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Slashdot Stories Firehose All Popular Polls Ask EventsSoftware Newsletter Jobs Submit Search Slashdot Login or Sign up Topics: Devices Build Entertainment Technology Open Source Science YRO more...Follow us: RSS Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Youtube Mastodon Newsletter Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading! Nickname: Password: Public Terminal Forgot your password? Close binspam dupe notthebest offtopic slownewsday stale stupid fresh funny insightful interesting maybe offtopic flamebait troll redundant overrated insightful interesting informative funny underrated descriptive typo dupe error !Sign up for the Slashdot newsletter! OR check out the new Slashdot job board to browse remote jobs or jobs in your area Do you develop on GitHub? You can keep using GitHub but automatically sync your GitHub releases to SourceForge quickly and easily with this tool so your projects have a backup location, and get your project in front of SourceForge’s nearly 20 million monthly users. It takes less than a minute. Get new users downloading your project releases today! × 173849927 story Could Atomically Thin Layers Bring A 19x Energy Jump In Battery Capacitors? (popularmechanics.com) 2525 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday May 12, 2024 @02:34PM from the better-batteries dept. Researchers believe they’ve discovered a new material structure that can improve the energy storage of capacitors. The structure allows for storage while improving the efficiency of ultrafast charging and discharging. The new find needs optimization but has the potential to help power electric vehicles. * An anonymous reader shared this report from Popular Mechanics : In a study published in Science , lead author Sang-Hoon Bae, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, demonstrates a novel heterostructure that curbs energy loss, enabling capacitors to store more energy and charge rapidly without sacrificing durability... Within capacitors, ferroelectric materials offer high maximum polarization. That’s useful for ultra-fast charging and discharging, but it can limit the effectiveness of energy storage or the "relaxation time" of a conductor. "This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems," the study authors write. Bae makes the change — one he unearthed while working on something completely different — by sandwiching 2D and 3D materials in atomically thin layers, using chemical and nonchemical bonds between each layer. He says a thin 3D core inserts between two outer 2D layers to produce a stack that’s only 30 nanometers thick, about 1/10th that of an average virus particle... The sandwich structure isn’t quite fully conductive or nonconductive. This semiconducting material, then, allows the energy storage, with a density up to 19 times higher than commercially available ferroelectric capacitors, while still achieving 90 percent efficiency — also better than what’s currently available. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.173846181 story Father of SQL Says Yes to NoSQL (theregister.com) 7171 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday May 12, 2024 @11:34AM from the debating-databases dept. An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register : The co-author of SQL, the standardized query language for relational databases, has come out in support of the NoSQL database movement that seeks to escape the tabular confines of the RDBMS. Speaking to The Register as SQL marks its 50th birthday, Donald Chamberlin, who first proposed the language with IBM colleague Raymond Boyce in a 1974 paper [PDF], explains that NoSQL databases and their query languages could help perform the tasks relational systems were never designed for. "The world doesn’t stay the same thing, especially in computer science," he says. "It’s a very fast, evolving, industry. New requirements are coming along and technology has to change to meet them, I think that’s what’s happening. The NoSQL movement is motivated by new kinds of applications, particularly web applications, that need massive scalability and high performance. Relational databases were developed in an earlier generation when scalability and performance weren’t quite as important. To get the scalability and performance that you need for modern apps, many systems are relaxing some of the constraints of the relational data model." [...] A long-time IBMer, Chamberlin is now semi-retired, but finds time to fulfill a role as a technical advisor for NoSQL company Couchbase. In the role, he has become an advocate for a new query language designed to overcome the " impedance mismatch " between data structures in the application language and a database, he says. UC San Diego professor Yannis Papakonstantinou has proposed SQL++ to solve this problem, with a view to addressing impedance mismatch between heavily object-based JavaScript, the core language for web development and the assumed relational approach embedded in SQL. Like C++, SQL++ is designed as a compatible extension of an earlier language, SQL, but is touted as better able to handle the JSON file format inherent in JavaScript. Couchbase and AWS have adopted the language, although the cloud giant calls it PartiQL . At the end of the interview, Chamblin adds that "I don’t think SQL is going to go away. A large part of the world’s business data is encoded in SQL, and data is very sticky. Once you’ve got your database, you’re going to leave it there. Also, relational systems do a very good job of what they were designed to do... "[I]f you’re a startup company that wants to sell shoes on the web or something, you’re going to need a database, and one of those SQL implementations will do the job for free. I think relational databases and the SQL language will be with us for a long time."173842227 story Are Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Costly and Unviable? (cosmosmagazine.com) 209209 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday May 12, 2024 @07:34AM from the getting-a-reaction dept. The Royal Institution of Australia is a national non-profit hub for science communication, publishing the science magazine Cosmos four times a year. This month they argued that small modular nuclear reactors " don’t add up as a viable energy source ." Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable. However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs will actually be more expensive than large reactors. This ’diseconomy of scale’ was demonstrated by the now-terminated proposal to build six NuScale Power SMRs (77 megawatts each) in Idaho in the United States. The final cost estimate of the project per megawatt was around 250 percent more than the initial per megawatt cost for the 2,200 megawatts Vogtle nuclear power plant being built in Georgia, US. Previous small reactors built in various parts of America also shut down because they were uneconomical. The cost was four to six times the cost of the same electricity from wind and solar photovoltaic plants, according to estimates from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Australian Energy Market Operator. "The money invested in nuclear energy would save far more carbon dioxide if it were instead invested in renewables," the article agues: Small reactors also raise all of the usual concerns associated with nuclear power, including the risk of severe accidents , the linkage to nuclear weapons proliferation , and the production of radioactive waste that has no demonstrated solution because of technical and social challenges . One 2022 study calculated that various radioactive waste streams from SMRs would be larger than the corresponding waste streams from existing light water reactors... Nuclear energy itself has been declining in importance as a source of power: the fraction...