Tariffs and IRA tax incentives are starting to reshape global supply chains—but vast challenges lie ahead, explains Shawn Qu, founder of Canadian Solar.
I believe that utopian societies need to help all people.
Hakeem Oluseyi was born as James Plummer Jr. The book opens the night his parents split up (a bright, proud and decidedly urban mother and handsome, capable and “country” father). For the next few years, Oluseyi’s mom moves him and his sister to different cities and different Black neighborhoods. As Oluseyi grows older, he simultaneously becomes aware of the inherent racism of the social world around him and his own inherent, interior focus on the natural world. The first section of the book details the challenges he faces in communities that are both rich in relationship and struggling with inequality. At the same time, he faces his own struggle as his mother deals with mental illness and his father takes him into the entirely new universe of rural life in Piney Woods Mississippi.
All through these changes, Oluseyi becomes progressively aware of his own questions about the universe and his strange (to everyone else) capacities as a questioner. As a shy kid trying to steer clear of bullies, he counts things relentlessly and, in his counting, begins to find order and pattern in the world. He begins a life of experimentation, much to his mother’s chagrin, pressing burning incense cones into the shower curtain to see how long they take to make a hole. And, on a glorious night out in the country, he catches a glimpse of the dark night sky awash in stars. By his teen years, the fire of inquiry was burning hard in the young man.
A Quantum Life then follows Oluseyi’s journey through high school and on to college, where a series of mentors recognize his talent and drive him forward, opening doors that eventually lead to graduate school at Stanford. While elements of this story that have been told before — a bright kid from an underprivileged background makes good in science through talent and grit — there are important aspects of Oluseyi story that demand their own recognition. Oluseyi is not an ultra-nerdy kid who stands apart from the community. Though born with the heart of a nerd, Oluseyi does not live apart from the streets or their greatest dangers. Along his journey Oluseyi picks up a drug habit that haunts him well into his graduate school years. In this way, Oluseyi’s story is not that of an otherworldly super-genius whose pure mentality allows him to rise above every challenge, but of a young man with a keen and intense talent in physics who must also deal with the very real world problems of addiction and a young family.
An AI chatbot for a Catholic group claimed to be a real priest and said baptism in Gatorade was OK. He was quickly defrocked.
We’re now adding a new location and entering into the next stage of the program’s evolution. Later this year, drone deliveries are coming to the West Valley of the Phoenix Metro Area in Arizona.
With this new location, we’ll be fully integrated into Amazon’s delivery network, meaning, for the first time, drones will deploy from facilities next to our Same-Day Delivery site in Tolleson. These smaller sites are hybrid—part fulfillment center, part delivery station. They allow us to fulfill, sort, and deliver products all from one site so we can get packages out to our customers even quicker. Our Same-Day Delivery sites are situated close to the large metro areas they serve, which means customers get their orders faster. And with connections to the larger Amazon fulfillment centers nearby, we are able to offer Same-Day Delivery on millions of items.
We’re currently working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and local officials in Tolleson to obtain all necessary permissions to conduct these deliveries in Tolleson. Once we’ve received all the necessary approvals, we’ll begin reaching out to customers in the West Valley so they can receive drone deliveries when the service goes live later this year.
As the old saying goes, two heads are better than one. The same is true when it comes to solar cells working in tandem. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have prepared a roadmap on how to move tandem solar cells—particularly those that mesh different photovoltaic technologies—closer to commercialization.
As the researchers pointed out in an article in the journal Joule, considerably more solar power must be added globally beyond the currently installed 1 terawatt of capacity. Because of the growing population and increased electrification of all energy sectors, experts are predicting the world will need 75 terawatts of photovoltaics (PV) by 2050.
The vast majority of solar modules in use today rely on a single junction, which is able to absorb only a fraction of the solar spectrum and thus are limited to how efficient they can be. Tandem solar cells, which consist of two or more junctions, hold the potential to reach much higher efficiencies. Because tandems are stacked on top of each other, the total area a module requires decreases—in turn, raising the efficiency and potentially lowering the total system cost.
Hugo de Garis: The Artilect War
Posted in military, singularity
Extract from the documentary “Singularity or Bust”.Pr. Hugo de Garis describes his view of a potential future warfare resulting from the conflict between pro…
In the 20th century, many options abounded as to our cosmic origins. Today, only the Big Bang survives, thanks to this critical evidence.
Physicists have proposed modifications to the infamous Schrödinger’s cat paradox that could help explain why quantum particles can exist in more than one state simultaneously, while large objects (like the universe) seemingly cannot.
The single-celled organism Naegleria fowleri ranks among the deadliest human parasites. Matthias Horn and Patrick Arthofer of the University of Vienna’s Center for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science, along with other researchers, have identified viruses that target this dangerous organism.
Named Naegleriavirus, these belong to the giant viruses, a group known for their unusually large particles and complex genomes. The team details their findings in the prestigious journal, Nature Communications.
Naegleri species are single-celled amoebae, found globally in water bodies. Notably, one species, Naegleria fowleri, thrives in warm waters above 30°C and causes primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), a rare but almost invariably fatal brain infection. A research team led by Patrick Arthofer and Matthias Horn from the University of Vienna’s Center for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science (CeMESS) has now isolated giant viruses that infect various Naegleria species.