An anonymous reader shares a report: A new report claims that Nvidia has recently raised the official prices of nearly all of its products to combat the impact of tariffs and surging manufacturing costs on its business, with gaming graphics cards receiving a 5 to 10% hike while AI GPUs see up to a 15% increase.

As reported by Digitimes Taiwan, Nvidia is facing "multiple crises," including a $5.5 billion hit to its quarterly earnings over export restrictions on AI chips, including a ban on sales of its H20 chips to China.

Digitimes reports that CEO Jensen Huang has been "shuttling back and forth" between the US and China to minimize the impact of tariffs, and that "in order to maintain stable profitability," Nvidia has reportedly recently raised official prices for almost all its products, allowing its partners to increase prices accordingly.

Western Digital has made a strategic investment in German startup Cerabyte, a company developing nearly indestructible ceramic-based data storage technology. The partnership aims to accelerate commercialization of Cerabyte's ceramic-on-glass material, which the company claims can preserve data for 5,000 years.

Cerabyte recently demonstrated its technology's resilience by boiling storage devices in salt water and subjecting them to oven-level heat. The company states its ceramic storage withstands fire, moisture, UV light, radiation, corrosion, and EMP bursts. Beyond durability, Cerabyte aims to enable massive capacity increases as the industry moves toward what it calls the "Yottabyte era," while targeting storage costs below $1 per TB by 2030.

Fusion energy "took one step closer to reality," announced the University of Texas at Austin, as their researchers joined with a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Type One Energy Group and "solved a longstanding problem in the field" — how to contain high-energy particles inside fusion reactors. When high-energy alpha particles leak from a reactor, that prevents the plasma from getting hot and dense enough to sustain the fusion reaction. To prevent them from leaking, engineers design elaborate magnetic confinement systems, but there are often holes in the magnetic field, and a tremendous amount of computational time is required to predict their locations and eliminate them. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters, the research team describes having discovered a shortcut that can help engineers design leak-proof magnetic confinement systems 10 times as fast as the gold standard method, without sacrificing accuracy... "What's most exciting is that we're solving something that's been an open problem for almost 70 years," said Josh Burby, assistant professor of physics at UT and first author of the paper. "It's a paradigm shift in how we design these reactors...."

This new method also can help with a similar but different problem in another popular magnetic fusion reactor design called a tokamak. In that design, there's a problem with runaway electrons — high-energy electrons that can punch a hole in the surrounding walls. This new method can help identify holes in the magnetic field where these electrons might leak.

Huawei has launched its first laptop running HarmonyOS instead of Windows, complete with AI features and support for over 2,000 mostly China-focused apps. The product is largely a result of U.S. sanctions that prevented U.S.-based companies like Google and Microsoft from doing business with Huawei, forcing the company to develop its own in-house solution. Liliputing reports: Early version of HarmonyOS were basically skinned version of Android, but over time Huawei has moved the two operating systems further apart and it now includes Huawei's own kernel, user interface, and other features. The version designed for laptops features a desktop-style operating system with a taskbar and dock on the bottom of the screen and support for multitasking by running multiple applications in movable, resizable windows.

Since this is 2025, of course Huawei's demos also heavily emphasize AI features: the company showed how Celia, its AI assistant, can summarize documents, help prepare presentation slides, and more. While the operating system won't support the millions of Windows applications that could run on older Huawei laptops, the company says that at launch it will support more than 2,000 applications including WPS Office (an alternative to Microsoft Office that's developed in China), and a range of Chinese social media applications.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple has "made progress" on a chip for a product that could rival the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The company is also reportedly working on glasses that use augmented reality. The Verge reports: The chip is apparently based on the chips Apple uses for the Apple Watch, though the company has removed parts and is being designed in such a way that it can handle the "multiple cameras" that the smart glasses might have, Bloomberg reports. Apple wants mass production of the chip to start by the end of 2026 or sometime in 2027, so the glasses themselves could come out within that timeframe. [...] Apple is developing chips for camera-equipped Apple Watch and Airpods as well, and the goal is for those chips to be ready "by around 2027," Bloomberg says. The company is also developing new M-series chips and dedicated AI server chips, per the report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: RIP, 486 processor. You've had a long run since Intel released you back in 1989. While Microsoft stopped supporting you with the release of Windows XP in 2001, Linux kept you alive and well for another 20+ years. But all good things must come to an end, and with the forthcoming release of the Linux 6.15 kernel, the 486 and the first Pentium processors will be sunsetted.

