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Category: transportation

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.

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Picture an airplane that can only climb to one or two altitudes after taking off. That limitation would be similar to the plight facing scientists who seek to avoid instabilities that restrict the path to clean, safe, and abundant fusion energy in doughnut-shaped tokamak facilities. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and General Atomics (GA) have now published a breakthrough explanation of this tokamak restriction and how it may be overcome.

Toroidal, or doughnut-shaped, tokamaks are prone to intense bursts of heat and particles, called edge localized modes (ELMs). These ELMs can damage the reactor walls and must be controlled to develop reliable fusion power. Fortunately, scientists have learned to tame these ELMs by applying spiraling rippled magnetic fields to the surface of the plasma that fuels fusion reactions. However, the taming of ELMs requires very specific conditions that limit the operational flexibility of tokamak reactors.

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Reaction Engines and Britain’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) have completed a concept study into the practicality of using ammonia as a jet aviation fuel. By teaming Reaction Engines’s heat exchanger technology with STFC’s advanced catalysts, they hope to produce a sustainable, low-emission propulsion system for tomorrow’s aircraft.

Modern jet engines use a variety of fuels based on kerosene that have a very high energy density that can propel aircraft well beyond the speed of sound and carry passengers and cargoes across the globe. Unfortunately, such fuels are also derived from fossil fuels and produce significant carbon dioxide emissions, which the airline industry and many governments have pledged to reduce radically by 2050.

One way of achieving these cuts is to look at alternatives to conventional jet fuels to power airliners. The problem is that most of these alternatives have much lower energy densities than standard aviation fuels and suffer from other drawbacks. For example, present-day battery technology would require future aircraft to be very small, short-range, and with little payload capacity. Meanwhile, liquid hydrogen could be a viable alternative, but so much of it would need to be carried that planes would have to be completely redesigned and new infrastructure built.

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Sales of completely autonomous cars will scale rapidly from the mid-2030s, according to BloombergNEF. Most of these so-called Level-4 autonomous vehicles will be deployed as robotaxis in shared services like Uber, Didi, Lyft and General Motors’ Cruise, among others.

Robotaxis are already being piloted for the public in a handful of cities by the likes of Alphabet Waymo in the U.S. and Baidu in China. These services will expand to new areas in the coming years as testing accelerates.

Numerous edge cases still have to be solved for robotaxis to be deployed in a broad range of different traffic situations and weather conditions, but favorable economics could enable fast growth once the underlying technology is well developed.

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TerraVis™ system — a platform for versatile and cost-effective solar power integrations for pick-up trucks. This groundbreaking innovation is the very first to combine practical, durable tonneau covers with a cutting-edge solar generation and energy storage system. This website launch marks the first release of design and application-related details.

Terravis | the future by worksport | welcome: terravis.

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In a step closer to skyscrapers that serve as power sources, a team led by University of Michigan researchers has set a new efficiency record for color-neutral, transparent solar cells.

The team achieved 8.1% efficiency and 43.3% transparency with an organic, or carbon-based, design rather than conventional silicon. While the cells have a slight green tint, they are much more like the gray of sunglasses and automobile windows.

“Windows, which are on the face of every building, are an ideal location for because they offer something silicon can’t, which is a combination of very and very high visible transparency,” said Stephen Forrest, the Peter A. Franken Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and Paul G. Goebel Professor of Engineering, who led the research.

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The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel will be operational in “only a few months,” according to company frontman Elon Musk, who updated the project’s progress on August 28.

Musk, CEO of the Boring Company, set out to create a new source of transportation in high-traffic areas several years ago while living in Los Angeles. While LA has a private test tunnel in Hawthorne, California, near the Tesla Design Studio and SpaceX Headquarters, Musk wanted to expand upon the idea and move it to other cities.

Las Vegas needed a transportation solution to handle traffic on the Strip, where many of the visitors spend the majority of their time while visiting the Sin City. However, the Las Vegas Convention Center also desired an underground people mover, and the Boring Co. was more than happy to make a $52.5 million bid on the project, which was accepted.

In October 2019, the Boring Company officially opened the construction of the Las Vegas Convention Center tunnel project. By January, the tunnel was nearly 50% complete.

The process of boring tunnels under the LVCC was completed in May, and now the final touches are being put into place before it can be ready to assist in moving thousands of people from location to location in Las Vegas.

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One of the biggest impediments to adoption of new technologies is trust in AI.

Now, a new tool developed by USC Viterbi Engineering researchers generates automatic indicators if data and predictions generated by AI algorithms are trustworthy. Their , “There Is Hope After All: Quantifying Opinion and Trustworthiness in Neural Networks” by Mingxi Cheng, Shahin Nazarian and Paul Bogdan of the USC Cyber Physical Systems Group, was featured in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.

Neural networks are a type of artificial intelligence that are modeled after the brain and generate predictions. But can the predictions these neural networks generate be trusted? One of the key barriers to adoption of self-driving cars is that the vehicles need to act as independent decision-makers on auto-pilot and quickly decipher and recognize objects on the road—whether an object is a speed bump, an inanimate object, a pet or a child—and make decisions on how to act if another vehicle is swerving towards it.

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