fidzu : computers

"In a milestone for energy storage technology, Peak Energy has selected Sacramento, California, as the home of America's first manufacturing facility dedicated to grid-scale sodium-ion battery systems," according to the sustainability news site Intelligent Living. The move "represents the first large-scale test of whether sodium-ion technology can deliver on its promise of cheaper, safer, and more sustainable grid storage at a scale that actually moves the needle for the U.S. electricity system." The 183,000-square-foot plant, representing a $71 million investment, will produce up to 4 gigawatt-hours of storage annually when production begins in early 2027. That is enough output each year to serve nearly four million homes, and it signals that sodium-ion technology has moved from laboratory promise to commercial reality... Peak Energy, founded in 2023 by former engineers from Tesla, Enovix, and Fluence, announced its Sacramento site selection on July 8, 2026, after a nationwide search that ultimately chose California over Texas... The factory is designed as a system assembly plant rather than a cell fabrication facility. Peak will receive sodium-ion cells, manufactured to its specifications by Chinese suppliers, and assemble them into complete 30-foot-long, 100,000-pound containerized storage systems. Each GS1.1 unit stores 3.1 megawatt-hours, enough to fully charge more than 40 electric vehicles... In the United States, Peak Energy has emerged as the most advanced grid-scale player. It has secured more than 6 GWh of customer commitments, including a landmark deal with Jupiter Power for up to 4.75 GWh through 2030, valued at up to $500 million. Energy Vault has committed to 1.5 GWh of sodium-ion storage for AI data center applications, and RWE Americas has already deployed Peak's first grid-scale system on the MISO grid in Wisconsin, energized in March 2026. General Motors is codeveloping sodium-ion cells with Peak at its Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center in Michigan, testing 170- and 190-amp-hour cell formats with domestic production targeted for 2028. China, however, remains the global heavyweight. CATL, the world's largest battery manufacturer, unveiled its TENER Sodium energy storage system in June 2026 with a rated cycle life of 15,000 cycles and a projected 25-to-30-year service life. In April 2026, CATL signed a 60 GWh supply agreement with HyperStrong, the largest sodium-ion deal announced to date. BYD, HiNa Battery, and Farasis are also shipping commercial sodium-ion products, including batteries for a $400 electric scooter already on sale in China... Peak Energy's first commercial shipments from Sacramento are slated for the first quarter of 2027, with contracted deliveries to Jupiter Power, Energy Vault, and RWE Americas following shortly after. The company has publicly stated it needs to deploy over $100 million in product in 2026, up from roughly $10 million in 2025, and the Sacramento facility is sized to meet that demand. At the system level, sodium-ion grid storage is already operating. Peak's pilot installation at the SolarTAC testing facility in Watkins, Colorado, stores 3.5 MWh and has been running since 2025. The RWE Americas deployment in Wisconsin, energized in March 2026, marks the first time sodium-ion batteries have backed up the MISO grid, which serves 15 central U.S. states and the Canadian province of Manitoba... According to the International Energy Agency, sodium-ion manufacturing capacity announcements have accelerated sharply since 2024, with global pipelines now exceeding 400 GWh annually... Researchers are also pushing the technology forward. In May 2026, a team at the National University of Singapore published a breakthrough in all-solid-state sodium batteries that could further reduce costs and eliminate the flammable liquid electrolytes found in both lithium-ion and current sodium-ion designs. "The technology's sweet spot is utility-scale, multi-megawatt-hour installations," the article points out, "where the system-level cost savings from passive cooling and longer cycle life outweigh the per-cell energy density penalty..." The article also points out observations from the American Battery Leadership Coalition, an industry group advocating for sodium-ion policy support, that sodium-ion batteries can be built almost entirely from American materials, including coal, sawdust, and agricultural waste. This week Syntropic Power and UNIGRID Inc. also announced "a major partnership to commercialize UNIGRID's proprietary sodium chromium oxide (NaCrO2) battery technology across North America," reports Interesting Engineering, "targeting one gigawatt-hour (1 GWh) of deployments in 2027. The technology could be used in residential, virtual power plant, and large-scale stationary grid applications..." Independent testing by the ISO-accredited Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Battery Development Center revealed something surprising. UNIGRID's 210Ah cells displayed endothermic behavior during charging. This means the chemical reaction actually absorbs heat rather than dumping it into the environment. Coupled with a 97.9% cell-level round-trip energy efficiency and remarkable thermal stability under abuse testing, the battery stays cool on its own. The 210Ah sodium-ion cells deliver up to 218Ah of discharge capacity. It demonstrated exceptional durability, retaining over 99% of its capacity after 1,000 full discharge cycles, as well as heat-absorbing behavior during charging. These validated strengths allow Syntropic to optimize its product designs, enabling platforms like GridSpan [its modular DC platform designed for large-scale energy applications with flexible discharge durations ranging from 20 minutes to 20 hours] to operate safely and efficiently at grid scale without needing complex mechanical cooling systems... Commercialization kicks off with Tenet, a safety-focused, wall-mounted system for residential, light-commercial, and virtual power plant uses... Relying on abundant and widely distributed raw materials like sodium and chromium - rather than lithium and cobalt - protects manufacturers from geopolitical price spikes and material shortages. Apart from offering an alternative to lithium, a successful rollout will demonstrate that the most durable energy storage is the kind that could stay cool entirely on its own. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Aug 2026 7:43pm GMT

