Lifeboat Foundation

Yet, it is a small percentage of its workforce.

Amazon.com Inc., one of the largest technology companies in the world with presence in ecommerce, advertising, video streaming and cloud computing, has announced that it will be laying off 18,000 workers as the company copes with the economic downturn in the future, The Wall Street Journal.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images.

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Fast charging stations have made the impossibility of driving from California to Florida in an EV possible.

In the past few years, the use of electric vehicles has grown significantly. Tesla is among the most popular EVs in the U.S., and its empire is growing daily. Many people may think traveling across the country in an EV is near impossible. But fast charging stations have recently made the impossible possible.

There are many types of fast chargers these days. Companies like Electrify America, Tesla, and EVgo have made fast chargers that can deliver +50 kWh.

Continue reading “Tesla Superchargers: EV charging stations innovating the world” »

The self-driving vehicle features a bubble-like dome that resembles the space car from The Jetsons.

The Asahi Kasei AKXY2 concept car is designed to envision a future of sustainable and community-focused transportation.

Continue reading “A new futuristic concept car is designed to foster personal connection” »

This past year, global attention has been focused on geo-strategic issues, such as the devastating war in Ukraine, which has dislocated many and caused immense suffering. Attention has also been focused on the recovery from the COVID pandemic, which was the overriding concern over the past three years. And finally, the economic destruction wrought by rapidly ramped interest rates which have targeted all sectors of the economy, particularly technology. But despite all this negativity, the business of building the future continues. There has been progress across major axes of computing, from visualization to AI and new types of processors (quantum).

With immense progress in technology, what might we look forward to in 2023?

Nearly a year after Sony and Honda shared plans to jointly make and sell electric vehicles, the two companies revealed a prototype under the brand name Afeela.

The four-door sedan was driven onstage at CES Wednesday as Kenichiro Yoshida, the CEO of Sony, talked through the company’s mobility philosophy, which prioritizes building vehicles that have autonomous capabilities and are transformed into “moving entertainment space[s].”

The first preorders of the Afeelas are scheduled in the first half of 2025, with sales to begin the same year, said Yoshida. Initial shipments will be delivered to customers in North America in the spring of 2026.

Google today is announcing a HD version of its vehicle mapping solution. Unlike Google Maps, Google’s HD map is not a consuming-facing application, but an additional layer of data that’s served to the vehicle’s L2+ or L3 assisted driving systems through Google Automotive Services.

The additional information sits on top of Google Maps’ data and delivers details such as precise lane makers and localization of objects (road signs) to help assisted driving vehicles orient themselves on the road. The driver will not be able to see or access the HD map or data directly. It’s not clear at this time if the driver will even know if the vehicle is using the HD mapping, though, presumably the vehicle’s assisted driving skills will be improved when it’s in use.

According to a Google spokesperson, the HD mapping is initially focused on high-traffic roads like freeways, but the spokesperson stopped short of saying exactly which cities or freeways. They said Google is working with automakers to determine where the HD map is most helpful.

Though it is a cornerstone of virtually every process that occurs in living organisms, the proper folding and transport of biological proteins is a notoriously difficult and time-consuming process to experimentally study.

In a new paper published in eLife, researchers in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Computer Science have shown that AF2Complex may be able to lend a hand.

Building on the models of DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2, a machine learning tool able to predict the detailed three-dimensional structures of individual proteins, AF2Complex—short for AlphaFold 2 Complex—is a deep learning tool designed to predict the physical interactions of multiple proteins. With these predictions, AF2Complex is able to calculate which proteins are likely to interact with each other to form functional complexes in unprecedented detail.

Artificial Intelligence is the buzzword of the year with many big giants in almost every industry trying to explore this cutting-edge technology. Right from self-checkout cash registers to AI-based applications to analyse large data in real-time to advanced security check-ins at the airport, AI is just about everywhere.

Currently, the logistics industry is bloated with a number of challenges related to cost, efficiency, security, bureaucracy, and reliability. So, according to the experts, new age technologies like AI, machine learning, the blockchain, and big data are the only fix for the logistics sector which can improve the supply chain ecosystem right from purchase to internal exchanges like storage, auditing, and delivery.

AI is an underlying technology which can enhance the supplier selection, boost supplier relationship management, and more. When combined with big data analytics AI also helps in analysing the supplier related data such as on-time delivery performance, credit scoring, audits, evaluations etc. This helps in making valuable decisions based on actionable real-time insights.

This week our guest is business and technology reporter, Peter Ward. Earlier this year, Peter released his book The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever, where he investigates the many movements and organizations that are seeking to extend human life, from the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida, to some of the biggest tech giants in Silicon Valley.

In this episode, we explore Peter’s findings, which takes us on a tour from cryonics to mind uploading, from supplements to gene editing, and much more. Along the way, we discuss the details of how one might actually achieve immortality, the details of senescent cells and telomeres, whether it’s better to live healthy than to live long, the scams and failures that seem to dominate the space, as well as the efforts that seem most promising.

Continue reading “The Failures and Opportunities of Immortality | Peter Ward, Feedback Loop, ep 75” »