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Tuesday, March 16th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 7:00a | Researchers In Switzerland Get Electricity From Wood fahrbot-bot shares a report from Electrek: Researchers at ETH Zurich and Empa have chemically modified wood and made it more compressible, turning it into a mini-generator. When compressed, it generates an electrical voltage. Such wood could serve as a biosensor or as a building material that harvests energy. Ingo Burgert and his team at public research university ETH Zurich and Swiss federal laboratory Empa have proven that wood is much more than just a building material. Their research enhances the properties of wood in order to use it for new applications. For instance, they have already developed high-strength, water-repellent, and magnetizable wood. Now, together with the Empa research group led by Francis Schwarze, the team has used one chemical and one biological process to generate electrical voltage from a type of wood sponge. In doing so, they amplify what is known as the "piezoelectric effect" of wood. The findings appear in the journal Science Advances. 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 1:00p | Cricut Decides To Charge Rent For People To Fully Use the Cutting Machines They Already Own An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hackaday: Probably the best known brand of cutter comes from Cricut, and that company has dropped a bombshell in the form of an update to the web-based design software that leaves their now very annoyed users with a monthly upload limit of 20 new designs unless they sign up for a Cricut Access Plan that costs $9.99 on monthly payments. Worse still, a screenshot is circulating online purporting to be from a communication with a Cricut employee attempting to clarify matters, in which it is suggested that machines sold as second-hand will be bricked by the company. We'd like to think that given the reaction from their online community the subscription plan will backfire, but unlike the world of 3D printing their market is not necessarily an online-savvy one. A crafter who buys a Cricut from a bricks-and-mortar warehouse store and uses it with Cricut cartridges may not balk at being required to pay rent to use hardware that's already paid for in the same way a member of our community with a 3D printer would. After all, Cricut have always tried to make their software a walled garden. However if the stories about second-hand models being bricked turn out to bear fruit that might be a different matter.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 5:25p | Intel Launches 11th-Gen Rocket Lake-S CPUs The new generation of Intel Core CPUs is here. Intel is using a new architecture on its ancient 14nm process to power the 11th-generation Rocket Lake-S processors. From a report: That results in some significant power improvements, but it also means that Intel can only fit 8 cores on its flagship Core i9-11900K. That sacrifice to the number of cores looks bad compared to the 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900X or even the last-gen 10-core i9-10900K. But Intel is also promising massive improvements to efficiency that should keep the Rocket Lake-S parts competitive -- especially in gaming. Rocket Lake-S CPUs launch March 30. The $539 Core i9-11900K has 8 cores and 16 threads with a single-core Thermal Velocity boost of 5.3GHz and 4.8GHz all-core boost. The slightly more affordable $399 i7-11700K boosts up to 5GHz, and the i5-11600K is $262 with 6 cores at a 4.9GHz boost. While the lack of cores is going to hurt Rocket Lake-S CPUs in multi-threaded applications, Intel claims that its 19% improvement to instructions per clock (IPC) will make up much of the difference. The UHD graphics processor in the CPUs also deliver 50% better performance than last generation. Of course, Intel is focusing on games because that is where its processors remain the most competitive versus AMD. And that should continue with its Rocket Lake-S chips. These high-clocked parts with improved performance should keep up and even exceed AMD's Zen 3 chips in certain games, like Microsoft's Flight Simulator (according to Intel).
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 11:20p | Google's Second-Gen Nest Hub Will Watch You Sleep Google's second-generation Nest Hub will be able to track your sleep via a Soli radar sensor -- not a camera. "Sleep Sensing" is the highlight feature, though, as "there's still a 7-inch display with a middling 600p resolution, a rear-facing fabric-covered speaker, and the device sensors poking through the otherwise uniform bezel," reports Android Police. From the report: According to Google, about 20 percent of first-gen Nest Hubs were placed in bedrooms, and the new Nest Hub can only show its full capabilities when you put it next to your bed. The lack of a camera is actually a selling point here as it ensures a certain degree of privacy. The Hub won't be able to see you, but it still kind of "sees" with radar waves. The Soli radar module creates a bubble where the Hub can track your breathing and movement overnight. Google says Soli in the Hub is accurate enough to detect the general shape and position of a person, but not specific faces or bodies. Combined with temperature and light levels, the Nest Hub can track your sleep and feed that data into Google Fit. Over time, Sleep Sensing can offer actionable tips to improve your sleep, too. This is similar to what you get with various fitness trackers and smartwatches that have sleep monitoring features, but you never have to worry about forgetting to wear your device to bed. Google says the raw Soli data (above) never leaves your Hub -- machine learning enhancements allow the smart display to do all the processing locally to further preserve your privacy. Soli also supports some basic gestures like holding your hand up to pause media or waving to snooze an alarm. Sleep Sensing will be a free feature at launch, but Google is planning to make it a paid add-on in the future.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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