TLDR 2022-04-14

Amazon plans to add a fuel and inflation surcharge to the fees it collects from US third-party sellers who use its fulfillment services. The new fee will go into effect from April 28 and is subject to change. It will apply to all product types. The surcharge is 24 cents per unit, lower than UPS's surcharge of 42 cents.

Mark Zuckerberg sees augmented reality glasses as a holy grail device that will redefine our relationship with technology. Meta is working on a first-generation device for release in 2024, with a more advanced design already planned for 2026. The devices will likely be priced higher than the company's Quest headsets as the materials will cost multiple thousands of dollars. Meta is aiming the first version at early adopters and developers, and it is not expecting high sales. More details about Meta's upcoming AR device are available in the article.

Scientists at the Fermilab in Illinois have measured the mass of a subatomic particle called the W boson. The ultraprecise measurement found that the particle had a mass seven standard deviations higher than the Standard Model predicts. The Standard Model is a framework that governs the world of quantum physics. There is an incredibly small probability that the result occurred by chance. Another experiment will be conducted to confirm the measurement. If the result can be replicated, it could mean a revision or extension of the Standard Model.

Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. The engine can convert heat to electricity with over 40% efficiency. The researchers plan to create a system that stores excess renewable energy into heavily insulated banks of hot graphite that will use the new engine to convert the heat to energy when needed. The battery can operate at high temperatures with low maintenance costs as it has no moving parts. It could enable a fully decarbonized power grid.

Images are important for the web. The img element has gained superpowers since it was created almost 30 years ago. This article looks at what the img element can do and how it can be used to improve user experience and Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are a set of page experience signals that Google Search uses for ranking pages.

Lexical is a JavaScript web text-editor framework. It was designed to be highly extensible, reliable, and accessible. Examples of apps created with Lexical are available.

Razer, a company known for gaming PCs and peripherals, and Lambda, a deep-learning infrastructure provider used by the US Department of Defense, have teamed up to release the Tensorbook, a Linux-based laptop designed for deep-learning development. The Tensorbook features a 16GB Nvidia RTX 3080 Max-Q, a 15.6-inch display with a 165 Hz refresh rate, an Intel i7-11800H with eight cores and a base clock speed of 2.3 GHz, 2TB of SSD storage, and 64GB of DDR4-3200 RAM. Pictures of the laptop, which will cost $3,500, are available in the article.

Atlassian is currently experiencing its longest outage ever. Almost 400 companies lost access to Atlassian Cloud services starting on April 4. The company estimates that many customers will not be able to access its services for another two weeks. This article discusses the timeline of events, the cause of the outage, the impact of the outage on customers and Atlassian's business, and lessons learned from the outage. The outage was caused by a script that accidentally deleted all customer data for anyone using a plugin that was being retired.