Elon Musk, who recently bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter, has made an offer to buy the company outright for $54.20 per share in cash in a hostile takeover of roughly $43 billion, according to a new report from Bloomberg News and documents filed with the SEC. Musk said in the SEC filing that if his offer isn’t accepted,…
“My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” Musk said in a filing.
Researchers have revealed a new thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell that converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency, performance nearly on par with traditional steam turbine power plants. The cells have the potential to be used in grid-scale “thermal batteries,” generating energy dependably with no moving parts.
Thermophotovoltaic cells work by heating semiconducting materials enough to significantly boost the energy of photons. At high enough energies, those photos can kick an electron across the material’s “bandgap,” generating electricity. So far, TPV cells have achieved up to just 32 percent efficiency because they operate at lower temperatures.
By contrast, the new design from MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) takes power from white-hot heat sources between 1,900 to 2,400 degree Celsius (3,452 to 4,352 degrees F). To do that, it uses “high-bandgap” metal alloys sitting over a slightly lower-bandgap alloy.
The high-bandgap layer captures the highest-energy photons from a heat source and converts them to electricity, while lower-energy photons pass through the first layer and add to the voltage. Any photons that run the two-layer gauntlet are reflected by a mirror back to the heat source to avoid wasting energy.
This is an absolutely critical step on the path to proliferate renewable energy and get to a fully decarbonized grid.
Measuring the efficiency using a heat flux sensor, the team found that power varied with temperature. Between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, the new TPV design produced electricity with about 40 percent efficiency.
Steam turbines can deliver the same efficiency, but are far more complicated and restricted to lower temperatures. “One of the advantages of solid-state energy converters are that they can operate at higher temperatures with lower maintenance costs because they have no moving parts,” MIT Professor Asegun Henry told MIT News. “They just sit there and reliably generate electricity.”
In a grid-scale thermal battery, the system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources like the sun and store it in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When needed, the TPV cells could then convert that heat to electricity and send it to the power grid. The experimental cell was just a square centimeter, so the team would have to ramp that up to around 10,000 square feet for grid-level power, but the technology already exists to create cells on that scale, Henry notes.
“Thermophotovoltaic cells were the last key step toward demonstrating that thermal batteries are a viable concept,” he said. “This is an absolutely critical step on the path to proliferate renewable energy and get to a fully decarbonized grid.”
Crypto investor Sina Estavi bought an NFT of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet ever for $2.9 million in March of 2021. And after a year of constant hype for NFTs, most people would naturally assume Estavi might be able to turn a nice profit on his investment by now. But most people would be wrong.
The truck burst into flames and nearly sailed right off an overpass.
Nikon has released the firmware 2.0 update for its flagship mirrorless Z9 camera that gives it significant new video powers including 8.3K 60p RAW. It also offers benefits to photographers with autofocus and EVF enhancements along with a new feature that pre-captures photos before you hit the shutter button.
The 45-megapixel Z9 was already a powerful mirrorless camera for video, but the new enhancements put it ahead of all rivals, including Sony’s A1 and Canon’s EOS R5, at least on the spec sheet. The biggest update is the addition of 12-bit RAW video at up to 8.3K 60p using Nikon’s new RAW video format called N-RAW, along with 12-bit ProRes RAW HQ capture at up to 4.1K 60p.
N-RAW “records a vast amount of scene information, yet is a significantly smaller file size, allowing for much more recording time and [a] less intensive workflow,” Nikon wrote in a press release. The files take up about half the space of equivalent ProRes RAW HQ files (ProRes RAW HQ 12-bit, 4K 24p video has a data rate of 80-140 MB/s). At the same time, they contain a large amount of detail and up to 68 billion colors, something that’s very helpful for VFX, editing and color correction.
A company called IntoPix previously said that Nikon would be using its TicoRAW technology for RAW video. When the firmware is released, N-RAW will be supported on DaVinci Resolve and Edius, but not Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro or other editing apps.
On top of 8.3K 60p, the Z9 can capture N-RAW 4.1K 120p, 60p, 30p and 24p (plus equivalent PAL formats) in full frame FX mode, 5.3K 60p, 30p and 24p with a 1.5X crop and 3.8K 120p with a 2.3X crop. It also creates an MP4 proxy file, allowing for “previews, quick transfers or edits on the fly,” according to Nikon.
