New battery chemistry results in first rechargeable zinc-air battery

Enlarge (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Most of the disposable batteries you'll come across are technically termed alkaline batteries. They work at high pH and typically use zinc as the charge carrier. Zinc is great because it's very cheap, can be used to make one of the two electrodes, and, in the right context, allows the use of air at the other electrode. These latter two items simplify the battery, allowing it to be more compact and lighter weight—so far, attempts to do similar things with lithium batteries have come up short.

The problem with all of this is that the batteries are disposable for a good reason: the chemistry of discharging doesn't really allow things to work in reverse. Carbon dioxide from the air reacts with the electrolyte, forming carbonates that block one electrode. And the zinc doesn't re-deposit neatly on the electrode it came from, instead creating spiky structures called dendrites that can short out the battery.

Now, an international team has figured out how to make zinc batteries rechargeable. The answer, it seems, involves getting rid of the alkaline electrolyte that gave the batteries their name.

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Activist hedge fund advises Intel to outsource CPU manufacturing

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Activist hedge fund Third Point has taken a stake of nearly $1 billion in Intel and called on the chipmaker to consider shedding its manufacturing operations, throwing a core part of its strategy into question.

The firm with $15 billion in assets run by Daniel Loeb made a number of demands in a letter sent to Intel’s chairman Omar Ishrak on Tuesday and seen by the Financial Times.

In the letter, Mr Loeb said that Intel was “once the gold standard for innovative microprocessor manufacturing” but had fallen behind manufacturing competitors in East Asia such as TSMC and Samsung.

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Basking shark families go on road trips in search of fine dining

Enlarge / Basking sharks in the aquarium, Loro Parque, Tenerife, Canary Islands, 2007. (credit: Heritage Images | Getty Images)

Picture the scene. Swimming off Scotland’s west coast during a summer holiday you notice a large dark shark nearly 10 metres long headed towards you. A prominent triangular dorsal fin cuts the surface, the powerful rhythmically beating tail driving it silently through the cloudy green depths. You’re transfixed by a cavernous mouth large enough to swallow a seal.

Musing this may be your last swim, it might be surprising to learn this leviathan of the deep is a harmless yet endangered gentle giant. It has little interest in humans, focusing on some unseen bounty of the warmer summer waters: zooplankton, the tiny creatures found near the surface of the ocean.

This is the basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus), once common off western Europe, feeding on the annual plankton bonanza of the European shelf.

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Ars Technica’s 2021 Deathwatch—2020 was just the beginning

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Here at Ars Technica, we would like to formally congratulate you for surviving the year that was 2020. COVID-19 may have changed everything about normal life in the last 12 months, but things are looking up for 2021. A vaccine is currently rolling out, a more science-friendly US administration will take office in January, and maybe we can even look forward to a return to normal public gatherings sometime this year. We're going to be fine. [Editor's note: We're trying to be optimistic here.]

Unfortunately, you probably can't say the same for some of the companies we write about as we head into 2021. The pandemic year has taken a toll on the tech industry, too, delaying some things we thought were happening in 2020 (like a conclusion to Oracle v. Google) and accelerating other changes we all saw coming (like record streaming numbers). So to walk you through the companies staring down a rough new year, welcome back to the annual Ars Technica Deathwatch, 2021 edition.

If you haven't previously visited the Deathwatch during Ars Editor Emeritus Sean Gallagher's tenure, please know: As usual, we're being a bit dramatic with the name "Deathwatch." This list is not predicting that the following companies will drop dead precisely within the next calendar year. Bankruptcy laws, acquisitions, and other accounting shenanigans make exact corporate death dates either very unpredictable or agonizingly slow, but we can at least make some educated guesses about the companies, products, and services that are facing down a terrible 2021.

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That time physicist John Wheeler left classified H-bomb documents on a train

Enlarge / In 1953, the eminent physicist and H-bomb advocate took an ill-fated overnight train from Philadelphia to Washington, DC, that would indirectly lead to the Robert Oppenheimer security hearing. (credit: Michail_Petrov-96/iStock/Getty Images)

In the popular science world, physicist John Wheeler is probably best known for popularizing the term "black hole," although his research spanned a broad range of fields, including relativity, quantum theory, and nuclear fission. He also worked on Project Matterhorn B in the early 1950s, the controversial US effort to develop a hydrogen bomb. In January 1953, Wheeler accidentally left a highly classified document concerning that program on a train as he traveled from his Princeton, New Jersey home to Washington, DC. It was a stereotypical "absent-minded professor" moment, and one with significant national security implications.

Alex Wellerstein told the story in detail late last year in an article in Physics Today. Wellerstein is a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, where his research centers on the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear history. (Fun fact: he served as a historical consultant on the short-lived TV series, Manhattan.) His forthcoming book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, is slated for publication in April 2021 by the University of Chicago Press.

A self-described "dedicated archive rat," Wellerstein maintains several homemade databases to keep track of all the digitized files he's accumulated over the years from official, private, and personal archives. The bits that don't find their way into academic papers typically end up as items on his blog, Restricted Data, where he also maintains the NUKEMAP, an interactive tool that enables users to model the impact of numerous types of nuclear weapons on the geographical location of their choice.

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Corellium notches partial victory in Apple iOS copyright case

Enlarge / Just some of the iDevice types that Corellium didn't break one law—but may still have broken another—by emulating. (credit: Kristin Lee | Getty Images)

Security firm Corellium, which develops software that researchers can use to analyze Apple products, has been handed a partial victory in Apple's lawsuit against it, as a judge ruled that its creation of virtual iOS environments does not violate Apple's copyrights.

