For the first time, two new all-electric passenger trains are operating in the US, which is woefully behind the rest of the world in electrifying its rolling stock. The Verge: The two new trains are operated by Caltrain. California Governor Gavin Newson and House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi were on hand to take the inaugural ride, which took place on Saturday. The trains were put into regular service the following day, running along the route between San Jose and San Francisco.

It's taken almost 20 years since the idea of electric trains was first proposed in California. But officials insisted the new trains will be quieter and faster than the diesel-powered trains in current operation while also providing a better experience for passengers. The two trains will be joined by 17 others that should be in service by mid-September.

[...] It shouldn't come as any shock that the US is lagging behind the rest of the world in introducing electric trains. India is on the cusp of electrifying 100 percent of its rail lines, while China is nearing three-quarters of its network. Over 57 percent of the rail system in the European Union is electric.

Apple has threatened to remove crowdfunding app Patreon from the App Store if creators continue to use unsupported third-party billing options or disable transactions on iOS, instead of using Apple's own in-app purchasing system. From a report: In a blog post and email to Patreon creators about upcoming changes to membership in the iOS app, the company says it's begun a 16-month-long migration process to move all creators to Apple's subscription billing by November 2025. Patreon also informed creators it will switch them over to subscription billing as of November 2024, but they will be able to decide whether to price their memberships at a higher fee to cover Apple's commission or decide if they want to absorb the fee themselves. In addition, creators can opt to delay the migration in their Patreon settings to November 2025, the company said. However, if creators choose the latter option, they won't be able to offer memberships in the iOS app until they adopt Apple's subscription billing, as Apple rules will apply as of this November.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Paint isn't one of Windows' best photo editing apps, but in the recent past, the software giant introduced some exciting features, such as layer support, to make the app more viable for Windows users. While Microsoft was pouring the Paint app with new features, the Paint 3D app was dying a slow death. The app will finally be delisted from the Microsoft Store in November this year.

Proximity to natural gas lines could become just as desirable for datacenter operators as high-speed fiber-optic networks as they scramble to satiate AI's ever growing thirst for power. From a report: Speaking to analysts during their respective earnings call this week, executives at Energy Transfer LP and Williams Companies, both of which operate pipelines across the US, revealed they were in talks with datacenter operators to supply them with large quantities of natural gas. "We are, in four different states, in discussions with multiple datacenters of different sizes. Some of them, or many of them, want to put generation on site ... So it's an enormous opportunity for us," Mackie McCrea, co-CEO of Energy Transfer LP, told Wall Street, according to a transcript.

Energy Transfer LP's pipelines currently span 15 states in the USA, serving 185 power plants. Looking at the opportunity afforded by datacenter hookups, McCrea estimated that power demand could increase by 30 to 40 gigawatts over the next six to eight years. "We believe we are extremely well positioned to benefit from the anticipated rise in natural gas needs," Energy Transfer LP co-CEO Tom Long added. Energy Transfer LP isn't the only pipeline operator eager to take advantage of skyrocketing datacenter power demands. Speaking to analysts earlier this week, Williams Companies CEO Alan Armstrong expressed optimism about the firm's ability to capitalize on this demand.

A company called ChargerHelp provides certified technicians to service EV charging stations (for a monthly fee). And they've just issued their annual "reliability report," reports CleanTechnica: Its analysis of more than 19 million data points collected from public and private sources in 2023 — including real-time assessments of 4,800 chargers from ChargerHelp technicians in the field — finds that â"software consistently overestimates station uptime, point-in-time status, and the ability to successfully charge a vehicle...."

[W]hen ChargerHelp technicians personally inspected 4,800 charge points, they found more than 10% were reported to be online but were in fact unable to complete a test charge... These findings by ChargerHelp are backed up by many smaller scale studies and surveys over the past several years that have found that claims of 95% uptime or greater do not match real world experience. A 2022 study of 657 chargers at 181 non-Tesla public charging sites in the San Francisco Bay Area determined that only 73% were capable of delivering a charge for more than two minutes, for example.