If you’d rather shoot ProRes RAW HQ, 8K isn’t an option as capture is limited to 4.1K 60p, though crop options are available. Nikon has also introduced an “extended oversampling mode” delivering 2:1 oversampled 4K 60fps footage from an 8K capture. That setting requires a very fast CFexpress card, limited to ProGrade’s Cobalt 650GB or 325GB memory cards. Nikon also launched its own CFexpress card today, the 660GB MC-CF660G, arriving in June 2022 with up to 1700 MB/s and 1500 MB/s read/write speeds.
Video operation is also improved with several new features. The most requested is the addition of a waveform display that greatly helps visualize exposure, particularly with in log modes. You can also put a red frame around the display during recording and adjust the magnification. Other features include finer ISO increments for smoother transitions and a “Fast AF On” function that lets you quickly change the AF speed without diving into menus — another much-asked-for setting.
On the photography side, the Z9 now has a pre-buffer option for JPEGs only, at 30fps full resolution and 11-megapixel 120 fps modes. It captures buffered images when the shutter button is half press pressed, keeping up to a second of images when you fully press it. It also retains up to 4 seconds afterwards.
Meanwhile, Nikon boosted the EVF’s refresh rate to a smoother 120 fps, bringing it in line with rivals like Sony and Canon — though enabling the setting will reduce battery life. It also added custom Wide AF zones, letting you select which parts of your scene are active and create two user-defined zones. That way, you can keep the AF and subject tracking in a defined area to improve focus reliability.
The update is one of the most impressive I’ve seen and significantly improves the $5,500 Z9’s functionality and desirability. Features like MP4 proxies are usually only seen on pro video cameras. However, Nikon has nothing to lose by making the Z9 a limit-free video powerhouse, because unlike Sony and Canon, it has no professional video lineup to cannibalize. The firmware 2.0 upgrade will be available to download for free starting on April 20, 2022 at Nikon’s website.
Google has finally countered Apple’s “Move to iOS” app by releasing “Switch to Android” for iOS on the App Store, confirming earlier rumors. As the name indicates, it’s designed to help iPhone and iPad users import contacts, photos, calendars and video to an Android device. It also shows users how to turn off iMessage in favor of Android messaging and transfer photos/videos by connecting to iCloud.
Google dropped the new app without a lot of fanfare, as TechCrunch notes. On its Switch to Android website, the app is still not mentioned and can only be found on the App Store with a direct link — search results still turn up nothing.
The app is a big improvement over the current system, which requires you to back up photos, video, calendar and contacts using the Google Drive iOS app. It was first spotted last summer by 9to5Google in code tucked into Google’s Data Transfer Tool, and seen in a more recent release with the ability to import iCloud video and photos into Google Photos.
Apple’s equivalent app arrived way back in September 2015, so Google certainly took its time responding. “Move to iOS” works in much the same way, helping users import photos, video, messages, contacts and more over to an iOS device. One Android device maker, Samsung, has its own device migration app as well called Smart Switch, helping you switch from an iPhone or other Android device to a Galaxy smartphone. However, it’s only available on Google Play or its own Galaxy store and doesn’t run on iOS.
The “Late Show” host is number one in news about number two.
Amazon will charge US sellers using its fulfillment services a 5 percent fuel and inflation fee for the first time. It will add the fees to what it already collects from third-party sellers using the Fulfillment by Amazon service to store, pack and ship their goods starting on April 28th, the e-commerce giant wrote on its website. Amazon already raised its fulfillment fees back in January by an average of around 5.2 percent, as noted by Bloomberg.
In an email sent to sellers, Amazon said it has experienced “significant cost increases and absorbed them, wherever possible” to reduce the impact on its sellers. When it raised its fulfillment fees earlier this year, the company said it more than doubled its US fulfillment capacity since the start of the pandemic, hired over 628,000 people and increased its starting wage in the US. It raised its fulfillment fees back then to offset its higher operating costs going forward.
Now, Amazon told CNBC in a statement that while it expected a return to normalcy this year after COVID-19 restrictions have started lifting, “fuel and inflation have presented further challenges.” Inflation in the US surged to 8.5 percent in March from the same period last year, according to the Labor Department, which is the highest increase the country has seen over the past four decades. Gas prices, as most people know, reached new heights after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Amazon explained that it chose to impose a fuel and inflation surcharge instead of raising its fees permanently again, because it’s “unclear if these inflationary costs will go up or down, or for how long they will persist.” The spokesperson said its surcharge will cost 24 cents per unit, which is lower than the fuel surcharge imposed by UPS and FedEx. All the same, some sellers told Bloomberg that they have to raise prices to remain in business, so buyers can most likely expect to pay more for their purchases in the near future.
The UN report said these poorer countries were already struggling to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and a lack of access to adequate funding.
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