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.
Category: transportation – Page 223
Tesla (TSLA) has been upgraded to investment grade
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.
Taiwan is turning unused metro stations into vertical farms
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.
Former Apple Car Executive’s Battery Startup Plans $1.6 Billion Factory in Michigan
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.
New shape memory alloy discovered through artificial intelligence framework
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.
Latest Machine Learning Research at MIT Presents a Novel ‘Poisson Flow’ Generative Model (PFGM) That Maps any Data Distribution into a Uniform Distribution on a High-Dimensional Hemisphere
Deep generative models are a popular data generation strategy used to generate high-quality samples in pictures, text, and audio and improve semi-supervised learning, domain generalization, and imitation learning. Current deep generative models, however, have shortcomings such as unstable training objectives (GANs) and low sample quality (VAEs, normalizing flows). Although recent developments in diffusion and scored-based models attain equivalent sample quality to GANs without adversarial training, the stochastic sampling procedure in these models is sluggish. New strategies for securing the training of CNN-based or ViT-based GAN models are presented.
They suggest backward ODEsamplers (normalizing flow) accelerate the sampling process. However, these approaches have yet to outperform their SDE equivalents. We introduce a novel “Poisson flow” generative model (PFGM) that takes advantage of a surprising physics fact that extends to N dimensions. They interpret N-dimensional data items x (say, pictures) as positive electric charges in the z = 0 plane of an N+1-dimensional environment filled with a viscous liquid like honey. As shown in the figure below, motion in a viscous fluid converts any planar charge distribution into a uniform angular distribution.
A positive charge with z 0 will be repelled by the other charges and will proceed in the opposite direction, ultimately reaching an imaginary globe of radius r. They demonstrate that, in the r limit, if the initial charge distribution is released slightly above z = 0, this rule of motion will provide a uniform distribution for their hemisphere crossings. They reverse the forward process by generating a uniform distribution of negative charges on the hemisphere, then tracking their path back to the z = 0 planes, where they will be dispersed as the data distribution.
Tesla announces it’s moving away from ultrasonic sensors in favor of ‘Tesla Vision’
Tesla announced today that it is moving away from using ultrasonic sensors in its suite of Autopilot sensors in favor of its camera-only “Tesla Vision” system.
Last year, Tesla announced it would transition to its “Tesla Vision” Autopilot without radar and start producing vehicles without a front-facing radar.
Originally, the suite of Autopilot sensors – which Tesla claimed would include everything needed to achieve full self-driving capability eventually – included eight cameras, a front-facing radar, and several ultrasonic sensors all around its vehicles.
Wisk Aero aims to be the first FAA certified autonomous air taxi with its 6th generation eVTOL
The company targets a price of $3 per passenger per mile.
The first self-flying, all-electric, four-passenger eVTOL air taxi in the world was unveiled by the California-based Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) company Wisk Aero. Generation 6 is Wisk’s go-to-market aircraft and the first autonomous eVTOL to be a candidate for type approval by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The most sophisticated air taxi in the world, Generation 6 combines one of the safest passenger transport systems in commercial aviation with industry-leading autonomous technology and software, human oversight of every trip, and a generally streamlined design.