[I]mprovements have been slow to materialize. In fact, driver satisfaction with public charging has only worsened over the past year, according to the latest J.D. Power Electric Vehicle Experience Ownership Study, released in February. As the variety, price, and range of EVs available to US drivers have become more attractive, mistrust of public charging now constitutes the most significant headwind for EV adoption, J.D. Power says.
The report also "lists the biggest infrastructure pain points," reports the Verge, "including a failure to report broken stalls, inaccurate station status messages, aging equipment, and some habitually unreliable network providers (who go unnamed in the study, unfortunately)." EV chargers can break in many ways, the study concludes. These include broken retractor systems intended to protect the cable from getting mangled by vehicle tires, broken screens, and inoperable payment systems. There is also general damage to the cabinet and, of course, broken cables and connectors.

Across the chargers recorded, ChargerHelp calculates that actual uptime is only 73.7 percent, compared to the 84.6 percent self-reported by the EV network providers.

The Guardian reports Sunday, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, highlighted that Russian forces appeared to have started a fire in one of the cooling towers of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant that it has occupied since the early days of the war. "Radiation levels are within norm," Zelenskiy said before accusing Russia of using its control of the site, whose six reactors are in shutdown mode, "to blackmail Ukraine, all of Europe, and the world". A Ukrainian official in Nikopol, the nearest town across the river Dnipro from the nuclear plant, added that according to "unofficial information", the fire was caused by setting fire to "a large number of automobile tyres" in a cooling tower. Video and pictures showed smoke dramatically billowing from one of the towers, although experts said they are not in use while the reactor is in shutdown mode, prompting some to question whether it was a way of trying raise the stakes over Ukraine's incursion into Russia.
From the CBC: The Russian management of the facility said emergency workers had contained the fire and that there was no threat of it spreading further. "The fire did not affect the operation of the station," it said. The six reactors at the plant located close to the front line of the war in Ukraine are not in operation but the facility relies on external power to keep its nuclear material cool and prevent a catastrophic accident. Moscow and Kyiv have routinely accused each other of endangering safety around it.

"Not many Americans have August 6 circled on their calendars," writes the New York Times, "but it's a day that the Japanese can't forget."

79 years after an atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, the Times visits a hospital that "continues to treat, on average, 180 survivors — known as hibakusha — of the blasts each day." The bombs killed an estimated 200,000 men, women and children and maimed countless more. In Hiroshima 50,000 of the city's 76,000 buildings were completely destroyed. In Nagasaki nearly all homes within a mile and a half of the blast were wiped out. In both cities the bombs wrecked hospitals and schools. Urban infrastructure collapsed...

[T]he hibakusha and their offspring have formed the backbone of atomic memory. Many see their life's work as informing the wider world about what it's like to carry the trauma, stigma and survivor's guilt caused by the bombs, so that nuclear weapons may never be used again. Their urgency to do so has only increased in recent years. With an average age of 85, the hibakusha are dying by the hundreds each month — just as the world is entering a new nuclear age. Countries like the United States, China and Russia are spending trillions of dollars to modernize their stockpiles. Many of the safeguards that once lowered nuclear risk are unraveling, and the diplomacy needed to restore them is not happening. The threat of another blast can't be relegated to history...

Kunihiko Sakuma [who was 9 months old the day of the attack]: "People died or got sick not just right after the bombing. The reality is, their symptoms are emerging even today, 79 years later. I thought all this was in the past. But as I started talking to survivors, I realized their suffering was ongoing. The atomic bomb is such an inhumane weapon, and the effects of radiation stay with survivors for a very long time. That's why they need our continued support."
The article includes this quote from Keiko Ogura, who was 8 years old at the time of the attack — and still worries she hasn't done enough to abolish the use of nuclear weapons: "As survivors, we cannot do anything but tell our story. 'For we shall not repeat the evil' — this is the pledge of survivors. Until we die, we want to tell our story, because it's difficult to imagine."

Many of the stories are horrifying. But I'll note this one by Seiichiro Mise — who on the day of the atomic bomb attack was 10 years old: "I got married in 1964. At the time, people would say that if you married an atomic bomb survivor, any kids you had would be deformed.

"Two years later, I got a call from the hospital saying my baby had been born. But on my way, my heart was troubled. I'm an atomic bomb victim. I experienced that black rain. So I felt anguished. Usually new parents simply ask the doctor, 'Is it a boy or girl?' I didn't even ask that. Instead, I asked, 'Does my baby have 10 fingers and 10 toes?'

"The doctor looked unsettled. But then he smiled and said it was a healthy boy. I was relieved."
The first U.S. president to visit Hiroshima was Barack Obama in 2016. The article notes he did not issue the official apology many Japanese had hoped for. But he did say "we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again...

