A $1 billion solar farm in Nevada has been approved by the US government; the majority of British want weekly car-free days in towns and cities.
Category: transportation – Page 377
Washington (AFP) — Facebook unveiled an initiative Tuesday to take on “hateful memes” by using artificial intelligence, backed by crowd sourcing, to identify maliciously motivated posts.
The leading social network said it had already created a database of 10,000 memes — images often blended with text to deliver a specific message — as part of a ramped-up effort against hate speech.
“These efforts will spur the broader AI research community to test new methods, compare their work, and benchmark their results in order to accelerate work on detecting multimodal hate speech,” Facebook said in a blog post.
At Uber’s Elevate summit in Washington, DC earlier this month, researchers, industry leaders and engineers gathered to celebrate the approaching advent of on-demand air service. For Dr. Anita Sengupta, co-founder and Chief Product Office at Detroit’s Airspace Experience Technologies (abbreviated ASX), it was an event full of validation of her company’s specific approach to making electric vertical take-off and landing craft a working, commercially viable reality.
ASX’s eVTOL design is a tilt-wing design, which is distinct from the tilt-rotor design you might see on some of the splashier concept vehicles in the category. As you might’ve inferred from the name of each type of aircraft, with tilt-wing designs the entire wing of the aircraft can change orientation, while on tilt-rotor, just the rotor itself adjust independent of the wing structure.
The benefits of ASX’s tilt-wing choice, according to Sengupta, is speed to market and compatibility with existing regulatory and pilot licensing frameworks – and that’s why ASX could be providing cargo transport service relatively quickly for paying customers, with passenger travel to follow once regulators and the public get comfortable with the idea.
No one has ever seen any airplane like this, except on computer animation. Now, some of the world’s top aeronautical engineers are going to build it for real.
The plan calls for constructing a six-ton unmanned, remote controlled plane the size of a business jet with 24 spinning propellers embedded in its huge moveable wings that allow it to magically hover in midair.
It’s an experimental airplane they call LightningStrike.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Monday that the company’s factory in Fremont, California is open and has restarted production despite a stay-at-home order issued by Alameda County.
Musk said in tweet Monday afternoon that he will “be on the line,” a reference to the assembly line at the factory where Tesla makes the Model X, Model S, Model 3 and Model Y. He added “if anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”
Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.
The battery in the Lexus UX 300e electric car is air-cooled, but Lexus is backing it up with one of the best warranties yet.
The China Electricity Council (CEC) ratified and published a set of national standards for electric vehicle wireless charging, which will be based on the magnetic resonance technology developed and patented by WiTricity, a wireless power transfer specialist based in Massachusetts.
Lack of standardization was always a major obstacle for the popularization of the wireless charging, but it seems that in the near future the industry will finally introduce a general solution for all EVs — not only in China, but also globally.
“For the past four years, WiTricity has been actively involved in the Chinese EV wireless charging standardization process through its work with China Electric Power Research Institute (CEPRI), China Automotive Technology and Research Center (CATARC) and the CEC. With a global IP portfolio of over 1400 issued and pending patents, WiTricity has declared twenty Chinese patents as ” standards essential” to systems implementing the GB standard.
In 2033, people can be “uploaded” into virtual reality hotels run by 6 tech firms. Cash-strapped Nora lives in Brooklyn and works customer service for the luxurious “Lakeview” digital afterlife. When L.A. party-boy/coder Nathan’s self-driving car crashes, his high-maintenance girlfriend uploads him permanently into Nora’s VR world. Upload is created by Greg Daniels (The Office).
Tesla has patented a new battery cell with a tabless electrode that Elon Musk hypes as “way more important than it sounds.”
In the new patent application published today, Tesla explains constraints with current battery cells:
Current cells use a jelly-roll design in which the cathode, anode, and separators are rolled together and have a cathode tab and an anode tab to connect to the positive and negative terminals of the cell can. The path of the current necessarily travels through these tabs to connectors on the outside of the battery cell. However, ohmic resistance is increased with distance when current must travel all the way along the cathode or anode to the tab and out of the cell. Furthermore, because the tabs are additional components, they increase costs and present manufacturing challenges.