Technology
Google Maps’ Street View expanding to more countries
Google’s vast catalog of services also covers the mapping and navigation segments. Every so often, services like Google Maps, Waze, and Earth receive new features to make them more useful or even entertaining. Now, the company has announced that Google Maps‘ Street View is reaching more countries. Additionally, Google Earth will let you “travel back in time.”
Google Maps’ Street View now supports 80 countries; getting AI-powered sharper images
Street View is a Google Maps‘ feature that provides “virtual tours” of streets in multiple locations around the world. On supported locations, Street View allows you to virtually “walk” between streets in a multi-directional navigation system. To develop the feature, Google is sending its own cars equipped with advanced cameras to take 360° images of the location.
Now, the company has revealed that Google Maps’ Street View experience is now available in more countries. Google is adding new imagery to existing countries, as well as bringing Street View tours to others for the first time. The feature is currently live in 80 countries, with virtual tours of such iconic landmarks as the Great Barrier Reef and the International Space Station. Street View currently has an impressive gallery of more than 280 billion images.
Google also revealed that it’s using AI technology and new cameras in its cars to offer sharper imagery during Street View explorations. So, the experience should be more immersive than ever, especially on AR/VR headsets. The company began rolling out the improvements to Street View on September 25, so you might want to check it out.
Google Earth will get “time travel”
Google Earth is also getting some love from the company. The service will allow users to take “time travels” that allow them to see firsthand the changes the planet has experienced over the decades. To do so, Google will use “satellite and aerial imagery” collected over the past 80 years. In some locations, the Mountain View giant claims that you will be able to go back in time to the 1930s. Lastly, Google Earth will soon support the creation of custom maps by researchers and companies.
Microsoft says it has “listened to feedback” following a privacy row over a new tool which takes regular screenshots of users’ online activity.
It was labelled a potential “privacy nightmare” by critics when it was unveiled in May 2024 – prompting the tech giant to postpone its release.
It now plans to relaunch the artificial intelligence (AI) powered tool in November on its new CoPilot+ computers.
Some of its more controversial features have been stripped out – for example, it will be opt-in whereas the original version could not be switched off.
The controversy over Recall had led the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s data watchdog, to “make enquiries” with the tech giant about the tool.
It said it had now been informed that a “series of changes” had been made to the product.
“We will be continuing to assess Recall as Microsoft moves toward launch”, it said in a statement.
When it initially announced the tool at its developer conference in May, Microsoft said it used AI “to make it possible to access virtually anything you have ever seen on your PC”, and likened it to having photographic memory.
It said Recall could search through a users’ past activity, including their files, photos, emails and browsing history.
It was designed to help people find things they had looked at or worked on previously by searching through desktop screenshots taken every few seconds.
But critics quickly raised concerns, given the quantity of sensitive data the system would harvest, with one expert labelling it a potential “privacy nightmare.”
Recall was never made publicly available.
A version of the tool was set to be rolled out with CoPilot+ computers – which Microsoft billed as the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built – when they launched in June, after Microsoft told users it had made changes to make it more secure.
But its launch was delayed further and has now been pushed back to the autumn. The company has also announced extra security measures for it.
“Recall is an opt-in experience. Snapshots and any associated information are always encrypted,” said Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows and devices.
He added that “Windows offers tools to help you control your privacy and customise what gets saved for you to find later”.
However a technical blog about it states that “diagnostic data” from the tool may be shared with the firm depending on individual privacy settings.
The firm added that screenshots can only be accessed with a biometric login, and sensitive information such as credit card details will not be snapped by default.
Recall is only available on the CoPilot+ range of bespoke laptops featuring powerful inbuilt AI chips.
Professor Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at Surrey University, said the new measures were a significant improvement.
“Before any functionality like Recall is deployed the security and privacy aspects will need to be comprehensively tested,” he said.
However he added he would be rushing to use it.
“Personally I would not opt-in until this has been tested in the wild for some time.”
A bulldozer moves coal that will be burned to generate electricity at the American Electric Power coal-fired power plant in Winfield, West Virginia.
Luke Sharrett | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The planned restart of Three Mile Island is a step forward for nuclear power, but the U.S. needs to deploy new plants to keep up with rising electricity demand, one of the nation’s top nuclear officials said this week.
The U.S. needs to at least triple its nuclear fleet to keep pace with demand, slash carbon-dioxide emissions and ensure the nation’s energy security, said Mike Goff, acting assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy.
The U.S. currently maintains the largest nuclear fleet in the world with 94 operational reactors totaling about 100 gigawatts of power. The fleet supplied more than 18% of the nation’s electricity consumption in 2023.
The U.S. needs to add 200 gigawatts of nuclear, Goff told CNBC in an interview. This is roughly equivalent to building 200 new plants, based on the current average reactor size in the U.S. fleet of about a gigawatt.
“It’s a huge undertaking,” Goff said. The U.S. led a global coalition in December that formally pledged to meet this goal by 2050. Financial institutions including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America endorsed the target at a climate conference in New York City this week.
Constellation Energy‘s plan to restart Three Mile Island by 2028 is a step in the right direction, Goff said. The plant operated safely and efficiently, only shutting down in 2019 for economic reasons, he said.
The reactor that Constellation plans to re-open, Unit 1, is not the one the partially melted down in 1979.
Microsoft will purchase electricity from the plant to help power its data centers. Goff said the advent of large data centers that consume up to a gigawatt of electricity only reinforces the need for new reactors.
“A lot of the data centers are coming in and saying they do need firm, 24/7, baseload clean electricity,” Goff said. “Nuclear is obviously a perfect match for that,” he said.
But restarting reactors in the U.S. will only provide a small fraction of the nuclear power that is needed, he said. There are only a handful of shuttered plants that are potential candidates for restarts, according to Goff.