"Someday the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade."

Mozilla's interim CEO Laura Chambers "says the company is reinvesting in Firefox after letting it languish in recent years," reports Fast Company, "hoping to reestablish the browser as independent alternative to the likes of Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari.

"But some of those investments, which also include forays into generative AI, may further upset the community that's been sticking with Firefox all these years..." Chambers acknowledges that Mozilla lost sight of Firefox in recent years as it chased opportunities outside the browser, such as VPN service and email masking. When she replaced Mitchell Baker as CEO in February, the company scaled back those other efforts and made Firefox a priority again. "Yes, Mozilla is refocusing on Firefox," she says. "Obviously, it's our core product, so it's an important piece of the business for us, but we think it's also really an important part of the internet."

Some of that focus involves adding features that have become table-stakes in other browsers. In June, Mozilla added vertical tab support in Firefox's experimental branch, echoing a feature that Microsoft's Edge browser helped popularize three years ago. It's also working on tab grouping features and an easier way to switch between user profiles. Mozilla is even revisiting the concept of web apps, in which users can install websites as freestanding desktop applications. Mozilla abandoned work on Progressive Web Apps in Firefox a few years ago to the dismay of many power users, but now it's talking with community members about a potential path forward.

"We haven't always prioritized those features as highly as we should have," Chambers says. "That's been a real shift that's been very felt in the community, that the things they're asking for . . . are really being prioritized and brought to life."
Firefox was criticized for testing a more private alternative to tracking cookies which could make summaries of aggregated data available to advertisers. (Though it was only tested on a few sites, "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" was enabled by default.) But EFF staff technologist Lena Cohen tells Fast Company that approach was "much more privacy-preserving" than Google's proposal for a "Privacy Sandbox." And according to the article, "Mozilla's system only measures the success rate of ads — it doesn't help companies target those ads in the first place — and it's less susceptible to abuse due to limits on how much data is stored and which parties are allowed to access it." In June, Mozilla also announced its acquisition of Anonym, a startup led by former Meta executives that has its own privacy-focused ad measurement system. While Mozilla has no plans to integrate Anonym's tech in Firefox, the move led to even more anxiety about the kind of company Mozilla was becoming. The tension around Firefox stems in part from Mozilla's precarious financial position, which is heavily dependent on royalty payments from Google. In 2022, nearly 86% of Mozilla's revenue came from Google, which paid $510 million to be Firefox's default search engine. Its attempts to diversify, through VPN service and other subscriptions, haven't gained much traction.

Chambers says that becoming less dependent on Google is "absolutely a priority," and acknowledges that building an ad-tech business is one way of doing that. Mozilla is hoping that emerging privacy regulations and wider adoption of anti-tracking tools in web browsers will increase demand for services like Anonym and for systems like Firefox's privacy-preserving ad measurements. Other revenue-generating ideas are forthcoming. Chambers says Mozilla plans to launch new products outside of Firefox under a "design sprint" model, aimed at quickly figuring out what works and what doesn't. It's also making forays into generative AI in Firefox, starting with a chatbot sidebar in the browser's experimental branch.
Chambers "says to expect a bigger marketing push for Firefox in the United States soon, echoing a 'Challenge the default' ad campaign that was successful in Germany last summer. Mozilla's nonprofit ownership structure, and the idea that it's not beholden to corporate interests, figures heavily into those plans."

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: More than a year after Hyundai and Kia released new anti-theft software updates, thefts of vehicles with the new software are falling — even as thefts overall remain astoundingly high, according to a new analysis of insurance claim data. The automakers released the updates starting last February, after a tenfold increase in thefts of certain Hyundai and Kia models in just the past three years — sparked by a series of social media posts that showed people how to steal the vehicles. "Whole vehicle" theft claims — insurance claims for the loss of the entire vehicle — are 64% lower among the Hyundai and Kia cars that have had the software upgrade, compared to cars of the same make, model and year without the upgrade, according to the Highway Loss Data Institute. "The companies' solution is extremely effective," Matt Moore, senior vice president of HLDI, an industry group backed by auto insurers, said in a statement...

Between early 2020 and the first half of 2023, thefts of Hyundai and Kia models rose more than 1,000%.
The article points out that HDLI's analysis covered 2023, and "By the end of that year, only about 30% of vehicles eligible for the security software had it installed. By now, around 61% of eligible Hyundai vehicles have the software upgrade, a Hyundai spokesperson said."

