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Public transportation just got way cooler. Premium Swedish electric boat maker Candela has just unveiled the new Candela P-12, an electric hydrofoil water taxi.

Designed to replace traditional diesel-powered ferries, the Candela P-12 uses an electric powertrain combined with a carbon fiber hull and hydrofoils to create a super-efficient drive system.

The 8.5 meter (28 foot) water taxi can fit up to 12 passengers in its panoramic-view cabin.

For drone racing enthusiasts. 😃


If you follow autonomous drone racing, you likely remember the crashes as much as the wins. In drone racing, teams compete to see which vehicle is better trained to fly fastest through an obstacle course. But the faster drones fly, the more unstable they become, and at high speeds their aerodynamics can be too complicated to predict. Crashes, therefore, are a common and often spectacular occurrence.

But if they can be pushed to be faster and more nimble, drones could be put to use in time-critical operations beyond the race course, for instance to search for survivors in a natural disaster.

About 2,000 light-years away from Earth, there is a star catapulting toward the edge of the Milky Way. This particular star, known as LP 40–365, is one of a unique breed of fast-moving stars—remnant pieces of massive white dwarf stars—that have survived in chunks after a gigantic stellar explosion.

“This star is moving so fast that it’s almost certainly leaving the galaxy…[it’s] moving almost two million miles an hour,” says JJ Hermes, Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of astronomy. But why is this flying object speeding out of the Milky Way? Because it’s a piece of shrapnel from a past explosion—a cosmic event known as a supernova—that’s still being propelled forward.

This axion insulating state was realized, Bansil says, by combining certain metals and observing their magnetoelectric response. In this case, researchers used a solid state chip composed of manganese bismuth telluride, which were adhered together in two-dimensional layers, to measure the resulting electric and magnetic properties.

Researchers note that such a finding has implications for a range of technologies, including sensors, switches, computers, and memory storage devices, among many others. The “storage, transportation, and manipulation of magnetic data could become much faster, more robust, and energy-efficient” if scientists can integrate these new topological materials into future devices, the researchers write.

“It’s like discovering a new element,” Bansil says. “And we know there’s going to be all sorts of interesting applications for this.”

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia — To see Russia’s ambitions for its own version of Silicon Valley, head about 5,600 miles east of Moscow, snake through Vladivostok’s hills and then cross a bridge from the mainland to Russky Island. It’s here — a beachhead on the Pacific Rim — that the Kremlin hopes to create a hub for robotics and artificial intelligence innovation with the goal of boosting Russia’s ability to compete with the United States and Asia.


On Russia’s Pacific shores, the Kremlin is trying to build a beachhead among the Asian tech powers.