Japan and U.S have agreed to Tokyo’s contribution for hosting U.S. military forces to 9.2 Billion dollars over the five-year period from fiscal 2022, which starts in April, government sources said.
Roughly 5% increase in so-called host nation support came in response to calls from the administration of U.S president Joe Biden for the Japanese government to foot more of the cost, given the need for U.S. forces to deal with China.
The two sides have agreed to reduce Tokyo’s financial contribution for utility costs, with the increased amount to be allocated to funding expenses such as maintenance of facilities used by both Japan’s self-Defence Forces and the U.S. military as well as their joint exercise.
Now, Future Meat Technologies have announced that they have managed to produce cultivated chicken breast for just $7.70 per pound, (or $1.70 per 110-gram of chicken breast) down from under $18 per pound just six months ago. The move could soon see lab-grown meat making the rounds on supermarkets everywhere.
The firm also announced that it had raised $347 million in a Series B round of financing, meaning it will have plenty of money to continue on its mission to bring lab-grown meat to the masses.
“We are incredibly excited by the massive support of our global network of strategic and financial investors,” said in a statement Professor Yaakov Nahmias, founder and president of Future Meat. “This financing consolidates Future Meat’s position as the leading player in the cultivated meat industry, just three years after our launch. Our singular technology reduced production costs faster than anyone thought possible, paving the way for a massive expansion of operations. Our team will break ground on the first-of-its-kind, large-scale production facility in the United States in 2022.”
KUALA LUMPUR: More than 21,000 people affected by Malaysia’s worst flooding in years — most of them in Selangor — were sheltering in relief centres on Sunday (Dec 19).
Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob announced the government would allocate an initial sum of RM100 million for house and infrastructure repairs, and will provide financial aid to affected households.
In a Facebook post, the prime minister said he had “directed all ministries to double up efforts in helping flood operations especially in the severely affected areas as soon as possible”.
Lightelligence, a Boston-based photonics company, revealed the world’s first small form-factor, photonics-based computing device, meaning it uses light to perform compute operations. The company claims the unit is “hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as NVIDIA RTX 3080.” 350 times faster, to be exact, but that only applies to certain types of applications.
However, the PACE achieves that coveted specialization through an added field of computing — which not only makes the system faster, it makes it incredibly more efficient. While traditional semiconductor systems have the issue of excess heat that results from running current through nanometre-level features at sometimes ludicrous frequencies, the photonic system processes its workloads with zero Ohmic heating — there’s no heat produced from current resistance. Instead, it’s all about light.
Lightelligence is built around its CEO’s Ph.d. thesis — and the legitimacy it provides. This is so because when “Deep Learning with Coherent Nanophotonic Circuits” was published in Nature in 2017, Lightelligence’s CEO and founder Yichen Chen had already foreseen a path for optical circuits to be at the forefront of Machine Learning computing efforts. By 2020, the company had already received $100 million in funding and employed around 150 employees. A year later, Lightspeed has achieved a dem product that it says is “hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as NVIDIA RTX 3080”. 350 times faster, to be clear.
The PACE’s debut aims to charm enough capital to comfortably reach its goal of launching a pilot AI accelerator product to the market in 2022. That’s still only a stretch goal in the company’s vision, however, its goal is to develop and distribute a mass-market, photonics-based hardware solution as early as 2023, targeting the Cloud AI, Finance, and Retail markets. Considering how Lightelligence managed to improve the company’s 2019 COMET design performance by a factor of a million with PACE in a span of two years, it’ll be interesting to see where their efforts take them when it comes to launching.
According to a newly released survey from nonprofit technical organization IEEE, about one in five respondents say AI and machine learning (21%), cloud computing (20%), and 5G (17%) will be the most important technologies next year. The study examines the most important technologies in 2022, the industries expected to be most impacted by technology in the year ahead, and anticipated technology trends through the next decade.
What industries are expected to be most impacted by technology in the year ahead? Technology leaders surveyed cited manufacturing (25%), financial services (19%), health care (16%), and energy (13%) as industries poised for major disruption.
Regarding the key technology trends to expect through the next decade, an overwhelming majority (95%) agree — including 66% who strongly agree — that AI will drive the majority of innovation across nearly every industry sector in the next one to five years. Furthermore, 81% agree that, in the next five years, one-quarter of what they do will be enhanced by robots, and 77% agree that, in the same timeframe, robots will be deployed across their organization to enhance nearly every business function, from sales and human resources to marketing and IT. A majority of respondents agree (78%) that in the next 10 years, half or more of what they do will be enhanced by robots.
Petra emerged from stealth this week, announcing a $30 million Series A. The round, led by DCVC, brings the robotics company’s funding up to $33 million, with additional participation from ACME Capital Congruent Ventures, 8VC, Real Ventures, Elementum Ventures and Mac Venture Capital.
“We’ve invented a completely new way to excavate rock and this will have profound implications on the future of tunneling,” co-founder and CEO Kim Abrams said in release tied to the news. “By delivering a boring solution that affordably undergrounds utilities through high-grade rock, we can finally protect communities from exposure to wildfires and ensure the safety of critical infrastructure in disaster-prone areas, especially in places like the Sierra Nevada mountains, Rocky Mountains, and coastal regions.”
The news arrives as the company is announcing a successful pilot of its robot, Swifty. According to the firm, the robot successfully bored a 20-foot tunnel through Sioux Quartzite at a rate of one inch-per-minute. The metamorphic rock is notoriously hard, making it a popular choice for buildings in the upper Midwest region in which it is found. That strength, however, also makes it a formidable challenge from infrastructure and other projects that require tunneling.
The disclosure is the strongest indication yet that the service is banking on autonomous weapon systems to give it an edge in the increasingly fierce military competition with China.
California-headquartered SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWR) announced today that it’s launched SunPower Financial, which means that customers working with SunPower to buy rooftop solar and storage no longer need a third-party lender to obtain and manage financing.
SunPower claims that it’s now the first and only solar provider to give US homeowners a one-stop shop for the purchase of solar and storage, including design, sales, installation, financing, and warranty.
A key aim of the launch of its financial arm is to expand access to residential solar for lower-income customers.