Corellium has since 2017 been creating iOS environments that can run on desktop computers, for use as a research and development tool. Apple sued Corellium in 2019, alleging, "Corellium's true goal is profiting off its blatant infringement" of iOS, and claiming that the firm "encourages its users to sell any discovered information [about system vulnerabilities] on the open market to the highest bidder."

Earlier this year, Apple amended the suit to include allegations that Corellium's work violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) prohibition circumventing or breaking DRM.

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With the right catalyst, we might make jet fuel from CO₂

Enlarge (credit: Bernal Saborio)

Techniques to take atmospheric CO₂ and turn it into a fuel provide a climate-friendly alternative to exploiting fossil fuels—they may releases CO₂ back into the air when burned, but there's no net change. This includes biofuels crops, but can extend to industrial processes that directly involve CO₂. As processes that capture CO₂ from ambient air become more economical, so will the potential value of that CO₂ as a resource for fuels.

There are a few ways to go about making fuel, but all require considerable energy because CO₂ is a stable molecule—reversing the combustion reaction to make a new fuel doesn’t happen for free. But there's an additional challenge: designing a process tuned to produce the exact type of fuel you want.

One way to do that is with a catalyst—a substance that guides the chemical reactions without being consumed by them. With the help of one catalyst, captured CO₂ plus hydrogen gas might primarily be turned into methane; a different catalyst might shift the primary product towards the larger molecules of liquid fuels.

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McConnell introduces bill tying $2K stimulus checks to Section 230 repeal

Enlarge / Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), has thrown a wrench into the expected Congressional over-ride of President Trump's veto of the National Defense Authorization Act. (credit: Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has thrown a wrench into Congressional approval of an increase in government stimulus relief checks from $600 to $2,000. The House voted overwhelmingly on Monday to increase the payments, as President Trump had advocated for. Instead of voting on the House bill, however, McConnell blocked it and instead introduced a new bill tying higher stimulus payments to Section 230's full repeal, according to Verge, which obtained a copy of the bill's text.

It's a tangled web, but the move is tied to Trump's veto of the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes $740 billion in defense spending for the upcoming government fiscal year. "No one has worked harder, or approved more money for the military, than I have," Trump said in a statement about the veto, claiming falsely that the military "was totally depleted" when he took office in 2017. "Your failure to terminate the very dangerous national security risk of Section 230 will make our intelligence virtually impossible to conduct without everyone knowing what we are doing at every step."

Section 230 has nothing to do with military intelligence; it's a 1996 law designed to protect Internet platforms. At its highest level, the short snippet of law basically does two things. First, it grants Internet service providers, including online platforms, broad immunity from being held legally liable for content third-party users share. Second, it grants those same services legal immunity from the decisions they make around content moderation—no matter how much or how little they choose to do.

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New virus variant found in Colorado while UK struggles to limit it

Enlarge / UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson poses for a photograph with a vial of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University COVID-19 candidate vaccine. (credit: WPA Pool/Getty Images)

This week, the UK released more data on the newly evolved strain of SARS-CoV-2, providing further evidence that it spreads more readily than previously circulating strains of the virus. Despite efforts to keep it limited to the UK, most public health experts expected it was already too late—a fear confirmed by the discovery of cases in Colorado. There is some good news, however, as the UK's data indicates the new strain doesn't appear to be more dangerous to people once they become infected.

In another bit of good news, health authorities in the UK approved the use of another vaccine, this one from a collaboration between Oxford University and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. While the vaccine doesn't appear to be as effective as the two others already in wide use, the addition of another supplier ensures that the UK should now have enough vaccine for its entire population early next year.

New, but decidedly not improved

Because the coronavirus accumulates mutations over time, there are now many distinct strains of SARS-CoV-2 circulating. The one that's now causing concern first drew the attention of medical authorities in the UK because it drove a wave of new infections at a time where targeted lockdown policies were reducing the levels of other strains. By the middle of December, the strain had a name (B.1.1.7), was circulating widely within the UK, and had already been spotted elsewhere in Europe. But nearly everything else about the strain was an open question, including whether it was actually more infectious, or had simply ended up circulating within groups that were more likely to pass it on to others.

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Pandemic-boosted remote workforce may be in for a shock at tax time

Enlarge / Depending where you live and work, you may need at least this many devices to sort your tax situation out this spring. (credit: Boonchai Wedmakawand | Getty Images)

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a trend that was already well underway: employers letting their workers perform their jobs remotely, from home, most or all of the time. But even if you and your employer both know exactly where you live and work, you may be surprised to learn that state departments of taxation can have some very different ideas about where "here" is. As a result, Texans, Utahns, and Arkansawyers who work for New York- or Massachusetts-based companies will have income taxes withheld from their paychecks, even if they've never set foot in the home office.

In the wake of the pandemic, dozens of major companies are embracing employees' desire to stay remote, increasing their support for working from home permanently. Some businesses have even closed offices or let leases lapse, counting on a physically distant, flexible workforce to reduce their real estate needs.

In many ways this can be a win/win: employers can save overhead costs on expensive square footage in high-demand cities, and employees can save time and money by skipping the commute and dialing in from, basically, anywhere they want. New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are expensive; maybe you want to move to Montana and dial in from the woods, or get a nice little ocean-view place in Florida. Unfortunately, as far as the state is concerned, your beachside cabana may as well be squarely in the middle of Manhattan, and you will be taxed as such.

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