After Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashed, all eyes are on Chandrayaan-3 as India attempts to become the first nation to land on the moon’s south pole.
Meyers Manx, the original maker of the Volkswagen Beetle-based, fiberglass-bodied beach buggy from the 1960s, just published the starting price for its all-new, all-electric Manx 2.0 electric buggy, and it’s not exactly cheap.
Revealed last year at The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering, the company’s first all-new vehicle in nearly 20 years starts at $74,000 for the base variant with the 20-kilowatt-hour battery pack and yet-to-be-released performance figures. That’s almost as expensive as the recently introduced Tesla Model S Standard Range, which starts at $78,490 and offers a 320-mile range.
The base MSRP came with no extra information and was casually thrown in a sentence at the end of the press release for the company’s new Resorter Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV), which debuted last week at The Quail, so we still don’t know how much the top-of-the-line model will set prospective customers back.
Through a series of innovative experiments, he and his team found that a sheet of glass crystal just a few atoms thick could trap and carry light. Not only that, but it was surprisingly efficient and could travel relatively long distances—up to a centimeter, which is very far in the world of light-based computing.
The research, published Aug. 10 in Science, demonstrates what are essentially 2D photonic circuits, and could open paths to new technology.
2D optical waveguides could point way to new technology.
You might be wary – or weary – of headlines that begin with “scientists are trying to build,” because most of them really don’t seem to watch enough science fiction movies.
Additionally, iProov reveals a 295 percent yearly increase in biometric attacks that use novel face swaps. Using this technique, attackers generate synthetic images with AI, either replacing the face of the victim with a video of him to bypass liveness checks or with the face of the attacker itself.
But beyond deep fakes and other more rudimentary presentation attacks where identities are spoofed using masks or other presentation techniques, another type of attack is gaining ground: digital injection.
The FBI is warning the public that cyber criminals are embedding malicious code in mobile beta-testing applications (apps) to defraud potential victims. Beta-testing apps are online services for testing of mobile apps prior to official release. The beta apps typically are not subject to mobile operating systems’ review processes.
The malicious apps enable theft of personally identifiable information (PII), financial account access, or device takeover. The apps may appear legitimate by using names, images, or descriptions similar to popular apps. Cyber criminals often use phishing or romance scams to establish communications with the victim, then direct the victim to download a mobile beta-testing app housed within a mobile beta-testing app environment, promising incentives such as large financial payouts.
India is preparing for its second attempted moon landing, a historic moment for the world’s most populous country.
Chandrayaan-3, which means “mooncraft” in Sanskrit, is scheduled to put down its Vikram lander shortly after 6pm (1230 GMT) near the little-explored lunar south pole in what would be a world first for any space programme.
The robotic Luna-25 spacecraft appeared to have “ceased its existence” after a failed orbital adjustment, the space agency Roscosmos said.
The prospect of a quantum internet, connecting quantum computers and capable of highly secure data transmission, is enticing, but making it poses a formidable challenge. Transporting quantum information requires working with individual photons rather than the light sources used in conventional fiber optic networks.
To produce and manipulate individual photons, scientists are turning to quantum light emitters, also known as color centers. These atomic-scale defects in semiconductor materials can emit single photons of fixed wavelength or color and allow photons to interact with electron spin properties in controlled ways.
A team of researchers has recently demonstrated a more effective technique for creating quantum emitters using pulsed ion beams, deepening our understanding of how quantum emitters are formed. The work was led by Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers Thomas Schenkel, Liang Tan, and Boubacar Kanté who is also an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
In a recent advance, researchers have created a novel battery charger that can support present and future generations of battery packs for EVs across a vast range of voltages: anything between 120 and 900 volts. The new tech is described in a study published in the September edition of theIEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.
These next-generation batteries will bring shorter charging times while also weighing less, which means that EVs can be ready to drive sooner and travel farther on a full charge. “However, charging these high-voltage batteries with existing chargers degrades the efficiency, due to operating at twice the rated voltage,” says Deepak Ronanki, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, in Chennai, India, and an IEEE senior member who was involved in the study.
Ronanki and doctoral research scholar Harish Karneddi created a universal charger capable of supporting voltages between 120 and 900 V—something they say had not yet otherwise been achieved.
Ronanki and Karneddi’s battery charger is actually a two-stage charger, with a front-end boost-buck power factor correction (PFC) circuit followed by a reconfigurable DC-DC converter. As the term “boost-buck” suggests, the battery charger can boost the voltage when the battery voltage is greater than the input voltage and, conversely, buck the voltage when the battery voltage is less than the input voltage.