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Category: transportation

Rolls-Royce, the 115-year-old iconic British Engineering firm, has now achieved a new feat. After manufacturing world-class jet engines, it has left its mark in the electric aviation world.

Spirit of Innovation, a single-seat, electric-powered propeller plane built by Rolls-Royce, obliterated the zero-emission speed record, reaching over 556 kilometers per hour (345 mph) over a three-kilometer distance—and even maxing out at 623 kilometers per hour. This flight successfully smashed all previous records of electric planes which are environment friendly.

With a clarion call given by the COP26 on the need to cut emissions, Rolls-Royce has presented itself as a company that could earnestly provide that solution. With the aviation industry registering a record number of flights after a year of lockdowns, the emissions are set to grow further.

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Microsoft’s attempts to steer Windows users toward the Edge browser are attracting notice. Can the Third Browser War around the corner?

Users of Microsoft’s Windows 10 and 11 operating systems have recently reported seeing unusual prompts when they attempt to download Google’s Chrome browser to their device, according to The Verge.

If Microsoft is indeed launching a third Browser War, can the mid-1990s be far behind? Men, put on your flat-front chinos or straight-leg jeans, women, put on a mini-skirt and knee socks, pop a disc with “The Macarena” into your car’s sound system, and head for the mall. There, Toy Story or Braveheart is playing, and you can stop by Starbucks for their new frozen Frappuccino.

If you’re lucky enough to have a home computer, a new company called eBay is selling Pez dispensers, and another new company named Amazon has just sold its first book: Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter.

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While 1% of anything doesn’t sound like much, with light, that’s still really fast — close to 7 million miles per hour! At 1% the speed of light, it would take a little over a second to get from Los Angeles to New York. This is more than 10,000 times faster than a commercial jet.

Bullets can go 2,600 mph (4,200 km/h), more than three times the speed of sound. The fastest aircraft is NASA’s X3 jet plane 0, with a top speed of 7,000 mph (11,200 km/h). That sounds impressive, but it’s still only 0.001% the speed of light.

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The price of the batteries that power electric vehicles has fallen by about 90 percent since 2010, a continuing trend that will soon make EVs less expensive than gasoline vehicles.

This week, with battery pricing figures for 2021 now available, I wanted to get a better idea of what the near future will look like.

First, the numbers: The average price of lithium-ion battery packs fell to $132 per kilowatt-hour in 2021, down 6 percent from $140 per kilowatt-hour the previous year, according to the annual battery price survey from BloombergNEF. The new average is a step closer to the benchmark of $100 per kilowatt-hour, which researchers say is the approximate point where EVs will cost about the same as gasoline-powered vehicles.

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Over the past few years, different techniques have made it possible to improve the viewing angles of the cameras, taking advantage of extra functionalities such as lasers. This technology allows the device to track objects moving around corners, even when they are completely obscured from view. The device could be used for search-and-rescue missions or installed on cars to detect incoming vehicles.

Now, researchers at the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab have developed a novel method called non-line-of-sight imaging, or keyhole imaging, that allows you to scan an entire room by simply pointing a laser through the keyhole. A single point of laser light entering a room can be used to see what physical objects might be inside.

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) technique has been refined by continuous research with it in the lead role, aimed at creating cameras that image objects lying behind corners beyond the field of view. In the past, this technique used flat surfaces, such as walls or floors, that happened to be in the line of sight with a hidden object and a camera. A series of light pulses originating from the camera, usually from lasers, bounce off these surfaces and then bounce off the hidden object before eventually making their way back to the camera’s sensors.

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As the spread of electric vehicles continues to gain speed across the globe, the electric charging network needs to keep pace with the growing demand. Tesla, the global leader in electric vehicles, has spent millions to expand its supercharging network and the company currently has more than 25,000 supercharging stations across the planet. The EV manufacturer is looking to democratize its superchargers, and in certain regions, you can charge your Porsche Taycan right next to regular Tesla offerings such as the Model 3 and Model S, but some have been experiencing an unpleasant trend in recent times: internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles are blocking charging stations. This act is known as “ICEing”, and it has become such an issue in China that Tesla has banded with its customers to come up with an interesting solution.

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We talk a lot about electric cars, and it’s evident that engineers are working toward fossil fuel alternatives for our land-based travel. But what about airplanes? In 2019, 18.27 billion gallons of fuel were used by planes. That’s far from carbon-neutral.

Soon though, we could feel less guilty about flying. A team of researchers has created a prototype jet engine that’s able to propel itself forward using only electricity. Their study was published in AIP Advances in May 2020.

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A new “common-sense” approach to computer vision enables artificial intelligence that interprets scenes more accurately than other systems do.

Computer vision systems sometimes make inferences about a scene that fly in the face of common sense. For example, if a robot were processing a scene of a dinner table, it might completely ignore a bowl that is visible to any human observer, estimate that a plate is floating above the table, or misperceive a fork to be penetrating a bowl rather than leaning against it.

Move that computer vision system to a self-driving car and the stakes become much higher — for example, such systems have failed to detect emergency vehicles and pedestrians crossing the street.

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Strategy accelerates the best algorithmic solvers for large sets of cities.

Waiting for a holiday package to be delivered? There’s a tricky math problem that needs to be solved before the delivery truck pulls up to your door, and MIT researchers have a strategy that could speed up the solution.

The approach applies to vehicle routing problems such as last-mile delivery, where the goal is to deliver goods from a central depot to multiple cities while keeping travel costs down. While there are algorithms designed to solve this problem for a few hundred cities, these solutions become too slow when applied to a larger set of cities.

The solver algorithms work by breaking up the problem of delivery into smaller subproblems to solve — say, 200 subproblems for routing vehicles between 2,000 cities. Wu and her colleagues augment this process with a new machine-learning algorithm that identifies the most useful subproblems to solve, instead of solving all the subproblems, to increase the quality of the solution while using orders of magnitude less compute.

Their approach, which they call “learning-to-delegate,” can be used across a variety of solvers and a variety of similar problems, including scheduling and pathfinding for warehouse robots, the researchers say.

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