Why? Linus Torvalds wrote recently on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), "I really get the feeling that it's time to leave i486 support behind. There's zero real reason for anybody to waste one second of development effort on this kind of issue." Senior Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar put Torvalds' remark into context, writing, "In the x86 architecture, we have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very very few people are using with modern kernels. This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things." "This will be the first time Linux has dropped support for a major chip family since 2012, when Linux stopped supporting the 386 family," notes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "Moving forward, the minimum supported x86 CPU will now be the original Pentium (P5) or newer, requiring the presence of the Time Stamp Counter (TSC) and the CMPXCHG8B (CX8) instruction. These features are absent in the older 486 and early 586 processors, such as the IDT WinChip and AMD Elan families."

That said, you can continue running Linux on Pentium CPUs, but you'll have to "run museum kernels," as Torvalds pointed out in 2022 when he first floated the idea of ending support for 486.

Google has partnered with Elementl Power to develop at least 600 MW of nuclear capacity at each of three planned sites. It's unknown where the three proposed sites will be located or how much Google is investing. World Nuclear News reports: The two companies will work "with utility and regulated power partners to identify and advance new projects" and Elementl "will continue the evaluation of potential technology, engineering, procurement and construction, and other project partners, while prioritising specific sites for accelerated development."

Elementl Power, founded in 2022, describes itself as a technology-agnostic advanced nuclear project developer which aims to provide "turn-key development, financing and ownership solutions for customers that want access to clean baseload power but may not want to own or operate nuclear power assets." It says its mission is to "to deploy over 10 gigawatts of next-generation nuclear power in the US by 2035."

It is not Google's first nuclear power deal -- in October 2024 the company signed an agreement with Kairos Power to purchase power from its fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature small modular reactors, with a fleet of up to 500 MW of capacity by 2035. The aim of the power purchase agreement was to facilitate Kairos Power to develop, construct, and operate plants and sell energy, ancillary services, and environmental attributes to Google. At the time of that announcement Google said that it would help it achieve net-zero emissions across all of its operations and value chain by 2030. Further reading: Google tries to greenwash massive AI energy consumption with another vague nuclear deal (The Register)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: There's a new warehouse robot at Amazon that has a sense of touch, allowing it to handle a job previously only done by humans. Amazon unveiled the robot, called Vulcan, Wednesday at an event in Germany. CNBC got an exclusive first look at Vulcan in April, as it stowed items into tall, yellow bins at a warehouse in Spokane, Washington. An up-close look at the "hand" of the robot reveals how it can feel the items it touches using an AI-powered sensor to determine the precise pressure and torque each object needs. This innovative gripper helps give Vulcan the ability to manipulate 75% of the 1 million unique items in inventory at the Spokane warehouse. Amazon has used other robotic arms inside its warehouses since 2021, but those rely on cameras for detection and suction for grasp, limiting what types of objects they can handle.

Vulcan can also operate 20 hours a day, according to Aaron Parness, who heads up the Amazon Robotics team that developed the machine. Still, Parness told CNBC that instead of replacing people in its warehouses, Vulcan will create new, higher skilled jobs that involve maintaining, operating, installing and building the robots. When asked if Amazon will fully automate warehouses in the future, Parness said, "not at all." "I don't believe in 100% automation," he said. "If we had to get Vulcan to do 100% of the stows and picks, it would never happen. You would wait your entire life. Amazon understands this." The goal is for Vulcan to handle 100% of the stowing that happens in the top rows of bins, which are difficult for people to reach, Parness said. [...] Amazon said Vulcan is operating at about the same speed as a human worker and can handle items up to 8 pounds. It operates behind a fence, sequestered from human workers to reduce the risk of accidents.

