Lifeboat Foundation

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proposed building a network of underground highway systems across the West Bank to enable the maintenance of territorial contiguity for both Israeli settlements and Palestinian towns, The Times of Israel’s sister site, Zman Yisrael, reported Saturday.

Netanyahu is aiming for high-speed tunnels routes designed ostensibly to address the problems of traffic jams and congestion, per the vision of the billionaire Elon Musk, and his engineering firm Boring Company.

Netanyahu presented his plans during a conversation Friday with French investors in Paris at the hotel where he spent the weekend.

In the world of self-driving, the strong leaders are now Google/Alphabet’s Waymo, and GM’s Cruise. Both are headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, and both have thus been keen to deploy in the city of San Francisco itself. No wonder, it’s their hometown. Driving it is a challenge but an important one to handle. On the other hand, it doesn’t snow, though it faces fog. It’s a city that already has many people who don’t own cars, and it was the birthplace of ride-hail, first with the now-defunct Sidecar, then Lyft and Uber. It makes a lot of sense that they both want to be there.

Even so, the city of San Francisco and it’s agencies have not been too happy with the pilot deployments of these companies and recently wrote letters hoping to slow them down. This article examines the conflict between the companies and their city, considering not just the particular points of contention, but also what sort of relationship makes sense here and how to resolve conflicts going forward.

San Francisco doesn’t have the authority to regulate driving. That’s the California DMV. Ride services are under the authority of the California Public Utilities Commission. The federal government regulates the making, importing and selling of vehicles and keeping them safe.

The world’s biggest commercial aircraft makers seem increasingly convinced that autonomous passenger flight is a question of when, not if.

Where it stands: Flying today’s high-tech passenger jets is often a matter of setting up and overseeing their autopilot and other automated systems — but we’re not yet at a point where computer systems can entirely replace human pilots.

Driving the news: “Autonomy is going to come to all of the airplanes eventually,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun told Bloomberg TV at an event this week marking the delivery of the last commercial 747.

Kurt “The CyberGuy” Knutsson details the design and features of the REGENT Seaglider and also explains the benefits of the electric aircraft.

A jury found Elon Musk not liable for costing investors when he issued a series of tweets saying he had “secured” funding to take the electric car maker private.

The Friday verdict, issued by a nine-person Northern California jury, represents a legal victory for the 51-year-old billionaire, who has seen the value of his Tesla holdings decline some 44% over the past year.

During the trial, Musk personally took the witness stand to defend the tweets, testifying he believed he had a handshake agreement in 2018 with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to convert Tesla, which is a publicly traded company, into a private one. It was the Saudis, he said, who subsequently reneged on the deal.

Continue reading “Jury finds Elon Musk did not defraud Tesla investors with infamous ‘funding secured’ claim” »

This is the BMW electric wingsuit 2021.

BMW Group will present the first electric drive system for a wingsuit with which the centuries-old dream of flying can be realised in a completely novel way. The innovative drive module and the likewise entirely newly designed wingsuit were developed in a cooperation between BMW i, Designworks and the professional wingsuit pilot Peter Salzmann from Austria. His maiden flight with the Electrified Wingsuit by BMW i was visually captured in an elaborately staged video documentation. The spectacular film, which will be seen for the first time in the run-up to the #NEXTGen 2020, shows impressively how BMW eDrive technology is able to make a lasting change to the individual mobility experience.

Continue reading “Meet BMW Electric Wingsuit — the future of individual flying is now” »

Sometimes, the most complex problems can be solved with the simplest approaches. Such was the case for researchers at UC Santa Barbara as they tried to resolve a longstanding issue of fluid friction—the resistance between an object moving through fluid, or conversely, a stationary object with fluid flowing around or through it. It’s also known as drag.

“We had built a theory, but it was a very messy problem,” said mechanical engineering professor Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz. Their problem dealt in particular with superhydrophobic surfaces (SHS), which are seen as a potential solution to the problem of drag, a phenomenon that reduces the efficiency of things traveling through water, like cargo ships, and increases the energy expenditure to pump liquids through pipes.

Their calculations for an effective SHS encompassed 10 complex parameters, but as it turns out, the ability to predict if an SHS will perform as intended boils down to just one. Their research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Phone and electric car batteries are made with cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cobalt Red author Siddharth Kara describes the conditions for workers as a “horror show.”

A judge in Colombia caused a stir by announcing he had used the AI chatbot ChatGPT in preparing a ruling in a children’s medical rights case.

Judge Juan Manuel Padilla said he used the text-generating bot in a case involving a request to exonerate an autistic child from paying fees for medical appointments, therapy and transportation given his parents’ limited income.

Padilla told Blu Radio on Tuesday that ChatGPT and other such programs could be useful to “facilitate the drafting of texts” but “not with the aim of replacing” judges.