Tootfinder

China suspends export restrictions for a year on five critical minerals to the US, including gallium and germanium, used to make certain types of semiconductors (Keith Bradsher/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/09/business/china-suspends-export-c…

China Suspends Export Controls on More Critical Minerals
The changes would make it easier for American firms to obtain key minerals, delivering on what the White House said the two countries had agreed to at last month’s summit.

Good Morning #Canada
Have you put up your #ChristmasTree yet? #StatsCan (2021 census data) reports there are 1,364 Christmas tree farms. Ontario (418) had the most farms, followed by British Columbia (276) and Quebec (257). Nova Scotia’s 213 farms were more than the combined total of the Prairie and Maritime provinces (199). Canadian Christmas tree producers earned nearly $163.5M in 2021, and exported over 2.4 million fresh Christmas trees that same year. most of which (97.2%) ended up in the United States. Final destinations for most of them were Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia. Trump's tariffs hit artificial trees with a 30% price hike which means it could be an excellent year for real Canadian trees in the U.S. market. Most of the remaining exports in 2021 were to warmer climates in the Western Hemisphere, including Panama, Curaçao, Bermuda, Aruba, St. Maarten (Dutch part) and Barbados.
#CanadaIsAwesome #HoHoHo
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/xmas-tree-trends-2025-9.6993539

Operator-Consistent Physics-Informed Learning for Wafer Thermal Reconstruction in Lithography
Ze Tao, Yuxi Jin, Ke Xu, Haoran Xu, Hanxuan Wang, Fujun Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09207

Operator-Consistent Physics-Informed Learning for Wafer Thermal Reconstruction in Lithography
Thermal field reconstruction in post-exposure bake (PEB) is critical for advanced lithography, but current methods lack consistent accuracy and physical alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce a physics-informed neural model that unifies coordinates, fields, and differential operators on a single computation graph using gated liquid layers. Applied to a 2D PEB scenario with internal heat generation and convective boundaries, the model formulates residuals via differential forms and a loss f…

Sources: Google is set to be hit with a potentially large EU fine in Q1 2026 if it does not do more to ensure Google Play complies with EU competition rules (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainabili…