Here are some tech news videos I've enjoyed over the past month:

"Scientists in Copenhagen have successfully demonstrated a chip that can send enough data every second to cope with the entire internet's traffic, all at a fraction of the energy demand."

"A New Way to Achieve Nuclear Fusion" - this isn't related to the fusion announcement by the government last month, it's a different company that came out of stealth mode afterwards.

"6K Energy has developed an innovative process to produce battery material that leapfrogs legacy battery material processing technology with proven 6,000-degree Kelvin microwave plasma technology, known as UniMelt®. 6K’s UniMelt process can produce multiple chemistries ultra-fast and at substantially lower cost with significantly less environmental impact than the current process. 6K’s UniMelt can produce battery material using 90% less water, generating zero solid and liquid waste and significantly less energy and CO2 emissions."

Latest Boston Dynamics demonstration:

"How Physicists Created a Holographic Wormhole in a Quantum Computer" - interesting developments on the topic of traversable wormholes and the idea that black holes and quantum entanglement are the same thing.

There has been lots of battery tech news over the past month but it's always hard to know what will actually come to market and what technologies will win. BMW announced their Gen 6 battery will offer 30% improved range, 50% reduced cost and 60% reduced carbon emissions to produce. They plan to debut the new batteries in their Neue Klasse models in 2025.

StoreDot's Extreme Fast Charging batteries tout faster charging and higher energy density, have already been confirmed by third parties and are expected to be in production next year.

There are numerous battery factories coming to the US and some good news for Australia, too:

This video about flywheels is an interesting look at how old technology can also meet modern demands:

I've posted before about how I like to keep up with battery tech, so here's some updates from this past month.

NASA is making progress with a solid state battery that weights 30-40% less than conventional lithium-ion batteries with 2-3x the energy density. As a solid state battery it doesn't contain liquid, which solves the flammability issues associated with traditional batteries. It also doesn't use cobalt, nickel, or manganese. These batteries make electric planes a lot more feasible, due to the combination of reduced weight and improved energy density.

We're still gonna need a lot of lithium but as demand grows, the processes to extract and refine lithium will continue to improve. Here's a video about EnergyX, a company that is doing that sort of stuff:

As we move away from fossil fuels as an energy source, the alternatives will keep getting better. Batteries keep getting better, solar panels keep getting better and we keep finding better ways to make both of these with more common resources. More and more money and research will be invested in these spaces as it becomes clear that people won't be buying internal combustion engine cars in the future. As long as we don't get cold feet and turn back, things will continue to get better.

US factory production is apparently the highest it's been in 14 years and it should continue to improve as the US on-shores more of its chip, battery and electric vehicle production. Things still feel like a mess right now but there are a lot of signs that better days are coming. I'm hopeful!

I was in New York City yesterday and took three pictures. I would have taken more but I was trying to be in the moment. This was my first time in NYC since before COVID so I got to see the Little Island that opened there.

You can listen to this song while you look at the pictures:

This past weekend Adult Swim rolled into Philly to host a block party, with panels and concerts and other festivities.

One of the events was a Smiling Friends panel on Saturday, featuring show creators @psychicpebbles and @MichaelCusack. Nick Wolfhard was slated to moderate the panel but he couldn't make it to town, so I ended up being the moderator! I'm credited as Nick Wolfhard in this video, though:

The full panel was an hour long and included a premier of the Brazil episode.

@Potatoman, @BuhlBoy, @NickSenny, @SirLenward, @IvanAlmighty, @houndkidz, @technotiki, @playblast and @Cryptospore were in attendance, as well as maybe @Luis but he is a sneaky one.

@Potatoman, me, @technotiki, @psychicpebbles, @houndkidz, @Cryptospore and friends

Photo courtesy @Cryptospore

Watch Smiling Friends on Adult Swim / HBO Max and enjoy this Smiling Friends fanart on NG!

This week there was a story going around about Choco Tacos being discontinued and as a Choco Taco fan, I tweeted about it. By some twist of fate, my tweet ended up on the Today show this morning! Maybe we'll increase our Choco Taco-aligned userbase on NG as a result.

