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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: According to Modvion, the Swedish start-up that has just built the world's tallest wooden turbine tower, using wood for wind power is the future. "It's got great potential," Otto Lundman, the company's chief executive, says as we gaze upwards at the firm's brand new turbine, a short drive outside Gothenburg. It's 150m (492ft) to the tip of the highest blade and we are the first journalists to be invited to have a look inside. The 2 megawatt generator on top has just started supplying electricity to the Swedish grid, providing power for about 400 homes. The dream of Lundman and Modvion is to take the wood and wind much higher. On the horizon near the Modvion project, several very similar-looking turbines are turning. Steel, not wood, is the key material for them, as it is for almost all of the world's turbine towers. Strong and durable, steel has enabled huge turbines and wind farms to be constructed on land and at sea. But steel is not without its limitations, particularly for projects on land. As demand has grown for taller turbines that harvest stronger winds with larger generators, the diameter of the cylindrical steel towers to support them has had to grow too. In a world of road tunnels, bridges and roundabouts, many in the wind industry say getting those huge pieces of metal to turbine sites has become a real headache, in effect limiting how tall new steel turbines can be. From the outside, there is little obvious difference between the Modvion wooden turbine and its steel cousins. Both have a thick white coating to protect them from the elements and blades made primarily from fiberglass attached to a generator, which produces electricity when it turns. It is only when we go inside the tower that the differences becomes clear. The walls have a curved raw wood finish, not unlike a sauna. The 105m (345ft) tower's strength comes from the 144 layers of laminated veneer lumber (LVL) that make its thick walls. By varying the grain of each of the 3mm-thick layers of spruce, Modvion says it has been able to control the wall's strength and flexibility. "It's our secret recipe," says company co-founder -- and former architect and boat builder -- David Olivegren, with a smile. [...] Lundman and Olivegren tell me their turbine's big selling point is that, by using wood and glue, towers can be built in smaller, more easily transported modules. That will make it much easier to build really tall towers, they say, and to take the pieces to challenging locations. However, Dr Maximilian Schnippering, head of sustainability at Siemens Gamesa -- one of the worlds largest turbine manufacturers -- says more pieces are likely to mean more trucks, more people and more time to complete the installation. He considers the modular system "an advantage" and that wooden towers can "nicely complement" steel towers. [...] Though wind power is cheaper and cleaner than almost all other forms of electricity generation, making steel involves extremely hot furnaces and almost always the burning of fossil fuels. That means CO2 emissions -- the main driver of climate change. Modvion says using wood instead of steel eliminates the wind turbines' carbon footprint entirely, making them carbon negative. That's because the trees take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere when they are alive and, when they are chopped down, the carbon is stored in the wood. As long as the wood doesn't end up rotting or being burned, the carbon is not released. About 200 trees went into Modvion's turbine tower. They were the same species -- spruce -- that is used for Christmas trees and the company says they are farmed sustainably, meaning when they are harvested more are planted. Modvion hopes to build another even taller turbine soon with plans to open a facility that will produce 100 wooden modular turbines a year in 2027. "The industry is currently putting up 20,000 turbines a year," Lundman says. "Our ambition is that in 10 years time 10% of those turbines -- about 2,000 -- will be wooden."

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Partners don’t know much about what’s going on. Which leaves users in limbo, too

Broadcom has told VMware partners the virtualization champion’s channel program will end in early 2024.…

Scientists discovered a way to break apart the membranes of cancer cells by stimulating aminocyanine molecules with near-infrared light. Slashdot reader Baron_Yam shares a report from ScienceAlert: The research team from Rice University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Texas, says the new approach is a marked improvement over another kind of cancer-killing molecular machine previously developed, called Feringa-type motors, which could also break the structures of problematic cells. "It is a whole new generation of molecular machines that we call molecular jackhammers," says chemist James Tour from Rice University. "They are more than one million times faster in their mechanical motion than the former Feringa-type motors, and they can be activated with near-infrared light rather than visible light." In tests on cultured, lab-grown cancer cells, the molecular jackhammer method scored a 99 percent hit rate at destroying the cells. The approach was also tested on mice with melanoma tumors, and half the animals became cancer-free. The structure and chemical properties of aminocyanine molecules mean they stay in sync with the right stimulus -- such as near-infrared light. When in motion, the electrons inside the molecules form what's known as plasmons, collectively vibrating entities that drive movement across the whole of the molecule. The plasmons have an arm on one side, helping to connect the molecules to the cancer cell membranes while the movements of the vibrations bash them apart. It's still early days for the research, but these initial findings are very promising. The research has been published in Nature Chemistry.

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In October, Apple issued notifications warning over a half dozen India lawmakers of their iPhones being targets of state-sponsored attacks. According to a new report from the Washington Post, the Modi government responded by criticizing Apple's security and demanding explanations to mitigate political impact (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). From the report: Officials from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) publicly questioned whether the Silicon Valley company's internal threat algorithms were faulty and announced an investigation into the security of Apple devices. In private, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, senior Modi administration officials called Apple's India representatives to demand that the company help soften the political impact of the warnings. They also summoned an Apple security expert from outside the country to a meeting in New Delhi, where government representatives pressed the Apple official to come up with alternative explanations for the warnings to users, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. "They were really angry," one of those people said. The visiting Apple official stood by the company's warnings. But the intensity of the Indian government effort to discredit and strong-arm Apple disturbed executives at the company's headquarters, in Cupertino, Calif., and illustrated how even Silicon Valley's most powerful tech companies can face pressure from the increasingly assertive leadership of the world's most populous country -- and one of the most critical technology markets of the coming decade. The recent episode also exemplified the dangers facing government critics in India and the lengths to which the Modi administration will go to deflect suspicions that it has engaged in hacking against its perceived enemies, according to digital rights groups, industry workers and Indian journalists. Many of the more than 20 people who received Apple's warnings at the end of October have been publicly critical of Modi or his longtime ally, Gautam Adani, an Indian energy and infrastructure tycoon. They included a firebrand politician from West Bengal state, a Communist leader from southern India and a New Delhi-based spokesman for the nation's largest opposition party. [...] Gopal Krishna Agarwal, a national spokesman for the BJP, said any evidence of hacking should be presented to the Indian government for investigation. The Modi government has never confirmed or denied using spyware, and it has refused to cooperate with a committee appointed by India's Supreme Court to investigate whether it had. But two years ago, the Forbidden Stories journalism consortium, which included The Post, found that phones belonging to Indian journalists and political figures were infected with Pegasus, which grants attackers access to a device's encrypted messages, camera and microphone. In recent weeks, The Post, in collaboration with Amnesty, found fresh cases of infections among Indian journalists. Additional work by The Post and New York security firm iVerify found that opposition politicians had been targeted, adding to the evidence suggesting the Indian government's use of powerful surveillance tools. In addition, Amnesty showed The Post evidence it found in June that suggested a Pegasus customer was preparing to hack people in India. Amnesty asked that the evidence not be detailed to avoid teaching Pegasus users how to cover their tracks. "These findings show that spyware abuse continues unabated in India," said Donncha O Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty International's Security Lab. "Journalists, activists and opposition politicians in India can neither protect themselves against being targeted by highly invasive spyware nor expect meaningful accountability."

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