“Scientists have known for nearly 200 years that certain materials can convert heat to electricity…” reports Science, describing research into an intriguing new approach: Refrigerators, boilers, and even lightbulbs continually dump heat into their surroundings. This “waste heat” could — in theory — be turned into electricity, as it is sometimes done with power plants,…

Graphics-chip maker Nvidia is reportedly nearing an agreement to acquire the semiconductor designer. …read more Source:: CNet

This week the Guardian published an essay written by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator, calling it “a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it.” For this esssay, the essay was fed the prompt, “I am not a human. I am…

The Nissan Leaf is the best-selling electric car of all time so far, thanks largely to it being one of the first mass produced all-electric EVs. While getting into the market early was great for Nissan, they haven’t made a lot of upgrades that other EV manufacturers have made and are starting to lose customers…

What student wouldn’t appreciate a good pair of headphones? Here’s a wide selection of top wireless models. …read more Source:: CNet

Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace writes: The FAA has begun looking into quality-control problems at Boeing for their wide-body jet Dreamliner that go back almost a decade. The Wall Street Journal reports that “the plane maker has told U.S. aviation regulators that it produced certain parts at its South Carolina facilities that failed to meet…

These are the best car rental companies based on price, customer satisfaction, service, rewards and more. …read more Source:: CNet

“Security researchers from Amsterdam have publicly detailed ‘BlindSide’ as a new speculative execution attack vector for both Intel and AMD processors,” reports Phoronix: BlindSide is self-described as being able to “mount BROP-style attacks in the speculative execution domain to repeatedly probe and derandomize the kernel address space, craft arbitrary memory read gadgets, and enable reliable…

Head into the weekend with a $50 stabilizer for your smartphone, a $40 Tribit Bluetooth speaker and more. …read more Source:: CNet

This week Krebs on Security reported that Microsoft “released updates to remedy nearly 130 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and supported software.” None of the flaws are known to be currently under active exploitation, but 23 of them could be exploited by malware or malcontents to seize complete control of Windows computers with…