Lifeboat Foundation

For the first time, Volkswagen announced it aims to start producing its most affordable ID.1 electric car, starting at 20,000 euros ($21,700), in 2027. The $20K Volkswagen ID.1 will offer “affordable electric mobility for everyone,” VW brand leader Thomas Shafer said Thursday.

“The working title is ID.1 and the vehicle is planned for 2027,” Shafer confirmed during VW’s annual press conference Thursday.

Work on the ID.1 is already well underway. Shafer said, “We’re already in the middle of it, we know what the car should look like.” However, the biggest challenge will be deciding where to build it.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is teaming up with Larry Ellison’s Oracle to help farms plan and predict their agricultural output using an AI tool.

Larry Ellison said on Oracle’s earnings call on Monday that it’s collaborating with Musk and SpaceX to create the AI-powered mapping application for governments. The tool creates a map of a country’s farms and shows what each of them is growing.

The Oracle executive chairman said the tool could help farms assess the steps needed to increase their output, and whether fields had enough water and nitrogen.

With their lightweight, flexible design, printed solar cells can be deployed in previously unimaginable ways.

Automakers were once struggling to keep pace with demand for some new EVs, but now the opposite appears to be true.

Do we have enough fuel to get to our destination? This is probably one of the first questions that comes to mind whenever your family gets ready to embark on a road trip. If the trip is long, you will need to visit gas stations along your route to refuel during your travel.

NASA is grappling with similar issues as it gets ready to embark on a sustainable mission back to the moon and plans future missions to Mars. But while your car’s fuel is gasoline, which can be safely and indefinitely stored as a liquid in the car’s gas tank, spacecraft fuels are volatile cryogenic liquid propellants that must be maintained at extremely low temperatures and guarded from environmental heat leaks into the spacecraft’s propellant tank.

And while there is already an established network of commercial gas stations in place to make refueling your car a cinch, there are no cryogenic refueling stations or depots at the moon or on the way to Mars.

Find out how this high-schooler developed an AI tree equipped with a solar-powered trap designed to counter invasive Lanternflies.

This article discusses the risks of ChatGPT and Generative AI innovations are having on sustainability goals and highlights the energy and water consumption risks.

At the brink of a new phase of the industrial revolution, the Navigating the Industrial Metaverse: A Blueprint for Future Innovations report draws on insights from over 150 experts, advocating for a responsible approach to metaverse innovation that balances economic growth with sustainability and human-centric values.

Covariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1). Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of the UC Berkeley artificial intelligence spinout tells TechCrunch the platform, “is basically a large language model (LLM), but for robot language.”

RFM-1 is the result of, among other things, a massive trove of data collected from the deployment of Covariant’s Brain AI platform. With customer consent, the startup has been building the robot equivalent of an LLM database.

“The vision of RFM-1 is to power the billions of robots to come,” Chen says. “We at Covariant have already deployed lots of robots at warehouses with success. But that is not the limit of where we want to get to. We really want to power robots in manufacturing, food processing, recycling, agriculture, the service industry and even into people’s homes.”