Lifeboat Foundation

Azeem speaks with Professor Yoshua Bengio. In 2018, Yoshua, Geoff Hinton and Yann LeCun were awarded the Turing Award for advancing the field of AI, in particular for their groundbreaking conceptual and engineering research in deep learning. This earnt them the moniker the Three Musketeers of Deep Learning. I think Bengio might be Aramis: intellectual, somewhat pensive, with aspirations beyond combat, and yet skilled with the blade.

With 750,000 citations to his scientific research, Yoshua has turned to the humanistic dimension of AI, in particular, the questions of safety, democracy, and climate change. Yoshua and I sit on the OECD’s Expert Group on AI Futures.

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently shared a number of notable updates for the next-generation Roadster. Apart from stating that Tesla is aiming to unveil the upcoming all-electric supercar later this year, Musk also provided some interesting tidbits about the vehicle. Among these is the fact that the new Roadster would be the product of Musk’s two largest companies — Tesla and SpaceX.

The new Roadster has been pushed far back in the company’s list of projects for years. Initially unveiled in late 2017 during the Tesla Semi’s unveiling, the Roadster was announced with a target availability date of 2020. The year came and went, of course, and the next-generation Roadster has mostly been forgotten, especially with Tesla getting busy with the Cybertruck.

But with the Cybertruck now being produced and the company now working on its next-generation platform, it would appear that Tesla is finally ready to work on releasing the new Roadster. Over the years, Musk’s comments about the vehicle have become wilder, with the CEO noting that the supercar should be able to fly for short “hops” due to a dedicated SpaceX package that would incorporate rocket tech in the car.

Do the impacts of deforestation go beyond the environment? What about human health, specifically the health of children? This is what a recent study published in Economics & Human Biology hopes to address as Dr. Gabriel Fuentes Cordoba, who is an associate professor of economics from Sophia University in Japan, investigated how deforestation in Cambodia effects the health of children around the time of their birth. This study holds the potential to help scientists, conservationists, and the public better understand the health effects of deforestation, specifically with the increasing effects of climate change around the world.

For the study, Dr. Fuentes Cordoba analyzed data obtained from the Cambodian Demographic Health Surveys and forest loss to ascertain the health impacts for pregnant women and children under five years of age who reside in areas of deforestation. In the end, Dr. Fuentes Cordoba discover alarming results that suggest deforestation exposure to women less than one year before pregnancy could lead to development of anemia, which is a precursor to malaria. This could result in significant health impacts on children being born, specifically reductions in birth weight, along with overall height and weight as they age.

“This research shows a negative impact of deforestation on child health,” Dr. Fuentes Cordoba said in a statement. “This negative impact may persist into adulthood and affect other aspects of wellbeing such as education acquisition and even wages. My findings indicate that future research should explore this aspect further.”

The Tesla Model 3 has raised its own benchmark by winning the 2024 Drive Car of the Year Best Urban Electric Vehicle under $100K.

CIGS solar cells can also be used a bottom layer in the tandem solar cell design helping reduce production costs.

Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden have created a new world record by designing a CIGS solar cell with 23.64 percent energy conversion efficiency.

Elon Musk has shared a new video on X of Tesla’s incredible Optimus robot taking a casual stroll around Tesla’s laboratory. Since being published on Saturday, February 24, the 1-minute and 18-second clip has garnered much attention, with almost 79 million views in a few days (at the time of writing).

The clip shows Optimus in a more complete aesthetic than previously released videos. It also shows how mobile the robot truly is. However, as other commentators have said, Tesla’s Optimus’ progress would have been impressive only a few years ago but lags behind other efforts like those by Boston Dynamics.

Tesla took half the awards for brand loyalty in the automotive industry in S&P Global Mobility’s new study.

Once you go electric, you don’t go back.

Studies have shown that electric vehicle buyers generally don’t go back to gasoline vehicles.

When analyzing the all-electric vehicle (EV) market, we have noticed that the segment shifted towards all-wheel-drive (AWD) powertrains. The front-wheel-drive (FWD) and rear-wheel-drive (RWD) models are in the minority.

It wasn’t always like that though. Between 2010 and 2013, there were only single-motor FWD and RWD models on the market. Things changed in the 2014 model year when Tesla introduced a dual-motor AWD version of the Model S (85D).

In the 2015 model year, Tesla expanded the dual-motor family to a few versions (about a quarter of all versions on the market, at the time), and then doubled the AWD lineup with the newly launched Model X in the 2016 model year.