Lifeboat Foundation

Tesla scraps plans for its bargain version of the Model Y.

Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s mid-size electric SUV, the Model Y, Thursday night in Hawthorne, Calif.

The most-affordable Model Y will have a base price of $39,000 and a 230-mile battery range, but customers will have to wait until at least 2021 to own one of the five-seater SUVs. Tesla will first sell more expensive versions of the Model Y — with prices starting from $47,000 to $60,000, and offering more battery range. Those will ship starting in 2020, according to the company. There are additional charges for Tesla’s autopilot software, a third row of seats and colors other than black. A panoramic glass roof comes standard.

Continue reading “Tesla Model Y: Elon Musk’s second electric SUV is here” »

The news: IBM has built a new chemistry lab called RoboRXN in the cloud. It combines AI models, a cloud computing platform, and robots to help scientists design and synthesize new molecules while working from home.

How it works: The online lab platform allows scientists to log on through a web browser. On a blank canvas, they draw the skeletal structure of the molecular compounds they want to make, and the platform uses machine learning to predict the ingredients required and the order in which they should be mixed. It then sends the instructions to a robot in a remote lab to execute. Once the experiment is done, the platform sends a report to the scientists with the results.

Why it matters: New drugs and materials traditionally require an average of 10 years and $10 million to discover and bring to market. Much of that time is taken up by the laborious repetition of experiments to synthesize new compounds and learn from trial and error. IBM hopes that a platform like RoboRXN could dramatically speed up that process by predicting the recipes for compounds and automating experiments. In theory, it would lower the costs of drug development and allow scientists to react faster to health crises like the current pandemic, in which social distancing requirements have caused slowdowns in lab work.

45 seconds with Elon Musk during his BCI demonstration. The excerpt counts with subtitles in Spanish.

Excerpt from the demonstration by Elon Musk of the Brain Computer Interface (BCI) in development progress by Neuralink. The event took place on August 28, 2020.

Continue reading “Elon Musk during his BCI demo: ‘The future is gonna be weird’ (S/T en Español)” »

A new image shows what Venus would look like if it had water on its surface, similar to the Earth.

Otto Aviation’s Celera 500L could carry six business passengers at 450 mph at around 20 miles per gallon thanks to a new high-efficiency piston engine.

A new space-aged propeller plane could overtake business jets at a fraction of the running costs.

Continue reading “New Luxury Prop Plane Boasts Speed of a Jet, Fuel Efficiency of a Car And Fraction of Costs” »

SkyDrive claims the vehicle has been engineered to be easily embraced by people. “SkyDrive’s flying car has been designed to be a coupe embodying dreams and exuding charisma, such that it will be welcomed into people’s lives and used naturally,” reads the firm’s press release.

“The company hopes that its aircraft will become people’s partner in the sky rather than merely a commodity and it will continue working to design a safe sky for the future.”

SkyDrive also revealed that it will continue field testing the flying car under different conditions to hone its technology and hopefully acquire compliance with the safety provisions of the Civil Aeronautics Act.

This groundbreaking technique might be used to replace human organs with lab-grown versions 😮.

Using nothing but light and bioink, scientists were able to directly print a human ear-like structure under the skin of mice. The team used a healthy ear as a template and 3D printed a mirror image of that ear—tissue layer by tissue layer—directly onto the back of a mouse.

All without a single surgical cut.

If you’re thinking that’s super creepy, yeah…I’m with you. As a proof-of-concept, however, the team shows that it’s possible to build or rebuild tissue layers, even those as intricate as an ear, without requiring surgical implant. This means that it could one day be possible to fix an ear or other surface tissue defects—either genetic or from injuries—directly at the injury site by basically waving a sophisticated light wand.