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Jan 11, 2022

How John Deere created its autonomous tractor

Posted by in categories: business, mobile phones, robotics/AI

A farmer can put the tractor to work with a swipe of a smartphone app and then walk away to attend to other business.

Jan 11, 2022

Amazon Will Buy Thousands Of Ram ProMaster Electric Delivery Vans Every Year

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Amazon says it will buy thousands of Ram ProMaster electric vans a year beginning in 2024.


The folks at Inside EVs noticed something in a press package from CES 2022 that most others missed. It said, “As part of a separate agreement with Stellantis, Amazon will be the first commercial customer for Stellantis’ new Ram ProMaster Battery Electric Vehicle launching in 2023. Stellantis, with input from Amazon, designed the vehicle with unique last mile delivery features and Amazon will deploy the vehicles to routes across the United States. Building on the current relationship and as part of the long-term agreement, Stellantis and Amazon will be putting thousands of BEV ProMasters on the road every year.”

Amazon has bought thousands of delivery vans from Mercedes, Ford, and Stellantis to bring packages to its customers in North America for years. Even though it has a 20% ownership stake in Rivian and expects to purchase 100,000 of its electric delivery vans, its need for such vehicles is so massive that it will continue to buy trucks from traditional manufacturers to get the hundreds of thousands of packages it delivers every day from its warehouses — called fulfillment centers — to its customers.

Continue reading “Amazon Will Buy Thousands Of Ram ProMaster Electric Delivery Vans Every Year” »

Jan 11, 2022

Euler’s 243-Year-Old ‘Impossible’ Puzzle Gets a Quantum Solution

Posted by in category: quantum physics

A surprising new solution to Leonhard Euler’s famous “36 officers puzzle” offers a novel way of encoding quantum information.

Jan 11, 2022

🤔 How do we “talk” with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope?

Posted by in category: space travel

🚀 Launch was a team effort including NASA’s Near Space Network, ESA, and #NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN).

📡 As the spacecraft travels to the second Lagrange point, nearly 1 million miles from Earth, the #DSN will continue enabling communications.

Jan 11, 2022

Unblock research bottlenecks with non-profit start-ups

Posted by in category: government

A type of non-profit start-up could be a better way to support projects that enable research. These would have full-time scientists, engineers and executives, and total funding of about US$20 million to $100 million that would last around 5 years — longer than most grants or venture-capital funding rounds allow. And they would be set up to pursue predefined milestones, such as improving the resolution of a measurement system by tenfold, or gathering a pre-specified amount of data. We call them focused research organizations (FROs).


‘Focused research organizations’ can take on mid-scale projects that don’t get tackled by academia, venture capitalists or government labs.

Jan 11, 2022

AI’s 6 Worst-Case Scenarios

Posted by in categories: quantum physics, robotics/AI, surveillance

However, as Malcolm Murdock, machine-learning engineer and author of the 2019 novel The Quantum Price, puts it, “AI doesn’t have to be sentient to kill us all. There are plenty of other scenarios that will wipe us out before sentient AI becomes a problem.”

“We are entering dangerous and uncharted territory with the rise of surveillance and tracking through data, and we have almost no understanding of the potential implications.” —Andrew Lohn, Georgetown University.

In interviews with AI experts, IEEE Spectrum has uncovered six real-world AI worst-case scenarios that are far more mundane than those depicted in the movies. But they’re no less dystopian. And most don’t require a malevolent dictator to bring them to full fruition. Rather, they could simply happen by default, unfolding organically—that is, if nothing is done to stop them. To prevent these worst-case scenarios, we must abandon our pop-culture notions of AI and get serious about its unintended consequences.

Jan 11, 2022

Quantum computing companies to see real-world use cases in 2022

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Quantum computing is finally making its presence felt among companies around the world. Over the last few years, companies have shown interest in quantum computing but often couldn’t make definitive decisions on using the technology, as there was not enough research on its practical applications beyond the theoretical.

Nevertheless, 2021 has been a remarkable year for the quantum computing industry. Not only has there been more research on the potential use cases for the technology, but investments in quantum computing have shot up globally to boot.

While the US and China continue to compete with each other for supremacy in this evolving branch of computing, other countries and organizations around the world have slowly been playing catch up as well. And now, 2022 is expected to be the year whereby companies can start seeing quantum computing breakthroughs that could result in practical uses.

Jan 11, 2022

Supercomputing! The Purest Indicator of Structural Technological and Economic Progress (1H 2022)

Posted by in categories: economics, supercomputing

How to check the trends of Supercomputing Progress, and how this is as close to a pure indicator of technological progress rates as one can find. The recent flattening of this trend has revealed a flattening in all technological and economic progress relative to long-term trendlines.

Top500.org chart : https://top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/

Continue reading “Supercomputing! The Purest Indicator of Structural Technological and Economic Progress (1H 2022)” »

Jan 11, 2022

3D-printed homes will soon be built in Brevard and a robot will do the job

Posted by in categories: habitats, robotics/AI

Apis Cor entered the Guinness Book of Records in October 2019 by building the world’s largest 3D-printed structure (in terms of volume) in Dubai.

Jan 11, 2022

MIT Physicists Detect Strange Hybrid Particle Held Together by Uniquely Intense “Glue”

Posted by in categories: engineering, particle physics

In the particle world, sometimes two is better than one. Take, for instance, electron pairs. When two electrons are bound together, they can glide through a material without friction, giving the material special superconducting properties. Such paired electrons, or Cooper pairs, are a kind of hybrid particle — a composite of two particles that behaves as one, with properties that are greater than the sum of its parts.

Now MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances.