A team of young Japanese engineers is developing a flying car with the goal of launching it in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
The futuristic vehicle – dubbed Skydrive – is fitted with three wheels, a motor and four rotors, enabling it to take off and land vertically from public roads without the need of a runway.
Measuring only 9.5 feet by 4.3 feet, Skydrive claims to be the world’s smallest flying car, with a target top flight speed of 62 mph, while travelling up to 32 feet above the ground.
Tesla’s Semi truck has already made some city-to-city trips, but how does it fare on cross-country jaunts — you know, what it’ll be doing when it enters service? Just fine, if you ask Elon Musk. In response to an Electrekpiece on the Semi’s latest visit (to Arkansas trucking behemoth J.B. Hunt), the CEO noted that the Semi has been traveling thousands of miles entirely by itself, using the existing Supercharger network. The only necessary help is an “extension cord” to help the truck plug in. To be exact, it’s a system of cords that plugs into multiple stations at once to top up the Semi’s giant battery before the company’s Megachargers come online.
That solo travel is likely meant in part to reassure customers (including J.B. Hunt) that the Semi is already capable of handling long-distance trips without escorts. However, it does leave a few open questions. How long does it take to top up using Superchargers, and how likely is it that drivers could rely on them when Megachargers aren’t available? While it’s easy for a Tesla-operated truck to cross the US using the existing framework, it’d be another matter with thousands of third-party trucks in service. This is a significant step toward the Semi hitting the road in earnest, but there are many more steps to go.
What’s cool is that it was driven across the country alone (no escort or any accompanying vehicles), using the existing Tesla Supercharger network and an extension cord— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2018
China has announced an unmanned police station will soon be put into use.” The station will provide numerous driver and vehicle related services via AI.
Alphabet’s self-driving car subsidiary, Waymo, has kicked off speculation about its ambitions for the Chinese market by creating a small outpost in Shanghai.
What’s it mean?: If Waymo is aiming to break into China, then this would be a very preliminary step. The new office might also be something less exciting: a means of working with Chinese hardware suppliers for instance.
Auto revolution: T hat said, it would make a lot of sense for Waymo to target China. It is the world’s largest auto market and a hotbed of technology and market innovation. And while Google’s plans to re-enter the Chinese market have proven controversial, the truth is that China cannot be ignored by any tech company that wants to a global force.
Packing more energy into batteries is the key to delivering electric cars with longer range, smartphones that can last days—and cheaper electronic products all around.
The promise: Lithium-oxygen batteries represent one of the more promising paths toward that end. They could boost energy density by an order of magnitude above conventional lithium-ion batteries—in theory, at least. In a paper published today in Science, researchers at the University of Waterloo identified ways of addressing some of the major hurdles to converting that potential into commercial reality.
The challenge: A critical problem has been that as a lithium-oxygen battery discharges, oxygen is converted into superoxide and then lithium peroxide, reactive compounds that corrode the battery’s components over time. That, in turn, limits its recharging ability—and any real-world utility.
The facial recognition technology the US is testing for airports has caught its first imposter merely three days after Washington Dulles International started using it. According to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a 26-year-old man from Sao Paulo, Brazil successfully fooled people with a French passport until he presented it to a Dulles officer who used the new facial comparison biometric technology. The system determined that his face wasn’t a match with the person in the passport, and he was sent for a comprehensive check, which revealed the Republic of Congo ID hidden inside his shoe.
Materials can deform plastically along atomic-scale line defects called dislocations. Many technical applications such as forging are based on this fundamental process, but the power of dislocations is also exploited in the crumple zones of cars, for instance, where dislocations protect lives by transforming energy into plastic deformation. FAU researchers have now found a way of manipulating individual dislocations directly on the atomic scale.
Using advanced in situ electron microscopy, the researchers in Prof. Erdmann Spiecker’s group have opened up new ways to explore the fundamentals of plasticity. They have published their findings in Science Advances.
Russia’s most famous weapons manufacturer has unveiled a 13ft tall walking killer robot operated by pilots who sit inside it.
Kalashnikov Concern presented the state-of-the-art bulletproof robot along with utility vehicles and new assault rifles at the Army 2018 fair at the Patriot Park just outside Moscow.
The gold robot, called Igorek, is still in development and its creators do not wish to reveal all of its features until they have finished.
One of the most significant AI milestones in history was quietly ushered into being this summer. We speak of the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), probably the most sought-after goal in the entire field of computer science. With the introduction of the Impala architecture, DeepMind, the company behind AlphaGo and AlphaZero, would seem to finally have AGI firmly in its sights.
Let’s define AGI, since it’s been used by different people to mean different things. AGI is a single intelligence or algorithm that can learn multiple tasks and exhibits positive transfer when doing so, sometimes called meta-learning. During meta-learning, the acquisition of one skill enables the learner to pick up another new skill faster because it applies some of its previous “know-how” to the new task. In other words, one learns how to learn — and can generalize that to acquiring new skills, the way humans do. This has been the holy grail of AI for a long time.
As it currently exists, AI shows little ability to transfer learning towards new tasks. Typically, it must be trained anew from scratch. For instance, the same neural network that makes recommendations to you for a Netflix show cannot use that learning to suddenly start making meaningful grocery recommendations. Even these single-instance “narrow” AIs can be impressive, such as IBM’s Watson or Google’s self-driving car tech. However, these aren’t nearly so much so an artificial general intelligence, which could conceivably unlock the kind of recursive self-improvement variously referred to as the “intelligence explosion” or “singularity.”
Alt-aviation wizard Burt Rutan set out to design a plane that could haul rockets to the edge of space. Then he persuaded Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to build a dual-fuselage beast with a wingspan longer than a football field.
