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AI chips, which are semiconductors designed to accelerate machine learning, have many applications. One of the promising use cases, according to Albert Liu, is using AI chips in autonomous driving vehicles.

That’s why Liu’s AI chipmaking startup Kneron has been quietly racking up investments to march into smart transportation. It recently closed a new round of $25 million funding led by Lite-On Technology, a Taiwanese optoelectronic pioneer, which was a strategic investor in the round. Other investors included Alltek, PalPilot, Sand Hill Angels and Gaingels.

The new proceeds lifted Kneron’s total funding to over $125 million since its inception in 2015. The San Diego-and Taipei-based company has assembled a list of renowned investors, including Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-Shing’s Horizon Ventures, Alibaba, Qualcomm, Sequoia and Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer and Apple’s supplier.

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The James Dyson Award recently recognized a team of Malaysian designers for their sustainable desalination pod concept called WaterPod that works on solar distillation to convert seawater into drinkable water. Developed by Bennie Beh Hue May, Yap Chun Yoon, and Loo Xin Yang, the WaterPod is designed to be floated at sea, and therefore accessible to sea nomads.

WaterPod is a low-cost yet environmentally-friendly desalination method to generate drinkable water.

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As workers move around, forecasters predict additional jobs will continue to open up in the new year, giving job-switchers even more opportunities to choose from, says Julia Pollak, chief economist with the job-search site ZipRecruiter.

“We’ve seen substantial job growth in recent months, all taking place without the labor force participation rate changing,” Pollak tells CNBC Make It. She says it’s “an exciting moment for job seekers who are benefiting from employers offering hiring incentives and reducing their requirements” to fill a sharply rising number of vacancies.

Here are three reasons why Pollak believes workers will continue to have their pick of jobs in 2022, and what it will take for more Americans to rejoin the labor force.

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More precise, faster, cheaper: Researchers all over the world have been working for years on producing electrical circuits using additive processes such as robotic 3D-printing (so-called robocasting) with great success, but this is now becoming a problem. The metal particles that make such 3D substrates electrically conductive are exacerbating the problem of electronic waste, especially since the waste generated is likely to increase in the future in view of new types of disposable sensors, some of which are only used for a few days.

This constitutes unnecessary waste, according to Gustav Nyström, head of Empa’s Cellulose & Wood Materials lab: “There is an urgent need for materials that balance electronic performance, cost and sustainability.” To develop an environmentally friendly ink, Nyström’s team therefore set ambitious goals: metal-free, non-toxic, biodegradable. And with in mind: easily formable and stable to moisture and moderate heat.

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The empirical fact of short winter days and long winter nights has been known essentially forever, and has driven enormous amounts of human activity including the construction of monuments like the passage tomb at Newgrange that I keep banging on about in previous posts about timekeeping. The correct explanation of the phenomenon has only been understood for around 400 years, dating back to Johannes Kepler’s description of the orbits of the planets.

The change in the relative length of days and nights is due to a combination of the motion of the Earth about the Sun, and the rotation of the Earth on its axis. Specifically, it happens because the Earth’s axis is tilted by about 23 degrees relative to the axis of its orbit. And because angular momentum is conserved, that axis stays pointing in the same direction through the whole orbit, in the same way that a gyroscope on a gimbal mount will remain pointed in the same direction in space as it’s moved around.

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