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Different works of fiction have different logic and physics takes on exactly how time travel works in their creative universe. Here’s a great rundown of some of the variants.
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The post How Time Travel Works In Fiction appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.
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Michigan State University researchers say a new transparent solar panel technology is right outside your door. Or more precisely: inside your window. The completely clear innovation could deliver up to 40% of U.S. power.
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Because winter is coming, this is a video of inventor Colin Furze demonstrating his Briefcase Fireplace, a portable gas fireplace built inside a briefcase. WARNING: The TSA will think it’s a bomb, which it technically could be. Still, a great idea for non-flying travelers who like to cozy up to a warm fireplace at night, but the cheap motel you’re staying at doesn’t have one. Hopefully it doesn’t have blood stains on the mattress either. I just tried building one myself, but I don’t think I added enough heat and flame resistant backing, because now my dad’s entire briefcase is on fire. Obviously, it’s gonna take some pretty quick thinking to get myself out of this one. “Son, have you seen my–” The devil made me do it!
Keep going for the video.
Thanks to Yelp Anne, who remembers when you just started a fire in a wastebasket if you got cold.
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Most electric vehicle discussions revolve around passenger cars. Sometimes buses get thrown into the mix. We’re laser-focused on how people will get from point A to point B and sometimes forget that our streets are also teeming with delivery trucks and vans. Daimler hasn’t forgotten and neither has its light-truck brand Fuso.
After years of testing, Fuso (it’ll be using eFuso for its electric vehicles) is putting its eCanter truck on the roads of Japan and the United States, delivering for 7-Eleven and UPS, respectively. Fifty of the trucks will land in North America by the end of 2017.
During an event at Mercedes-Benz’s research and development facility in Silicon Valley, (Daimler is the parent company or Mercedes and Fuso), I was able to take the new eCanter out for a spin. For the driver in the cab, it’s not much different from the diesel and gas vehicles they’re used to steering.
But for everyone else, the eCanter is almost completely silent and doesn’t spew CO2 into the air while hauling our Amazon purchases around town. Both of those, along with the cost savings of switching from oil-based fuels to electric, are the big selling points of the eCanter.
Most delivery trucks (including the traditional Canter) use diesel and make quite a bit of racket while the engine runs. It’s why you can tell when the UPS or FedEx truck is out front, but not the pizza delivery person. Anytime you can reduce noise in a work environment, not only are you making things better for employees but also, in this instance, reducing noise pollution on our already hectic streets.
As for environmental pollution, Fuso says that driving the eCanter instead of the regular Canter prevents 16 tons of pollution from the air per year. If you think about how many trucks like this you see roaming around your city every day, that’s an incredible amount of CO2 kept from the air.
But companies need more than quiet trucks and good environmental vibes to replace their current fleets with battery-powered ones. Fuso said that these new trucks could generate a saving of $19,000 after five years of use compared to their predecessors. The trucks will also be offered with the option for lessees to upgrade the batteries when improvements become available.
And finally, by using a companion system, companies can track their trucks’ energy usage in far greater detail than they can with their diesel counterparts, including staggering how much and at what times the vehicle needs charging. This can be pretty often if the truck strays too far from its distribution center.
The eCanter has a range of 60 to 80 miles based on the terrain and how much of a load it’s carrying. The truck is rated for 9,000 pounds of cargo. Recharging the vehicle’s six battery packs can take as long as eight hours using a typical level 2 charger, but with a DC fast-charger it can get to 80 percent in about an hour. This means a driver could replenish the charge during a lunch break if a fast-charger is available. A full charge will take up to two hours.
These specs make the truck perfect for dense areas like San Francisco, Chicago and New York, but for cities, like Los Angeles, that are basically hundreds of miles of sprawl, the eCanter probably won’t be replacing vehicles that needed to cover all those miles in a day. For those routes under the century mark, the eCanter looks to be a solid performer, based on my time in the cab of the truck.
