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The US power grid needs all of support it can get. Sad that some would stand in the way of progress.

There is no love lost between the notorious Koch brothers and the nation’s railroad industry, and the relationship is about to get a lot unlovelier. A massive new, first-of-its-kind renewable energy transmission line is taking shape in the Midwest, which will cut into the Koch family’s fossil energy business. It has a good chance of succeeding where others have stalled, because it will bury the cables under existing rights-of-way using railroad rights-of-way and avoid stirring up the kind of opposition faced by conventional above-ground lines.

The Koch brothers and their family-owned company, Koch Industries, have earned a reputation for attempting to throttle the nation’s renewable energy sector. That makes sense, considering that the diversified, multinational firm owns thousands of miles of oil, gas, and chemical pipelines criss-crossing the US (and sometimes breaking down) in addition to other major operations that depend on rail and highway infrastructure.

Koch Industries owns fleets of rail cars, but one thing it doesn’t have is its own railroad right-of-way. That’s a bit ironic, considering that railroads provided the initial kickstart for the family business back in the 1920s, but that is where trouble has been brewing today.

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Generational shifts in the workforce are creating a loss of operational expertise. Veteran workers with years of institutional knowledge are retiring, replaced by younger employees fresh out of school, taught on technologies and concepts that don’t match the reality of many organizations’ workflows and systems. This dilemma is fueling the need for automated knowledge sharing and intelligence-rich applications that can close the skills gap.

Industrial organizations are accumulating massive volumes of data but deriving business value from only a small slice of it. Transient repositories like data lakes often become opaque and unstructured data swamps. Organizations are switching their focus from mass data accumulation to strategic industrial data management, homing in on data integration, mobility, and accessibility—with the goal of using AI-enabled technologies to unlock value hidden in these unoptimized and underutilized sets of industrial data. The rise of the digital executive (chief technology officer, chief data officer, and chief information officer) as a driver of industrial digital transformation has been a key influence on this trend.

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Livestreaming is a trillion-dollar industry in China, where social networking and entertainment meet marketing and e-commerce. China’s retail economy has become influencer-driven, with almost all online consumers buying products based on recommendations by their idols. That trend has enabled livestreaming and video platforms like Kuaishou and Douyin, which cultivated a roster of hugely popular influencers, to participate in the e-commerce market through partnerships with the online sales platforms.

Many people and businesses would not have survived the pandemic if it were not for the gig economy, says the co-founder of Asia Innovations Group, the start-up behind the live-streaming platform Uplive.

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Fusion energy has the potential to supply safe, clean, and nearly limitless power. Although fusion reactions can occur for light nuclei weighting less than iron, most elements will not fuse unless they are in the interior of a star. To create burning plasmas in experimental fusion power reactors such as tokamaks and stellarators, scientists seek a fuel that is relatively easy to produce, store, and bring to fusion. The current best bet for fusion reactors is deuterium-tritium fuel. This fuel reaches fusion conditions at lower temperatures compared to other elements and releases more energy than other fusion reactions.

Deuterium and tritium are isotopes of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Whereas all isotopes of hydrogen have one proton, deuterium also has one neutron and tritium has two neutrons, so their ion masses are heavier than protium, the isotope of hydrogen with no neutrons. When deuterium and tritium fuse, they create a helium nucleus, which has two protons and two neutrons. The reaction releases an energetic neutron. Fusion power plants would convert energy released from fusion reactions into electricity to power our homes, businesses, and other needs.

Fortunately, deuterium is common. About 1 out of every 5000 hydrogen atoms in seawater is in the form of deuterium. This means our oceans contain many tons of deuterium. When fusion power becomes a reality, just one gallon of seawater could produce as much energy as 300 gallons of gasoline.

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The U.S. Space Development Agency has five satellites riding on SpaceX’s Transporter-2 mission scheduled to launch June 25.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Development Agency has five satellites riding on SpaceX’s Transporter-2 rideshare mission scheduled to launch June 25.

“There’s nothing in the space business that gets your blood pumping like the idea of a launch, especially if you’ve got multiple satellites,” a senior Space Development Agency (SDA) official told reporters June 22. “We’re really excited about what’s going to happen.”

Transporter-2 is expected to carry as many as 88 small satellites from commercial and government customers to a sun synchronous polar orbit. SDA’s five payloads include two pairs of satellites to demonstrate laser communications links, and one to demonstrate how data can be processed and analyzed autonomously aboard a satellite.

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REDMOND, Wash.—()—Helion Energy (Helion), a clean electricity company committed to creating a new era of clean energy through fusion, today became the first private company to announce exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius in their 6th fusion generator prototype, Trenta. Reaching this temperature is a critical engineering milestone as it is considered the ideal fuel temperature at which a commercial power plant would need to operate. Helion will be presenting these operational results at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics. See abstract below.

“These achievements represent breakthroughs with major implications for how the world meets its expanding future electricity needs while dramatically reducing climate impact on a relevant timescale” Tweet this

Helion also announced their Trenta prototype recently completed a 16-month testing campaign, which pushed fusion fuel performance to unprecedented levels and performed lifetime and reliability testing on key components of the fusion system. Helion will be presenting these results at the 2021 IEEE Pulsed Power Conference & Symposium on Fusion Engineering. See abstract below.

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The Lunar Lantern, an intriguing concept for establishing a human presence on the Moon, is currently being featured at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition.

In October of 2024, NASA’s Artemis Program will return astronauts to the surface of the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era. In the years and decades that follow, multiple space agencies and commercial partners plan to build the infrastructure that will allow for a long-term human presence on the Moon. An important part of these efforts involves building habitats that can ensure the astronauts’ health, safety, and comfort in the extreme lunar environment.

This challenge has inspired architects and designers from all over the world to create innovative and novel ideas for lunar living. One of these is the Lunar Lantern, a base concept developed by ICON (an advanced construction company based in Austin, Texas) as part of a NASA-supported project to build a sustainable outpost on the Moon. This proposal is currently being showcased as part of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the La Biennale di Venezia museum in Venice, Italy.

The Lunar Lantern emerged from Project Olympus, a research and development program made possible thanks to a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract and funding from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). Consistent with ICON’s commitment to developing advanced construction technologies, the purpose of Olympus was to create a space-based construction system that will support NASA and other future exploration efforts on the Moon.

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WARREN, Mich. – Starting today, General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) is gathering hundreds of employees, dealers, investors, analysts, media and policymakers to share details of its strategy to grow the company’s electric vehicle (EV) sales quickly, efficiently and profitably.

“Our team accepted the challenge to transform product development at GM and position our company for an all-electric future,” said Mary Barra, GM chairman and CEO. “What we have done is build a multi-brand, multi-segment EV strategy with economies of scale that rival our full-size truck business with much less complexity and even more flexibility.”

The heart of GM’s strategy is a modular propulsion system and a highly flexible, third-generation global EV platform powered by proprietary Ultium batteries. They will allow the company to compete for nearly every customer in the market today, whether they are looking for affordable transportation, a luxury experience, work trucks or a high-performance machine.

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Tesla’s NEW Giga Press Is a BIG Game Changer Tesla and big things are inseparable. Be it ambition, idea, or more tangible items, Tesla would rather go big. Perhaps that is due to the many successes the company has racked up in the short time it has existed or just the personality of the CEO, Elon Musk. Whatever the case, Tesla tends to come along and fundamentally change how things are done, just like with its Giga Press. What is a Giga Press and how does it work? Why is it a game changer in the auto making business? Welcome to Tech Archives.

What is a Giga Press?

They are giant machines made by IDRA Group based out in Italy. The name was actually coined by IDRA, not Tesla. Their purpose is die casting large parts in a single piece. If you have a head for figures, Giga Presses produce a clamping forces of between 55000 kilonewtons and 61000 kilonewtons. Giga Presses are the biggest casting machines to ever exist. To get a sense of how massive these machines are, they weigh 410 to 430 tonnes. That is the equivalent of five Space Shuttles. They are the sizes of houses, at 20 meters by 7.5 meters by 6 meters and require dozens of flatbed trucks for transportation. And to get a sense of what a Giga Press does, think of a small plastic toy car. You would notice the chassis is made from a single piece. That is what a Tesla Giga Press tries to achieve. Instead of a chassis that uses up to 70 bolted and welded parts as it is done by all other car makers, the new Tesla chassis will be one solid piece of engineering feat. Tesla’s NEW Giga Press Is a BIGI Game Changer Buckle up because on this channel we will go through all things Tesla, ev, and Elon Musk. Stay tuned for the latest Tesla news and Tesla updates. Click here to subscribe: https://bit.ly/3fjwstS

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