“It’s not a huge number,” Goff said of potential restarts. “We need to really be moving forward also on deploying plants,” he said.
From coal to nuclear
Coal communities across the U.S. could provide a runway to build out a large number of new nuclear plants. Utilities in many parts of the U.S. are phasing out coal as part of the clean energy transition, creating a supply gap in some regions because new generation is not being built fast enough.
Recently shuttered coal plants, those expected to retire, and currently operating plants with no estimated shutdown date yet could provide space for up to 174 gigawatts of new nuclear across 36 states, according to a Department of Energy study published earlier this month.
Coal plants already have transmission lines in place, allowing reactors at those sites to avoid the long process of siting new grid connections, Goff said. The plants also have people experienced in the energy industry who could transition to working at a nuclear facility, he said.
“We can actually get a significant cost reduction by building at a coal plant,” Goff said. “We can maybe get a 30% cost reduction compared to just going on a greenfield site.”
Cost overruns and long timelines are major hurdles for building new nuclear plants. The expansion of the Vogtle plant in Georgia with two new reactors, for example, cost more than $30 billion and took around seven years longer than expected.
Expanding operational nuclear plants and building at retired sites in the U.S. could create a pathway for up to 95 gigawatts worth of new reactors, according to the DOE study. Between coal and nuclear sites, the U.S. potentially has space for up to 269 gigawatts of additional nuclear power.
The potential capacity would depend on whether advanced, smaller reactors are built at the sites, or larger reactors with a gigawatt or more of power.
More electricity could potentially be generated if the smaller reactors were rolled out on a large scale because there is space for more them, according to the DOE study. Some of these smaller advanced designs, however, are still years away from commercialization.
But rising electricity demand from data centers, manufacturing and the electrification of the economy could provide a catalyst to build the larger plants as well, according to Goff. The Three Mile Island restart, for example, would bring back just under a gigawatt of power to meet Microsoft’s needs.
“That increased power demand, that will lead toward an additional push toward those gigawatt size reactors as well,” he said.
Restarts likely to secure greenlight
While reactor restarts aren’t a silver bullet, shoring up and maintaining the existing fleet is crucial, Goff said. The U.S. went through a decade-long period in which reactors were shutting down because they could not compete with cheap, abundant natural gas.
The economics are changing, however, with tax support from the Inflation Reduction Act and nuclear increasingly valued for its carbon-free attributes, Goff said.
“One of the issues with the economics, especially in the non-regulated utilities, was there was no value necessarily for clean, baseload electricity,” he said. “There is a lot more recognition of the need for that clean, firm, reliable baseload for nuclear”
Constellation’s decision to restart Three Mile Island follows in the footsteps of the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. The private owner, Holtec International, plants to restart Palisades in 2025. The two restarts are subject to review and approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
“They are an independent agency, but I expect if the safety cases are presented, they’re going to approve it,” Goff said of those potential restarts.
“Constellation obviously operated the Three Mile Island plant for years, and has a very large fleet of reactors that they’ve operated safely and efficiently,” he said. “They will continue to have a great expertise in moving those plants to continue their safe operation.”
But finding additional plants to restart could prove difficult, said Doug True, chief nuclear officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute.
“It gets harder and harder,” True previously told CNBC. “A lot of these plants have already started the deconstruction process that goes with decommissioning and the facility wasn’t as thoroughly laid up in a way that was intended to restart in any way.”
Many, many servers these days run as virtual machines — but there was a time when virtualization was still just catching on, and companies needed physical servers to be as dense as possible. So let’s look at a blade server system from around 2010 that packs 32 CPU sockets and weighs 500 pounds!
Image of C7000 chassis will full-height blades: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HP_BladeSystem_c7000_Enclosure.jpg#/media/File:HP_BladeSystem_c7000_Enclosure.jpg
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Imagine if governments around the world announced restrictions on the sale of rulers that are 34 centimetres long. You would be pretty confused, given there doesn’t seem to be anything special about that length – and 34cm rulers don’t exist.
Such legislation would be ludicrous, but something similar has been enacted for quantum computers in several nations (see “Multiple nations enact mysterious export controls on quantum computers“). The restrictions – which limit the export of computers with 34 or more qubits, or quantum bits, and error rates below a certain threshold – are puzzling, as such devices have no practical use, according to all published research.
But the very specificity of the number suggests some thought behind it. Clearly, someone, somewhere, is worried about nefarious use of these devices – most likely their potential to break widely used encryption methods – and wants them restricted in the name of national security.
So what is going on? There are two possibilities here: either they are wrong, as scientific evidence suggests, and pointless legislation is now being cut and pasted across the world, or they are right and have now alerted their adversaries that this is a number worth paying attention to. Both possibilities seem counterproductive, but without access to the research behind these restrictions, it is impossible to say.
One of the great strengths of science is that it is an open endeavour. For all its faults, peer review allows us to harness minds around the world to scrutinise and improve research. Our approach to making policy should be no different.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows just how powerful this can be. By publicly synthesising research, it has allowed policy-makers to understand what needs to be done to tackle climate change – and allowed others to use that evidence base to analyse policy decisions. Equally, published research during the covid-19 pandemic allowed for a public discussion on rules being imposed on us. Simply plucking a number from the air, as seems to be the case with quantum computers, is no way to govern.
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Unlike the other major consoles on the market, Nintendo has worked hard to establish the Switch as a console for all ages. The majority of the best Switch games are made to appeal to gamers both young and old, with a great mix of big-budget games and some of the best indie games. With so many games on the market, and only more exciting upcoming Switch games, it can be difficult to tell which games are best for kids and which are better games for adults. Luckily, we have compiled a few of the most popular kids’ games for the Switch all in one place!
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