The silent truck also displayed the characteristics found on other electric vehicles. It has plenty of torque right off the line and that power is available at almost any speed. Driving it as easy as driving any truck with an automatic transmission: You just point and go. For drivers that might not be fans of change, the only adaptation they’ll have to make is looking at a battery gauge instead of a fuel one.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter if companies or drivers want to switch to electric. The UK and France want to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2040 and cities like Paris are banning all gas-powered cars in the future. At some point, if you want to deliver packages, companies will need electric trucks, and Daimler’s eFuso eCanter will be right there waiting for them.
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Whenever Intel develops a new generation of SSDs based entirely on in-house technology, the result is usually a product that turns heads. Several times, Intel has set a new standard for SSD performance, starting with its original X25-M. Their most recent shake-up of the consumer SSD market was the Intel SSD 750, the first consumer NVMe SSD. Such significant releases don’t happen every year, and in the intervening years Intel’s competitors always catch up and surpass Intel.
However this year’s revolution from Intel will be very hard for the competition to match anytime soon. All of Intel’s previous record-setting SSDs have relied on the drive’s controller to stand out from the crowd. This time, Intel’s advantage comes from the storage medium: its 3D XPoint memory technology, a new nonvolatile memory that offers much higher performance than flash memory.
The new Intel Optane SSD 900P is a premium NVMe PCIe SSD offering the highest level of performance, with a moderate capacity. The Optane SSD 900P is intended for high-end desktop systems and workstations with very disk-heavy workloads. The Optane SSD 900P isn’t for everyone and won’t be displacing any existing products – it exists alone in a new product tier, with prices that are more than twice what the fastest flash memory based SSDs are selling for.
Optane is Intel’s brand name for products featuring 3D XPoint memory. The Intel Optane SSD 900P is actually the third Optane product to be released, but it’s the first family member to go after the high end consumer market segment. The Intel Optane Memory M.2 drives released earlier this year have capacities far too small for general-purpose storage use and instead have been marketed for use as a cache device to be paired with a mechanical hard drive. Intel’s caching strategy works and can bring a hard drive’s responsiveness up to the level of mainstream SSDs, but it has downsides. The Optane Memory caching requires a few extra steps to setup, and the caching software will only run on Intel platforms introduced this year: Kaby Lake or newer.
The Optane SSD DC P4800X is Intel’s flagship enterprise SSD, and it is priced accordingly—putting it far out of reach of consumer budgets, and even with a price tag of over $1500 for 375GB it has been quite difficult to acquire. In the enterprise storage market, the P4800X has been highly sought after, but it isn’t appropriate for all use cases and is not a threat to the many enterprise SSDs that prioritize capacity over performance and endurance.
The Optane SSD 900P will still cause some sticker shock for consumers expecting prices in line with M.2 PCIe SSDs, but it is acceptable for the kinds of machines that might be packing multiple GPUs or 10+ CPU cores. The Optane SSD 900P probably wouldn’t be the only drive in such a system, but it would work well as a blazing fast primary storage device.
| Intel Optane SSD 900P Specifications | ||
| Capacity | 280 GB | 480 GB |
| Controller | Intel SLL3D | |
| Memory | Intel 128Gb 3D XPoint | |
| Interface | PCIe 3.0 x4 | |
| Form Factor | HHHL Add-in card or 2.5″ 15mm U.2 |
HHHL Add-in card |
| Sequential Read | 2500 MB/s | |
| Sequential Write | 2000 MB/s | |
| Random Read IOPS | 550k | |
| Random Write IOPS | 500k | |
| Power Consumption | 8W Read 13W Write 14W Burst 5W Idle |
|
| Write Endurance | 10 DWPD | |
| Warranty | 5 years | |
| Recommended Price | $389 ($1.39/GB) | $599 ($1.25/GB) |
The Intel Optane SSD 900P is initially launching with 280GB and 480GB capacities. Both sizes will be available as PCIe 3.0 x4 half-height half-length add-in cards, and the 280GB model is also available as a 2.5″ U.2 drive. Higher capacities may be added later, but Intel isn’t promising anything yet. The sequential transfer speeds are nothing special for a NVMe SSD these days—Samsung’s 960 PRO can hit much higher read speeds and slightly higher write speeds. The random read and write IOPS are far higher than any consumer SSD has offered before.
