The demonstration represents a new-generation of micro-reactors.
An innovative nuclear plant that runs on lower waste fuel hopes to be online by 2022-2025.
The plant’s creator, Oklo, joins startups around the world working to innovate safer, smaller nuclear power plants.
But experts suggest that Oklo’s timeline is unrealistic with years of nuclear approval process ahead.
An experimental nuclear reactor in Idaho could be the first of its kind in the United States: a commercial reactor providing power using fuel that reduces nuclear waste. The small power plant could power about 1,000 homes and can run almost autonomously for 20 years.
The US Navy has successfully installed its first Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN) laser weapon aboard one of its warships. During dry-dock operations, the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey (DDG 105) received the stand-alone laser system, which is designed to blind the sensors on Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS).
The ODIN laser isn’t the first to be deployed on a US Navy warship. That honor goes to the Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) Laser Weapon System (LaWS), which was deployed on the USS Ponce (LPD-15) in 2014. However, this experience by the team behind LaWS at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Dahlgren Division provided the expertise needed to complete the development of ODIN.
Graphic image of a thin film of protein nanowires generating electricity from atmospheric humidity. (Ella Maru Studios)
Soon having to replace batteries or spend time recharging your phone could be a thing of the past. Scientists in Amherst are developing a new technology that will use the moisture from the air to create a charge.
The device is still in early stages having only been made public on Monday on the UMass website. It uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air and could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and the future of medicine.
In layman’s terms; “We are literally making electricity out of thin air,” said the laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao. “The Air-gen generates clean energy 24/7.”
The latest automaker to experiment with alternate ownership models
Car subscriptions: they’re totally a thing! The latest automaker to test the waters on subscriptions is Nissan, which just launched a new, two-tier service in Houston, Texas. It’s called “Nissan Switch,” and it will feature a variety of models, including the all-electric Nissan Leaf Plus, the Titan pickup, and the GT-R sports car.
Nissan Switch has two tiers: the $699-a-month “Select” plan, which includes the Altima, Rogue, Pathfinder, and Frontier; and the $899-a-month “Premium” plan, which includes the Leaf Plus, Maxima, Murano, Armada, Titan, and 370Z coupe. The GT-R sports car is available to either Select or Premium customers, but includes an additional $100-a-day fee and can only be taken out for a maximum of seven days.
This flexible graphene supercapacitor design can store 10 times more energy than comparable existing technology
Supercapacitors can charge almost instantly, and discharge enormous amounts of power if needed. They could completely erase the Achilles heel of electric vehicles – their slow charging times – if they could hold more energy. And now Chinese and British scientists say they’ve figured out a way to store 10 times more energy per volume than previous supercapacitors.
A team split between University College London and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has released a study and proof of concept of a new supercapacitor design using graphene laminate films and concentrating on the spacing between the layers, the researchers discovering that they could radically boost energy density when they tailored the sizes of pores in the membranes precisely to the size of electrolyte ions.
Using this design, the team says it’s achieved a massive increase in volumetric energy density. Where “similar fast-charging commercial technology” tends to offer around 5-8 watt-hours per liter, this new design has been tested at a record 88.1 Wh/l. The team claims it’s “the highest ever reported energy density for carbon-based supercapacitors.”
A Zapata researcher works on one of the company’s quantum computing algorithms.
Startups are helping companies write software for quantum computers. It isn’t easy.
Zapata Computing, a 30-person startup in Boston, creates software for quantum computers. But when a customer has a problem it would like to solve, one of Zapata’s first steps is to figure out how much it can avoid using a quantum machine.
That’s because quantum computing is, like the tiny particles that underlie the technology, in a paradoxical state: It has arrived, but it isn’t quite here. Quantum algorithms theoretically will be used for such transformative purposes as cracking encryption, simulating chemical reactions, and optimizing financial transactions. But the quantum machines that Google, IBM and other companies have so far put online for people to use aren’t up to the task. Their limited number of quantum bits, or qubits, are unstable: They can’t encode a lot of data yet.
