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Category: transportation

Elon Musk was on stage at the 2017 TED Conference in Vancouver on Friday, and he revealed some of his tunnel work and aspirations, but he also talked about a few ongoing Tesla projects he’s referenced before. The multi-CEO showed a shadowy image that gives us our first look at what his forthcoming electric Semi Truck will look like, and also let drop the suggestion that Tesla will likely announce four new global Gigafactory locations sometime this year.

Elon Musk teased semi-truck at TED talk. pic.twitter.com/sY0w7KSsTx

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N” After upending the taxi market with its ride-hailing service, Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] is now aiming for the skies with its flying taxis.

The company expects to deploy its flying taxis in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, and Dubai by 2020, Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden said at the Uber Elevate Summit in Dallas on Tuesday.

Uber’s flying taxis will be small, electric aircraft that take off and land vertically, or VTOLs, with zero emissions and quiet enough to operate in cities.

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Back in November, we heard about Uber’s plans to add flying-car-like air taxis to its existing transport system. At the time, it wasn’t clear just what form those vehicles would take. This Tuesday, however, the company announced that it has selected Virginia-based Aurora Flight Sciences as a partner to develop an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for its Uber Elevate Network – and a functioning model of it has already been flown.

The concept combines technologies from several other projects that Aurora has been working on.

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The fledgling “flying car” industry just received a major boost as Google cofounder Larry Page officially launched his new startup out of stealth.

Founded in 2015, Kitty Hawk has been known to exist for some time already, but we’ve hitherto had no real idea about what it was all about — beyond it having something to do with flying cars. But earlier this morning, company CEO Sebastian Thrun, who once headed up Google’s self-driving car efforts and later went on to found online learning platform Udacity, tweeted out a link to the company’s website and Twitter page. Kitty Hawk’s website now offers some clue as to what we can expect.

It transpires that Kitty Hawk isn’t working on a “flying car,” as such, instead it’s working on a personal “ultralight aircraft” designed to be flown in “uncongested” areas, particularly over fresh water — it can’t be flown in cities. And, crucially, it doesn’t require a pilot’s license, which opens things up to widespread recreational use, though this will naturally raise some safety concerns.

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I remember posting that video in here a few months ago. Some lab in California was testing their AI’s to drive cars in the game. I wish they’d let them goof around in Multiplayer it would be interesting to mess with one. How would it re act if it got attacked, if a random person hopped in a car and started playing with the radio or other weird stuff.

2017%2f03%2f24%2f09%2fscreenshot20170324at12.20.00pm.4D9d2By Tina Amini 2017/04/21 17:23:46 UTC

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By Nidhi Kalra

After California’s Department of Motor Vehicles recently proposed new regulations governing the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles, many were left to wonder: Will this help retain the state’s status as a testing and deployment ground for the technology, and will it make California safer?

The answer is… yes and… maybe?

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Schematic illustrating the direction of ion/water permeation along graphene planes (credit: J. Abraham et al./ Nature Nanotechnology)

British Scientists have designed a way to use graphene-oxide (GO) membranes to filter common salts out of salty water and make the water safe to drink.

Graphene-oxide membranes developed at the National Graphene Institute had already demonstrated the potential of filtering out small nanoparticles, organic molecules, and even large salts. And previous research at The University of Manchester also found that if immersed in water, graphene-oxide membranes become slightly swollen and smaller salts flow through the membrane along with water, but larger ions or molecules are blocked.

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