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The boiling of fluids such as water is an energy-intensive step that is at the heart of many industrial processes, including most power plants, many chemical production systems, and even the cooling systems of electronic equipment. Improving the efficiency of systems that heat and evaporate water can significantly reduce their energy usage. Now researchers at […]

Wildfires and other stressors are killing trees in California’s mountains and open spaces — with fewer new trees filling the void, reports a University of California, Irvine (UCI) study. “Forests can’t keep up with these fires,” said study co-author Professor James Randerson of UCI Earth System Science. Since 1985, tree cover across the state has

The GCC Steering Committee approved the GCC Rust front-end, adding Rust language support to the GNU Compiler Collection. It will likely be merged into the mainline before GCC 13 is released next year. GCC Rust is still under active development, GCC 13 is expected to release a stable version in April next year, and GCC

The U.S. and Russia struck a deal on Friday: NASA astronauts will once again fly on Russian rockets, while Russian astronauts will begin traveling to the International Space Station on SpaceX rockets this fall. This agreement does not involve any money-related transactions. NASA and Russian officials say the move will ensure at least one Russian

Free hardware is increasingly scarce, but the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is still holding on to its philosophy, and its server configurations are quite old because newer generations of hardware contain non-free proprietary firmware. FSF recently said it replaced the last machine running a non-free BIOS. It currently has two data centers and over a

Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a law banning the use of crypto assets as a form of payment. The new law will take effect in ten days. There has been speculation that Russians may use cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions, but cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are in fact easy to track, and the US and

Satellite data analysis shows a significant decline in global wheat production . Weather factors such as drought and high temperatures will reduce the EU wheat harvest by 4.7 million tonnes from last year, bad news for countries looking to replace Ukrainian wheat. Three of the world’s top five wheat producers — the United States, France

Over the past few years, Google has spent billions of dollars developing a new operating system called Fuchsia, but so far it has had little success. The only achievement of Fuchsia is to use it as the underlying operating system for Nest devices. Google has tried to make Fuchsia run Android applications. For this reason,

In the past, if players wanted to buy additional content of BioWare games such as DLC, they could only use a virtual currency called BioWare Points. This virtual currency was rarely discounted, and the game itself was often much cheaper than DLC, causing players to complain. To partially solve this problem, EA has bundled BioWare

The Kremlin officially announced the dismissal of Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin and his replacement by Yuri Borisov. Both served as deputy prime ministers in charge of the defense industry, and being head of the astronautics is effectively a demotion. Rogozin has acted as aggressive as a wolf warrior over the past few months, making

Entity-listed drone maker DJI is lobbying the U.S. Congress to try to block a bill that would bar the federal government from procuring its drones. DJI has hired two lobbying firms—Han Yu International Law Firm and Vogel Group—to persuade members of Congress not to support the American Safe Drone Act (ASDA), which bars the U.S.

India plans to introduce a right-to-repair law to give consumers the ability to repair their devices through third parties, combating a growing culture of planned obsolescence. India’s Ministry of Consumer Affairs said it formed a committee to develop a legal framework for the right to repair, which will include mobile phones, tablets, consumer durables, cars

Artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI released DALL-E 2 in April, the successor to DALL-E due in 2021. Both AI systems can generate stunning images from natural language text descriptions; they can make images that look like photos, illustrations, paintings, animations, and basically any artistic style you can express in words. DALL-E 2 has many improvements