Lifeboat Foundation

An electrochemical reaction that splits apart water molecules to produce oxygen is at the heart of multiple approaches aiming to produce alternative fuels for transportation. But this reaction has to be facilitated by a catalyst material, and today’s versions require the use of rare and expensive elements such as iridium, limiting the potential of such fuel production.

Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed an entirely new type of catalyst material, called a metal hydroxide-organic framework (MHOF), which is made of inexpensive and abundant components. The family of materials allows engineers to precisely tune the catalyst’s structure and composition to the needs of a particular chemical process, and it can then match or exceed the performance of conventional, more expensive catalysts.

The findings are described today in the journal Nature Materials, in a paper by MIT postdoc Shuai Yuan, graduate student Jiayu Peng, Professor Yang Shao-Horn, Professor Yuriy Román-Leshkov, and nine others.

Russia launched attacks on major cities and airports across Ukraine, shelling more than a dozen cities and towns and crossing the border in multiple locations.

A new report claims that Tesla is starting work on building a new factory adjacent to Gigafactory Shanghai in order to double production capacity to two million cars annually.

Tesla currently operates two main factories, Tesla Fremont and Gigafactory Shanghai, and it has Gigafactory Texas and Gigafactory Berlin slowly starting to ramp up production.

Those four projects alone should push Tesla’s production capacity beyond three million vehicles annually by the end of next year, but the automaker has much greater ambitions for this decade that will require several more factories. The company recently confirmed that it plans to announce a new location for a factory by the end of this year.

Elon Musk’s back at it again, folks — and this time, his attorney is accusing the federal government of leaking.

Following up on his claim that the Securities and Exchange Commission was trying to harass him into silence, Musk’s attorney accused the commission of “leaking certain information” in an ongoing retaliation campaign against the Tesla and SpaceX CEO.

This alleged campaign supposedly began back in 2018, when the SEC investigated Musk for tweeting about selling Tesla stock at $420 a share and taking the company private, eventually charging him with misleading investors. Though that case was settled in 2018 after Musk and Tesla paid $20 million each in fines, new reporting about the commission subpoenaing the CEO in recent months has reignited the debacle.

Imagine a field of wheat that extends to the horizon, being grown for flour that will be made into bread to feed cities’ worth of people. Imagine that all authority for tilling, planting, fertilizing, monitoring and harvesting this field has been delegated to artificial intelligence: algorithms that control drip-irrigation systems, self-driving tractors and combine harvesters, clever enough to respond to the weather and the exact needs of the crop. Then imagine a hacker messes things up.

A new risk analysis, published today in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, warns that the future use of artificial intelligence in agriculture comes with substantial potential risks for farms, farmers and food security that are poorly understood and under-appreciated.

“The idea of intelligent machines running farms is not science fiction. Large companies are already pioneering the next generation of autonomous ag-bots and decision support systems that will replace humans in the field,” said Dr. Asaf Tzachor in the University of Cambridge’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), first author of the paper.

A new artificial intelligence program has beaten the world’s best players in the popular PlayStation racing game Gran Turismo Sport. But the impact could be felt far beyond that.

This makes too much sense not to try.

Could passenger planes begin flying in formation to draft each other’s wingtip vortex effects? One Airbus-based startup concept thinks so. The concept uses a formation idea inspired by birds, who commute north to south and back in large V shapes to capitalize on the updraft generated by the birds in front.

✈ You love badass planes. So do we. Let’s nerd out over them together.

Continue reading “Airliners Could Soon Fly in Formation, Just Like a Flock of Birds” »

The Russian Army has sent its BMPT-72 or Terminator 2 armored fighting vehicle towards the Ukrainian border area. Nearly 150,000 and 200,000 Russian troops are reportedly poised for a possible invasion of Ukraine. Experts say that BMPT-72 could be used for a potential campaign in an urban environment inside Ukraine.

00:00-Introduction.
00:15 — Russia Sends BMPT-72 Towards Ukrainian Border?
01:25 — What Is BMPT-72?
03:00 — BMPT-72’s Firepower?
03:48 — What BMPT-72’s Deployment Shows?

Continue reading “Putin Sends BMPT-72 ‘Terminator’ Fighting Vehicles Towards Ukraine l Russia Planning Combat Ops?” »