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Tesla is advancing its full self-driving technology in Austin, Texas, with plans for an unsupervised robo taxi service by June 2025, positioning itself for significant revenue growth and regulatory approval through enhanced safety and efficiency ## ## Questions to inspire discussion Operational Efficiency.

🏭 Q: How is Tesla using unsupervised FSD at Giga Texas? A: Tesla is using unsupervised FSD to drive new Model Y and Cybertruck units from production lines to outbound logistics lots, logging over 50,000 driverless miles between Texas and Fremont factory deployments.

💰 Q: What are the benefits of automating car movement at Giga Texas? A: Automating car movement reduces labor costs, improves throughput, creates a scalable logistics model, and boosts production margins. Regulatory Advantage.

🚗 Q: How does Tesla benefit from Texas regulations regarding autonomous vehicles? A: Texas laws don’t require permits for autonomous vehicles, providing Tesla with a regulatory advantage and a lower-risk proving ground before public rollout of robo taxis. Technological Edge.

đŸ–„ïž Q: What hardware advantages does Tesla’s FSD system have over competitors? A: Tesla’s vision-only FSD with Tesla-designed HW4 uses no LIDAR or radar, accelerating the data flywheel with unsupervised miles accumulated. Future Prospects.

🚕 Q: When and where will Tesla launch its first public unsupervised robo taxi service? A: Tesla plans to launch its first public unsupervised robo taxi service in Austin as a pilot rollout in June 2025.

A new study in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by researchers including IstvĂĄn Szapudi of the University of HawaiÊ»i at Mānoa Institute for Astronomy suggests the universe may rotate —just extremely slowly. The finding could help solve one of astronomy’s biggest puzzles.

“To paraphrase the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who famously said ‘panta rhei’ (everything moves), we thought that perhaps panta kykloutai—everything turns,” said Szapudi.

Current models say the expands evenly in all directions, with no sign of rotation. This idea fits most of what astronomers observe. But it doesn’t explain the so-called Hubble tension—a long-standing disagreement between two ways of measuring how fast the universe is expanding.

“We named this galaxy ZhĂșlĂłng, meaning ‘Torch Dragon’ in Chinese mythology. In the myth, ZhĂșlĂłng is a powerful red solar dragon that creates day and night by opening and closing its eyes, symbolizing light and cosmic time,” team leader Mengyuan Xiao of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) said in a statement. “What makes ZhĂșlĂłng stand out is just how much it resembles the Milky Way in shape, size, and stellar mass.”

Another similarity between the Milky Way and this early cosmic dragon galaxy is the sizes of their stellar disks and the masses of those regions. ZhĂșlĂłng’s disk spans around 60,000 light-years and has a mass of 100 billion times that of the sun. The Milky Way’s disk is slightly wider at 100,000 light-years wide with a stellar mass estimated at around 46 billion solar masses.

Imagine a Slushee composed of ammonia and water encased in a hard shell of water ice. Now picture these ice-encrusted slushballs, dubbed “mushballs,” raining down like hailstones during a thunderstorm, illuminated by intense flashes of lightning.

Planetary scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, now say that hailstorms of mushballs accompanied by fierce lightning actually exist on Jupiter. In fact, mushball hailstorms may occur on all gaseous planets in the galaxy, including our solar system’s other giant planets, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The idea of mushballs was initially put forth in 2020 to explain nonuniformities in the distribution of gas in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere that were detected both by NASA’s Juno mission and by on Earth.

A Southwest Research Institute-led study modeled the chemistry of TOI-270 d, an exoplanet between Earth and Neptune in size, finding evidence that it could be a giant rocky planet shrouded in a thick, hot atmosphere. TOI-270 d is only 73 light years from Earth and could serve as a “Rosetta Stone” for understanding an entire class of new planets.

Exoplanets orbit stars outside of our solar system. Sub-Neptunes refer to planets between the size of our solar system’s largest rocky planet, Earth, and the smallest gas giant, Neptune.

“The nature of sub-Neptunes is one of the hottest topics in exoplanetary science,” said SwRI’s Dr. Christopher Glein, first author of a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and available on the preprint server arXiv.

Astronomers may have uncovered a hidden population of galaxies that could rewrite what we know about the universe’s evolution.

These faint, dusty galaxies were discovered using the deepest far-infrared image ever created, thanks to data from the Herschel Space Observatory. Their collective light might explain a long-standing mystery about the universe’s energy output in the infrared spectrum. If confirmed, these galaxies would challenge current galaxy evolution models and reveal a previously unseen side of the cosmos—one shrouded in dust and only visible in longer wavelengths of light.

Unveiling hidden galaxies in the early universe.

Using the radial velocity method, an international team of astronomers has discovered a new extrasolar planet orbiting a nearby star known as GI 410. The newfound alien world was classified as a sub-Neptune exoplanet with a mass of at least 8.4 Earth masses. The discovery was reported April 4 on the pre-print server arXiv.

The radial velocity (RV) method of detecting an exoplanet is based on the detection of variations in the velocity of the central star, due to the changing direction of the gravitational pull from an unseen exoplanet as it orbits the star. Thanks to this technique, more than 600 exoplanets have been detected so far.

Now, a group of astronomers led by Andres Carmona of the Grenoble Alpes University in France reports another detection using the RV technique. The discovery was made with the SPIRou near-infrared spectropolarimeter at the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). The observations were complemented by data from the optical velocimeter SOPHIE at the Haute-Provence Observatory.

A trio of animal physiologists at the University of TĂŒbingen, in Germany, has found that at least one species of crow has the ability to recognize geometric regularity. In their study published in the journal Science Advances, Philipp Schmidbauer, Madita Hahn and Andreas Nieder conducted several experiments that involved testing crows on their ability to recognize geometric shapes.

Recognizing regularity in geometric shapes means being able to pick out one that is different from others in a group—picking out a plastic star, for example, when it is placed among several plastic moons. Testing for the ability to recognize geometric regularity has been done with many animals, including chimps and bonobos. Until now, this ability has never been observed in any creature except for humans.

Because of that, the team started with a bit of skepticism when they began testing carrion crows. In their work, the testing was done using computer screens—the birds were asked to peck the outlier in a group; if they chose correctly, they got a food treat. The team chose to test carrion crows because prior experiments have shown them to have exceptional intelligence and mathematical capabilities.