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UK online reseller bought out of administration in -pre-pack agreement, say sources

London Stock Exchange-listed Fraser Group is understood to have bought struggling UK online tech bazaar Ebuyer from administrators in a pre-pack agreement, sources have told The Register.…

Microsoft’s AI-centric code editor and IDE adds the ability to rollback misguided AI prompts

The Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) team has rolled out version 1.103 with new features including GitHub Copilot chat checkpoints.…

Joburg and Warsaw among the hotspots for sprawling server farm construction

Lagos, Warsaw and Dubai are among the fastest growing cities for colocation services - with metro areas in the Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions expanding more rapidly than traditional datacenter hotspots.…

Researchers at Kyushu University have developed a solid-oxide fuel cell that operates at just 300C, less than half the usual operating temperature. The team was able to do this by engineering a "ScO6 highway" in the electrolyte, allowing protons to move quickly without losing performance. "The team expects that their new findings will lead to the development of low-cost, low-temperature SOFCs and greatly accelerate the practical application of these devices," said the researchers in a press release. Interesting Engineering reports: "While SOFCs are promising due to their high efficiency and long lifespan, one major drawback is that they require operation at high temperatures of around 700-800C (1292F-1472F)," added the researchers in a press release. Such heat requires costly, specialized heat-resistant materials, making the technology expensive for many applications. A lower operating temperature is expected to reduce these manufacturing costs. The team's success comes from re-engineering the fuel cell's electrolyte, the ceramic layer that transports protons (hydrogen ions) to generate electricity. Previously, scientists faced a trade-off. Adding chemical dopants to an electrolyte increases the number of available protons but also tends to clog the material's crystal lattice, slowing proton movement and reducing performance. The Kyushu team worked to resolve this issue. "We looked for oxide crystals that could host many protons and let them move freely -- a balance that our new study finally struck," stated Yamazaki. They found that by doping two compounds, barium stannate (BaSnO3) and barium titanate (BaTiO3), with high concentrations of scandium (Sc), they could create an efficient structure. Their analysis showed that the scandium atoms form what the researchers call a "ScO6 highway." This structure creates a wide and softly vibrating pathway through the material. "This pathway is both wide and softly vibrating, which prevents the proton-trapping that normally plagues heavily doped oxides," explained Yamazaki. The resulting material achieves a proton conductivity of more than 0.01 S/cm at 300C, a performance level comparable to conventional SOFC electrolytes that run at more than double the temperature. The research has been published in the journal Nature Materials.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Legacy tech for nation's farmers must migrate ... contract swells to £245M

The UK's government department for agriculture and the countryside has upped the potential contract value on offer for cloud and datacenter hosting by more than £100 million.…

Home Office officials reportedly concede Brit government on back foot as Trump moves to protect US Big Tech players

Analysis The Home Office's war on encryption – its most technically complex and controversial aspect of modern policymaking yet – is starting to look like battlefield failure after more than ten years of skirmishes.…

Taskforce delivers damning interim report on next generation of energy generation

An independent taskforce commissioned by the UK government has warned of the nation's "unnecessarily slow, inefficient, and costly" approach to nuclear power (and weaponry).…

After four weather-related delays, Amazon successfully launched 24 more Kuiper internet satellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, bringing its total to 102. CNBC reports: SpaceX's Starlink is currently the dominant provider of low-earth orbit satellite internet, with a constellation of roughly 8,000 satellites and about 5 million customers worldwide. Amazon is racing to get more of its Kuiper satellites into space to meet a deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC requires that Amazon have about 1,600 satellites in orbit by the end of July 2026, with the full 3,236-satellite constellation launched by July 2029. Amazon has booked up to 83 launches, including three rides with SpaceX. While the company is still in the early stages of building out its constellation, Amazon has already inked deals with governments as it hopes to begin commercial service later this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sysadmins, your job is safe

Automating IT operations using AI may not be the best idea at the moment.…

Don’t laugh, a French nuclear power plant just shut down for a while after invertebrates overwhelmed its intakes

Proponents of increased use of nuclear energy to power datacenters have a new foe: Jellyfish.…