Lifeboat Foundation

The only in-flight beverages on the 11-seat private jet were bottled water and a genetically modified bacterial slurry designed to prevent the worst effects of hangovers.

A handful of passengers on the short evening flight from Hawthorne to the edge of the Mojave — venture capitalists, a man with a mushroom-based manufacturing company and this reporter — downed the mixture. The pilot, along with two senior SpaceX engineers, politely declined.

At the Apple Valley Airport, a helicopter waited to take us beyond a far ridge, farther from civilization. Miles from paved roads were two tents, a ring of shipping containers and an “H” painted on the dirt marking a makeshift helipad.

Elon Musk took to his Instagram to show off the elevator that could bring your car under LA traffic as a part of The Boring Company. See it in action.

The newest update to Musk’s “Boring Company,” which wants to transport your car in tunnels under LA traffic.

Tesla’s air filtration system with “Bioweapon Defense Mode” is proving useful for the owners affected by the current wildfires in California.

Watch an owner using the system while going through a hellish-looking road with scary air quality.

Continue reading “Watch Tesla with ‘Bioweapon Defense’ air system drive through scary wildfires” »

Researchers at TU Delft have developed a new supercompressible but strong material without conducting any experimental tests at all, using only artificial intelligence (AI). “AI gives you a treasure map, and the scientist needs to find the treasure,” says Miguel Bessa, first author of a publication on this subject in Advanced Materials on 14 October.

Foldable bicycle

Continue reading “Researchers design new material using artificial intelligence” »

A team of researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and the Université Paul Sabatier-Toulouse III (France) have developed a system that is capable of managing all traffic in a city, which will help to prevent traffic jams while reducing the driving times of vehicles and pollution levels. The system has been designed for autonomous vehicles and includes a route provider service capable of forecasting the present and future density of traffic in the city. It also takes that information into account when choosing new routes. The work has been published in Electronics.

Unlike existing systems that can suggest alternative routes depending on the bottlenecks at a certain time, the new system makes it possible to find out the present and future density of traffic in the entire metropolitan area, and controls traffic as a whole, aiming to minimize or totally eliminate traffic jams. In addition, it allows including different criteria—environmental, atypical situations, accidents, etc.—to dynamically provide advice about routes.

“Our proposal makes it easier for authorities to restrict or eliminate traffic in a certain area during the time period they find appropriate. For example, reducing traffic next to schools during the entry/exit hours, or in areas where ambulances circulate or an accident has happened, etc.,” explains Carlos Tavares Calafate, researcher at the Networking Research Group-DISCA of the UPV and coordinator of the work.

Elon Musk gave another hint about the Tesla Pickup truck design, which he now calls ‘Cybertruck’. The CEO says that it looks like ‘an armored personnel carrier from the future.’

The CEO shocked some when he said that the Tesla Pickup Truck will have a ‘really futuristic-like cyberpunk Blade Runner’ design without explaining what that meant other than saying that ‘it won’t be for everyone’.

Continue reading “Elon Musk: Tesla Pickup looks like ‘an armored personnel carrier from the future’” »

Physicists and materials scientists have developed a compact optical device containing vertically stacked metasurfaces that can generate microscopic text and full-color holograms for encrypted data storage and color displays. Yueqiang Hu and a research team in Advanced Design and Manufacturing for Vehicle Body in the College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering in China implemented a 3D integrated metasurface device to facilitate miniaturization of the optical device. Using metasurfaces with ultrathin and compact characteristics, the research team designed optical elements by engineering the wavefront of light at the subwavelength scale. The metasurfaces possessed great potential to integrate multiple functions into the miniaturized optoelectronic systems. The work is now published on Light: Science & Applications.

Since existing research on multiplexing in the 2-D plane remains to fully incorporate capabilities of metasurfaces for multi-tasking, in the present work, the team demonstrated a 3D integrated metasurface device. For this, they stacked a hologram metasurface on a monolithic Fabry-Pérot (FP) cavity-based color filter microarray to achieve simultaneous cross-talk, polarization-independent and highly efficient full-color holography and microprint functions. The dual function of the device outlined a new scheme for data recording, security, encryption color displays and information processing applications. The work on 3D integration can be extended to establish flat multi-tasking optical systems that include a variety of functional metasurface layers.

Metasurfaces open a new direction in optoelectronics, allowing researchers to design optical elements by shaping the wavefront of electromagnetic waves relative to size, shape and arrangement of structures at the subwavelength. Physicists have engineered a variety of metasurface-based devices including lenses, polarization converters, holograms and orbital angular momentum generators (OAM). They have demonstrated the performance of metasurface-based devices to even surpass conventional refractive elements to construct compact optical devices with multiple functions. Such devices are, however, withheld by shortcomings due to a reduced efficiency of plasmonic nanostructures, polarization requirements, large crosstalk and complexity of the readout for multiwavelength and broadband optical devices. Research teams can therefore stack 3D metasurface-based devices with different functions in the vertical direction to combine the advantages of each device.

A biomimetic ceramic that is strong and tough could be used to make lightweight vehicles.

Porsche and Boeing are teaming up to build luxury, electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft for rich people to fly above traffic-choked cities. They are the latest companies to announce intentions to explore the risky and potentially dangerous urban air mobility market.

Porsche and Boeing have signed a nonexclusive memorandum of understanding, which means they will look for ways to work together, but they aren’t locked into a binding agreement. As part of the partnership, the companies say they will “create an international team to address various aspects of urban air mobility, including analysis of the market potential for premium vehicles and possible use cases.”

The word “premium” would seem to indicate that this won’t be a “flying car” for the masses, which is fair considering we’re talking about Porsche here. Many companies interested in creating a network of electric flying taxis have stretched credulity by insisting that people at all income levels will be able to afford to purchase tickets. But given the costs associated with creating an infrastructure to support electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, including landing pads and charging stations, it seems clear that it will be marketed toward the very wealthy — at least to start.