Volvo To Go All Electric By 2030

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Volvo’s entire car lineup will be fully electric by 2030, the Chinese-owned company said on Tuesday, joining a growing number of automakers planning to phase out fossil-fuel engines by the end of this decade. “I am totally convinced there will be no customers who really want to stay with a petrol engine,” Volvo…

Verizon Support Recommends Turning Off 5G to Conserve Battery Life

“Are you noticing your battery life is draining faster than normal?” tweeted Verizon Wireless customer support on Sunday, the Verge reports: Despite its relentless promotion of 5G phones and the fact that it spent more than $45 billion bidding on a new faster spectrum, Verizon support now is advising people on Twitter to turn off their phones’ 5G access to preserve…

Apple’s Powerful M1 MacBooks are Lowering The Resale Value of Older MacBooks

“The impressive performance and battery life gains of the new M1 MacBooks have created a historic discontinuity in the normally placid resale market,” reports ZDNet: Should you spend $800 for a one year old MacBook Air when for $200 more you could get a MacBook Air with several times the performance and 50 percent better battery life? That’s a question savvy…

Volkswagen CEO Says He’s Not Scared of Apple

Volkswagen’s CEO Herbert Diess isn’t intimidated by Apple, even though the tech company potentially has an electric car on the way. From a report: “The car industry is not a typical tech sector that you could take over at a single stroke,” Diess said in an interview with German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Apple will not manage that overnight.” For years,…

Nevada Department of Education Has No Direct Say In Who Gets Tesla’s $37.5 Million K-12 Donation

theodp writes: The Nevada Legislature in 2014 approved a $1.3 billion tax break — the largest tax break in the history of the state — to woo Tesla into locating its battery factory in Northern NV. In return, Tesla made a $37.5 million pledge to support K-12 education ($7.5M annually, for 5 years, beginning in 2018). Lawmakers are now expressing surprise…

The Nintendo Switch Can Now Run Android 10, Unofficially

Thanks to the hard work of the SwitchRoot team, it’s now possible to enjoy an Android 10-based LineageOS 17.1 port on your Nintendo Switch console. XDA Developers reports: The Android 10 release is based on the LineageOS 17.1 build for the NVIDIA SHIELD TV and brings many improvements over the previous release, including a much-needed deep sleep mode so the OS…

German Institute Develops ‘Powerpaste’ That Stores Hydrogen Energy At 10x the Density of a Lithium Battery

A German research organization has developed a magnesium-based “Powerpaste” with an energy density ten times more than current battery technology. Hackaday reports: We’ve been promised hydrogen-powered engines for some time now. One downside though is the need for hydrogen vehicles to have heavy high-pressure tanks. While a 700 bar tank and the accompanying fuel cell is acceptable for a city bus…

Spacewalkers Complete Battery Replacement Work, Install New Cameras on Space Station

Astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover floated back outside the International Space Station Monday and completed solar array battery replacement work that began four years ago. They also installed three new video cameras and made preparations for upcoming work to install new roll-out solar blankets to upgrade the lab’s power system. From a report: The work took less time than expected…

Spacewalkers complete 4 years of power upgrades for station

A pair of spacewalking astronauts completed a four-year effort to modernize the International Space Station’s power grid on Monday, installing one last battery. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-spacewalkers-years-power-station.html…