Lifeboat Foundation

RAND has opened an office in the San Francisco Bay Area to foster collaboration with the region’s leaders and researchers working to solve today’s complex problems—issues including technological change and innovation, social inequality, water resource management, and transportation.

“RAND’s research and analysis in technology, science, and economic policy intersect directly with the innovation emerging from the San Francisco Bay Area,” said Michael D. Rich, president and CEO of RAND. “RAND’s new office should help strengthen awareness within the Bay Area community of our long-standing commitment to using evidence and data to help policy and decisionmakers enhance well-being in the region and beyond.”

RAND brings a unique set of tools to address these policy concerns: big-data analytics, gaming, and methods to help people make difficult decisions in the face of uncertainty. Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist, is leading the new office and will be convening public- and private-sector stakeholders to discuss important issues. “We want to partner with the region’s technology and innovation communities, to link our research and their expertise to make better policies and improve people’s lives,” she said.

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Bosch and the car manufacturer behind Mercedes, Daimler, have announced they are joining forces “to advance the development of fully automated and driverless driving”.

The two companies are to enter into a development agreement that they say will bring fully automated driving to urban roads by “the beginning of the next decade”.

To do this the two companies will develop software and algorithms that lead to an autonomous driving system.

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Older automakers like Ford and General Motors driverless cars outscored Waymo and Uber in new survey, USA Today reports.

It takes millions of years for natural processes to convert plants into gasoline, but researchers at Ghent University have figured out how to do it much faster. By pre-treating grass to make it break down quicker, and then adding Clostridium bacteria similar to that found in your gut, they produced decane, one of the main ingredients of gasoline and jet fuel. While decane is a polluting fuel, commercial jets will need it for at least the next few decades, and the researchers believe their process is efficient enough to make it commercially feasible.

For their system to work, the scientists first treated the grass with a compound that broke it down and made it easier for bacteria to digest. They then treated it with an enriched Clostridium bacteria from the family that makes up the good bacteria in your gut, rather than the one that kills you. Fermentation much like that used for beer produced lactic acid and its derivatives, and further treatment yielded caproic acids. With further processing, that was converted into decane, a primary ingredient of gasoline and jet fuel.

As mentioned, decane and similar products aren’t very clean fuels (they produce CO₂ when burned), but they still have a much higher energy density than, say, lithium batteries. As such, be the main fuel used in aviation for the foreseeable future, as jet planes need to be relatively light to get aloft.

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Its six compact jet engines will send you hurtling through the sky at 100 mph.

The media is bursting at its seams with what seems to be the superhero revolution. Comic book publishers like Marvel and DC have spilled over onto the big screen, and now it may look as though they’re spilling over into our technology in the real world. While we have been making efforts at a superhero heads up display or an iron man workout suit, we are also inching our way up to a functional flight suit.

Gravity is a British technology start-up started by Richard Browning on March 31, 2017. The company has developed a human propulsion system to re-imagine manned flight. With miniaturized jet engines and a customized exoskeleton, the Daedalus is expected to push us into a new era of aviation. Browning and his team developed the suit over the course of 2016, with the team’s journey covered in this short documentary:

This RV is a luxury yacht on wheels.

We’re a lot closer to flying cars that we think. In fact, Dubai has already begun testing a prototype of a self-driving hover-taxi with the hope of launching an aerial shuttle service by July.

“The autonomous aerial vehicle exhibited at the World Government Summit is not just a model. We have already experimented (with) the vehicle in a flight in (the) Dubai sky. RTA will spare no effort to launch the AAV in July 2017,” shares director general of the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) Mattar Al-Tayer.

To avail of the taxi service, passengers will simply select a destination before they board the vehicle with the help of a ground control center. The EHang 184 quadcopter can travel on a programmed course at 100 km an hour (60 mph) at an altitude of 300 meters (1,000 feet), the authority said in a statement.

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These self-driving tractors could make farming easier and greener.