Screenshot by @MrHotDog77

In the past two weeks, I've made changes to 64 FLA files and 81 AS files related to Nightmare Cops. There's over 300 FLA files and over 130 AS files total. Not that sheer numbers mean much but this game represents a decade of us making a lot of stuff; it's gonna be cool some day when people can play it!

I tend to follow a lot of tech news because I get really depressed thinking about how Earth is retaining more and more heat in its atmosphere, which will eventually kill everything if left unchecked. We all have a long way to go towards decarbonizing but one area I enjoy reading about is ongoing battery research. The problem with battery research is there are exciting things being discovered all the time but most of them don’t scale, or it’s not something happening in the next decade. Still, there have been some interesting discoveries just this past month so I thought I’d share some!

Engineers at Drexel University (my alma mater) in Philly accidentally discovered an important step on the road to sulfur-ion batteries, which have the potential to be three (possibly even five) times as energy-dense as lithium-ion.

Using AI, researchers at the University of North Carolina have made interesting findings with a Fluoride battery, which could be ten times as energy-dense as a lithium-ion battery. Having a battery that dense could mean a car that goes over 3,000 miles on a charge but you could also have a much smaller battery, resulting in a lighter car that uses less energy to cover the same distance (with more charging stops).

Contemporary Amperex Technology just announced the Qilin Battery, claiming a 1,000 km (621 miles) vehicle range with mass production starting in 2023.

Alsym Energy just emerged from stealth mode with a water-based battery they claim is similar to lithium-ion but half the cost and with no risk of fires.

All these various solutions reduce or eliminate the need for certain rare earth minerals and lithium, replacing them with more common elements and more potential for rapid expansion without the traditional bottlenecks. The if and when remains unclear but it’s all hopeful stuff.

There’s also QuantumScape’s work on a solid state battery, which will be another step forward and could be something we see in the near future (as in the next few years). Full disclosure, I bought some QuantumScape stock when it was a SPAC and at one point my value had tripled but at the moment it's down by around half of what I invested. It could go up, it might not! Most of my attempts to invest in green tech have failed.

Besides making electric cars way more efficient and environmentally friendly, we need battery solutions for grid storage from sources like wind and solar. Sodium batteries are a big one to watch in this space; they aren’t as energy dense as lithium-ion but use salt (very abundant) vs lithium and are much cheaper, so you could see tons of large sodium batteries being used for grid or even home energy storage.

There’s also interesting things happening with carbon capture tech, something that could help pull CO2 from the atmosphere as we work to reduce the CO2 we’re putting out.

I hope it all pans out!

There's a website that does unlicensed statues and apparently they are doing Dad from Dad 'n Me!

Check it out, pretty surreal:

Been listening to Goat Girl today while programming zombie hands and a killer lawnmower.

@Dungeonation pointed out that Cathode Raybots can load levels in Ruffle now. Here's a test link if you're curious!

A few notes: You'll get to a mode select screen that will be completely blank because blend modes aren't supported yet. Click the left side of the screen to go to the level select menu. You'll then be able to select a level and it will successfully load, although the level layout itself won't be visible because it requires Cache as Bitmap functionality. Ruffle has been making progress with bitmaps and blend modes so I'm looking forward to these working in the future!

For now, it's cool to see how well the level actually runs; it never felt that smooth in the Flash Player. Cathode Raybots was a big project for me where I was trying to expand on my abilities. It has a level editor, a gameplay recorder for enemy patterns and a drawing tool, all capable of saving user creations to NG. It was a game intended to flex our content sharing API, which sadly released as Flash was on its way out. @PsychoGoldfish might eventually introduce a similar system via Newgrounds.io for HTML5 games; he's working on cloud saves at the moment.

With NG and Flash in decline at the time of Cathode Raybots' launch in 2013, I felt like it never got to live up to its potential. At least people will be able to keep playing it, thanks to Ruffle!