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Will your next camper van be an EV? Thor industries think so and their latest all-electric camper van could show us the very future of EV travel. Welcome to the Thor Vision Vehicle, an electric camper van ready to take your entire family on a camping adventure without the use of any fossil fuels. Does this EV concept have what it takes to beat out its gas-powered competition?

Much like the car and truck market, the camper van space is seeing a large shift towards electric power. Last week Winnebago unveiled their electric RV concept, and Airstream recently revealed their eStream electric trailer at the Tampa RV Show. Thor Industries is the parent company of Airstream further showing the brand’s commitment to the electric vehicle space. Based on what we know so far, the new Thor Vision Vehicle may be the best of the breed.

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Circa 2019

The race to engineer the next-generation banana is on. The Colombian government confirmed last month that a banana-killing fungus has invaded the Americas — the source of much of the world’s banana supply. The invasion has given new urgency to efforts to create fruit that can withstand the scourge.

Scientists are using a mix of approaches to save the banana. A team in Australia has inserted a gene from wild bananas into the top commercial variety — known as the Cavendish — and are currently testing these modified bananas in field trials. Researchers are also turning to the powerful, precise gene-editing tool CRISPR to boost the Cavendish’s resilience against the fungus, known as Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 (TR4).

Breeding TR4 resistance into the Cavendish using conventional methods isn’t possible because the variety is sterile and propagated by cloning. So the only way to save the Cavendish may be to tweak its genome, says Randy Ploetz, a plant pathologist at the University of Florida in Homestead. The variety accounts for 99% of global banana shipments.

Continue reading “CRISPR might be the banana’s only hope against a deadly fungus” | >

Circa 2016

90% of people who try to learn guitar quit in the first year. So when Brian Fan wanted to start strumming out lullabies for his baby daughter, he reinvented the instrument itself. Suddenly, a single finger on a button could replace four on different strings, and anyone could learn to play popular songs in a few minutes.

Meet the Magic Instruments Rhythm guitar. It might look like a toy video game controller from Guitar Hero, but it can play real music through its built-in speaker. And with the accompanying app, you’ll get instructions for how play tons of popular songs by big name artists from The Beatles to Bob Marley.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=E1AxVXt2Gv4&feature=share

Marcus Hutter is a senior research scientist at DeepMind and professor at Australian National University. Throughout his career of research, including with Jürgen Schmidhuber and Shane Legg, he has proposed a lot of interesting ideas in and around the field of artificial general intelligence, including the development of the AIXI model which is a mathematical approach to AGI that incorporates ideas of Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction, and reinforcement learning.

This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it & use code “LexPodcast”:
Cash App (App Store): https://apple.co/2sPrUHe.
Cash App (Google Play): https://bit.ly/2MlvP5w.

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website:

Lex Fridman Podcast


Apple Podcasts:
https://apple.co/2lwqZIr.
Spotify:
https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS:
https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist:

Clips playlist:

EPISODE LINKS:
Hutter Prize: http://prize.hutter1.net.
Marcus web: http://www.hutter1.net.
Books mentioned:
- Universal AI: https://amzn.to/2waIAuw.
- AI: A Modern Approach: https://amzn.to/3camxnY
- Reinforcement Learning: https://amzn.to/2PoANj9
- Theory of Knowledge: https://amzn.to/3a6Vp7x.

OUTLINE:

Continue reading “Marcus Hutter: Universal Artificial Intelligence, AIXI, and AGI” | >

It’s wild.

A global apocalypse could be closer than you think.

According to astronomers, in five billion years or so, the sun will run out of hydrogen in its core completely and expand, possibly engulfing the earth. Now that’s a bright future you don’t want. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently tweeted that the expansion of the Sun would result in the extinction of all life on the planet, making interplanetary living a necessity. Musk said this in response to a paper warning about mass extinction caused by human activity, arguing for the necessity of working on ways to move off-world. However, while we lack the technology to live on other worlds just yet, we may have a more immediate catastrophe at hand — climate change and global warming. a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed, Sohrab Rahvar, proposes using gravity assist by the asteroids to change the orbit of the Earth.

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DJI is rolling out a new firmware update that makes its latest smart controller, RC Pro, backward compatible with Air 2S drones.

So, it was only natural that RC Pro would receive interest from even those DJI users who weren’t planning to upgrade to the Mavic 3. However, there was no other drone that the controller was compatible with at launch.

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