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Luminar, a laser lidar startup led by one of the youngest U.S. billionaires, has a new partnership with Mercedes-Benz that includes supplying sensors for its luxury vehicles and gathering on-road data from them to improve automated driving. The German carmaker also bought a small stake in the tech company.

Luminar’s Iris lidar will be integrated into future Mercedes planned for its next-generation platform to improve safety and help them operate autonomously during highway driving, the companies said. Details including specific models that will use the sensor and when they’ll be available for sale to customers aren’t being disclosed. Mercedes also acquired 1.5 million Luminar shares as part of the partnership, founder and CEO Austin Russell, 26, tells Forbes.

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Records of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in ancient history: what they tell us and what not.

An analysis of UAP in classical antiquity.

Scotland awarded rights for a massive offshore wind development more than twice the size of the U.K.’s current capacity, in a move that surprised the market for its scale and was welcomed by environmentalists.

The list of winning projects in the tender adds up to nearly 25 gigawatts, far bigger than the 10 gigawatts that Scottish authorities had anticipated ultimately being built.

UNSW Sydney-led research paves the way for large silicon-based quantum processors for real-world manufacturing and application.

Australian researchers have proven that near error-free quantum computing is possible, paving the way to build silicon-based quantum devices compatible with current semiconductor manufacturing technology.

“Today’s publication in Nature shows our operations were 99 percent error-free,” says Professor Andrea Morello of UNSW, who led the work.

While the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is well known for smashing protons together, it is actually the quarks and gluons inside the protons – collectively known as partons – that are really interacting. Thus, in order to predict the rate of a process occurring in the LHC – such as the production of a Higgs boson or a yet-unknown particle – physicists have to understand how partons behave within the proton. This behavior is described in Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs), which describe what fraction of a proton’s momentum is taken by its constituent quarks and gluons.

Knowledge of these PDFs has traditionally come from lepton–proton colliders, such as HERA at DESY. These machines use point-like particles, such as electrons, to directly probe the partons within the proton. Their research revealed that, in addition to the well-known up and down valence quarks that are inside a proton, there is also a sea of quark–antiquark pairs in the proton. This sea is theoretically made of all types of quarks, bound together by gluons. Now, studies of the LHC’s proton–proton collisions are providing a detailed look into PDFs, in particular the proton’s gluon and quark-type composition.

A cure for range anxiety?

General Motors Ultium batteries.

“When you need to put much more energy into the storage form, you get to a point where it’s no longer economical with the batteries, and that’s where the hydrogen comes in,” Freese explained to Green Car Reports. “So there will be a need for both.”

“Grid buffering is more than just the 24-hour cycle…it’s even more than what we talk about with wind, which might flow for a week and then not flow for two weeks,” he argued, noting that if the sources on the grid follow a seasonal nature and loads change quite a bit, it makes sense.

Official launch marks a milestone in the development of quantum computing in Europe.

A quantum annealer with more than 5,000 qubits has been put into operation at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and D-Wave Systems, a leading provider of quantum computing systems, today launched the company’s first cloud-based quantum service outside North America. The new system is located at Jülich and will work closely with the supercomputers at JSC in the future. The annealing quantum computer is part of the Jülich UNified Infrastructure for Quantum computing (JUNIQ), which was established in autumn 2019 to provide researchers in Germany and Europe with access to various quantum systems.

A string of Chinese video platforms are accelerating moves toward producing high-quality, 8K ultrahigh definition content by integrating 5G, artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies.

It’s an important step toward moving 8K video into people’s living rooms, experts said.

Chinese UHD video production and distribution platform Sikai Garden Network Technology Co Ltd, also known as 4K Garden, plans to send UHD content to different terminal devices, including televisions, outdoor 8K light-emitting diode screens and VR headsets, and to explore diversified and innovative applications for the UHD industry, said Wu Yi, chairman of 4K Garden.