Data storage firm Seagate is working to develop a 100-terabyte hard drive by 2030, touting blistering demand from data centers for the 70-year-old technology in the artificial intelligence boom. From a report: BS Teh, Seagate's chief commercial officer, told CNBC that the company is aiming to launch such a drive -- which would have about three times the capacity of the firm's top-of-the-line hard drives -- by 2030. The largest hard disk drive Seagate currently produces is the 36-terabyte Exos M model, which it launched in January.

"You may be thinking, 'Who would need it?'" Teh said, referring to the idea of a 100-terabyte hard drive. "Well, plenty." He added: "I think there's definitely strong demand. This is a key enabler for the industry to be able to deliver the storage capacity that the market needs, because there's no other technology that's able to produce this capacity of storage technology to meet the growth that the market needs."

According to the Washington Post (paywalled), the Trump administration plans to eliminate the Energy Star program -- a long-standing EPA initiative that has saved Americans over $500 billion in energy costs since 1992. "The organization states that the average American saves about $450 per year on energy bills by choosing appliances that have been Energy Star-certified," adds Engadget. From the report: The EPA hasn't said when this would go into effect and when consumers would stop seeing Energy Star certifications on home appliances. It's technically illegal for a presidential administration to end this program without Congress, but the same goes for many of Trump's pronouncements and executive orders. "Eliminating the Energy Star program would directly contradict this administration's promise to reduce household energy costs," Paula Glover, president of the nonprofit coalition Alliance to Save Energy, told CNN. "For just $32 million a year, Energy Star helps American families save over $40 billion in annual energy costs. That's a return of $350 for every federal dollar invested."

Hyundai Motor Group is accelerating its factory automation efforts by deploying Atlas humanoid robots from Boston Dynamics at its Metaplant America facility in Georgia, as part of a broader $21 billion U.S. investment strategy to boost efficiency and local production amid rising tariffs. InterestingEngineering reports: At Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, Hyundai already uses Spot robots -- four-legged machines -- for industrial inspections. In addition, the plant features a dedicated robot that removes car doors before the vehicles enter General Assembly, and a fixed robot that reinstalls the doors toward the end of the process -- a technology unique to the Georgia facility.

The South Korean automaker has not disclosed how many Atlas robots will be deployed at the facility or what specific tasks they will perform. According to reports, the company plans to further expand the use of robots across its global manufacturing facilities, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency. [...] The automaker aims to manufacture 300,000 electric and hybrid vehicles annually at the new facility. At its recent Grand Opening Ceremony, the company announced plans to ramp up production to 500,000 units over time, without specifying a timeline.

"When Disneyland turns 70 this July, Main Street's Opera House will play host to the return of Walt Disney, who will sit down with audiences to tell his story in robot form," writes Gizmodo.

But they point out Walt's granddaughter Johanna Miller wrote a Facebook post opposing the idea in November. ("They are Dehumanizing him. People are not replaceable...") The idea of a Robotic Grampa to give the public a feeling of who the living man was just makes no sense. It would be an imposter... You could never get the casual ness of his talking interacting with the camera his excitement to show and tell people about what is new at the park.

You can not add life to one. Empty of a soul or essence of the man. Knowing that he did not want this. Having your predecessors tell you that this was out of bounds.... So so Sad and disappointed.
The Facebook post claims that the son of a Disney engineer even remembers Walt saying that he never wanted to be an animatronic himself. And "Members of the Walt Disney family are said to be divided," reports the Los Angeles Times, "with many supporting the animatronic and some others against it, say those in the know who have declined to speak on the record for fear of ruining their relationships."

So that Facebook post "raised anew ethical questions that often surround any project attempting to capture the dead via technology," their article adds, "be it holographic representations of performers or digitally re-created cinematic animations. And then some media outlets got a partial preview Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times reports: An early sculpt of what would become the animatronic was revealed, one complete with age spots on Disney's hands and weariness around his eyes — Imagineers stressed their intent is faithful accuracy — but much of the attraction remains secretive. The animatronic wasn't shown, nor did Imagineering provide any images of the figure, which it promises will be one of its most technically advanced. Instead, Imagineering sought to show the care in which it was bringing Disney back to life while also attempting to assuage any fears regarding what has become a much-debated project among the Disney community...

Longtime Imagineer Tom Fitzgerald, known for his work on beloved Disney projects such as Star Tours and the Guardians of the Galaxy coaster in Florida, said Wednesday that "A Magical Life" has been in the works for about seven years. Asked directly about ethical concerns in representing the deceased via a robotic figurine, Fitzgerald noted the importance of the Walt Disney story, not only to the company but to culture at large... "What could we do at Disneyland for our audience that would be part of our tool kit vernacular but that would bring Walt to life in a way that you could only experience at the park? We felt the technology had gotten there. We felt there was a need to tell that story in a fresh way...."

"Walt Disney — A Magical Life" will walk a fine line when it opens, attempting to inspire a new generation to look into Disney's life while also portraying him as more than just a character in the park's arsenal. "Why are we doing this now?" Fitzgerald says. "For two reasons. One is Disneyland's 70th anniversary is an ideal time we thought to create a permanent tribute to Walt Disney in the Opera House. The other: I grew up watching Walt Disney on television. I guess I'm the old man. He came into our living room every week and chatted and it was very casual and you felt like you knew the man. But a lot of people today don't know Walt Disney was an individual. They think Walt Disney is a company."

And now nearly 60 years after his death, Disney will once again grace Main Street, whether or not audiences — or even some members of his family — are ready to greet him.

"It is the fastest, most efficient transistor ever," proclaims an announcment from Peking University. "And most important of all, there's no trace of silicon involved," adds ZME Science. From the South China Morning Post: A team of researchers at Peking University claims to have shattered chip performance limits and proven that China can use new materials to "change lanes" in the semiconductor race by circumventing silicon-based roadblocks entirely.

The researchers, led by physical chemistry professor Peng Hailin, said their self-engineered 2D transistor could operate 40 per cent faster than Intel and TSMC's cutting-edge 3-nanometre silicon chips, while consuming 10 per cent less energy.... "While this path is born out of necessity due to current sanctions, it also forces researchers to find solutions from fresh perspectives," [Hailin] added.
"Peking's major innovation comes from the two-dimensional nature of their transistors, facilitated by using an element other than silicon," writes Tom's Hardware: BiâOâSe, or bismuth oxyselenide, is a semiconductor material studied for its use in sub-1nm process nodes for years, largely thanks to its ability to be a 2D semiconductor. Two-dimensional semiconductors, like 2D BiâOâSe, are more flexible and sturdy at a small scale than silicon, which runs into reduced carrier mobility at even the 10nm node. Such breakthroughs into stacked 2D transistors and the move from silicon to bismuth are exciting for the future of semiconductors and are necessary for the Chinese industry to compete on the leading edge of semiconductors.
ZME Science adds this note of skepticism. "Turning laboratory breakthroughs into commercial chips typically takes years — sometimes decades..."

Thanks to Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares an article from Renewables Now: Chinese tech company Leapting has successfully completed its first commercial deployment of photovoltaic (PV) modules with an AI-driven solar module mounting robot in Australia. The Chinese company was tasked with supporting the installation of French Neoen's (EPA:NEOEN) 350-MW/440-MWp Culcairn Solar Farm in New South Wales' Riverina region. Shanghai-based Leapting said this week that its intelligent robot has installed almost 10,000 modules at an "efficient, safe, and stable" pace that has "significantly" reduced the original construction timeline.

Litian Intelligent was deployed at the Australian project site in early February. The machine has a 2.5-metre-high robotic arm sitting on a self-guided, self-propelled crawler. Equipped with a navigation system, and visual recognition technology, it can lift and mount PV panels weighing up to 30 kilograms. By replacing labour-intensive manual operations, the robot shortens the module installation cycle by 25%, while the installation efficiency increases three to five times as compared to manual labour and is easily adapted to complex environments, Leapting says.
Or, as Clean Technica puts it, "Meet the robot replacing four workers at a time on solar projects." This is part of a broader industrial trend. In the United States, Rosendin Electric demonstrated its own semi-autonomous system in Texas that allowed a two-person team to install 350 to 400 modules per day, a clear step-change from traditional methods. AES Corporation has been developing a robot called Maximo that combines placement and fastening with computer vision. Trina Solar's Trinabot in China operates in a similar space, with prototype systems demonstrating 50-plus modules per hour... In an industry where time-to-energy is critical, shaving weeks off the construction schedule directly reduces costs and increases net revenue...

[T]he direction is clear. The future of solar construction will be faster, safer, and more precise — not because of human brawn, but because of robotic repetition. There will still be humans on-site, but their role shifts from lifting panels to managing throughput. Just as cranes and excavators changed civil construction, so too will robots like Leapting's define the next era of solar deployment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely. The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step.

Now Pi boards have their tiny bits and bigger pieces soldered at the same time through an intrusive reflow soldering process undertaken with Raspberry Pi's UK manufacturing partner, Sony. After adjusting component placement, the solder stencil, and the connectors, the board makers could then place and secure all their components in the same stage. Intrusive reflow soldering this way involves putting solder paste on both the pads for SMD bits and into the through-hole pins. The through-hole parts are pushed onto the paste, and the whole board then goes into a reflow oven, where the solder paste melts, the connectors fall in more fully, and joints are formed for all the SMD and through-hole parts at once. You can watch the process up close in this mesmerizing video from Surface Mount Process.

Intrusive reflow soldering is not a brand-new process, but what it did for the Raspberry Pi is notable, according to Thornton. The company saw "a massive 50% reduction in product returns," and it sped up production by 15 percent by eliminating the break between the two soldering stages. By removing the distinct soldering bath from its production line, the company also reduced its carbon dioxide output by 43 tonnes per year (or 47.4 US tons).

New submitter MicroBitz shares a report: SPROUT, short for Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit, is a flexible, vine-like robot developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame. Unlike rigid robots or static cameras, SPROUT can "grow" into tight, winding spaces that are otherwise inaccessible, giving first responders a new way to explore, map and assess collapsed structures. Beyond disaster response, the technology could be adapted for inspecting military systems or critical infrastructure in hard-to-reach places, making SPROUT a versatile tool for a variety of high-stakes scenarios. "The urban search-and-rescue environment can be brutal and unforgiving, where even the most hardened technology struggles to operate. The fundamental way a vine robot works mitigates a lot of the challenges that other platforms face," says Chad Council, a member of the SPROUT team, which is led by Nathaniel Hanson.

"The mechanical performance of the robots has an immediate effect, but the real goal is to rethink the way sensors are used to enhance situational awareness for rescue teams," adds Hanson. "Ultimately, we want SPROUT to provide a complete operating picture to teams before anyone enters a rubble pile."

You can see the SPROUT vine robot in action in a YouTube video from MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

Sales of electric vehicles in America jumped 10.6% in the first three months of 2025 (compared to the same period in 2024), reports Bloomberg.

And research provider BloombergNEF expects all of 2025 will see a 31.5% sales increase from 2024's sales in the U:S. — slightly above the global increase rate of 30%. (That's 22 million battery-powered vehicles around the world.)

"EV adoption is cruising along in the U.S.," Bloomberg writes, with interest "spreading from early-adopters to mainstream consumers" tired of paying for gas and oil changes — and attracted by new products from familiar brands: Of the 63 or so fully electric cars and trucks on the U.S. market, one quarter weren't available a year ago. The product blitz includes the first EV offerings from Acura, Dodge and Jeep, second models from Mini and Porsche and two more battery-powered machines each from Cadillac and Volvo...

Many of the new EVs are relatively affordable. Cox Automotive estimates the price spread between EVs broadly and internal combustion cars and trucks has shrunk to just $5,000. General Motors, meanwhile, plans to resurrect its Chevrolet Bolt later this year with a price point around $30,000...

Remember First Light Fusion? Founded in 2011, it was a pioneering British startup that in 2022 "successfully combined atomic nuclei, which U.K. regulators called a milestone in the decades-long push for fusion energy.

It's now "pulled the plug on plans to build its first reactor," reports the Telegraph, abandoning its push for a prototype power plant based on its "projectile fusion" technology due to a lack of funding. The technology involves a 5p-sized projectile being fired at a fuel cell at extreme speeds using electromagnets to generate a powerful reaction and simulate collisions at extremely high speeds, such as those in space. Instead of building its own plant, First Light plans to supply other nuclear power companies with one of its inventions, called an "amplifier", which houses a nuclear fuel capsule and boosts the power of fusion reactions.

The group has burned through tens of millions of pounds trying to bring its technology to fruition... The decision to ditch its original plan will allow First Light Fusion to be more "capital light", the nuclear group said in March, while licensing its inventions would generate more revenues. The company said it had recently secured the first tranche of a new funding round. Mark Thomas, First Light Fusion's chief executive, said: "We have been very pleased with the response to our strategy pivot, moving to an enabler of inertial fusion while rapidly accelerating revenues...

First Light Fusion's other investors include Chinese technology giant Tencent.

What can you build with a 3D printer? Starbucks just printed itself a new store — a drive-through location in the southern tip of Texas.

Fast Company says it's a store that "looks more like the future of construction than your average café." Built with layers of concrete piped out by a giant robotic printer, the 1,400-square-foot structure is part of the company's ongoing effort to modernize operations and trim costs... Peri-3D, a German company, used a giant 3D printer to pump out layers of concrete mixture to create the structure. According to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, the cost for building the small scale coffee shop was about $1.2 million...

Of course, the new method is a first for the brand. And builders say, the more they use the technology, the more efficient they are at it. In Georgetown, Texas, an entire community of 100 homes was recently built using 3D-printing. The company who built the community, Lennar, says they're seeing costs drop with each build. Stuart Miller, chairman and co-CEO of Lennar, told CNBC earlier this year that the construction company says their costs and cycle time go down "by half" by adopting 3D-printing. "This is significant improvement in evolving a housing market that has the ability to change over time and being more adaptable and more functional in providing affordable and attainable housing for a broader swath of the market," said Miller...

3D-printing is also much faster, meaning that projects can be completed in a fraction of the time, potentially drastically cutting labor costs. According to the World Economic Forum, 3D-printing can cost just 30% of what building structures the old-fashioned way costs.
The article offers more examples of 3D-printed buildings. ("in Japan, a 3D-printed train station was just erected. And Peri-3D, itself, has completed at least 15 construction projects, including residential buildings in Europe and Germany.")

3D-printing has even been incorporated into some restaurants for customizing food, the article notes, "but building restaurants with the technology is a brand-new development."

Although not everyone seems convinced. Instagram comments on a picture of Starbucks' new 3D-printed drive-through characterized its aesthetic as "dirty", "fugly", "violently hideous", and "like hot garbage".

An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider: A Lufthansa flight carrying 461 passengers had to divert after someone's tablet became "jammed" in a business-class seat.

The Airbus A380 took off from Los Angeles on Wednesday, bound for Munich, and had been flying for around three hours when the pilots diverted to Boston Logan International Airport. In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the tablet had become "jammed in a Business Class seat" and had "already shown visible signs of deformation due to the seat's movements" when the flight diverted. [The aviation site] Simply Flying, which first reported the news, said the device was an iPad.

The decision to divert was taken "to eliminate any potential risk, particularly with regard to possible overheating," the spokesperson added, saying that it was the joint decision of the crew and air traffic control. Lithium batteries pose a safety risk if damaged, punctured, or crushed... In a confined space like an aircraft cabin, a lithium battery fire poses a serious hazard to the passengers onboard. Last year, a Breeze Airways flight from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh had to make an emergency landing in Albuquerque after a passenger's laptop caught fire.