The Dallas Business Journal reported Monday that the U.S. multinational paper goods company Kimberly-Clark announced "that its researchers identified and advanced patented technology transforming fibers from hesperaloe, a low-water-use plant with pointy leaves that thrives in the southwest region of the country, into material for paper towels." Discovering an alternative to conventional wood fiber "could reshape how the company, and the industry at large, manufactures products," according to article. And the move comes "amid growing pressure on manufacturers regarding their reliance on wood fibre from freshly felled trees," reports The Telegraph. "Campaigners claim that more than one million trees are cut down every day..." Unlike trees, hesperaloe can be grown on dry, low-quality farmland unsuitable for most food crops and harvested much more quickly. Kimberly-Clark said it had tested more than 70 potential materials before settling on hesperaloe. Earlier candidates included wheat straw, corn waste, seaweed, algae and chicken feathers. The US consumer goods giant will now develop the fibre at a pilot factory in Yuma, Arizona, working with local growers to determine whether the crop can be cultivated for commercial use in its tissue products. "This represents an exciting moonshot for Kimberly-Clark and the culmination of more than two decades of materials and plant science expertise," said Craig Slavtcheff, who is helping develop the new toilet paper. However, the company said products made from hesperaloe remained years away from supermarket shelves, with further research needed before the fibre could be produced at the scale required for global manufacturing. The US-based company has invested about $250m (£190m) in the project and filed more than 30 patents linked to the technology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Aug 2026 6:34pm GMT

The Washington Post shared surprising news this week about five top AI companies. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle "are spending so much on developing AI and delivering it to customers that they're expected to bleed cash in the coming year, according to a Washington Post analysis of data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence." Free cash flow, which measures the cash left over after paying expenses and AI infrastructure costs, is now expected to shrink to almost nothing for the five companies combined in 2026, and decline again to negative $125 billion the following year... AI spending by Amazon and Google pushed the companies to an ignominious milestone: They lost more cash in the past three months than any other large U.S. companies, according to S&P Global data. Investment analysts expect Elon Musk's SpaceX to show even worse cash bleeding this week.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Aug 2026 5:34pm GMT

About 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous.

08 Aug 2026 11:30am GMT

Open source WeatherNext model can make accurate predictions with lower-resolution weather data.

08 Aug 2026 11:05am GMT

Copernicus Browser adds wildfire visualization amid record wildfire season.

