Technology startup is working on producing passenger drones.
EHang may raise as much as $200 million in public offering.
EHang, one of China’s largest drone makers, has made a confidential application for an initial public offering with Nasdaq Inc., according to people with knowledge of the matter.
EHang plans to float 10% to 15% of its shares, with the company’s valuation not yet set due to volatile market conditions, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. EHang may raise as much as $200 million in the IPO, one of the people said.
It’s hard living in a relativistic Universe, where even the nearest stars are so far away and the speed of light is absolute. It is little wonder then why science fiction franchises routinely employ FTL (Faster-than-Light) as a plot device.
Push a button, press a petal, and that fancy drive system – whose workings no one can explain – will send us to another location in space-time.
However, in recent years, the scientific community has become understandably excited and skeptical about claims that a particular concept – the Alcubierre Warp Drive – might actually be feasible.
If we want to colonize Mars, we’re going to need to figure out a way to feed ourselves there, and continuously sending food to the Red Planet isn’t a sustainable plan.
But now, a team of researchers thinks it’s figured out a way to produce enough food on Mars to feed a million people — and they say their plan to make Martian colonists self-sufficient would take just a hundred years to implement.
Rivian, the startup electric truck manufacturer, will build 100,000 custom electric delivery vehicles exclusively for Amazon beginning in 2021, the companies said. — Amazon/dpa
Rivian, the startup electric truck manufacturer, will build 100,000 custom electric delivery vehicles exclusively for Amazon beginning in 2021, the companies have announced.
The huge order by Amazon represents a previously unrevealed commercial vehicle to be designed and built at Rivian’s factory in downstate Normal, alongside the manufacturer’s consumer-focused electric truck and SUV lines. Online retail giant Amazon is also a significant investor in Rivian.
“This has been in the works for some time,” Rivian spokeswoman Amy Mast said Thursday. “The idea that you can marry consumer applications to these more commercial applications … is just really exciting.”
Target production is to have 10,000 electric delivery vans on the road for Amazon by late 2022, ramping up to the full 100,000 order by 2030. The first of the new vans are expected to begin delivering packages in 2021, the companies said.
A new leasing program is putting dozens of robots to work in the real world
Boston Dynamics is letting its first major robot out of the lab.
Since June, the company has been talking about a public release for its Spot robot (formerly SpotMini), and today, it finally gave some details about what’s in store. The Spot isn’t going on sale exactly, but if you’re a company with a good idea (and some money), you’ll be able to get one. That also means, for the average person on the street, that the odds of seeing a Spot in the wild just got a lot better.
The capabilities are more or less what the company showed off in June, but it’s still impressive to see them in person. The Spot can go where you tell it, avoid obstacles, and keep its balance under extreme circumstances — which are all crucial skills if you’re trying to navigate an unknown environment.
The Spot can also carry up to four hardware modules on its back, giving companies a way to swap in whatever skills the robot needs for this particular job. If it’s checking for gas leaks, you can build in a methane detector. If you need connectivity over longer distances, you can attach a mesh radio module. Boston Dynamics is already outfitting units with LIDAR rigs from Velodyne (a favorite component for self-driving car projects) to create 3D maps of indoor spaces. Since the Spot is designed to work in the rain, outdoor spaces are on the table, too.
Google has reportedly demonstrated for the first time that a quantum computer is capable of performing a task beyond the reach of even the most powerful conventional supercomputer in any practical time frame—a milestone known in the world of computing as “quantum supremacy.”
The ominous-sounding term, which was coined by theoretical physicist John Preskill in 2012, evokes an image of Darth Vader–like machines lording it over other computers. And the news has already produced some outlandish headlines, such as one on the Infowars website that screamed, “Google’s ‘Quantum Supremacy’ to Render All Cryptography and Military Secrets Breakable.” Political figures have been caught up in the hysteria, too: Andrew Yang, a presidential candidate, tweeted that “Google achieving quantum computing is a huge deal. It means, among many other things, that no code is uncrackable.”
Nonsense. It doesn’t mean that at all. Google’s achievement is significant, but quantum computers haven’t suddenly turned into computing colossi that will leave conventional machines trailing in the dust. Nor will they be laying waste to conventional cryptography in the near future—though in the longer term, they could pose a threat we need to start preparing for now.