Intel’s specifications for power consumption show one big reason why the Optane SSD 900P is a desktop-only product. Laptops are not equipped to supply up to 14W to a SSD, and they usually aren’t equipped to cool a drive that idles at 5W instead of 50mW. The level of performance offered by the Optane SSD 900P cannot currently fit within the power budget or space constraints of a M.2 card.
The five year warranty Intel offers is typical for a high-end SSD in today’s market, but doesn’t compare to the 10 year warranty that Samsung’s flagship 850 PRO SATA SSD offers. On the other hand, the 10 drive writes per day write endurance rating is far higher than most consumer SSDs get; 0.3 DWPD is more typical.
The Intel Optane SSD 900P starts shipping worldwide today, and here is our review of the 280GB version.
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TOKYO — Kobe Steel supplied parts with false specifications for nuclear equipment owned by Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd, JNFL said on Friday, adding that the products were not used.
The parts were destined for use in centrifuges to enrich uranium, a JNFL spokesman said by phone. Citing security reasons, he declined to provide further details.
Kobe Steel has not told JNFL whether there are any safety issues with the parts, the spokesman said.
A Kobe Steel spokesman confirmed the firm fabricated data about specialized coatings used on the parts and had not identified any safety issues.
JNFL is the second company in the nuclear power industry to receive components affected by the steelmaker’s data tampering.
Tokyo Electric Power Co said this month it had taken delivery of pipes from Kobe Steel that were not checked properly.
Japan’s atomic regulator has asked nuclear operators to check whether they are using Kobe Steel products at nuclear plants, it said on Wednesday, adding it had received no reports that Kobe Steel’s data tampering scandal had affected safety.
No deadline has been given for nuclear operators to report back to the Nuclear Regulation Authority, a spokesman said by phone on Friday.
The unfolding data tampering scandal has spread from Kobe Steel’s copper and aluminum business to most areas of the company and sent companies at the end of complex supply chains across the world scrambling to check whether the safety or performance of their products has been compromised.
While no safety issues have been identified, Japan’s third-largest steelmaker is likely to face claims for replacement parts and other costs.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd would ask Kobe Steel to cover any costs for replacement of parts or other expenses related to the data tampering, President Yoshinori Kanehana told reporters on Friday at an earnings briefing.
The company earlier said affected materials were used in aircraft parts and in engine components. On Friday, Kanehana said it was still checking with customers receiving aircraft, engine and train parts, declining to comment further.
Japanese industry ministry officials have also said Kobe Steel materials were used in some defense equipment made by Kawasaki Heavy.
Asked about the fabrications, Kanehana said “as a company also based in Kobe, this is very regrettable and something that should not have been allowed to happen.”
He said Kawasaki Heavy “will consider whether to continue doing business with Kobe Steel after we have seen the results of their investigation into the causes and preventative measures.”
Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp, Japan’s biggest steelmaker, said on Friday it would maintain an alliance it has with Kobe Steel.
The alliance involves cooperating on steel supplies during shortages or maintenance of factories, while Nippon Steel has a 2.95 percent stake in Kobe Steel, with the latter holding 0.71 percent of its bigger rival’s shares.
Kobe Steel said on Thursday 88 out of 525 affected customers had yet to confirm its products were safe in the light of widespread tampering of specifications, but that it had not received any requests for recalls.
Japan’s third-largest steelmaker supplies manufacturers of cars, planes, trains and other products across the world and the data tampering has spiraled into one of Japan’s biggest industrial scandals.
Kobe Steel shares, which are down about 35 percent since the scandal broke, rose 0.6 percent on Friday, while the Nikkei 225 rose 1.3 percent.
Reporting by Sam Nussey, Osamu Tsukimori, Taiga Uranaka and Yuka Obayashi
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