RogerRoast writes “The anode is a critical component for storing energy in lithium-ion batteries. The Berkeley Lab (D.O.E) has designed a new kind of anode that can absorb eight times the lithium of current designs, and has maintained its greatly increased energy capacity after over a year of testing and many hundreds of charge-discharge cycles. According to the research published in Advanced Materials they used a tailored polymer that conducts electricity and binds closely to lithium-storing silicon particles, even as they expand to more than three times their volume during charging and then shrink again during discharge.”

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Superior Anode For Lithium-Ion Batteries Developed

Mark.JUK writes “Telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent has today become the first-to-market with VDSL2 Vectoring technology which, it claims, will push the top broadband internet access speeds of existing copper telephone lines over 100Mbps and without needing to bond multiple lines together. Vectoring is essentially a ‘noise cancellation’ method (similar, in principal, to the technology found in some headphones) that works to cancel out background noise / interference (i.e. crosstalk) and can thus boost performance and reach (coverage) by between 25% and 100%.”

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Alcatel-Lucent Boosts Copper Broadband To 100Mbps

An anonymous reader writes “After more than 30 years of unerring and yet surprising supremacy, BIOS is taking its final bows. Taking its place is UEFI, a specification that begun its life as the Intel Boot Initiative way back in 1998 when BIOS’s antiquated limitations were hampering systems built with Intel’s Itanium processors. UEFI, as the article explains, is a complete re-imagining of a computer boot environment, and as such it has almost no similarities to the PC BIOS that it replaces.”

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Demystifying UEFI, the Overdue BIOS Replacement

Earlier in the week, we posted news of a vulnerability discovered in virtually all websites secured with theoretically outdated (but widespread) versions of SSL and TLS encryption. Luckily for all non-nefarious users, this vulnerability (called BEAST, short for Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS) was discovered and disclosed by researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo, and browser makers are pushing out changes to nullify it. Many systems, though, will remain unpatched for a long time. Nick Mathewson (nickm) of the Tor project has posted an explanation of why Tor traffic, as he understands the attack, remains safe. As a side benefit for those of us who aren’t security experts, his description explains in plain language just what the danger is.

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Why the BEAST Doesn't Threaten Tor Users