Lifeboat Foundation

The company’s Destinus 3 prototype is expected to be the world’s first hydrogen-powered unmanned aircraft, soaring supersonic at Mach 1.3.

Three days ago CNBC reporters visited Pepsi’s Frito-Lay facility in Modesto, California, where it is using Tesla Semi’s new electric trucks. CNBC wanted to see whether the Semis live up to the hype. Watching that report I learned a couple of very interesting details about Pepsi Tesla Semi operations and here I wanted to share with you.

With ambitious goals of being a leader in sustainable mobility, Porsche has joined forces with Frauscher Shipyard in Austria to engineer an electric yacht that is also intended to set standards on the water with its typical Porsche E-Performance. The vehicle is called the Frauscher x Porsche 850 Fantom Air highlighting the collaboration that made it possible.

Porsche.

This is according to a press release by the carmaker published on Saturday.

Continue reading “Porsche is developing an exclusive electric sports boat” »

Many people love the Raspberry Pi (us included). Not only are the computing boards cheap, but you can do so much with them. Wild, wonderful projects spring up all the time with RPi boards as a central piece. The latest creation to catch our eye might just rank as one of the most astonishing: a truck transformed into a dot matrix printer.

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, YouTuber Ryder Damen (who runs the channel Ryder Calm Down) uses a Raspberry Pi to control his homebrew “printer,” which involves a pickup truck, water, and a whole array of gear to spell out messages on the ground. Damen calls it “skywriting, but on the road.”

In the video, Damen explains how the idea came to be (watching trucks paint markers on the road), as well as the process of constructing the “printer” and the materials used. A plywood and a trailer hitch form the frame of the rig, with solenoids, valves, and hoses then mounted to the wood to serve as printer parts. The solenoids control the valves—when 12V current is applied to them, they open. Meanwhile, the hoses split the water flow from a central point (a pump and a bucket full of water) to each valve.

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The age of generative AI is here: only six months after OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene, as many as half the employees of some leading global companies are already using this type of technology in their workflows, and many other companies are rushing to offer new products with generative AI built in.

But, as those following the burgeoning industry and its underlying research know, the data used to train the large language models (LLMs) and other transformer models underpinning products such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney comes initially from human sources — books, articles, photographs and so on — that were created without the help of artificial intelligence.

Significantly improved electric vehicle (EV) batteries could be a step closer thanks to a new study led by University of Oxford researchers, published today in Nature. Using advanced imaging techniques, this revealed mechanisms which cause lithium metal solid-state batteries (Li-SSBs) to fail. If these can be overcome, solid-state batteries using lithium metal anodes could deliver a step-change improvement in EV battery range, safety and performance, and help advance electrically powered aviation.

One of the co-lead authors of the study Dominic Melvin, a PhD student in the University of Oxford’s Department of Materials, said: ‘Progressing solid-state batteries with lithium metal anodes is one of the most important challenges facing the advancement of battery technologies. While lithium-ion batteries of today will continue to improve, research into solid-state batteries has the potential to be high-reward and a gamechanger technology.’

Li-SSBs are distinct from other batteries because they replace the flammable liquid electrolyte in conventional batteries with a solid electrolyte and use lithium metal as the anode (negative electrode). The use of the solid electrolyte improves the safety, and the use of lithium metal means more energy can be stored. A critical challenge with Li-SSBs, however, is that they are prone to short circuit when charging due to the growth of ‘dendrites’: filaments of lithium metal that crack through the ceramic electrolyte. As part of the Faraday Institution’s SOLBAT project, researchers from the University of Oxford’s Departments of Materials, Chemistry and Engineering Science, have led a series of in-depth investigations to understand more about how this short-circuiting happens.

Artificial intelligence has possibly been the most popular term in 2023 so far – many industries are starting to explore new problem-solving possibilities thanks to machine learning technologies. The automotive industry isn’t lagging behind with many companies already using AI for different tasks within their research and development divisions. Toyota now announces it is starting to research AI-based car design thanks to its generative artificial intelligence technique developed by the Toyota Research Institute (TRI).

Don’t worry – your next Tacoma truck won’t have a purely AI-designed exterior. Instead, Toyota wants to use the technology in the early design stages where different iterations of a certain project are needed for engineering considerations. Or, simply put, if the automaker decides to build a new large two-door coupe, it could ask AI to generate a number of early designs based on preset parameters. Such is the case with the rendering you see attached at the top of this article – it has been created by artificial intelligence.

The most American-made cars sold in the US all come from Tesla, but the car in the number six spot is a bit of a surprise.

From Kasparov’s chess career to Steve Jobs’ bicycle, we already know how to approach these new AI tools. The real question: Will you master them before your competition does?