Arkansas is sitting atop lithium reserves that could be vast enough to satisfy the entire world’s demand for EV batteries, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS).

It estimates that there could be 5 to 19 million tons of lithium under southwestern Arkansas. That would be enough to supply nine times the amount of the key material needed globally for car batteries in 2030, the USGS says.

Lithium is a key ingredient for rechargeable batteries used in EVs and all kinds of devices. As the US tries to limit the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change by encouraging electric vehicle adoption, the Biden administration has made it a priority to build up domestic supply chains for critical minerals including lithium. The US might already have all the lithium in needs and then some, a recent study shows, if companies can develop new technologies to tap into it.

“Lithium is a critical mineral for the energy transition, and the potential for increased U.S. production to replace imports has implications for employment, manufacturing and supply-chain resilience,” David Applegate, USGS director, said in a press release yesterday.

Lithium laces the salty brine from the Smackover Formation, a geologic formation made of permeable limestone that stretches across parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. The formation is the result of an ancient sea, and it’s also a historic site for oil and gas production.

Until recently, that lithium-rich brine had been thought of as wastewater from oil and operations. Now, companies are trying to develop technologies to extract the lithium in a cost-effective way.

ExxonMobil is reportedly ready to pounce. The company plans to start production in 2027 and has already drilled exploratory wells in Arkansas, The New York Times reports. The fossil fuel giant declared its ambitions of becoming a “leading” lithium supplier for electric vehicles last year after purchasing drilling rights across 120,000 acres of land within the Smackover Formation in Arkansas.

“We know we have an attractive resource. We’re working on understanding that cost equation, understanding the supply-and-demand picture,” Dan Ammann, president of ExxonMobil’s low carbon solutions business, told The New York Times.

The company can use traditional oil and gas drilling techniques to reach lithium-rich saltwater trapped 10,000 feet underground. But it has to develop new technology called direct lithium extraction (DLE) to separate lithium from the water using chemical solvents or filters.

That’s supposed to be a much faster method for extracting lithium than the old-school way of leaving the brine in ponds until the water evaporates. Another potential benefit of DLE is that it would be less energy-intensive than conventional hard rock mining for lithium. To be sure, there are still concerns about the environmental impact all of these methods pose, ranging from how much land and water they use to what to do with any toxic waste left behind.

Shifting lithium production to the US would also be a global game-changer. Most lithium today comes from Australia and South America. Just 5 percent of global demand was met by US lithium producers in 2021. California’s Salton Sea also holds a lot of lithium-rich brine.

The potential in Arkansas still hinges on whether the lithium reserves will wind up being commercially recoverable, the USGS says. The agency used machine learning to produce the first estimate of the amount of lithium available in brine from the Smackover Formation in southern Arkansas, working with the Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment’s Office of the State Geologist. They analyzed new brine samples in a lab and compared them to data from historic samples of water from oil and gas production from the USGS produced waters database. A machine learning model used that data to predict lithium concentrations throughout the region.

“We have not estimated what is technically recoverable based on newer methods to extract lithium from brines,” Katherine Knierim, a hydrologist and the study’s principal researcher, said in the press release.

European Union regulators warned Elon Musk's X platform that it may calculate fines by including revenue from Musk's other companies, including SpaceX, according to a Bloomberg article published today.

X was previously accused of violating the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6 percent of total worldwide annual turnover. That fine would be levied on the "provider" of X, which could be defined to include other Musk-led firms.

Bloomberg writes that "regulators are considering whether sales from SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI and the Boring Company, in addition to revenue generated from the social network, should be included to determine potential fines against X, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified because the information isn't public." Bloomberg's report says that Tesla "sales would be exempt from this calculation because it's publicly traded and not under Musk's full control."

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A hurricane so small that it could not be observed by satellite formed this weekend, surprising meteorologists and even forecasters at the National Hurricane Center.

Hurricane Oscar developed on Saturday near Turks and Caicos, and to the northeast of Cuba, in the extreme southwestern Atlantic Ocean. As of Saturday evening, hurricane-force winds extended just 5 miles (8 km) from the center of the storm.

This is not the smallest tropical cyclone—as defined by sustained winds greater than 39 mph, or 63 kph—as that record remains held by Tropical Storm Marco back in 2008. However, this may possibly be the smallest hurricane in terms of the extent of its hurricane-force winds.

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It's been almost exactly a year now since we reported on the announcement that Squadron 42—the single-player campaign portion of the now 12-year-old crowdfunding boondoggle Star Citizen—was "feature complete" and in the "polish phase." Now, many years after the game's original 2015 release target, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) says that, with just a year or two of additional "polish," the game will finally launch sometime in 2026.

The announcement came during this weekend's CitizenCon, per IGN, where RSI founder and CEO Chris Roberts showed off a roughly hour-long prologue of the game's promised 30- to 40-hour storyline. IGN also reported that the live on-stage demo suffered "a number of crashes, bugs, and graphical problems," which helps explain why a little more time is needed to get from "feature complete" to "actual release."

"We did say we were doing it live, risking the demo gods, and they brought their wrath down on us," Roberts said on stage, according to the IGN report. "Both the team and I are confident of giving you this game in 2026. Obviously, you can see it’s not going to be tomorrow because you saw a few crashes there."

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After rumors swirled that TikTok owner ByteDance had lost tens of millions after an intern sabotaged its AI models, ByteDance issued a statement this weekend hoping to silence all the social media chatter in China.

In a social media post translated and reviewed by Ars, ByteDance clarified "facts" about "interns destroying large model training" and confirmed that one intern was fired in August.

According to ByteDance, the intern had held a position in the company's commercial technology team but was fired for committing "serious disciplinary violations." Most notably, the intern allegedly "maliciously interfered with the model training tasks" for a ByteDance research project, ByteDance said.

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Perhaps the coolest bit of hardware at OCP Summit 2024, Inventec has an 8-way Intel Xeon 6 server with a 96 DIMM CXL Box for 224 DIMMs total

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