Following reports of exploding batteries in its latest smartphone, Samsung is expected to announce an "unprecedented" recall of the Galaxy 7 Note less than a month after it first debuted. According to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency, an unnamed Samsung official says the company is conducting an investigation and is expected to announce the results this weekend or early next week. Samsung has indeed traced the explosions to the battery of the device and is in talks with Verizon and other U.S. business partners to figure out how to deal with the issue.

SolidEnergy is preparing to commercialize its "lithium metal" tech. The company now has its own facility and is building towards a November 2016 launch with drone batteries. Following that, it plans to commercialize cells for smartphones and other electronics in 2017, with EV batteries to follow in 2018.

Seagate has been showing off its monster 60TB solid-state drive (SSD) this week, which breezes past the 15TB SSD that Samsung launched in March. But don't expect to see Seagate's SSD in a consumer device any time soon, with the new drive set to join the high-performance end of its datacenter portfolio. Samsung's PM1633a has a 2.5-inch form factor and holds 15.36TB of data. For now, it remains the largest commercially available SSD and reportedly costs $10,000 per unit.

Batteries are notoriously hard to improve. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the opening last week, on July 29th, of Tesla’s Gigafactory, a massive battery plant in Nevada. According to its boss Elon Musk, Tesla built the factory because wringing more efficiency out of batteries is far more difficult than optimising the process by which they are made. It is an ironic coincidence, therefore, that last week also saw the publication, in Nature Energy, of a paper outlining a way of making a battery whose prototype stores twice as much juice as the lithium-ion cells the Gigafactory will turn out...

After oxygen, silicon is the most abundant element in the Earth’s crust. Its reserves are practically inexhaustible and it is cheap. When researchers look at an alternative to the current lithium-ion battery, it makes sense that they turn to silicon. Silicon-air batteries are not only smaller and lighter than their lithium-ion counterparts, but also have a much higher energy density. In addition, they are insensitive to external influences and environmentally friendly. Thus far, they have however only achieved relatively short running times.

As part of the exhibition Odyssey: Navigating Nameless Seas at the Singapore Art Museum, Korean artist U-Ram Choe has a mesmerizing kinetic sculpture installed entitled Una Lumino Callidus Spiritus that consists of 51 shiny flower-like individual units with translucent shells.

Sennheiser has announced a new pair of wireless headphones, the PXC 550, which comes with pretty exceptional battery life and a companion app that allows you to alter audio levels to your liking. The PXC 550 Wireless will last up to 30 hours with adaptive noise canceling engaged, according to Sennheiser, which is ten hours longer than wireless listening on the Bose QC35.

Full-color electronic paper is finally a reality. But don't expect to flip through vivid comic book e-pages any time soon: The technology will serve as signage for now. E Ink—maker of the ePaper display on your Nook, Kindle, or Kobo—this week unveiled Advanced Color ePaper (ACeP), a high-quality, full-color reflective display. ACeP uses colored pigments and a single layer of electrophoretic fluid to achieve a full color gamut.

This simple Raspberry Pi-Powered Linux laptop uses off-the-shelf parts, can be hooked up to a TV or monitor, and it fits in your pocket.

Researchers at the University of California have discovered a way to use nanowires to allow lithium-ion batteries in smartphones, electric vehicles and other commercial devices to be recharged hundreds of thousands of times.

University of California, Irvine researchers have invented nanowire-based battery material that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times, moving us closer to a battery that would never require replacement. The breakthrough work could lead to commercial batteries with greatly lengthened lifespans for computers, smartphones, appliances, cars and spacecraft.

University of California, Irvine researchers have created a battery material that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times.

Amazon’s philosophy with the Kindle line has been consistent for nearly 10 years now — to make the device disappear, by making it as close to paper as possible. However, with the release of its latest model, called the Kindle Oasis, Amazon is shining a spotlight on the Kindle design itself. It’s bringing its flagship e-reader back into the consumer tech conversation with a bold device, and it carries with it some new compromises.

New device could help advance the field of molecular electronics

Logitech’s flagship gaming mouse is impressive, but may fall short of converting wired fanatics. Last week at the 2016 Game Developers Conference, we sat down with Logitech senior product manager Chris Pate, who gave us a hands-on demonstration of the company’s upcoming G900 Chaos Spectrum professional-grade wireless gaming mouse. Being a wireless mouse in a community dominated by wired peripherals, the G900 carries an enormous weight.

The Raspberry Pi 3 was released earlier this month with some significantly improved hardware, including a quad-core 64-bit ARM CPU, an upgraded GPU, and embedded wireless—updates that will let people use it for a wider variety of tasks than before. For people whose use cases require a decent amount of storage, Western Digital has just announced a specialized low-profile hard drive called the PiDrive.

The C.E.O. of Adafruit Industries wants to help others see engineering the way that she does—as a deeply creative endeavor. By Nicola Twilley.

It's actually smaller than the light beam it needs to work. We've seen some ridiculously tiny electronics in our day, but this might take the cake. Swiss researchers have built an optical networking switch so small that it's measured on the atomic scale -- in fact, it's smaller than the wavelength of light it needs to transmit data. The system can use just one silver atom to transmit an electrical current between silver and platinum pads. Apply enough voltage and the atom moves into place...

New York area retail vets Ronny Shmoel and Albert Liniado are betting that the third time will be a

Scientists in the US have designed a reusable lithium-ion battery that will shut down under extreme temperatures and only work again once the device has cooled. The innovation may help to prevent battery fires in specialised lithium-ion technologies. Found in everything from laptops to smart watches, lithium-ion batteries are ubiquitous in the modern world and have revolutionised consumer electronics. But flaws have become apparent when the cell is used in some specific industrial settings...