After drones & self-driving vehicles, Japan shows flying cars are no longer a distant dream

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While drones and self-driving cars have been making the headlines, Japan has reportedly have cracked the code of making flying cars. Though the car was caged and only hovered for about a minute in the air, it was a successful attempt to make the vehicle fly. In an experiment right out of the sci-fi movies, this has been accomplished by Japan’s NEC Corp. While it is a small development directing towards bigger accomplishments, there is also a debate on whether it really is a flying “car” or just a bigger version of a drone.

What Can The Flying Car Accomplish?

The prototype which was unveiled by Japan’s NEC Corp had four propellers that could smoothly hover for about a minute. It was powered by a battery and could rise to about the height of 3 meters or 10 feet above the ground before setting down again. While the prototype that Japanese electronics maker demonstrated was flown without passengers in it, the company claims that it is capable of doing so in the future.

Continue reading… “After drones & self-driving vehicles, Japan shows flying cars are no longer a distant dream”

China’s driverless future farther off than first thought, report predicts

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As a number of Chinese tech companies put the pedal to the metal in the race to dominate the autonomous vehicle industry, a major global information provider is proceeding with caution with regard to predicting the industry’s near-term growth

Driverless cars won’t be widely available for online hire in China until around 2025, according to a report published Friday by London-based research firm IHS Markit.

While researchers recognized the potential of autonomous vehicles to make travel more efficient, they warned that the need for policymakers to regulate emerging industries will put the brakes on the switchover from conventional vehicles.

Nonetheless, by 2035 China is expected to be home to some 33.6 million autonomous vehicles, around 10% of the world’s total, the report added.

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The impact of driverless trucks on the U.S. warehouse market

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The legendary war philosopher Sun Tzu famously said, “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.” Logistics is all about efficiency, and in today’s e-commerce-challenged supply chain, efficiency has been blown up to a large extent. Supply chains across industries, particularly in the retail-to-end-user world, have been undergoing complete reinvention for the better part of a decade.

Supply chain disruption resulting from e-commerce is rooted in the push to an omnichannel delivery model: Retailers are working hard to adapt to consumer demand to buy anywhere, accept delivery anywhere and return anywhere. Five-to-seven-day delivery is being replaced by one-to-two-day delivery, and the quest for the holy grail of low-cost, same-day or even two-hour delivery is stressing the old retail supply chain model. Failure to adopt an omnichannel strategy usually means death, as the many recently bankrupt retailers would surely attest.

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BMW brings wireless charging to the US

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Because plugging in an electric vehicle is a hassle.

BMW first announced its wireless charging pilot program back in 2017. It works with BMW 530e plug-in hybrid models and the pilot program is helping people test the ability to charge the cars using magnetic induction. The system works in much the same way as we use induction charging for cell phones, except the charging pad is bigger. Parking over the pad starts the charging process automatically and the driver doesn’t have to do anything more. We knew the technology would make it to the US eventually, and now BMW has announced it’s testing it here through a pilot program.

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Sorry, scooters aren’t so climate-friendly after all

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A look at the full lifetime emissions of the vehicles call into question the ecological assumptions around “micromobility.”

Bird boasts that its dockless electric scooters allow customers to “cruise past traffic and cut back on CO2 emissions—one ride at a time.”

Its rival Lime claims the vehicles “reduce dependence on personal automobiles for short distance transportation and leave future generations with a cleaner, healthier planet.”

But the mere fact that battery-powered scooters don’t belch pollution out of a tailpipe doesn’t mean they’re “emissions free,” or as “eco-friendly” as some have assumed. The actual climate impact of the vehicles depends heavily on how they’re made, what they’re replacing, and how long they last.

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LA new mobility challenge

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 The L.A. New Mobility Challenge is a major global startup competition focused on solving the challenges of urban mobility. The third edition of the Challenge brings together 12 semi-finalists who will pitch their innovations on stage to a crowd of top Venture Capitalists and key public and private stakeholders on November 13, 2019, the eve of CoMotion LA 2019.

The four categories this year are shared and personal mobility, urban aerial mobility, smart infrastructure (including autonomy and connectivity), and zero emission mobility. To be eligible, companies must be less than five years old, have revenue of less than $5 million, and have a product in pilot, beta or prototype stage.

