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Elon Musk unveiled prototypes of Tesla’s Solar Roof tiles In October 2016. They came in four styles that looked just like normal roofing material but were essentially miniaturized versions of traditional solar panels.

The announcement helped Tesla justify its $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity one month later and represented Musk’s vision for what the businesses could do together.

It’s been almost two years since then. So where are the tiles?

“We now have several hundred homes with the Solar Roof on them, and that’s going well. It takes a while to just confirm that the Solar Roof is going to last for 30 years and all the details work out,” Musk said on Tesla’s Q2 earnings call in August.» Subscribe to CNBC: http://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBC

The new digital communications policy (NDCP) 2018, approved by the Cabinet on Wednesday, looks too good to believe. It has promised to create an additional four million jobs in five years and reskill another one million people in new-age skills and sectors such as 5G LTE and artificial intelligence. Six lakh villages will be connected which will eventually lead to creating jobs and several earning avenues such as managing WiFi hotspots and laying optical fibre, among others. The policy will give an impetus to the job market.

NDCP is bound to create a massive infrastructure and help the debt-ridden telecom sector emerge from its current turbulence. The policy document envisages the reduction in levies and ease of doing business, and this will help restore the financial health of the long-bleeding sector. The focus will be on the proliferation of telecom services and facilitating low-cost financing. The government’s ambitious plan of Digital India will get a booster shot. Thanks to the promise of 50 Mbps speed in the broadband connection, the consumer will be the ultimate beneficiary.

Plans are afoot to reform the licensing and regulatory regime to facilitate investments and innovation, besides promoting ease of doing business. The success of the policy will depend on the execution of the policy.

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Salesforce has showcased new natural language features for enabling its Einstein AI platform to further simplify the work of sales agents, marketers and business leaders.

On ‘AI Day’ at the Dreamforce conference, members of Salesforce’s data science team demonstrated how Einstein Voice—an emerging speech interface—can be used to better access sales figures and projections, automate repetitive tasks, and receive business insights, including through Amazon’s and Google’s smart speakers.

Jim Sinai, Salesforce’s vice president of marketing, said in a keynote that Salesforce had been working on Einstein Voice for the last year to better deliver Einstein’s data discovery, deep learning and machine learning capabilities.

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In a world increasingly driven by industries that rely on advanced technical learning and innovation, fluency in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) becomes more vital every day. Yet our education system isn’t keeping up. Five years ago, a Business-Higher Education Forum study found that 80% of high school students either lacked interest or proficiency in STEM subjects. Meanwhile, a college and career readiness organization known as ACT reported last year that the number of students pursuing STEM careers is growing at less than 1% annually.

The Amgen Foundation is doing something about it. As the principal philanthropic arm of Amgen, the largest independent biotechnology company, the Amgen Foundation has been committed to inspiring the next generation of scientists and innovators by making immersive science education a focus of its social investments for almost 30 years. While Amgen has reached millions of patients around the world with biotechnology medicines to combat serious illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and migraines, the Amgen Foundation has reached more than 4 million students globally—and it is poised to launch a new program called LabXchange with the potential to reach millions more.

“As a scientist, it’s clear to me that the most effective way to learn science is by doing it,” says David Reese, executive vice president of Research and Development at Amgen and member of the Amgen Foundation board of directors. “It’s time to transform the science learning experience. We need to move from information acquisition to application and exploration, from students as passive listeners to active participants in the learning process, from teachers as knowledge transmitters to facilitators and coaches.”

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Rory McCarthy, senior storage analyst for Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, illustrated for attendees how the business case for using renewables in place of natural gas is becoming more compelling following declines in solar and wind costs.

That business case is also improving as a result of massive increases in battery storage, where the U.S. leads the world in terms of operational and planned capacity.

Today, storage capacity amounts to around 6 gigawatt-hours worldwide, but Wood Mackenzie predicts a more than tenfold increase, to at least 65 gigawatt-hours, by 2022. The U.S. will continue to lead this build-out, thanks to its more mature market.

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The United States uses more energy for HVAC than Africa uses for all of their energy needs.


The starry night sky seems remarkably distant from the topic of air conditioning, but it’s revolutionizing the field in quite an unexpected way. In this episode of “The Spark,” watch how scientists from across the globe are harnessing natural phenomena to drastically redesign this century-old technology.

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Today, we would like to share a talk given by Stephen Hilbert, President of Oisin Biotechnologies, in which he discusses treating aging and cancer by removing harmful senescent cells.

On July 12th, we hosted our first conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases: Investment Prospects & Advances in Research, at the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, which is part of the Cooper Union campus in New York City. The packed event saw a range of people from research, investment, and the wider community coming together for a day of science and biotech business presentations and panels.

One of the companies at the event was Oisin Biotechnologies, a company working on therapies that remove harmful senescent cells, which accumulate as we age and drive aging processes through the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), which leads to chronic inflammation.

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