Covid vaccines alerted to the world to RNA’s potential. Now the technology is being used as an alternative to pesticides.
Our addiction to chemical pesticides comes with a bunch of downsides. New sprays made from RNA might offer a smarter, cleaner way to wage war on pests.
As promised, Walmart has started doing fully driverless box truck deliveries in partnership with startup Gatik between its own locations on a fixed 7-mile loop, the companies announced. Despite those limitations, the route in Bentonville, Arkansas involves “intersections, traffic lights and merging on dense urban roads,” the companies said. It’s another shot of good news for the progress of self-driving vehicles after GM’s cruise launched its self-driving taxis into testing last week.
The Gatik trucks are bringing grocery orders from a Walmart fulfilment center (dark store) to a nearby Walmart Neighborhood Market grocery store in Bentonville, the host city of the company’s headquarters. The route covers the “middle mile” transportation of goods between warehouses and stores. The program effectively got launched following the December 2020 approval by the Arkansas State Highway Commission, and has been driverless since this summer.
Gatik, a Silicon Valley-based developer of robotic technology to handle “middle-mile” deliveries from distribution centers to stores, has begun hauling goods for Walmart in autonomous trucks without a human backup at the wheel for the first time.
Gatik, which has been making delivery runs for Walmart since 2019 in the retail giant’s Bentonville, Arkansas, hometown, is operating two fully autonomous trucks that are hauling goods on a fixed, 7.1-mile route between an e-commerce distribution facility there to a Walmart Neighborhood Market store. This new phase started in August and is the first time any autonomous trucking company has operated commercial delivery routes without a human backup, the companies said.
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The proposed telescope would be powerful enough to detect distant planets 10 billion times fainter than their hosting star.
Astronomers have proposed a telescope that would far exceed the capabilities of Hubble.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine just released its Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics, also known as Astro 2020. The report outlines plans for the next decade of investment in astronomical equipment and projects in the U.S.
Continue reading “Astronomers Want to Build an $11BN Telescope That Would Outclass Hubble” »
Cutting the price of CO2 removal to under $100 per ton.
Reducing global carbon emissions can go a long way in reducing the impact of climate change, though it may not be enough.
In a bid to turn the tide around amid dire scientific predictions, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced ambitious new plans to accelerate the development of carbon capture technologies, a report from The Verge explains.
1. In a paper published on October 28 2021, in the peer-reviewed Journal of Heredity, scientists from the San Diego Zoo revealed that at least two California condors born over the last 40 years or so are biologically fatherless. A genetic database maintained since the 1980s showed no trace whatsoever of paternal genes in their DNA.
2. No one knows whether reproducing asexually is a new talent for California condors. Maybe the species has always been capable of it. California condors almost went extinct in the 1980s, and they are still endangered. Because of this, the number of animals in the genetic database is too small for anyone to address the question reasonably.
Consider the room you are sitting in: From the injection-molded plastic of a computer mouse to the synthetic carpet fibers on the floor, you are surrounded by petroleum-derived products in your daily life. But what if there is a better way to produce the products we depend on with cleaner and greener materials? Biomanufacturing offers a way to use materials from nature to create the items we use every day.
Checkerspot, a materials innovation company, is rethinking products from a molecular level. It is optimizing microbes to biomanufacture unique structural oils found in nature. The company has taken the technology it has built and turned it into a platform to bring us closer to a post-petroleum future.
A milestone achievement for the army.
After multiple attempts, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — commonly known as DARPA — has confirmed that it has successfully completed a mid-air recovery of the X-61 drone, Gremlins. While details of the test were not revealed, DARPA said that the mission was accomplished last month at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
Continue reading “DARPA Successfully Recovered a Gremlins Drone Mid-Air For the First Time” »
The Parker Solar Probe is an engineering marvel, designed by NASA to “touch the sun” and reveal some of the star’s most closely guarded secrets. The scorch-proof craft, launched by NASA in August 2,018 has been slowly sidling up to our solar system’s blazing inferno for the past three years, studying its magnetic fields and particle physics along the way. It’s been a successful journey, and the probe has been racking up speed records. In 2,020 it became the fastest human-made object ever built.
But Parker is learning a lesson about the consequences of its great speed: constant bombardment by space dust.
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Fusion power plants use magnetic fields to hold a ball of current-carrying gas (called a plasma.
Plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter, along with solid, liquid, and gas. It is an ionized gas consisting of positive ions and free electrons. It was first described by chemist Irving Langmuir in the 1920s.
