How close is urban air mobility to becoming a reality?

 

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eVTOL vehicle

So far, Uber is sticking publicly to its stated goal of beginning limited aerial ridesharing service in its pilot cities by 2023. And at least one of its vehicle partners, Joby Aviation, remains committed to certifying and operating its electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) air taxi by 2023.

The U.S. Air Force’s Agility Prime program, which is intended to help accelerate the certification of commercial eVTOL vehicles by providing access to testing resources and a government early-adopter market, is likewise targeting the fielding of a “small handful” of vehicles in 2023.

Uber planned to conduct flight tests on an experimental vehicle over a U.S. city later in 2020 but has not provided an update on whether the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted these plans. These flights, of a piloted vehicle without passengers, are intended to demonstrate the low noise of eVTOL vehicles, which is critical to achieving the public acceptance needed to begin commercial service.

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Who will own the cars that drive themselves?

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Self-driving Uber vehicles in a lot in Pittsburgh. One vision of the future sees fleets of cars hailed as people need a lift and less private vehicle ownership.

 Fleets of vehicles roaming streets waiting to be hailed are more efficient. But the coronavirus has made people think twice about the future of car ownership even when autonomous tech arrives.

It was a difficult question even before the coronavirus pandemic hit: When self-driving cars eventually rule the roads, will Americans own their cars or make use of ride-hailing fleets?

The challenge is now threefold. Self-driving car technology had already reached a plateau, and getting to full Level 5 autonomy will be more difficult than many had thought. With the nation’s economy hobbled by the virus, investment is slowing. And to car owners, their private automobile is now a sanctuary, and it’s unclear how long that attitude will persist.

A CarGurus.com poll of 400 active car shoppers, conducted in May for this article, asked, “What is your overall opinion about the development of self-driving cars?” It showed 22 percent of customers were excited by the prospect. A survey of auto owners in 2019 showed 31 percent of them were excited for autonomous cars.

The question about the long-term future for the world’s cars is far from settled, and the experts (some of whom see disaster for the planet if people own autonomous cars as we own our cars now) differ sharply in their perception of where we’re heading.

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Honeywell claims to have world’s highest performing quantum computer according to IBM’s benchmark

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The chamber housing the ion trap in Honeywell’s quantum computer system.

Honeywell said JP Morgan Chase and other customers are using its quantum computer in production, which it claims is the most powerful currently in use based on a benchmark established last year by IBM.

Industrial giant Honeywell on Thursday said it is now live with a quantum computer running client jobs that uses six effective quantum bits, or qubits, and a resulting “volume” of compute that it claims makes the system the most powerful quantum machine currently in production.

The announcement fulfills a vow the company made in March to offer a machine with a quantum volume of 64, as related on March 3rd by ZDNet’s Lawrence Dignan in a conversation with Honeywell’s head of quantum, Tony Uttley, who is president of the division Honeywell Quantum Solutions.

“In March we said within the next three months we’re going to be releasing the world’s highest-performing quantum computer, and so this is a case of Honeywell did what it said it was going to do,” Uttley told ZDNet in a telephone call.

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Pandemic alters carmakers’ driverless plans. Here’s how

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Detroit — The coronavirus pandemic is proving to be yet another obstacle for the self-driving and ride-sharing movement, delaying the widely touted arrival of next-generation automotive technology.

Ford Motor Co. is postponing for a year the commercial deployment of its autonomous vehicles. Waymo LLC, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc., had to temporarily suspend its on-road testing and its ride-hailing offerings in Arizona. Uber Advanced Technologies Group recently announced layoffs of 3,500, citing the pandemic. And General Motors Co. is shutting down Maven, the car-sharing service that debuted in 2016 as the wave of the future.

With demand for car-sharing and ride-sharing diminishing sharply in the age of social-distancing and other forms of vigilant hygiene, companies are shifting their focus to using driverless vehicles to deliver goods before they ferry people — a reversal of a robo-taxi future envisioned just a few years ago, courtesy of the virus that causes COVID-19.

Expensive electrification programs that have yet to create revenue for automakers, however, continue despite automakers losing billions with auto plants closed for eight weeks and many dealerships unable to sell vehicles with stay-at-home orders in place during the pandemic. Still, the prevailing industry consensus holds that electric vehicles must be an option for consumers, and electrified powertrains are the foundation of self-driving vehicles and future mobility technologies.

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Tesla will develop a new 12-seater electric van for Boring Company airport tunnel

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A new electric van could replace the prototype Tesla Model X for future The Boring Company tunnels.

A Southern California airport connector project will work with Elon Musk’s The Boring Company to build a high-speed underground tunnel and a new Tesla vehicle is reportedly part of the plan.

The San Bernardino County Transportation Authority approved a connector line between Rancho Cucamonga with the Ontario International Airport last week. The proposal is for a 2.8 mile-long tunnel that would move riders at 127 mph in electric vehicles. But which electric vehicles?

A county supervisor said that the new system would work with Musk’s electric car company Tesla to develop 12-seater electric vans, as reported in The Mercury News. The projected $60 million project is expected to carry 1,200 people per day to the airport and back.

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Why the office simply cannot go away : The compelling case for the workplace

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 The office is critical now for engagement, innovation and experience–and cannot go away.

 We’re in the midst of the most significant reinvention of work in our time. We’ve proven people can work anywhere and the greatest social experiment—sending everyone home to do their work—has decimated barriers to working away from the office.