07 Aug 2026 9:48pm GMT

There's been a small flurry of articles from a variety of sources, all talking about more or less the same thing: Microsoft is trying to explain why Windows 11 is as difficult to develop as it is, in turn justifying why it's become such a mess over the years. I'm picking this one from Windows Central, which is an interview with Microsoft's CVP of Design and Research for Windows and Devices, Marcus Ash. Taking the long, still ongoing transition from the Control Panel to the Settings application as an example, Ash explains why this is such a long and difficult process. Unsurprisingly, Ash says that the reason this has taken so long is that Microsoft prides itself on compatibility with legacy tooling and workflows, so it can't just rush in and modernize everything without first ensuring the modern replacements maintain functionality with what came before. ↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central This isn't really news to anyone. One of Windows' prized strong points is its often excellent backwards compatibility. This doesn't just apply to individual applications, but also to things like software makers adding settings panels to Control Panel, or complex business applications expecting certain entry points into the Control Panel to exist - and much, much more, all over the operating system. I'm exaggerating, but you can't so much as move a single pixel in the taskbar without breaking some component of some obscure corporate middleware suite from 1999 that somehow still functions as the beating heart of like 187 Fortune 500 companies. Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft is going about this the wrong way entirely. Of course, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I feel like Microsoft has so man tools at its disposal to deal with this issue that it's not really using to their fullest potential. Specifically, Windows itself has a number of incredibly capable tools in its toolbox to make sure any application ever written for Windows and even DOS, regardless of how many bits it requires, can run. Windows has advanced and highly capable tools for virtualisation and containerisation, and on top of that, Windows NT has a very capable personalities system that feels underutilised, too. Couldn't these tools be harnessed to effectively isolate the entire backwards compatibility problem from the actual Windows operating system people use, and turn them into optional components installed and activated when required by an older application? Isolating backwards compatibility this way would then leave the Windows team much less shackled and more free to improve Windows at every level without having to worry so much about maintaining backwards compatibility. If the components an older application needs are virtualised, containerised, or part of a Windows NT personality and thus frozen in time, the Windows team would be free to work on the "current" version of said component without breaking the application in question. I feel like Microsoft has tried to use these technologies to address backwards compatibility in the past, but in true Microsoft fashion, it always seems to do so halfheartedly, without any real coherent vision behind it. Again, I wish to reiterate I'm by no means qualified enough to make any definitive statements about this, but it sure does feel like Microsoft is underutilising a lot of the tools it already has at its disposal.

06 Aug 2026 10:20pm GMT

Once upon a time in the mysterious lands of Mexico, starting in Fall 1996 and through Spring 1997, I coded a windowed operating system in 32-bit machine code, fit it into a floppy, and jumped in excitement as it boot up. Of course, I knew it was a great thing because you couldn't boot Windows 3.1 or GEM from a floppy disk, but I was very far from knowing how so cool it was. Unfortunately, not a thing I could give away for everyone to see, as it was written for a homebrew computer based on the Am29000 processor. Let's go back to my memories, some notes, and the ride of discovering again what I forgotten. ↫ Óscar Toledo Gutiérrez Trying to summarise this absolute gem of an article and all of the amazing effort and skill involved would be a huge disservice to Óscar Toledo Gutiérrez. I enjoyed this so much. Be sure to try out his custom emulator of a custom computer to run his custom operating system.

06 Aug 2026 9:28pm GMT

Two years ago, I was Porting my JavaScript Game Engine to C for No Reason. I have since found a reason: making a new N64 game! The result is Xibalba 64 - a Wolfenstein 3D-like FPS. Modretro agreed to publish the game as a physical launch title for their M64 (a modern N64 clone), complete with cartridge, packaging and manual! ↫ Dominic Szablewski The article details the development process, from setting up the correct tooling to actually getting the game to play on a real Nintendo 64, and everything in between - including optimising the game to get it to run at a steady 60fps. The biggest issue is that the Nintendo 64 is quite a complex and quirky console, and in order to develop for it, you needed access to Nintendo's officially sanctioned platform library, libultra. These days, though, there's an open source alternative, libdragon, enabling homebrew development. It's awesome that, thanks to the hard work of volunteers, people can still develop top-notch games for something like the Nintendo 64. If we had left it up to Nintendo, we'd be seeing nothing of the sort today.

06 Aug 2026 9:06pm GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT