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The high-lift wing shapes are more aerodynamic than conventional aircraft, giving the SE200 more efficiency and shorter takeoff and landing capabilities. Courtesy SE Aeronautics.

SE points to its integrated monocoque structure as a breakthrough for performance and safety. The company notes aircraft manufacturers bolt together large sections called “barrels,” in order to maximize production. “This is usually where fuselages break apart in an accident,” SE says. “SE will build a single-piece, tough composite fuselage.”

The monocoque design and composite materials will make the aircraft the most efficient ever built, claims the company, with a 50-year service life. “We will also be able to build these aircraft in less than half the time it takes to normally build an aircraft of its size,” it says.

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Circa 2015

With the 2015 Chevrolet Impala Bi-Fuel, drivers can top off their tank with waste byproducts, almost like Dr. Emmett Brown — aka “Doc” — did with his time-traveling DeLorean in the movie “Back to the Future.”

But instead of dumping banana peels and backwash from a beer can directly into the DeLorean’s “Mr. Fusion” reactor (see the video clip below), Impala Bi-Fuel owners simply fill up on natural gas, some of which comes from biogas, Chevy points out in its announcement about the new full-size sedan arriving in dealerships soon.

Biogas is derived from the methane that microrganisms emit after breaking down organic waste material in an oxygen-less environment. The process is called anaerobic digestion.

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BMW Motorrad may not have arrived very early to the electric motorcycle party, but the company is making up for it now with what could become an industry first electric motorcycle with a driveshaft.

BMW loves its driveshaft motorcycles, but the electric motorcycle industry hasn’t been as keen on them.

Electric motors and batteries have freed motorcycle manufacturers from the typical design constraints of gas-powered drivetrains. Unshackled from traditional gas tanks and bulky internal combustion engines, designers have been granted unprecedented levels of freedom thanks to the modularity of electric motorcycle components.

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Since the DeepSpeed optimization library was introduced last year, it has rolled out numerous novel optimizations for training large AI models—improving scale, speed, cost, and usability. As large models have quickly evolved over the last year, so too has DeepSpeed. Whether enabling researchers to create the 17-billion-parameter Microsoft Turing Natural Language Generation (Turing-NLG) with state-of-the-art accuracy, achieving the fastest BERT training record, or supporting 10x larger model training using a single GPU, DeepSpeed continues to tackle challenges in AI at Scale with the latest advancements for large-scale model training. Now, the novel memory optimization technology ZeRO (Zero Redundancy Optimizer), included in DeepSpeed, is undergoing a further transformation of its own. The improved ZeRO-Infinity offers the system capability to go beyond the GPU memory wall and train models with tens of trillions of parameters, an order of magnitude bigger than state-of-the-art systems can support. It also offers a promising path toward training 100-trillion-parameter models.

ZeRO-Infinity at a glance: ZeRO-Infinity is a novel deep learning (DL) training technology for scaling model training, from a single GPU to massive supercomputers with thousands of GPUs. It powers unprecedented model sizes by leveraging the full memory capacity of a system, concurrently exploiting all heterogeneous memory (GPU, CPU, and Non-Volatile Memory express or NVMe for short). Learn more in our paper, “ZeRO-Infinity: Breaking the GPU Memory Wall for Extreme Scale Deep Learning.” The highlights of ZeRO-Infinity include:

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(Bloomberg) — On a Wednesday afternoon in May, an Uber driver in San Francisco was about to run out of charge on his Nissan Leaf. Normally this would mean finding a place to plug in and wait for a half hour, at least. But this Leaf was different.

Instead of plugging in, the driver pulled into a swapping station near Mission Bay, where a set of robot arms lifted the car off of the ground, unloaded the depleted batteries and replaced them with a fully charged set. Twelve minutes later the Leaf pulled away with 32 kilowatt hours of energy, enough to drive about 130 miles, for a cost of $13.

A swap like this is a rare event in the U.S. The Leaf’s replaceable battery is made by Ample, one of the only companies offering a service that’s more popular in markets in Asia. In March, Ample announced that it had deployed five stations around the Bay Area. Nearly 100 Uber drivers are using them, the company says, making an average of 1.3 swaps per day. Ample’s operation is tiny compared to the 100000 public EV chargers in the U.S.—not to mention the 150000 gas stations running more than a million nozzles. Yet Ample’s founders Khaled Hassounah and John de Souza are convinced that it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. discovers that swapping is a necessary part of the transition to electric vehicles.

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‘I would expect these vehicles to make 15 trips, twice a day during rush hour to justify the cost of the vehicles,’ says researcher.

The key is to rapidly heat the battery to a certain temperature using a nickel foil, which then allows for ultra quick charging without causing any damage.

“I think flying cars have the potential to eliminate a lot of time and increase productivity and open the sky corridors to transportation,” Dr Wang said.

“Commercially, I would expect these vehicles to make 15 trips, twice a day during rush hour to justify the cost of the vehicles. The first use will probably be from a city to an airport carrying three to four people about 50 miles.”

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Last month, self-driving technology company TuSimple shipped a truckload of watermelons across the state of Texas ten hours faster than normal. They did this by using their automated driving system for over 900 miles of the journey. The test drive was considered a success, and marked the beginning of a partnership between TuSimple and produce distributor Guimarra. This is one of the first such partnerships announced, but TuSimple may soon have some competition from another big player in the driverless vehicles game: Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Waymo.

Yesterday, Waymo announced a partnership with transportation logistics company JB Hunt to move cargo in automated trucks in Texas. The first route they’ll drive is between Houston and Fort Worth, which Waymo claims is “one of the most highly utilized freight corridors in the country.”

At around 260 miles long, much of the route is a straight shot on Interstate 45. The trucks will have human safety drivers on board who will likely take over some of the city driving portions, but the goal is to use the automated system as much as possible. A software technician will be on board as well, which makes sense given software will be doing the bulk of the driving.

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The aircraft could be used to transfer passengers between home and airports, Virgin believes. It would be able, for example, to make the 56-mile journey from Cambridge to Heathrow in 22 minutes, compared with a 90-minute drive.

The announcement represents another step in the race to making mass electric flight and air taxis a reality. Some analysts have predicted the sector could be worth £150bn by 2040 but significant hurdles remain, including regulation and safety certification. The VA-X4 has yet to take its first test flight. Dómhnal Slattery, the chief executive of Avolon, said its order would “accelerate the inevitable commercial rollout of zero-emissions aircraft. Before the end of this decade, we expect zero-emission urban air mobility, enabled by eVTOLs, to play an increasingly important role in the global commercial aviation market.”

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US-based Archer Aviation says it wants to make mass market mobility solutions and could launch Maker flying taxi in Los Angeles and Miami by 2024…Maker is a flying taxi that can seat four while not contributing to rising emission levels when on the move.

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Chipmaker Nvidia is acquiring DeepMap, the high-definition mapping startup announced. The company said its mapping IP will help Nvidia’s autonomous vehicle technology sector, Nvidia Drive.

“The acquisition is an endorsement of DeepMap’s unique vision, technology and people,” said Ali Kani, vice president and general manager of Automotive at Nvidia, in a statement. “DeepMap is expected to extend our mapping products, help us scale worldwide map operations and expand our full self-driving expertise.”

One of the biggest challenges to achieving full autonomy in a passenger vehicle is achieving proper localization and updated mapping information that reflects current road conditions. By integrating DeepMap’s tech, Nvidia’s autonomous stack should have greater precision, giving the vehicle enhanced abilities to locate itself on the road.

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