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Category: transportation – Page 179

CEO Elon Musk unveiled two prototypes of the Tesla robot at his company’s second annual AI Day — and while the bots are nowhere near as impressive as some of the humanoids we’ve seen before, they could have a bigger impact on the future of work.

The Tesla robot: In 2021, Tesla held its first AI Day, a livestreamed event to present its latest developments in AI hardware and software, with a focus on Tesla cars’ Autopilot system.

Near the end of the event, Tesla presented a short video of a sleek, humanoid robot — and then a person dressed like the robot walked onto the stage and broke into dance.

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A Canadian startup called TransPod wants to revolutionize ground-based transportation by sending magnetically levitated trains through vacuum-sealed tubes at ludicrous speeds.

It’s a highly ambitious — and immensely expensive, nevermind comically vague — concept that’s generated some serious buzz in recent weeks.

And we can’t shake the feeling that we’ve seen this kind of design before. Remember the “Hyperloop?”

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A new AI system can create natural-sounding speech and music after being prompted with a few seconds of audio.

AudioLM, developed by Google researchers, generates audio that fits the style of the prompt, including complex sounds like piano music, or people speaking, in a way that is almost indistinguishable from the original recording. The technique shows promise for speeding up the process of training AI to generate audio, and it could eventually be used to auto-generate music to accompany videos.

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As if Elon Musk’s week couldn’t be more eventful, the Tesla (TSLA) CEO gave the automotive world more news to chew on.

In a tweet last night, Musk said Tesla has begun production of its long-awaited electric Tesla Semi truck, and that deliveries to Pepsi (PEP) would begin on December 1st. In a follow-up tweet, Musk said the semi would have 500 miles of range and would be “super fun to drive.”

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BYU engineers design a molten-salt reactor that will never melt down and fits on a flatbed truck.

Developed at Brigham Young University, the micro-reactor can fit on a flatbed truck and produce enough energy to power 1,000 homes.

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Tesla (TSLA) has been officially upgraded to investment grade long-term credit rating by S&P Global Ratings.

Despite delivering profits for more than two years straight and building a cash position of over $18 billion while sitting on very little debt, Tesla was still rated as a “junk bond” by rating companies like S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service.

Earlier this year, we reported that the rating agencies are finally changing their opinion on the electric automaker and considering upgrading their ratings.

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The 40-square-meter hydroponic farm cultivates lettuce under LED lighting without using pesticides.

In an effort to provide passengers with amenities beyond transportation, Taiwan has chosen an unusual location for vertical farming, an underground metro station.

Nanjing Fuxing station in Taipei cultivates vegetables in a technologically advanced setting that assures precisely controlled humidity, temperatures, and other elements promoted as a method of cultivating unpolluted and healthy plants, Taiwan News reported on Wednesday.

In order to fulfill a high demand for sustainable, clean and organic food, Taiwan is looking for alternative spaces to grow vegetables.

Continue reading “Taiwan is turning unused metro stations into vertical farms” | >

Our Next Energy Inc., an electric-car battery startup involving several former leaders of Apple secretive car project, is planning to invest $1.6 billion into a factory in Michigan to make enough battery cells for about 200,000 EVs annually.

The state of Michigan on Wednesday approved a $200 million grant for the project that promises to create 2,112 new jobs once the facility in Van Buren Township, about 10 miles west of the Detroit airport, is fully operational by the end of 2027. The company must create and maintain the jobs or face a clawback of the funds.

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Researchers from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University have used an Artificial Intelligence Materials Selection framework (AIMS) to discover a new shape memory alloy. The shape memory alloy showed the highest efficiency during operation achieved thus far for nickel-titanium-based materials. In addition, their data-driven framework offers proof of concept for future materials development.

This study was recently published in the Acta Materialia journal.

Shape memory alloys are utilized in various fields where compact, lightweight and solid-state actuations are needed, replacing hydraulic or pneumatic actuators because they can deform when cold and then return to their original shape when heated. This unique property is critical for applications, such as airplane wings, jet engines and automotive components, that must withstand repeated, recoverable large-shape changes.

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