Some contend people are working with a reasonable level of productivity from home. And this is during arguably the worst-case situation for remote work: Being forced to work from home without choice, experiencing stress about the pandemic, sharing space with spouses or partners who are furloughed or also trying to work from home and finding time to educate children who would normally be at school—all of these create challenging conditions. Even so, people are getting work done—and could probably perform even better from home when the coronavirus abates, children go back to school and employees can return to a more typical way of life.

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Almost half of Universities may be gone in 5 to 10 years, professor admits

 

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Scott Galloway, lecturer in Marketing at New York University, speaking at the DLD (Digital-Life-Design) conference in Munich, Germany, 18 January 2016.

An NYU professor of business surmises that because of the effects of the coronavirus, anywhere from one-quarter to almost one-half of universities in the nation may go out of business in the next five to ten years. NYU professor Scott Galloway also admitted that foreign students paying full tuition are the “cash cow” for universities and “might decide not to show up.” He commented, “What department stores were to retail, tier-two higher tuition universities are about to become to education and that is they are soon going to become the walking dead.”

Speaking with Hari Sreenivasanon on PBS’ “Amanpour and Co.,” Galloway spoke of the impact of the coronavirus on colleges and universities, forcing them to hold their classes over the internet, and how that may catalyze flight from the universities and the universities’ subsequent downfall. Galloway stated, “Students I think across America along with their families listening in on these Zoom classes are all beginning to wonder what kind of value, or lack thereof, they’re getting for their tuition dollars … There’s generally a recognition or disappointment across America, and I would argue that it’s not that they’re disappointed in the Zoom classes, it’s more the recognition that Zoom has uncovered how disappointing college education is. I think there’s a lot of households saying, ‘This is what we’re paying for?’”

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These hungry superworms happily munch through plastic

 

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A superworm can eat about eight times more than other plastic-ingesting insects.

Recycling seems like a simple cure for our plastic addiction: just take the plastic we have and make it into new items. But problems abound. Current technology mostly creates plastic of a lower quality than it was before, many types of plastic aren’t recyclable at all, and much of the plastic is floating in the ocean, not even in the recycling stream. So it’s vital that we find new ways to break down plastic, and scientists have just discovered one: a superworm that can eat about eight times more than other plastic-ingesting insects like mealworms.

Superworms are actually beetle larvae, and commonly sold at pet stores as food for reptiles and fish. In a paper recently published by the American Chemical Society, researchers Jiaojie Li, Dae-Hwan Kim, and their team detail how they placed 50 superworms in a chamber with two grams of polystyrene. After 21 days, the superworms had consumed about 70% of the polystyrene.

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Bryter raises $16M for a no-code platform for non-technical people to build enterprise automation apps

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Automation is the name of the game in enterprise IT at the moment: We now have a plethora of solutions on the market to speed up your workflow, simplify a process and perform more repetitive tasks without humans getting involved. Now, a startup that is helping non-technical people get more directly involved in how to make automation work better for their tasks is announcing some funding to seize the opportunity

Bryter — a no-code platform based in Berlin that lets workers in departments like accounting, legal, compliance and marketing who do not have any special technical or developer skills build tools like chatbots, trigger automated database and document actions and risk assessors — is today announcing that it has raised $16 million. This is a Series A round being co-led by Accel and Dawn Capital, with Notion Capital and Chalfen Ventures also participating.

The funding comes less than a year after Bryter raised a seed round — $6 million in November 2019 — and it was oversubscribed, with term sheets coming in from many of the bigger VCs in Europe and the U.S. With this funding, the company has now raised around $25 million, and while the valuation is considerably up on the last round, Bryter is not disclosing what it is.

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Germany requires all gas stations to provide EV charging

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As part of Germany’s new increased electric-vehicle incentive package, the country will require gas stations to offer EV charging. Details about the plan are not yet known, such as the timeline and type of required chargers. But EV advocates quickly praised the move as a boost to electric-car adoption.

BDEW, Germany’s association for energy and water industries, believes that at least 70,000 charging stations and 7,000 fast-charging stations are required to achieve a mass market for EVs in the country. BDEW reports that there are currently about 28,000 stations in Germany.

According to Reuters, electric cars made up only 1.8% of new passenger car registrations last year in Germany, with diesel and petrol cars accounting for 32% and 59.2%, respectively.

New German EV incentives double existing subsidies to €6,000 ($6,720) on electric vehicles costing up to €40,000 ($44,800). Germany will also implement higher taxes for fuel-thirsty, internal-combustion SUVs.

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Tesla announces massive Supercharger expansion in China to support growth

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Tesla announced plans to install 4,000 Superchargers in China this year alone in order to support its growth in the market.

 Over the last five years, Tesla has deployed over 2,500 Supercharger stalls in over 150 cities in China.

At their Shanghai office last week, the automaker announced its plan to deploy 4,000 Superchargers in the country in 2020 alone.

This is a massive acceleration of Supercharger deployment for Tesla in China.

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Mini human livers grown from stem cells successfully implanted into rats

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Miniature human livers can be grown from stem cells and implanted into rats – and hopefully, one day humans

 Imagine needing a liver transplant, and instead of waiting for a donor, a new one could be grown from your own skin cells. Scientists have now taken quite a big step towards that future, by successfully transplanting miniature human livers grown from induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs) into rats.

Organ transplants save lives, but there are hurdles to overcome. For one, there’s a constant shortage of donors and, even when one is found, the patient’s immune system often rejects the new tissue.

Growing a replacement organ from a patient’s own cells could solve both problems. It can be done on demand when a patient needs one, and the organ won’t be rejected because the immune system recognizes the cells as “self.”

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