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Category: transportation – Page 127

Led by the Aerospace Technology Institute (ATI) and backed by the UK government, FlyZero has concluded that green liquid hydrogen is the optimum fuel for zero-carbon emission flight and could power a midsize aircraft with 280 passengers from London to San Francisco directly, or from London to Auckland with just one stop.

FlyZero, the UK study into zero-carbon emission commercial air travel, has published its vision for a new generation of aircraft powered by liquid hydrogen, today Thursday 17th March.

The report “Our Vision for Zero-Carbon Emission Air Travel” marks the conclusion of a 12-month study which set out to consider the feasibility of zero-carbon emission aircraft. The project concludes aviation can achieve net zero 2050 through the development of both sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and green liquid hydrogen technologies.

To secure market share on new hydrogen-powered aircraft, UK companies must be ready to demonstrate technologies by 2025. This timescale is key for new zero-carbon emission aircraft to enter service by 2035 and to achieve the net zero 2050 target.

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This post is also available in: he עברית (Hebrew)

Two autonomous “robotaxi” companies in San Francisco received the green light to start increasing their operations in the city, after previously facing limits on when or where they could charge for rides.

The promise of driverless car services transforming transport has been very slow to develop since they first came into the public eye over a decade ago, having been faced with technology glitches, safety fears, and high-profile accidents involving vehicles.

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The shuttle is electric and has no driver’s seat or steering wheel.

San Francisco has launched a new service that lets people ride a driverless shuttle around Treasure Island, a former naval base in the middle of the bay. The free shuttle, which runs daily on a fixed route, is part of a pilot program to test how autonomous vehicles can improve public transportation.

Credits: AP Photo/Terry Chea.

A convenient and eco-friendly option?

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It’s no surprise that machines have the same problem. Although they’re armed with a myriad of sensors, self-driving cars are still trying to live up to their name. They perform well under perfect weather conditions and roads with clear traffic lanes. But ask the cars to drive in heavy rain or fog, smoke from wildfires, or on roads without streetlights, and they struggle.

This month, a team from Purdue University tackled the low visibility problem head-on. Combining thermal imaging, physics, and machine learning, their technology allowed a visual AI system to see in the dark as if it were daylight.

At the core of the system are an infrared camera and AI, trained on a custom database of images to extract detailed information from given surroundings—essentially, teaching itself to map the world using heat signals. Unlike previous systems, the technology, called heat-assisted detection and ranging (HADAR), overcame a notorious stumbling block: the “ghosting effect,” which usually causes smeared, ghost-like images hardly useful for navigation.

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The term ‘Expensive optimization problem’ (EOP) refers to any problem that requires expensive or even unaffordable costs to evaluate candidate solutions. These problems exist in many significant real-world applications.

On the one hand, the “expensive cost” can refer that an evaluation itself that requires abundant time, money and so on. On the other hand, the “expensive cost” is a relative concept rather than an absolute concept in many real-world problems.

For instance, when encountering emergencies like epidemics or , transportation and dispatching can be urgent for supporting daily operations and saving lives, where the time cost of will become too expensive to accept at this time.

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Warren Buffett missed a trick when he passed on Tesla early on, Elon Musk said.

“He could’ve invested in Tesla when we were worth basically nothing and didn’t,” the SpaceX and Tesla CEO posted on X, the website formerly called Twitter, on Thursday.

He was responding to a post highlighting Buffett’s vast wealth and the enormous value of his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate.

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