iFixit today announced that its do-it-yourself iPhone battery replacement kits will remain $29.99 until the end of 2019. The repair website lowered the price of its kits in late 2017 to match Apple's discounted iPhone battery replacement fee of $29, which ended on December 31, 2018. Apple now charges $49 to replace the battery in the iPhone 6 through iPhone 8 Plus and $69 for the iPhone X and newer outside of warranty.

What does it mean that one of my favorite demos at CES 2019 — the world’s foremost technology show — was a block of wood? Maybe that I’ve been spending too much time in my garage with a table saw. Maybe that we’re collectively suffering from a bad case of screen fatigue. Maybe both. But if the crowd surrounding Mui is any indication, I’m not the only one smitten with the Kyoto-based company’s head-smackingly simple approach to technology.

As clever as we humans like to think we are, plenty of things we invent have already been done more effectively by nature. Our drones are pretty handy, but nature's drones – bees – are far more efficient. Rather than building our own buzzing robots from scratch, researchers at the University of Washington have created tiny suites of sensors that bees can wear like backpacks, to help gather data from their environment.

Batteries that use aluminum and oxygen normally live fast and die young. But a new design could help these high-energy devices endure. Aluminum-air batteries are promising candidates for a new generation of non-rechargeable batteries, because they’re super lightweight and compact. The batteries, however, aren’t widely used because their internal components quickly degrade each other.

A regular shop-bought mushroom has been turned into an electricity generator in a process scientists hope will one day be used to power devices. The “bionic mushroom” was covered with bacteria capable of producing electricity and strands of graphene that collected the current. Shining a light on the structure activated the bacteria’s ability to photosynthesise, and as the cells harvested this glow they generated a small amount of electricity known as a “photocurrent”.

Every state uses some type of electronic voting, but only a few have totally done away with paper ballots. Learn where your state stands.

The Librarian of Congress and US Copyright Office just proposed new rules that will give consumers and independent repair experts wide latitude to legally hack embedded software on their devices in order to repair or maintain them. This exemption to copyright law will apply to smartphones, tractors, cars, smart home appliances, and many other devices.

The sunbeams falling on the globe can create energy that is more than adequate to satisfy global energy requirements

Repair is one of the secret keys to a better life. Repairs keep our gadgets in use longer (saving our pocketbooks) and divert e-waste from landfills or toxic recycling processes (saving our planet). Repair is an engine of community prosperity: when you get your phone screen fixed at your corner repair shop, your money goes to a locally owned small business (my daughter and the phone screen guy's daughter go to the same school and he always tut-tuts over the state of my chipped and dented phone at parent-teacher nights).

If DDR4 memory pricing is the only thing holding you back from building a new PC or upgrading your existing one, you might be in luck if you can hold off until next year. Following up on a previous report predicting lower DRAM product prices in the fourth quarter of this year, DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, believes an even bigger drop is in store for 2019.

When you buy a game console, smartphone, dryer, vacuum cleaner, or any number of other complicated electronics, there’s usually a sticker or a piece of paperwork telling you that trying to repair the device yourself will void your warranty. That’s illegal under the federal Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. Companies offering a warranty on their goods aren’t allowed to void that warranty if the user attempts to repair it themself, but that doesn’t stop the company from scaring customers into thinking it’s true.

"I was just sitting there talking to my Dad, and suddenly an explosion went off in my pocket," Mann said.

OnePlus is working on a followup to the OnePlus 6, the OnePlus 6T. The company's latest smartphone should launch sometime in October, and until then we're getting a slow, continual drip of information on the device. The latest news is not so great. The company has revealed that it's dumping the headphone jack on the OnePlus 6T.

Why it matters: If analysts are correct, we could be seeing very significant price drops in SSD and perhaps even DRAM it 2019. The industry is currently facing a very large surplus of NAND flash memory. They say to expect a price correction over the next several quarters.

The European Parliament accepted a resolution to lengthen consumer goods and software’s longevity, a counter to the alleged planned obsolescence process built into a lot of products.

Scientists have experimented with a new organic molecule that has an ability to ‘renew’ and this can be the basis of a new type of organic flow battery which has the potential to last for several decades.

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from smartphones and laptops to electric cars and e-cigarettes. But, with lithium close to breaking point, researchers are scrambling for the next battery breakthrough

Reserves of cobalt and nickel used in electric-vehicle cells will not meet future demand. Refocus research to find new electrodes based on common elements such as iron and silicon, urge Kostiantyn Turcheniuk and colleagues.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has successfully developed the industry’s first 10-nanometer (nm) class* 8-gigabit (Gb) LPDDR5 DRAM. Since bringing the first 8Gb LPDDR4 to mass production in 2014, Samsung has been setting the stage to transition to the LPDDR5 standard for use in upcoming 5G and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered mobile applications.

There has been some hopeful discussion that the silicone-covered keyswitches in the 2018 MacBook Pros could filter down to 2016 and 2017 models via repair. There is some precedent for this; many customers with 2016 models have reported that Apple has replaced their keyboards with the 2017 variant. However, that does not seem to be the case this year, according to Joe Rossignol at MacRumors...