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From the game-changer department: CATL has unveiled a second-generation Shenxing battery capable of delivering a 520km range in just five minutes of charging, surpassing BYD's recent breakthrough and positioning both Chinese firms ahead of Western rivals in EV battery tech. The battery manufacturer also introduced a sodium-ion battery called Naxtra, offering up to 500km range for EVs and potential to diversify global energy resources. The Financial Times reports: The claims by the Chinese battery groups would put them ahead of major western rivals. At present, Tesla vehicles can be charged up to 200 miles (321km) in added range in 15 minutes, while Germany's Mercedes-Benz recently launched its all-electric CLA compact sedan, which can be charged for up to 325km within 10 minutes using a fast-charging station. [...] The second generation of the Shenxing battery, which boasts a range of 800km on one charge, can achieve a peak charging speed of 2.5km per second, the company said at a media event ahead of this week's Shanghai auto show.
"We look forward to collaborating with more industry leaders to push the limits of supercharging through true innovation," said CATL's chief technology officer Gao Huan, adding that he wanted the new batteries to become "the standard for electric vehicles." Analysts at Bernstein said the latest progress meant that charging speeds had more than doubled in the past year and "increased tenfold over the past 3-4 years." Huan said the new Shenxing battery would be installed in more than 67 EV models this year. He later told reporters that energy density would not be sacrificed as a trade-off for fast charging.
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the tit-for-tat department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: While most people enjoy PCs that are powered by SSDs, mechanical hard drives are still king in the datacenter. When these drives reach the end of their useful lives, they are usually shredded, and the key materials they're made of -- including several rare earth elements (REE) -- end up as e-waste. At the same time, countries are mining these same materials and emitting a lot of greenhouse gases in the process. And China, a major source of REE, recently announced export restrictions on seven of them, potentially limiting the U.S. tech industry's access to materials such as dysprosium, which is necessary for magnetic storage, motors, and generators.
[On Thursday], Western Digital announced that it has created a large-scale hard disk drive recycling program in concert with Microsoft and recycling-industry partners CMR (Critical Materials Recycling) and PedalPoint Recycling. The new process reclaims Rare Earth Oxides (REO) containing dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium from hard drives, along with aluminum, steel, gold, palladium, and copper. The REO reclamation takes place completely within the U.S. and those materials go back into the U.S. market.
Dubbed the Advanced Recycling and Rare Earth Material Capture Program, WD's initiative has already saved 47,000 pounds worth of hard drives, SSDs, and caddies from landfills or less-effective recycling programs. WD was able to achieve a more than 90% reclaim rate for REE and an 80% rate for all of the shredded material. The drives came from Microsoft's U.S. data centers where they were first shredded and then sent to PedalPoint for sorting and processing. Magnets and steel were then sent to CMR, which uses its acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technology to extract the rare earth elements.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the that's-embarrassing department: Cursor AI users recently encountered an ironic AI failure when the platform's support bot falsely claimed a non-existent login restriction policy. Co-founder Michael Truell apologized for the issue, clarified that no such policy exists, and attributed the mishap to AI hallucination and a session management bug. The Register reports: Users of the Cursor editor, designed to generate and fix source code in response to user prompts, have sometimes been booted from the software when trying to use the app in multiple sessions on different machines. Some folks who inquired about the inability to maintain multiple logins for the subscription service across different machines received a reply from the company's support email indicating this was expected behavior. But the person on the other end of that email wasn't a person at all, but an AI support bot. And it evidently made that policy up.
In an effort to placate annoyed users this week, Michael Truell co-founder of Cursor creator Anysphere, published a note to Reddit to apologize for the snafu. "Hey! We have no such policy," he wrote. "You're of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines. Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line AI support bot. We did roll out a change to improve the security of sessions, and we're investigating to see if it caused any problems with session invalidation." Truell added that Cursor provides an interface for viewing active sessions in its settings and apologized for the confusion.
