It’s Elon Musk’s idea, but Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is trying to make this “pipe dream” a reality.
Category: transportation – Page 639
The UK’s first self-driving ‘pod’ vehicle hits the streets
The self-driving vehicle revolution has gotten underway in the UK, with the first of a number of automated ‘pod’ trial vehicles unveiled to the public in Milton Keynes this week.
The LUTZ (Low-carbon Urban Transport Zone) Pathfinder is a diminutive electric-powered two-seater that’s about half the length of an ordinary car. If you feel the need for speed, however, you may want to look elsewhere for now. The Pathfinder is designed for use in pedestrianised areas, with a top speed of just 24 km/hr.
One of the vehicle’s main purposes is to help people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to a car to get around in urban environments, such as the young or elderly, disabled people, or simply those who don’t own a vehicle.
Mercedes-Benz announces plans to develop luxury driverless cars
CEO of parent company, Damiler, says Mercedes premium driverless cars are a ‘concrete development goal’.
MIT creates diode for light, makes photonic silicon chips possible
Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are a cornerstone of consumer tech. They make thin-and-light TVs and smartphones possible, provide efficient household, handheld, and automobile illumination, and, of course, without LEDs your router would not have blinkenlights. Thanks to some engineers from MIT, though, a new diode looks set to steal the humble LED’s thunder. Dubbed a diode for light, and crafted using standard silicon chip fabrication techniques, this is a key discovery that will pave the path to photonic (as opposed to electronic) pathways on computer chips and circuit boards.
In electronics, a diode is a gate that only allows electrons to pass in one direction (and with an LED, it also emits light at the same time). In this case, the diode for light — which is made from a thin layer of garnet — is transparent in one direction, but opaque in the other. Garnet is usually hard to deposit on a silicon wafer, but the MIT researchers found a way to do it — and that’s really the meat of this discovery.
Basically, it’s now possible, with regular chip-fab tools, to create an integrated silicon circuit with optical, rather than electronic, interconnects — both internally, and between other chips. Photons, moving through the kind of transparent metamaterials that would be required to make such a circuit, move a lot faster than electrons. Furthermore, optical channels, through wavelength-division multiplexing, can carry a lot more data than electric signals. At the moment, hundreds of copper wires connect the CPU, northbridge, and memory — with on-chip photonic controllers, a motherboard might only have 10 or 20 channels.
Mercedes-Benz: Concept IAA (Intelligent Aerodynamic Automobile).
Click on photo to start video.
Take a look at the Mercedes-Benz: Concept IAA (Intelligent Aerodynamic Automobile) for a peep into our plans for the future of automotive.
How 5G will Power the Future Internet of Things
At Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco August 18th – 20th, two Intel executives discuss how 5G network capabilities will transform the way we live.
Imagine taking a trip to a cabin in the woods to get some work done and have a mini-vacation. Today, given our need for wireless connection, that’s a sketchy proposition.
You’ve got GPS in your rental car, plus your laptop, your smartphone, maybe a tablet or a smartwatch. But what if there’s no cable? What if there’s no Wi-Fi connection? What if the cellular connection is weak?
New York is getting wired with traffic signals that can talk to cars
Behind self-driving, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication is one of the biggest sea changes in transportation technology on the horizon — it could have an enormous impact on driving safety, if it’s implemented quickly and correctly. The concept is pretty simple: cars, signs, and traffic signals all communicate to one another over Wi-Fi-like airwaves, so that drivers (and automatic safety systems built into cars) have more information about the traffic and environment around them. (I got a compelling demo of V2V tech put on by Ford at CES a couple years ago, and I can say that the promise is pretty huge.)
There’s no federal rule in place for requiring V2V yet, but the US Department of Transportation is hoping to get those rules in place by the end of this year — and in the meantime, it’s rolling out huge new pilot programs to put the technology to the test. In the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, traffic signals will be equipped with V2I hardware, while up to 10,000 city-owned vehicles will be outfitted with V2V. (It’s unclear whether drivers of these vehicles will have access to the data through instrumentation, or whether it’s just being collected as part of the DOT’s ongoing V2V research.)
Future Transhumanist Tech May Soon Change The Definition Of Disability
My first article for TechCrunch. The story is on disability & transhumanism:
Radical technologies around the world may soon overhaul the field of disability and immobility, which affects in some way more than a billion people around the world.
MIT bionics designer Hugh Herr, who lost both his legs in a mountain climbing accident, recently said in a TED Talk on disability, “A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitation, but can transcend disability through technological innovation.”
His words are coming true. Around the world, the deaf hear via cochlear implants, paraplegics walk with exoskeletons and the once limbless have functioning limbs. For example, some amputees have mind-controlled robotic arms that can grab a glass of water with amazing precision. In 15 or 20 years, that bionic arm could very well be better than the natural arm, and people may even electively remove their biological arms in favor of robotic ones. After all, who doesn’t want to be able to do a hundred pull ups in a row or lift the front end of a car up to quickly change a flat tire?