Raw Materials

BMW’s i4 sedan is the electric 4 Series you’ve been waiting for

Fabian Kirchbauer Photography The latest EV from Bavaria is a $55,400 luxury sedan with 300 miles of range Months after revealing its first new electric vehicle in nearly a decade, the iX SUV, BMW is ready to pull back the curtain on its next EV. The i4 electric sedan is the automaker’s electrified 4 Series,… Read more

US supports lifting patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines

The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it supported waiving patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines, calling the pandemic a “global health crisis.” “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic,… Read more

Logitech Now Shows Your Mouse’s Carbon Footprint on its Packaging

Home News (Image credit: Logitech) Logitech announced on Earth Day that it has updated the packaging on several of its mice and keyboards to offer information about each product’s environmental impact. The company said it would start to display this data, which it compared to the nutrition facts label found on many foods, in June… Read more

Oatly investors should beware climate change

Oatly is going public, so out of prurient interest, I picked up their registration statement. Did you know: a risk factor to Oatly’s business? Climate change. In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission provided guidance about how to apply climate change disclosures — since it might be required in the risk factor section, among other… Read more

Realtek Chip Shortage Is More Bad News for PC, Components Market

Home News (Image credit: MZinchenko / Shutterstock.com) It seems that Realtek has joined the long list of supply chain bottlenecks. DigiTimes today reported that the company is struggling to meet demand for the various chips manufacturers use in their notebooks, automobiles and other kinds of devices. In the story, DigiTimes remarked that Realtek has extended… Read more

Unizyx CEO Reportedly Says Networking Chip Supply Is at a 30-Year Low

Home News (Image credit: Shutterstock) It might be time to add another supply issue to the list. Unizyx CEO Gordon Yang said the company is suffering the worst networking chip shortage in 30 years, DigiTimes today reported, and that it will likely have to raise its prices as a result. Unizyx offers a wide array… Read more

Brazil regulator fines Apple $2 million for not including chargers with iPhone 12

The consumer protection agency in Brazil’s São Paulo state has fined Apple $2 million for failing to include chargers within iPhone 12 boxes, according to 9to5 Mac. Procon-SP says Apple engaged in “misleading advertising, selling a device without the charger and unfair terms.” Apple announced in October that the iPhone 12 and would not come… Read more

Tesla’s co-founder is teaming up with Specialized to solve the problem of e-bike batteries

The growing popularity of electric bikes has raised a lot of exciting possibilities about the future of transportation, but it also presents a number of unique challenges. Chief among them is what to do with all those e-bike batteries when they eventually run out of juice. Rather than send them to a landfill, one major… Read more

YouTube Shorts arrives in the US to take on TikTok, but the beta is still half-baked

YouTube Shorts, the company’s short-form answer to TikTok, is launching in beta in the United States starting today. The short video format has already been available for several months in India, but today marks its debut stateside (along with the addition of several new features). For the beta launch, YouTube Shorts will feature all the… Read more

Retail giants look to greener cargo ships to meet climate goals

Pressure from some of their biggest customers is pushing companies like global shipping giant Maersk to pollute less when they transport goods. It’s a sign that individual companies’ commitments to tackling climate change can influence others along the entire supply chain. One of the latest trends in retail has been for companies to pledge to… Read more

Rescuing discarded fabric for designer bow ties

Nisha Blackwell is CEO of Knotzland, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes bow ties from upcycled textile waste. Giving wasted material a new life Nisha Blackwell remembers wearing a lot of hand-me-down clothes as a kid and sorting through things to try on with her mother and grandmother. Thrifting was just a thing everyone did, long… Read more

Report: TSMC and UMC Are Trucking in Water to Prevent Further Chip Shortages

Home News (Image credit: Shutterstock) Joining silicon shortages and limited factory capacity in delaying Taiwanese chip production, more mundane resource shortages such as a lack of water in Taiwan are also threatening to slow chipmakers’ pace, although the companies have a plan to compensate for the island’s recent drought. DigiTimes today reported that TSMC, UMC,… Read more

Nvidia RTX 30-Series GPU Availability to Worsen in Q1: Report

Home News (Image credit: Nvidia) When Nvidia launched its RTX 3000 GPUs, the availability of the cards was less than great, with demand far outstripping supply, leading to a shortage. Now a new report suggests the problem is about to get worse. European hardware retailer Alternate, which operates in Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, has… Read more

Micro-chips: Auto industry laments supply bottlenecks

Europe’s carmakers remain vulnerable – even if many of the destroyed supply chains have only just been repaired after the Corona crash. But an indispensable group of components is missing more and more frequently: semiconductor modules, the heart of all electronic systems and microchips. Some auto production lines have to close again because supplies are… Read more