Transportation – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Nov 28
2017

Airbus partners with Rolls-Royce and Siemens to build an electric airplane

Battery technology improvements are expected to soon enable electric flight and companies in the field are preparing their powertrain technology to support it. In a major move toward that goal, Airbus, Rolls-Royce and Siemens have announced a new partnership to gradually convert a plane to electric propulsion. The project they are collaborating on is the ‘E-Fan X’, a BAe 146 plane on which they are testing their electric motor technology. During ground tests, they already replaced one of the four gas turbines by a two-megawatt electric motor. Paul Eremenko, Airbus’s CTO, commented on the pr…

Nov 26
2017

Bali volcano shuts down flights, sends residents scurrying to safety

This one and one in iceland! wow!

Volcanic eruptions on the Indonesian resort island of Bali have prompted officials to cancel flights and move about 24,000 residents out of the way as a thick ash cloud from Mount Agung, thousands of meters high, drifts east and southeast along the archipelago.

Residents were evacuated from 224 points around the island while Lombok International Airport on Pulau Lombok, the island due east of Bali, has closed temporarily, said Ari Ahsan, spokesman for Ngurah Rai International Airport in Bali.

At Ngurah Rai, Bali’s main airport, flight cancellations stranded roughly 7,000 domestic and international passengers, according to the airport’s latest report.

Nov 23
2017

Philip Hammond pledges driverless cars by 2021 and warns people to retrain

Government of England pledges to roll out Level 5 Self Driving cars by 2021. And, they estimate 1 million people being left unemployed. Gives an idea of what will happen with automation of the Transportation Industry in the US.

UK chancellor says driverless vehicles will revolutionise people’s lives but says for some it will be ‘very challenging’.

Nov 21
2017

Walmart is ‘secretly’ testing self-driving floor scrubbers, signaling that more robots are coming

Planning to try and automate the entire store.

Walmart (WMT) has been quietly testing out autonomous floor scrubbers during the overnight shifts in five store locations near the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.

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A spokesperson for Walmart told FOX Business that the move, which was first reported by LinkedIn, is a “very small proof of concept pilot that we are running” and that the company still has a lot more to learn about how this technology “might work best in our different retail locations.”

Nov 20
2017

Tesla Roadster might fly — By Peter Valdes-Dapena | CNN Tech

“Musk seems to be talking about something different, a sports car that could “hop” over obstacles. The emphasis would, presumably, still be on performance and practicality with four wheels on the ground.”

Nov 18
2017

Why Waiting for Perfect Autonomous Vehicles May Cost Lives

Some people think autonomous vehicles must be nearly flawless before humans take their hands off the wheel. But RAND research shows that putting AVs on the road before they’re perfect improves the technology more quickly—and could save hundreds of thousands of lives over time.

Nov 18
2017

Waiting for Perfect Autonomous Vehicles May Cost Lives

Putting autonomous vehicles on the road when they perform just better than human drivers could save hundreds of thousands of lives over time. This article explains: r.rand.org/5y4v

Nov 17
2017

Tesla Unveils Its Electric ‘Semi’ Truck, And Adds A Roadster

Would love to see inside one of these trucks.

Elon Musk unveiled the Roadster’s return toward the end of an event that was supposed to be all about Tesla’s new Semi trucks.

Nov 17
2017

Could Terrorists Hack an Airplane? The Government Just Did

Hopefully not!

Hacking experts having been warning for years that it’s too easy to breach a cockpit’s defenses. Now an alarming government test proves their point.

Nov 16
2017

Traveling back in time could be possible, physicist says

As the common tropes of science fiction continue to break out into reality, from humanoid robots to self-driving cars, there’s one concept that has seemingly remained beyond our grasp: time travel.

But, jumping through time might not be impossible, after all, according to one astrophysicist.

By the rules of theoretical physics, certain conditions exist that would allow for the construction of elaborate wormholes, which could transport humans back to different eras.

While scientists have yet to discover the conditions needed to travel back in time, and construction a system large enough for humans certainly wouldn’t be easy, ‘there’s nothing forbidding it’ in the laws of theoretical physics, explains astrophysicist Ethan Siegel of Lewis & Clark College in the Forbes blog Starts With A Bang.

Backward time travel would rely on the elusive counterpart to the known positive energy / positive or zero mass particles found all throughout the universe – the negative mass/energy particles, which have long been theorized but never yet found.

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