Two years ago, Amylene Dingle lived with her husband and 7-year-old daughter in Payatas, an impoverished Manila neighborhood with the largest open dump site in the Philippines. Her husband worked on the security staff in a government building, earning 4,000 pesos a week, the equivalent of $80. She had always wanted to start a business, but she was unemployed, had no money saved, no credit history and couldn’t get a credit card or a bank loan.
Dingle’s fortunes took a dramatic turn after she responded to a Facebook ad for Tala, a Santa Monica-based startup that makes small loans through a smartphone app. After granting Tala access to her phone, through which the app cleverly parses mobile data to assess a borrower’s risk, she got a 30-day, $20 loan. She paid 15% interest and used the money to buy cold cuts, hamburgers and hot dogs. She marked them up 40% and sold them door-to-door, earning $4 in profit after paying back the interest and a small processing fee.
This image taken by the new microscope shows a living bone cancer cell with nucleus (blue), mitochondria (green) and cytoskeleton (magenta).
When you want to look at something small up close, you use a microscope. And when you want to look at something really really small, you use a super-resolution microscope. These tools can look in resolutions of a millionth of a millimeter, but they work slowly due to the volume of image data that they need to record. Now, researchers have developed a way to speed up the process by creating a method which can record data at this microscopic scale in real-time.
The company worked with police and cities to build in this real-time feature, emails showed.
Ring considered building a tool that would use calls to the 911 emergency number to automatically activate the video cameras on its smart doorbells, according to emails obtained by CNET. The Amazon-owned company isn’t currently working on the project, but it told a California police department in August 2018 that the function could be introduced in the “not-so-distant future.”
In the emails, Ring described a system in which a 911 call would trigger the cameras on Ring doorbells near the site of the call. The cameras would start recording and streaming video that police could then use to investigate an incident. Owners of the Ring devices would have to opt in to the system, the emails said.
“Currently, our cameras record based on motion alerts,” Steve Sebestyen, vice president of business development for Ring, said in an email that CNET obtained through a public records request. “However, we are working with interested agencies and cities to expand the device owners controls to allow for situations where a CFS [call-for-service] event triggers recording within the proximity of an event.”
It’s unclear how long Ring had contemplated this idea and how many cities it proposed this plan to, but the project is no longer being pursued.
Graphene nanoribbons on silicon wafers could help lead the way toward super fast computer chips. Image courtesy of Mike Arnold.
Smaller, better semiconductors have consistently allowed computers to become faster and more energy-efficient than ever before.
But the 18-month cycle of exponential increases in computing power that has held since the mid 1960s now has leveled off. That’s because there are fundamental limits to integrated circuits made strictly from silicon—the material that forms the backbone of our modern computer infrastructure.
As they look to the future, however, engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are turning to new materials to lay down the foundations for more powerful computers.
They have devised a method to grow tiny ribbons of graphene—the single-atom-thick carbon material—directly on top of silicon wafers.
Additions of new residential energy storage capacity in the United States reached a record high in the second quarter of the year, exceeding 30 MW, a new report by Wood Mackenzie says. The market for energy storage in the country is growing fast, the authors note, driven by customer interest and government incentives.
In May this year, IHS Markit forecast grid-connected energy storage capacity would jump twofold by the end of 2019, from 376 MW last to 712 MW. There may be a good chance of such an increase taking place: total new storage additions during the first half of the year were over 200 MW, with 148.8 MW deployed during the first quarter and 79.5 MW deployed during the second quarter.
According to Wood Mac, the reason for the slowdown in total storage capacity additions was due to a sizeable fall in front-of-the-meter storage additions. These, however, would pick up in the second half of the year, the consultancy said, with the pipeline for new FTM storage projects soaring 66 percent from a year earlier.
LaunchBio CEO Joan Siefert Rose leads a tour of life sciences co-working lab, BioLabs NC.
The growing popularity of co-working spaces like WeWork could pose a risk to the US economy in the next economic downturn, a Fed official warned on Friday.
Boston Federal Reserve Bank President Eric Rosengren, who has publicly dissented with the Fed’s recent interest rate cuts, said lower rates will boost risk in “unexpected places.”
“Evolving market models, along with low interest rates, are creating a new type of potential financial stability risk in commercial real estate,” he said at an event in New York City. “One such market model is the development of co-working spaces in many major urban office markets.”