The car companies told CNN that more than 2 million Hyundai and Kia vehicles have gotten the update (part of a $200 million class action settlement reached in May of 2023).

Though "It could take years to resolve," the Washington Post imagines six changes that could ultimately result from the two monopoly rulings on Google: Imagine a Google-quality search engine but without ads — or one tailored to children, news junkies or Lego fans. It's possible that Google could be forced to let other companies access its search technology or its essential data to create search engines with the technical chops of Google — but without Google...

Would Apple create a search engine...? The likeliest scenario is you'd need to pick whether to use Google on your iPhone or something else. But technologists and stock analysts have also speculated for years that Apple could make its own search engine. It would be like when Apple started Apple Maps as an alternative to Google Maps.

What if Google weren't allowed to know so much about you? Jason Kint of Digital Content Next, an industry group that includes online news organizations, said one idea is Google's multiple products would no longer be allowed to commingle information about what you do. It would essentially be a divorce of Google's products without breaking the company up. That could mean, for example, that whatever you did on your Android phone or the websites you visit using Chrome would not feed into one giant Google repository about your activities and interests.
The article also wonders if the judge could order Google to be broken up, with separate companies formed out of Android, Google search, and Chrome. (Or if more search competition might make prices drop for the products advertised in search results — or lower the fees charged in Android's app store.) Android's app store might also lose its power to veto apps that compete with Google.

"This is educated speculation," the article acknowledges. "It's also possible that not much will really change. That's what happened after Google was found to have broken the European Union's anti-monopoly laws."

Google has also said it plans to appeal Monday's ruling.

Fortune reports that Crowdstrike "is enjoying a moment of strange cultural cachet at the annual Black Hat security conference, as throngs of visitors flock to its booth to snap selfies and load up on branded company shirts and other swag." (Some attendees "collectively shrugged at the idea that Crowdstrike could be blamed for a problem with a routine update that could happen to any of the security companies deeply intertwined with Microsoft Windows.") Others pointed out that Microsoft should take their fair share of the blame for the outage, which many say was caused by the design of Windows in its core architecture that leads to malware, spyware and driver instability. "Microsoft should not be giving any third party that level of access," said Eric O'Neill, a cybersecurity expert, attorney and former FBI operative. "Microsoft will complain, well, it's just the way that the technology works, or licensing works, but that's bullshit, because this same problem didn't affect Linux or Mac. And Crowdstrike caught it super-early."
Their article notes that Crowdstrike is one of this year's top sponsors of the conference. Despite its recent missteps, Crowdstrike had one of the biggest booths, notes TechCrunch, and "As soon as the doors opened, dozens of attendees started lining up." They were not all there to ask tough questions, but to pick up T-shirts and action figures made by the company to represent some of the nation-state and cybercriminal grups it tracks, such as Scattered Spider, an extortion racket allegedly behind last year's MGM Resorts and Okta cyberattacks; and Aquatic Panda, a China-linked espionage group.

"We're here to give you free stuff," a CrowdStrike employee told people gathered around a big screen where employees would later give demos. A conference attendee looked visibly surprised. "I just thought it would be dead, honestly. I thought it would be slower over there. But obviously, people are still fans, right?"

For CrowdStrike at Black Hat, there was an element of business as usual, despite its global IT outage that caused widespread disruption and delays for days — and even weeks for some customers. The conference came at the same time as CrowdStrike released its root cause analysis that explained what happened the day of the outage. In short, CrowdStrike conceded that it messed up but said it's taken steps to prevent the same incident happening again. And some cybersecurity professionals attending Black Hat appeared ready to give the company a second chance....

TechCrunch spoke to more than a dozen conference attendees who visited the CrowdStrike booth. More than half of attendees we spoke with expressed a positive view of the company following the outage. "Does it lower my opinion of their ability to be a leading-edge security company? I don't think so," said a U.S. government employee, who said he uses CrowdStrike every day.
Although TechCrunch does note that one engineer told his parent company they might consider Crowdstrike competitor Sophos...

"Samsung's latest solid-state battery technology will power up premium EVs first, giving them up to 621 miles of range," writes PC Magazine: The new batteries — which promise to improve vehicle range, decrease charging times, and eliminate risk of battery fires — could go into mass production as soon as 2027. Multiple automakers have been reportedly testing samples. Samsung did not list any by name but it's worked with Hyundai, Stellantis, and General Motors, among others. "We supplied samples to customers from the end of last year to the beginning of this year and are receiving positive feedback," Samsung SDI VP Koh Joo-young said at SNE Battery Day 2024 in Seoul, according to Korean outlet The Elec and translated by Google.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the batteries won't be cheap. They will initially go in "super premium EVs" and will offer 900 to 1,000 kilometers (559-621 miles) of range and improved safety... Samsung's presentation also reiterated previously announced plans to create batteries that can charge in nine minutes and last 20 years by 2029.
More details from Notebookcheck: According to Samsung SDI's VP, automakers are interested in its solid-state battery packs because they are smaller, lighter, and much safer than what's in current electric cars. Apparently, they are also rather expensive to produce, since it warns that they will first go into the "super premium" EV segment. Those Samsung defines as luxury electric cars that can cover more than 600 miles on a charge.

Samsung's oxide solid-state battery technology is rated for an energy density of about 500 Wh/kg, which is about double the density of mainstream EV batteries. Those have capacities that already allow more than 300 miles on a charge, so 600 miles of range in a similar footprint is not out of the question, but the issue is production costs.
Thanks to Slashdot reader npetrov for sharing the news.

Google's loss in an antitrust trial is just the beginning. According to Yahoo Finance's senior legal reporter, Google now also has to defend itself "against another perilous antitrust challenge that could inflict more damage." Starting in September, the tech giant will square off against federal prosecutors and a group of states claiming that Google abused its dominance of search advertising technology that is used to sell, buy, and broker advertising space online... Juggling simultaneous defenses "will definitely create a strain on its resources, productivity, and most importantly, attention at the most senior levels," said David Olson, associate professor at Boston College Law School.... The two cases targeting Google have the potential to inflict major damage to an empire amassed over the last two decades.

The second case that begins next month began with a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia by the Justice Department and eight states in December 2020... Prosecutors allege that since at least 2015 Google has thwarted meaningful competition and deterred innovation through its ownership of the entities and software that power the online advertising technology market. Google owns most of the technology to buy, sell, and serve advertisements online... Google's share of the US and global advertising markets — when measured either by revenue or impressions — exceeded 90% for "many years," according to the complaint.

The government prosecutors accused Google of siphoning off $0.35 of each advertising dollar that flowed through its ad tech tools.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the article.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is exploring the possibility of directly converting radiation from nuclear reactors into electricity using radiovoltaics, a technology that could potentially revolutionize nuclear power generation by moving beyond traditional steam turbine methods. The agency is requesting information and suggestions on this topic in an RFI released on August 1st. Nuclear News reports: There's got to be a better way": Methods to convert the energy of nuclear fission reactions and the decay of radioisotopes into electricity have not evolved since the invention of radioisotope power systems and fission reactors over 70 years ago and remain unoptimized," the RFI says. They rely on thermal heat transfer, and "in each step of this indirect conversion method neutrons, heat, and energy are lost to the shielding material, working fluid, and other system materials." Advanced reactor designs that use alternative coolants, including helium, sodium, and salts, would still use what DARPA calls "heritage nuclear power conversion technology" with water and steam as the working fluids, as would the fusion power plants being planned today.

Why now? Tabitha Dodson, the program manager for DARPA DSO, which is launching the RFI, told Nuclear News that "two big things" are driving the interest. "One is the extreme surge of investment in small and advanced nuclear technologies, such as in fusion and space reactors, which do not have a concurrent pairing of advanced power generation methods that doesn't involve liquid-based heat transfer," she said. "Next, there has been an order of magnitude improvement in radiation tolerance and efficiency for voltaics in recent years with encouraging performance that indicates radiovoltaics could scale up as an array usable in nuclear reactors." [...]

What is the ask?: The RFI asks: "Is it possible to achieve [a] direct energy conversion nuclear power system, ranging in power from 10s of watts electric (We) to 100s of kWe?" DARPA wants information "on the potential to improve specific power greater than 1 We/kg conversion from watts-thermal per radiation emission product," and information on the potential to improve damage tolerance of the voltaic to nuclear radiation to reach an operating lifetime comparable to the life of its nuclear source, on the scale of decades. "We will learn what our boundary conditions are when respondents tell us what technologies in the field of voltaics are possible, and we'll use that to see if there is sufficient scientific rationale make a case to present for further DARPA investment," Dodson said. "I also hope people are going to start thinking about nuclear systems that use electromagnetic versus thermal-kinetic methods to harvest nuclear energetic reactions."

