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Introduction

The Fulfillment Platform is a foundational Uber domain that enables the rapid scaling of new verticals. The platform handles billions of database transactions each day, ranging from user actions (e.g., a driver starting a trip) and system actions (e.g., creating an offer to match a trip with a driver) to periodic location updates (e.g., recalculating eligible products for a driver when their location changes). The platform handles millions of concurrent users and billions of trips per month across over ten thousand cities and billions of database transactions a day.

In the previous article, we introduced the Fulfillment domain, highlighted challenges in the previous architecture, and outlined the new architecture.

Amazon released a huge number of smart home products today, including two robots for home security, a Nest competitor, more Echo devices, and a perfect device for Covid-times connection with friends and family. Plus there’s an updated fitness tracker, a partnership with TikTok, entertainment from Sling, and more.

And yes, that includes ways to chat with Han Solo or Chewbacca from Star Wars or Woody from Toy Story on your Amazon Echo devices.

MASK Architects has designed the world’s first steel 3D printed structure of modular houses for Nivola Museum’s visitors, Tourists and Artists in Orani, city of Sardinia. Öznur Pınar Cer and Danilo Petta have Inspired from the work of “Costantino Nivola”, they have designed “Exosteel Mother Nature” modular houses which they have taken inspiration from him sculpture called the “La Madre”.

The studio is the first architecture and design studio in the world to use a steel 3D-printed “exoskeleton” construction system that supports and distributes all the functional elements of the building, using their new solution of construction technique which they called “EXOSTEEL”.

The house is composed firstly by a hollow central column inserted for one / third of its length into the ground and by various organic branches that support the three floors of the building. On each floor a perimeter frame divides and supports the facades made up of panels modeled to follow the organic shape of the house.

Only two new coronaviruses have spread globally the past 2 decades: SARS-CoV, which caused an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2,003 and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But that may just be the tip of the iceberg of undetected infections with related viruses emerging from bats, a new paper claims. In a preprint published yesterday researchers estimate that an average of 400,000 people are likely infected with SARS-related coronaviruses every year, in spillovers that never grow into detectable outbreaks.

The researchers, including Peter Daszak from the EcoHealth Alliance and Linfa Wang from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, created a detailed map of the habitats of 23 bat species known to harbor SARS-related coronaviruses, the group to which SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 belong, and then overlaid it with data on where humans live to create a map of potential infection hot spots. They found that close to 500 million people live in areas where spillovers can occur, including northern India, Nepal, Myanmar, and most of Southeast Asia. The risk is highest in southern China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and on Java and other islands in Indonesia (see map, below).


Study pinpoints Asian regions that could spark the next coronavirus pandemic.

University of Arizona aerospace and mining engineers are mapping out a plan for harvesting the moon’s resources using autonomous robot swarms and new excavation techniques.

With scientists beginning to more seriously consider constructing bases on celestial bodies such as the moon, the idea of space mining is growing in popularity.

After all, if someone from Los Angeles was moving to New York to build a house, it would be a lot easier to buy the building materials in New York rather than buy them in Los Angeles and lug them 2,800 miles. Considering the distance between Earth and the moon is about 85 times greater, and that getting there requires defying gravity, using the moon’s existing resources is an appealing idea.

Cuba on Monday became the first country in the world to vaccinate children from the age of two against Covid-19, using home-grown jabs not recognised by the World Health Organization. The communist island of 11.2 million people aims to inoculate all its children before reopening schools that have been closed for the most part since March 2020. The new school year started on Monday, but from home via television programmes, as most Cuban homes do not have internet access.


Cuba is vaccinating children from the age of two using home-grown jabs not recognised by the World Health Organization.

Volkner’s over-the-top motorhome package slides a 1,480-hp Bugatti Chiron aboard its $2.4-million Performance S motorhome and treats owners of the elaborate ultra-luxury/hypercar vehicle experience.


In the past, we’ve seen Volkner edge out its few competitors for “most expensive motorhome of the Düsseldorf Caravan Salon” honors with stretched luxury homes as “modestly” priced as $1.7 million. This year, it leaves the competition in the dust, going all out on the priciest, most over-the-top motorhome package on the show floor. It slides a 1,480-hp Bugatti Chiron aboard its $2.4-million Performance S motorhome and treats owners of the elaborate ultra-luxury/hypercar vehicle experience to a lavishly appointed abode complete with custom Burmester audio system carefully tailored to the mobile space.

For more than a decade, Volkner has been wowing the Düsseldorf crowds with the sporty roadsters and supercars it manages to squeeze between the axles of its huge motorhomes. This year, it’s really upped its own game.

The $3-million Bugatti Chiron actually costs more than the Performance S motorhome itself and packs more than triple the horsepower of Volkner’s 430-hp 18-ton 39-footer. We preferred the Porsche 911 GT2 Volkner brought to the 2018 Caravan Salon not a full year after the car’s Nürburgring record, but there’s no denying that the Chiron and Performance S team is an absolutely stunning package, a pairing of extreme, over-the-top motorized engineering like few we’ll ever see.