Lifeboat Foundation

Family sedan breaks speed record.

The new Tesla Model S Plaid has reportedly achieved a new quarter-mile world record with a 9.2-second run, according to Jay Leno, who was at the racetrack for the record attempt.

After several months of delays, Tesla is apparently finally going to start deliveries of the new and updated Model S next week, including the new top performance Plaid version.

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The patent describes the complexity of the layers of this so-called bulletproof glass.

Franz von Holzhausen throwing a steel ball at the Tesla Cybertruck’s side window and breaking it, despite the fact that it was supposed to deflect it, went viral for all the wrong reasons. However, even though the window failed the ball test, Tesla will still install laminated armored glass on its truck and thanks to newly released patents, we now know more about how this multi-layered glass works.

The patent states that it should be able to withstand a 2 Joule impact, with only a 10 percent chance of failure (that means it has an IK07 impact protection rating). This means it should be not fail when a 0.5 kg (1.1 pound) mass is dropped on it from 40 centimeters (15.8 inches) nine times out of ten.

Circa 2016

From driverless buses to an AI council worker called Amelia, municipal services are becoming increasingly automated. But what does that mean for the future of our cities – and the jobs market?

Self-driving cars are taking longer to come to market than many expected. In fact, it’s looking like they may be outpaced by pilotless planes and driverless trucks. A truck isn’t much different than a car, but self-driving technology is already coming in handy on long-haul trucking routes, as a recent cross-country trip showed.

Last month TuSimple, a transportation company focused on self-driving technology for heavy-duty trucks, shipped a truckload of watermelons from Arizona to Oklahoma using the truck’s autonomous system for over 80 percent of the journey. The starting point was Nogales, at Arizon’s southern end right on the border with Mexico. A human driver took the wheel for the first 60 miles or so, from Nogales to Tucson—but from there the truck went on auto-pilot, and not just for a little while. It drove itself all the way to Dallas, 950 miles to the east (there was a human safety driver on board the whole time, but not controlling the truck).

If you look at the most direct route, it’s pretty straightforward: there’s one fork where I-10 splits off and merges with I-20, but other than that, it’s straight on through ‘til morning. Literally, in this case; the truck drove the route in 14 hours and 6 minutes, as compared to the given estimate of the average time it takes a human to drive the same route—24 hours and 6 minutes.

The adoption of Android Auto is on the rise, with more and more carmakers bringing it to their new models, but at the same time, there’s also a shift in terms of supported versions.

Deep-learning expert weighs in on getting to AGI, assessing algorithmic intelligence, autonomous vehicles,” “Mark Ryan is a Data Science Manager at Intact Insurance and the author of the recently-released “Deep Learning with Structured Data”. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, and is interested in chatbots and natural language processing.

Harvard University researchers have made a breakthrough in battery tech: a long-lasting solid-state lithium battery.

“A lithium-metal battery is considered the holy grail for battery chemistry,” researcher Xin Li told the Harvard Gazette.

Strong, cheaper, faster: Most of today’s electric vehicles (EVs) are powered by lithium-ion batteries, the same type of battery you’ll find in your laptop or smartphone.

While the remaining supersonic contenders duke it out to bring faster jets to market, private jet operators are doing their best to address the business traveler’s appetite for speed with aircraft that are as close to the sound barrier as they can be without actually breaking it, which poses all kinds of environmental issues.

With the news that supersonic planemaker Aerion has unexpectedly folded, is the dream of a successor to Concorde running out of fuel?

Bye Aerospace’s eFlyer 800 is a clean-sheet design that will carry eight people, including one or two pilots. The 800 will have two motors, powered by a grid of electric cells across the airframe.

This is the third model in a lineup of electric planes from the Denver-based aerospace firm, but the first with two motors. The eFlyer 2 is a two-seater for professional flight training that was developed when the company launched in 2014, and the eFlyer 4, a four-seater for air taxi and advanced training, came later. Both models have more than 360 orders each.