Cisco will cut thousands of jobs in a second round of layoffs this year as the U.S. networking equipment maker shifts focus to higher-growth areas, including cybersecurity and AI, Reuters reported Friday, citing sources. From the report: The number of people affected could be similar to or slightly higher than the 4,000 employees Cisco laid off in February, and will likely be announced as early as Wednesday with the company's fourth-quarter results, said the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Intel Linux engineer Colin Ian King discovered that if aligning the slab in the ACPI code via the "SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN" flag will offer a measurable improvement in memory performance and reducing the kernel boot time.

Colin explained with this one line kernel patch: "Enabling SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN for the ACPI object caches improves boot speed in the ACPICA core for object allocation and free'ing especially in the AML parsing and execution phases in boot. Testing with 100 boots shows an average boot saving in acpi_init of ~35000 usecs compared to the unaligned version. Most of the ACPI objects being allocated and free'd are of very short life times in the critical paths for parsing and execution, so the extra memory used for alignment isn't too onerous."

The FCC has proposed new rules governing the use of AI-generated phone calls and texts. Part of the proposal centers on create a clear definition for AI-generated calls, with the rest focuses on consumer protection by making companies disclose when AI is being used in calls or texts. A report adds: "This provides consumers with an opportunity to identify and avoid those calls or texts that contain an enhanced risk of fraud and other scams," the FCC said. The agency is also looking ensure that legitimate uses of AI to assist people with disabilities to communicate remains protected.

Major U.S. companies are tightening eligibility requirements for student discounts, cracking down on graduates who continue to claim benefits years after leaving school. Amazon, Spotify, and other firms are partnering with verification services like SheerID to validate student status, ending an era of lax enforcement that allowed many to exploit discounts long after graduation.

While companies aim to build brand loyalty among young consumers, they're also guarding against fraud. SheerID claims it helped clients avoid $2 billion in fraudulent discounts last year. Most streaming services retain over 90% of student customers after graduation, according to SheerID CEO Stephanie Copeland Weber. "They're building trust and loyalty with those consumers," she told WSJ.

There's a rot at the heart of modern software development that's destroying innovation, and infosec legend Moxie Marlinspike believes he knows exactly what's to blame: Agile development. Marlinspike argued that Agile methodologies, widely adopted over the past two decades, have confined developers to "black box abstraction layers" that limit creativity and understanding of underlying systems.

"We spent the past 20 years onboarding people into software by putting them into black box abstraction layers, and then putting them into organizations composed of black box abstraction layers," Marlinspike said. He contended this approach has left many software engineers unable to do more than derivative work, lacking the deep understanding necessary for groundbreaking developments. Thistle Technologies CEO Window Snyder echoed these concerns, noting that many programmers now lack knowledge of low-level languages and machine code interactions. Marlinspike posited that security researchers, who routinely probe beneath surface-level abstractions, are better positioned to drive innovation in software development.

Stressing science education, China is outpacing other countries in research fields like battery chemistry, crucial to its lead in electric vehicles. From a report: China's domination of electric cars, which is threatening to start a trade war, was born decades ago in university laboratories in Texas, when researchers discovered how to make batteries with minerals that were abundant and cheap. Companies from China have recently built on those early discoveries, figuring out how to make the batteries hold a powerful charge and endure more than a decade of daily recharges. They are inexpensively and reliably manufacturing vast numbers of these batteries, producing most of the world's electric cars and many other clean energy systems.

Batteries are just one example of how China is catching up with -- or passing -- advanced industrial democracies in its technological and manufacturing sophistication. It is achieving many breakthroughs in a long list of sectors, from pharmaceuticals to drones to high-efficiency solar panels. Beijing's challenge to the technological leadership that the United States has held since World War II is evidenced in China's classrooms and corporate budgets, as well as in directives from the highest levels of the Communist Party.

A considerably larger share of Chinese students major in science, math and engineering than students in other big countries do. That share is rising further, even as overall higher education enrollment has increased more than tenfold since 2000. Spending on research and development has surged, tripling in the past decade and moving China into second place after the United States. Researchers in China lead the world in publishing widely cited papers in 52 of 64 critical technologies, recent calculations by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reveal.