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First look at Tesla’s new Enhanced Anti-Theft system

Tesla launched a new ‘Enhanced Anti-theft’ system as an aftermarket product last month and we now take a first look at one of the very first installations on a Model X.

There have been strings of Tesla thefts earlier this year that prompt the automaker to offer several new security features.

We reported on several Tesla vehicle thefts through relay attacks in Europe earlier this year.

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Nvidia AI Can Render Complete Urban Environments in Unreal Engine 4

Interest in artificial neural networks has skyrocketed over the years as companies like Google and Facebook have invested heavily in machines that can think like humans. Today, an AI can recognize objects in photos or help generate realistic computer speech, but Nvidia has successfully built a neural network that can create an entire virtual world with the help of a game engine. The researchers speculate this “hybrid” approach could one day make AI-generated games a reality.

The system build by Nvidia engineers uses many of the same parts as other AI experiments, but they’re arranged in a slightly different way. To goal of the project was to create a simple driving simulator, but without using any humans to design the environment.

Like all neural networks, the system needed training data. Luckily, work on self-driving cars has ensured there’s plenty of training footage of a vehicle driving around city streets. The team used a segmentation network to recognize different object categories like trees, cars, sky, buildings, and so on. The segmented data is what Nvidia fed into its model, which used a generative adversarial network to improve the accuracy of the final output. Essentially, one network created rendered scenes, and a second network would pass or fail them. Over time, the network is tuned to only create believable data.

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Henri Becquerel and the Serendipitous Discovery of Radioactivity

Antoine Henri Becquerel (born December 15, 1852 in Paris, France), known as Henri Becquerel, was a French physicist who discovered radioactivity, a process in which an atomic nucleus emits particles because it is unstable. He won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie, the latter of whom was Becquerel’s graduate student. The SI unit for radioactivity called the becquerel (or Bq), which measures the amount of ionizing radiation that is released when an atom experiences radioactive decay, is also named after Becquerel.

Becquerel was born December 15, 1852 in Paris, France, to Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel and Aurelie Quenard. At an early age, Becquerel attended the preparatory school Lycée Louis-le-Grand, located in Paris. In 1872, Becquerel began attending the École Polytechnique and in 1874 the École des Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Highways School), where he studied civil engineering.

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Supersonic air travel is finally coming back

Supersonic air travel is back. 15 years after the Concorde was grounded, everyone from aerospace companies to NASA to small startups is working to bring back ultrafast civilian aircraft. We take a look at the engineering challenges that make supersonic flight so difficult, and try to figure out what’s different about this new generation of planes.

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Tesla will live and die by the Gigafactory

Right now, in the desert just east of Reno, Nevada, Tesla is drilling into recently laid asphalt to install more electric vehicle chargers in the parking lot of the Gigafactory. The company has hired so many new workers in recent years that it needs more space to let them charge their Nissan Leafs, Chevy Bolts, Toyota Priuses, and, of course, Teslas. But before long, those chargers will be ripped right back out, along with the asphalt, and moved to a new spot to make room for more factory space.

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