Lithium-ion batteries power many of our favorite gadgets. However, they rely on toxic, flammable materials. A small defect can cause devices to explode. Scientists at John Hopkins University develop better ones, and Wired told the story.

A team of researchers led by physicists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory believed a safer battery was possible, and for the past five years they have been developing a lithium-ion battery that’s seemingly immune to failure. The rugged battery they first unveiled in 2017, working with researchers at the University of Maryland, can be cut, shot, bent, and soaked without an interruption in power. Late last year, the Johns Hopkins team pushed it further, making it fireproof and boosting its voltages to levels comparable with a commercial product. Samsung, eat your heart out.

I always enjoy Cult of Mac’s ‘Today in Apple History’ segments. Today is a particularly good one though, because on this day 36 years ago, Apple’s legendary Mac advert arrived in theaters.

The erroneous claim that Apple’s “1984” ad aired just once continues to thrive. Yes, the ad most memorably ran during 1984’s Super Bowl. But many forget its extraordinary theatrical run. The spot’s earliest showing was, as it happens, at 1 a.m. in Twin Falls, Idaho, on the last day of 1983, so as to make it eligible for ad awards the following year. Ridley Scott directed the “1984” ad. Back then, most knew Scott for making Alien and Blade Runner, although he possessed a strong advertising background. The “1984” Mac ad played on imagery from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four novella, presenting Apple as rebels fighting a technocratic elite.

Apple shares have soared recently, hitting record highs. Writing for AppleInsider, Daniel Eran Dilger argued that this is in no small part down to investors and analysts starting to properly value AAPL.

It certainly appears that Apple’s historically low valuation in terms of Price to Earnings—its stock valuation compared to its ability to generate profits—is tied directly to one of the largest mistakes made by tech industry investment analysts over the past decade: the idea that Apple’s iPhone was a fluke product that would rapidly be commodified and overrun by an army of cheaper, less restricted and more “open” handsets running Google’s Android… This assumption was grounded on the 1990’s history of the Macintosh, which began to perform well for Apple for just a few years before Microsoft copied its foundational concepts and spread them across generic PCs…

Microsft pledged to become carbon negative by 2030 on Thursday. It made the declaration in a new blog post. Led by Lisa Jackson, Apple has made strides in this regard too, including financing a carbon-free aluminum smelting process.

By 2030 Microsoft will be carbon negative, and by 2050 Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975. We recognize that progress requires not just a bold goal but a detailed plan. As described below, we are launching today an aggressive program to cut our carbon emissions by more than half by 2030, both for our direct emissions and for our entire supply and value chain. We will fund this in part by expanding our internal carbon fee, in place since 2012 and increased last year, to start charging not only our direct emissions, but those from our supply and value chains.