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From the mature-moves department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Whisky, a gaming-focused front-end for Wine's Windows compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer's toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you'll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers' CrossOver product.
Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break. "I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it's always a balancing act between my school work and dev work," Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars. The Whisky project has "been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it," Marovitz said, having received "a lot of questions" about the project status. [...] "Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," Marovitz wrote on the Whisky site.
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From the end-game department: Google is confronting an existential threat as the U.S. government tries to break up the company as punishment for turning its revolutionary search engine into an illegal monopoly. From a report: The drama began to unfold Monday in a Washington courtroom as three weeks of hearings kicked off to determine how the company should be penalized for operating a monopoly in search. In its opening arguments, federal antitrust enforcers also urged the court to impose forward-looking remedies to prevent Google from using artificial intelligence to further its dominance. "This is a moment in time, we're at an inflection point, will we abandon the search market and surrender them to control of the monopolists or will we let competition prevail and give choice to future generations," said Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist.
The proceedings, known in legal parlance as a "remedy hearing," are set to feature a parade of witnesses that includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to order a radical shake-up that would ban Google from striking the multibillion dollar deals with Apple and other tech companies that shield its search engine from competition, share its repository of valuable user data with rivals and force a sale of its popular Chrome browser. Google's attorney, John Schmidtlein, said in his opening statement that the court should take a much lighter touch. He said the government's heavy-handed proposed remedies wouldn't boost competition but instead unfairly reward lesser rivals with inferior technology. "Google won its place in the market fair and square," Schmidtlein said.
A new report has exposed a “true crime” community of Roblox players who reenact real-life murders. A part of this group is reportedly dedicated to digitally recreating and playing through famous school shootings within the extremely popular free-to-play game.
We all saw it coming. Once John Cena shocked the wrestling world by announcing his retirement after 2025 at Money in the Bank last July, him winning his record-breaking 17th World Championship was preordained. Wrestling fans around the world were on board with the WWE engineering a championship run for a man who…
All hell broke loose in the Pokémon community last October when leaked internal documents, game builds, and more from developer Game Freak appeared online. Fans got a front row seat to everything from upcoming project codenames to a rapidly meme-ified Typhlosion backstory. It may have been the biggest leak in Pokémon…
If you’ve been wanting to build your physical movie collection or just want to watch some new movies for cheap, then I have some good news. Amazon’s fantastic 3 for $33 4K UHD Blu-ray sale is back. It’s the perfect time to add some sharp looking classics and new hits to your movie collection.
When I heard Ubisoft claim that Assassin’s Creed Shadows would be Steam Deck verified at launch, I responded by saying “yeah right” with all the sass I could muster. I’ve tested a lot of games on Steam Deck here at Kotaku. I’ve seen games that should be slam dunks on the device fall short, and even games with the…
A flood of well-made, affordable gaming handhelds out of China has made the last few years a great time to be a retro enthusiast. Many of them are made by Anbernic, which offers everything from $50 Game Boy-style throwbacks to higher-end modern Android-powered handhelds. Or at least it used to. Fans in the U.S. will…
You’ll unlock a ton of equipment while playing through Monster Hunter Wilds’ campaign, including multiple mantles with unique perks. One such is Corrupted Mantle, which was recently nerfed to a more balanced state instead of being overpowered as hell. The recent nerf, combined with its compromising effects and…
Epic and Lucasfilm announced the next Star Wars-themed season of Fortnite starts on May 2. And one of the new characters skins being added to the popular free-to-play shooter is Darth Jar Jar, a fan-created meme character from a 2015 Reddit post. We live in the weirdest timeline.
Last night’s episode of The Last of Us was pretty brutal, especially if you didn’t already know what was coming from playing the games. If you, like me, would like a palate cleanser for all this anguish and violence, perhaps I can interest you in lead actors Pedro Pascal, Kaitlyn Dever, and Bella Ramsey being chummy…
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