Waymo cars refuse to drive in unsafe conditions

Heavy rain and blizzards aren’t the only forms of severe weather Waymo’s self-driving vehicles encounter on the regular. In a blog post published this morning, the Alphabet subsidiary laid out the ways its cars in over 25 cities tackle fog, dust, smoke, and other dangerous conditions that trip up even human drivers.

“Challenging [environmental] conditions, which affect human driver and vehicle performance, are one of the leading contributors to crashes on our roads … Poor perception creates significant risk for other road users including pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicle occupants,” wrote Waymo chief safety officer Debbie Hersman. “Waymo is working hard to master a variety of weather scenarios as part of our mission to improve road safety.”

Continue reading… “Waymo cars refuse to drive in unsafe conditions”

Lyft’s main taxi business is already profitable in some areas, but self-driving cars and bike-sharing are eating into that revenue

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A man rides a Lyft scooter near the White House in Washington DC Reuters

JPMorgan says Lyft’s core ride-hailing business is already profitable in certain markets.

It’s other bets on things like bikes, scooters, and self-driving cars that are dragging down the company’s balance sheet.

Other Wall Street analysts have also raised their estimates and targets for Lyft following second-quarter earnings that topped expectations.

Continue reading… “Lyft’s main taxi business is already profitable in some areas, but self-driving cars and bike-sharing are eating into that revenue”

This video of a rocket sled doing 6,599mph at Hollman AFB is absolute insanity

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The sound alone of something ripping by at hypersonic speed just feet above the desert floor is worth the click!

The internet is full of many wondrous things, most of which you have likely already seen. But something you probably have never seen before is an object rocketing along a set of tracks at 6,599 miles per hour, or right around Mach 8.6. No, I did not screw those metrics up, the video below shows a test being conducted on an object that is moving far beyond the threshold of hypersonic speed (Mach 5) just a few feet over the desert floor near Alamagordo, New Mexico.

Continue reading… “This video of a rocket sled doing 6,599mph at Hollman AFB is absolute insanity”

Self-driving cars will only last four years, Ford says

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Self-driving cars will only last four years because they will be used so much, a Ford executive has predicted.

John Rich, operations chief of Ford Autonomous Vehicles, dismissed concerns that demand for cars would wane in the future.

“The thing that worries me least in this world is decreasing demand for cars. We will exhaust and crush a car every four years in this business,” he told The Telegraph.

The Detroit-headquartered car maker plans to establish an autonomous fleet which will be used as a service by other companies, to be used as delivery vehicles or to transport employees.

Continue reading… “Self-driving cars will only last four years, Ford says”

Watch two ‘Jetmen’ fly alongside an A380 superjumbo

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We’ve seen Swiss daredevil Yves Rossy (aka Jetman) fly his carbon fiber jet wing over Rio, and above Dubai with his protege Jetman Vince Reffet. The latest video from the fearless aviators sees Rossy and Reffet share the skies with something a little bigger — an Emirates A380 airliner. Once again, the flight takes place over the Palm Jumeirah and Dubai skylines. We can only imagine the duo gives the A380 pilot constant heart palpitations as they deftly maneuver around the plane (y’know, with its jet intakes and all that).

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The world’s most advanced nanotube computer may keep Moore’s Law alive

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Up close photograph of nanotube

 MIT researchers have found new ways to cure headaches in manufacturing carbon nanotube processors, which are faster and less power hungry than silicon chips.

A team of academics at MIT has unveiled the world’s most advanced chip yet that’s made from carbon nanotubes—cylinders with walls the width of a single carbon atom. The new microprocessor, which is capable of running a conventional software program, could be an important milestone on the road to finding silicon alternatives.

The electronics industry is struggling with a slowdown in Moore’s Law, which holds that the number of transistors that can be packed on a silicon processor doubles roughly every couple of years. This trend is facing its physical limits: as the sizes of the devices shrink to a few atoms, electrical current is starting to leak from the metallic channels that shuttle it through transistors. The heat that’s released saps semiconductors’ energy efficiency—and may even cause them to fail.

Continue reading… “The world’s most advanced nanotube computer may keep Moore’s Law alive”

Gene-edited cattle have a major screwup in their DNA

 

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Bid for barnyard revolution is set back after regulators find celebrity “hornless” bovines contaminated by bacterial genes.

They were the poster animals for the gene-editing revolution, appearing in story after story. By adding just a few letters of DNA to the genomes of dairy cattle, a US startup company had devised a way to make sure the animals never grew troublesome horns.

To Recombinetics—the St. Paul, Minnesota gene-editing company that made the hornless cattle—the animals were messengers of a new era of better, faster, molecular farming. “This same outcome could be achieved by breeding in the farmyard,” declared the company’s then-CEO Tammy Lee Stanoch in 2017. “This is precision breeding.”

Except it wasn’t.

Food and Drug Administration scientists who had a closer look at the genome sequence of one of the edited animals, a bull named Buri, have discovered its genome contains a stretch of bacterial DNA including a gene conferring antibiotic resistance.

Continue reading… “Gene-edited cattle have a major screwup in their DNA”

Cambridge startup claims breakthrough electric car battery that can charge in 6 minutes

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A startup that spun out of Cambridge University claims a battery breakthrough that can charge an electric car in just six minutes.

It’s something we heard before, but the difference here is that they claim that they can commercialize the new battery as soon as next year.

The startup, Echion Technologies, was founded by Dr. Jean De La Verpilliere while he was studying for his PhD in nanoscience at the University of Cambridge.

Continue reading… “Cambridge startup claims breakthrough electric car battery that can charge in 6 minutes”

Bitcoin And Cryptocurrencies are a hedge for bad government

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World leaders and delegates depart a family photo session at the Group of 20 (G-20) summit in Osaka, Japan, on Friday, June 28, 2019.

There’s been a lot of news recently, especially with the advent of a news cycle focused on a potential recession, on the role of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies from a short-term investment perspective. Some have placed bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in the category of hedges, a form of digital gold or silver that can be used to store value through inflation and the debasement of fiat currency.

Yet that misses the forest for the trees. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies at scale are not just a hedge for inflation and an ever-expanding monetary supply — they are a fundamental hedge against bad governance and bad governments. In this respect, it may be easier to evaluate them along a longer-term horizon than just a short-term store of value.

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U.S. to test mirrorless, camera-based systems in autos

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An Audi 55 e-tron is seen ahead of the company’s annual news conference at its headquarters in Ingolstadt, Germany, March 14, 2019.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plans to test how drivers could use cameras to replace traditional rearview mirrors in automobiles, a technology already allowed in other countries, the agency said on Tuesday.

The planned test by the agency known as NHTSA would examine “driving behavior and lane change maneuver execution” in cars with traditional mirrors and camera-based visibility systems, the department said in a notice offering the public a chance to comment.

In March 2014, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers — a trade group representing General Motors Co, Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE), Toyota Motor Corp and others, along with Tesla Inc, petitioned NHTSA to use camera-based rear or side-vision systems. A similar petition was filed by Daimler AG in 2015 seeking approval for camera use instead of rearview mirrors in heavy-duty trucks. Those petitions are still pending.

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The world’s most popular artificial sweetener may not be safe for consumption

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The hugely popular sweetener aspartame – also known as Nutrasweet – has been taken to task by researchers for not being sufficiently proven to be safe for consumption. Aspartame has been a controversial ingredient for decades.

According to a new study by Professor Erik Millstone, a University of Sussex expert on food chemical safety policy, and Dr. Elisabeth Dawson, the 2013 appraisal by the European Food Safety Authority that aspartame is safe is flawed. The study finds that the EFSA disregarded the results of every one of the 73 studies that indicated that aspartame could be deleterious to health while accepting as reliable 84% of studies that concluded that aspartame was safe.

Continue reading… “The world’s most popular artificial sweetener may not be safe for consumption”

The dream of flying taxis may not be too far off

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Then again, Henry Ford said the same thing in 1940.

“Mark my words. A combination of airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile. But it will come,” Henry Ford quipped in 1940. Our dreams of cars capable of taking flight at the whim of their driver have been around nearly as long as we’ve had cars themselves, or at least as long as we’ve endured heavy commute traffic. Yet the prospect of actual, commercially available flying automobiles has always seemed to remain just out of reach, only a few years from viability. But even as drones become commonplace, are we really any closer to an age of aeronautical automobiles than we were in Ford’s day?

What even is a flying car? Designs have run the gamut from the AVE Mizar (basically a Ford Pinto with wings, to VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) designs like the Piasecki VZ-8 Airgeep. Even today, you’ve got roadable aircraft like the Terrafugia Transition, though these are quickly being pushed into the periphery in favor of VTOLs like the Bell Nexus being developed for Uber Elevate. That is, modern designs generally focus on serving as personal aircraft, rather than automobiles that can also fly.

Continue reading… “The dream of flying taxis may not be too far off”

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