Lifeboat Foundation

Mobileye is an an Israeli subsidiary of chipmaker Intel (who knew?) that develops self-driving cars and advanced driver-assistance systems. This week at CES the company announced a new chip called EyeQ Ultra, part of its system-on-a-chip line, saying the chip will be able to do 176 trillion operations per second and is purpose-built for autonomous driving.

Geely, meanwhile, is a carmaker based in Hangzhou, China. Founded in 1997, the company’s full name is Zhejiang Geely Holding Group; they’re the largest private automaker in China, and reportedly sold over 1.3 million cars in 2020. Among Geely’s holdings is Swedish carmaker Volvo, as well as an electric vehicle brand called Zeekr that was launched in March of 2021.

The new self-driving car will be a collaboration between Geely and Mobileye, and will be produced under the Zeekr brand. To be clear, the car still won’t quite approach the put-your-feet-up driverless vision. There are five levels of automation in driving, with Level 5 being full autonomy, in which the vehicle can drive itself anywhere (around cities, on highways, on rural roads, etc.) in any conditions (rain, sun, fog, etc.) without human intervention. The Zeekr car will supposedly be Level 4, which means it will be able to operate without a safety driver under certain conditions (namely, good weather), and will still have a steering wheel.

Tesla’s well-established Supercharger network would be a willing participant in the Infrastructure Bill’s US$7.5 billion effort to build 500,000 EV charging stations nationwide. In comments sent to the FHA, however, Tesla notes that it’d like its exclusive Supercharger stations to get the same grant treatment as any public stations it builds where non-Tesla cars can be charged.

MANSFIELD — Gas prices at the pump across Ohio have been on the rise for a while, but Russia’s invasion this week — and other more natural factors — could.

MOUNT VERNON — Gas prices at the pump across Ohio have been on the rise for a while, but Russia’s invasion this week — and other more natural factors — could make those prices rise even more.

The American Automobile Association reported Friday that Ohio’s average price at the pump for regular gas rose $0.01 from Thursday. It’s up $0.11 from last week and $0.27 from a month ago.

Continue reading “Gas prices continue to skyrocket, but Russian invasion of Ukraine only 1 factor” »

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.