In industry speak, he said it has to have electrical Vertical Take Off and Landing (eVTOL) to be a flying car. According to the Deloitte website, eVTOL vehicles have the potential to improve the future of elevated mobility by moving people and cargo more quickly, quietly, and cost-effectively than traditional helicopters. A separate journal described eVTOL as a new means of transport that can fly like an aircraft and take off and land vertically like a helicopter, “sometimes called personal aerial vehicle.”
Yoeli’s company has two models: the CityHawk and the Falcon XP, both of which weigh more than a ton, not including the passengers.
The FBI is conducting a probe after a pilot from American Airlines reported a man flying a jetpack above Los Angeles International Airport Sunday night.
“The FBI is aware of the reports by pilots on Sunday and is working to determine what occurred,” a spokesperson told FOX 11 Tuesday.
A second pilot from a separate airline company also reportedly spotted a man using a jetpack as the planes were approaching the airport at around 3,000 feet and 10 miles out for a landing.
Batteries with high energy densities could enable the creation of a wider range of electric vehicles, including flying vehicles that can transport humans in urban environments. Past studies predict that to support the operation of vehicles capable of take-off and landing, batteries require energy densities of approximately 400 Wh kg-1 at the cell level, which is approximately 30% higher than the energy density of most existing lithium-ion (Li-ion) cells.
In addition to powering flying vehicles, high-energy cells (i.e., single units within a battery that convert chemical into electrical energy) could increase the distance that electric cars can travel before they need to be charged again. They may also reduce overall fabrication costs for electric vehicles, as similar results could be achieved using fewer but better-performing cells.
Anode-free lithium metal cells are particularly promising for creating batteries with higher energy densities. While they use the same cathode as Li-ion cells, these cells store energy via an electroplated lithium metal instead of a graphite host, and they can have energy densities that are 60% greater than those of Li-ion cells.
For years, researchers have aimed to learn more about a group of metal oxides that show promise as key materials for the next generation of lithium-ion batteries because of their mysterious ability to store significantly more energy than should be possible. An international research team, co-led by The University of Texas at Austin, has cracked the code of this scientific anomaly, knocking down a barrier to building ultra-fast battery energy storage systems.
The team found that these metal oxides possess unique ways to store energy beyond classic electrochemical storage mechanisms. The research, published in Nature Materials, found several types of metal compounds with up to three times the energy storage capability compared with materials common in today’s commercially available lithium-ion batteries.
By decoding this mystery, the researchers are helping unlock batteries with greater energy capacity. That could mean smaller, more powerful batteries able to rapidly deliver charges for everything from smartphones to electric vehicles.
SPIDERS often make people jump but a bunch of clever scientists have managed to train one to jump on demand.
Researchers managed to teach the spider – nicknamed Kim – to jump from different heights and distances so they could film the arachnid’s super-springy movements.
The study is part of a research programme by the University of Manchester which aims to create a new class of micro-robots agile enough to jump like acrobatic spiders.
November 2019 is a landmark month in the history of the future. That’s when humanoid robots that are indistinguishable from people start running amok in Los Angeles. Well, at least they do in the seminal sci-fi film “Blade Runner.” Thirty-seven years after its release, we don’t have murderous androids running around. But we do have androids like Hanson Robotics’ Sophia, and they could soon start working in jobs traditionally performed by people.
Russian start-up Promobot recently unveiled what it calls the world’s first autonomous android. It closely resembles a real person and can serve in a business capacity. Robo-C can be made to look like anyone, so it’s like an android clone. It comes with an artificial intelligence system that has more than 100,000 speech modules, according to the company. It can operate at home, acting as a companion robot and reading out the news or managing smart appliances — basically, an anthropomorphic smart speaker. It can also perform workplace tasks such as answering customer questions in places like offices, airports, banks and museums, while accepting payments and performing other functions.
“We analyzed the needs of our customers, and there was a demand,” says Promobot co-founder and development director Oleg Kivokurtsev. “But, of course, we started the development of an anthropomorphic robot a long time ago, since in robotics there is the concept of the ‘Uncanny Valley,’ and the most positive perception of the robot arises when it looks like a person. Now we have more than 10 orders from companies and private clients from around the world.”
The self-driving car could transform our ideas of space and time, enabling us to do more of the things we love and less of the ones we loathe. Here are some of the most fascinating potential uses.
From the understated opulence of a Bentley to the stalwart family minivan to the utilitarian pickup, Americans know that the car you drive is an outward statement of personality. You are what you drive, as the saying goes, and researchers at Stanford have just taken that maxim to a new level.
Using computer algorithms that can see and learn, they have analyzed millions of publicly available images on Google Street View. The researchers say they can use that knowledge to determine the political leanings of a given neighborhood just by looking at the cars on the streets.
“Using easily obtainable visual data, we can learn so much about our communities, on par with some information that takes billions of dollars to obtain via census surveys. More importantly, this research opens up more possibilities of virtually continuous study of our society using sometimes cheaply available visual data,” said Fei-Fei Li, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab, where the work was done.
