8 kilometer below the surface of the Atlantic, the two year long search for AF447’s black boxes, and the fruitless search for the wreckage of MH370 despite washed-up remnants have served as stark reminders of just how alien and how hostile the depths of the Earth’s oceans are. Yet with both tourism and mining efforts booming, will we one day conquer the full surface of Earth?

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Wind-to-Heat: A Lot Of Hot Air?

June 27, 2023 by 85 Comments

Heating is one of the greatest uses of energy in human society today. Where we once burned logs to stave off the brutal winter chill, now we lean on gas and electricity to warm our homes and keep us safe and toasty. In some colder climates, like the UK, heating can make up 60-80% of total domestic energy demands.

However, there are alternative ways to provide heating. Using wind energy to directly provide heat could be key in this area, using a variety of interesting methods that could have some unique niche applications.

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Et Tu, Red Hat?

June 23, 2023 by 94 Comments

Something odd happened to git.centos.org last week. That’s the repository where Red Hat has traditionally published the source code to everything that’s a part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to fulfill the requirements of the GPL license. Last week, those packages just stopped flowing. Updates weren’t being published. And finally, Red Hat has published a clear answer to why:

Red Hat has decided to continue to use the Customer Portal to share source code with our partners and customers, while treating CentOS Stream as the venue for collaboration with the community.

Sounds innocuous, but what’s really going on here? Let’s have a look at the Red Hat family: RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora.

RHEL is the enterprise Linux distribution that is Red Hat’s bread and butter. Fedora is RHEL’s upstream distribution, where changes happen fast and things occasionally break. CentOS started off as a community repackaging of RHEL, as allowed under the GPL and other Open Source licenses, for people who liked the stability but didn’t need the software support that you’re paying for when you buy RHEL.

Red Hat took over the reigns of CentOS back in 2014, and then imposed the transition to CentOS Stream in 2020, to some consternation. This placed CentOS Stream between the upstream Fedora, and the downstream RHEL. Some people missed the stability of the old CentOS, and in response a handful of efforts spun up to fill the gap, like Alma Linux and Rocky Linux. These projects took the source from git.centos.org, and rebuilt them into usable community operating systems, staying closer to RHEL in the process.

Red Hat has published a longer statement elaborating on the growth of CentOS Stream, but it ends with an interesting statement: “Red Hat customers and partners can access RHEL sources via the customer and partner portals, in accordance with their subscription agreement.” What exactly is in that subscription agreement? Well according to Alma Linux, “the way we understand it today, Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements.” Continue reading “Et Tu, Red Hat?” →

China Plans Its Own Megaconstellation To Challenge Starlink

June 22, 2023 by 39 Comments

Satellite internet used to be a woeful thing. Early networks relied on satellites in geostationary orbits, with high latency and minimal bandwidth keeping user demand low. That was until Starlink came along, and provided high-speed, low-latency internet access using a fleet of thousands of satellites in Low Earth orbit.

Starlink has already ruffled feathers due to concerns around light pollution and space junk in particular. Now, it appears that China may be readying its own competing constellation to avoid being crowded out of low orbits by the increasingly-popular service.

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