HTC just announced updates to the Vive Cosmos, its lineup of consumer-ready virtual reality headsets. But it’s also testing a more streamlined mixed reality device codenamed “Project Proton.” While the Proton is just a prototype, HTC shared concept images of its design, shedding some light on the company’s goals.
The Proton headset seems functionally similar to the upcoming Cosmos XR. Both are built for mixed or augmented reality experiences, but unlike Microsoft or Magic Leap’s mixed reality glasses, they use passthrough video instead of transparent waveguide lenses. (So basically, you’re looking at a VR-style screen, but it shows you live video overlaid with virtual elements.) But where the Cosmos XR looks like the Cosmos VR headset, the Proton looks more like ski goggles or — to put it generously — very large sunglasses.
Escherichia coli bacteria, coloured green, in a scanning electron micrograph.
A pioneering machine-learning approach has identified powerful new types of antibiotic from a pool of more than 100 million molecules — including one that works against a wide range of bacteria, including tuberculosis and strains considered untreatable.
Fear of losing your job to a robot is nothing new, but is it time the conversation shifted?
For as long as there have been robots, there have been fears they will take people’s jobs. The rise of the internet of things (IoT) echoes these concerns. An engineer no longer has to monitor a machine or switch on a bank of lights, IoT sensors can do it instead. Smart devices may not be an answer to the global talent shortage, but they’re starting to impact the work employees do.
The likes of heating, lighting and maintenance are already being automated, reducing routine tasks and eliminating others, in offices and factories around the globe. Demand for IoT is changing the role of facilities managers in a way that mirrors how self-service checkouts disrupted customer services in supermarkets or automatic doors and monitoring systems have affected guards and train drivers.
“The increased deployment of data-driven technologies is raising social, legal and ethical questions about the impact on people and their everyday lives. It’s vital that we find ways to engage with employees and the public, as well as identify the issues so they can be addressed,” says Julian David, chief executive of techUK.
Thought leaders are keen to highlight the strong demand for IoT isn’t going to lead to mass redundancies or answer post-Brexit talent shortages, an aging demographic or lead to less work for humans. Instead the focus is on IoT helping people do jobs better, with more productive and added-value tasks, empowered by data, redefining employment in the process.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is once again sounding a warning note regarding the development of artificial intelligence. The executive and founder tweeted on Monday evening that “all org[anizations] developing advance AI should be regulated, including Tesla.”
Musk was responding to a new MIT Technology Review profile of OpenAI, an organization founded in 2015 by Musk, along with Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman. At first, OpenAI was formed as a non-profit backed by $1 billion in funding from its pooled initial investors, with the aim of pursuing open research into advanced AI with a focus on ensuring it was pursued in the interest of benefiting society, rather than leaving its development in the hands of a small and narrowly-interested few (i.e., for-profit technology companies).
SpaceX is planning to send up to four private citizens into space to take a trip around Earth sometime at the end of 2021 or in early 2022. The spaceflight company announced an agreement on Tuesday with Space Adventures, a space tourism business that has helped seven different private citizens take trips to (and from) the International Space Station aboard Russia’s Soyuz rocket and spacecraft.
Space Adventures said the price of the mission will not be disclosed, and the two companies were light on other details, like what kind of preparation the tourists will have to go through. The companies did say Tuesday that the tourists will fly in the human-rated version of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft and that they will orbit Earth at two to three times the roughly 250-mile height of the ISS.
SpaceX has spent the last few years building and testing out this new version of Dragon as part of a contract with NASA to shuttle astronauts to and from the ISS, after years of using the spacecraft to shuttle cargo to the space station. The private spaceflight company recently completed the second major flight test of the Crew Dragon, as it’s called, which demonstrated the capsule’s ability to escape an exploding rocket.
It’s the latest bid by tech workers to gain more clout.
More tech company workers are unionizing in an attempt to improve their bargaining power. A group of 85 Kickstarter employees have voted to unionize, aligning themselves with a branch of the Office and Professional Employees International Union in New York. The staffers will use their collective bargaining power to push for equal pay, more inclusive hiring, greater transparency from management and more of a say in decisions.