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For the struggling legacy transit systems, new mobility options present challenges and opportunities

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Despite decades of ridership and revenue growth, the country’s busiest transit systems have struggled in recent years both at the turnstile and in the farebox, even as operating costs and unmet capital needs continue to grow. Metropolitan transit agencies serving New York, Chicago, Washington, DC, Boston and San Francisco, the country’s five largest systems, have all seen ridership declines in each of the last three years, and only the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) saw revenues increase, according to financial disclosures.

Some of the decline can be attributed to service quality. But these systems are also challenged by competition from ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, bike-share programs and the ever-polarizing electric scooter phenomenon.

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The remarkable legacy of Edward Cornish, founder of the World Future Society

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Edward S. Cornish, journalist and futurist association founder, dies at 91

Edward Seymour Cornish, founder and first president of the World Future Society and editor of its magazine, The Futurist, died August 14, 2019. He was 91. A longtime Maryland resident (Bethesda and Rockville), Cornish had been living at Olney Assisted Living in Olney, Md., during his battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

Cornish was born in New York City August 31, 1927, the son of George Anthony Cornish, an editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and Elizabeth Furniss (McLeod) Cornish. He attended New York schools and Harvard College, where he majored in social psychology. Following his graduation in 1950, he joined the staff of the Evening Star newspaper in Washington, D.C., as a copy boy, later becoming a dictationist and part-time reporter.

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UPS has been delivering cargo in self-driving trucks for months and no one knew

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The self-driving freight truck startup TuSimple has been carrying mail across the state of Arizona for several weeks.

UPS announced on Thursday that its venture capital arm has made a minority investment in TuSimple. The announcement also revealed that since May TuSimple autonomous trucks have been hauling UPS loads on a 115-mile route between Phoenix and Tucson.

UPS confirmed to Gizmodo this is the first time UPS has announced it has been using TuSimple autonomous trucks to deliver packages in the state.

Around the same time as the UPS and TuSimple program began, the United States Postal Service and TuSimple publicized a two-week pilot program to deliver mail between Phoenix and Dallas, a 1,000 mile trip.

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The rise of the virtual restaurant

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Ricky Lopez owns four restaurants: Top Round Roast Beef in San Francisco and three that exist only within the Uber Eats delivery app.CreditCreditCayce Clifford for The New York Times

 Food delivery apps are reshaping the restaurant industry — and how we eat — by inspiring digital-only establishments that don’t need a dining room or waiters.

SAN FRANCISCO — At 9:30 on most weeknights, Ricky Lopez, the head chef and owner of Top Round Roast Beef in San Francisco, stacks up dozens of hot beef sandwiches and sides of curly fries to serve hungry diners.

He also breads chicken cutlets for another of his restaurants, Red Ribbon Fried Chicken. He flips beef patties on the grill for a third, TR Burgers and Wings. And he mixes frozen custard for a dessert shop he runs, Ice Cream Custard.

Of Mr. Lopez’s four operations, three are “virtual restaurants” with no physical storefronts, tables or chairs. They exist only inside a mobile app, Uber Eats, the on-demand meal delivery service owned by Uber.

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The fashion line designed to trick surveillance cameras

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Adversarial Fashion garments are covered in license plates, aimed at bamboozling a device’s databases

An Adversarial Fashion dress, modeled by the designer, Kate Rose.

Automatic license plate readers, which use networked surveillance cameras and simple image recognition to track the movements of cars around a city, may have met their match, in the form of a T-shirt. Or a dress. Or a hoodie.

The anti-surveillance garments were revealed at the DefCon cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas on Saturday by the hacker and fashion designer Kate Rose, who presented the inaugural collection of her Adversarial Fashion line.

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Solar energy prices hit tipping point as China reaches “grid parity”

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It’s a landmark moment for China and the world.

The world’s most populous country has reached a tipping point in the pursuit of renewable energy.

China, which aims to consume 20 percent of its energy from non-fossil fuels by 2030, has reached a point where home-generated solar is cheaper than electricity generated from the national grid. The research, conducted by researchers in both Sweden and China and published in the journal Nature Monday, mark an historic moment in the drive to ditch fossil fuels.

The switchover point comes soon after a report that showed a similar crossover in the United States. The report in March showed that in 74 percent of cases, building new solar and wind capacity in a given area was cheaper than maintaining an existing coal-powered plant. Where levelized costs for wind reach $15 per megawatt-hour and $28 per megawatt-hour for solar, marginal costs for existing plants can jump as high as $104 per megawatt-hour.

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