Self-driving cars require an incredible amount of information to operate safely. Tesla and Elon Musk know this well.
Tesla Motors formally launched its long-awaited Autopilot feature on Wednesday, which is not quite a self-driving car, but rather a higher degree of autonomy. One of the new features of Autopilot: Tesla is creating high-precision digital maps of the Earth using GPS.
See also: I went hands-free in Tesla’s Model S on Autopilot, even though I wasn’t supposed to.
Tesla Motors Inc.’s newest software brings elements of autonomous driving to some of its Model S cars. With updated software, the vehicles can help drivers stay in their highway lane or change lanes for them.
The car can also parallel park for the driver or warn when an object such as another car is too close the side of the Model S, the company said in post on its website.
The maker of luxury electric vehicles has highlighted many high-tech features on its models, such as the industry’s largest touch screen and robust wireless access that allows for software upgrades, such as this update to version 7.0. But it has lagged some rival high-end automakers and even a few mainstream brands in its use of driver-assist technology such as lane-keep assist and adaptive cruise control. Tesla’s new system is the first to include automated lane changing.
Qualcomm is prepping a massive, 24-core server chip to take on Intel — and says this is just the prototype.
After years of searching, researchers say they’ve lastlyidentified a glueball — a particle made only of nuclear force. Hypothesized to exist as part of the standard model of particle physics, glueballs have stunned researchers since the 1970s as they can only be spotted indirectly by measuring their procedure of decay. Now, a group of particle scientists in Austria say they’ve found proof for the existence of glueballs by observing the decay of a particle identified as f0(1710). Protons and neutrons — the particles that everyday matter consist of — are made of tiny elementary particles called quarks, and quarks are seized together by even minor particles called gluons.
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“Next Wednesday, the design agency Positron will release a virtual reality “experience” in which viewers can get a first-person look from the cockpit at a race between the DeLorean and a Tesla Model S P90-D. The date is no coincidence: fans know October 21, 2015, is the day Marty McFly arrives in the future in Back to the Future II. This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the first film, released in 1985.”
The Biggest Opportunity of our Lifetime: Asteroid Mining could be a $100 Trillion Industry.
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A few years ago, researchers created the world’s lightest metal for Boeing, and now the airline has shown it off for the first time in this new video. Called microlattice, the material is 100 times lighter than styrofoam but is as rigid as metal, which means that it has some pretty exciting applications — not limited to being able to balance on top of a dandelion.
Microlattice was inspired by the structure of our bones, which are very rigid on the outside but mostly hollow on the inside, which means they can’t be easily crushed, but are lightweight enough for us to carry around all day. The new Boeing metal mimics this, and despite its rigid exterior, it has a 3D open-cellular polymer structure, which means its structure is 99.99 percent air.
The lattice in the metal is made up of interconnected hollow metal tubes — constructed from nickel, in the case of the prototype. Each of these tubes has a wall thickness of just 100 nanometres, which is 1,000 times thinner than human hair.
Researchers claim to have cracked the problem of creating giant displays that can show images in 3D without the need for glasses.
Austrian researchers have developed a laser system that sends different images to each eye — and say it could lead to New York’s Times Square having its first 3D ads.
It would mean the 3D billboards seen in Back to the Future II, set in 2015, could finally become a reality.
