Lifeboat Foundation

Supersonic air travel is back. 15 years after the Concorde was grounded, everyone from aerospace companies to NASA to small startups is working to bring back ultrafast civilian aircraft. We take a look at the engineering challenges that make supersonic flight so difficult, and try to figure out what’s different about this new generation of planes.

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Continue reading “Supersonic air travel is finally coming back” »

The driver was arrested for drunk driving.

Right now, in the desert just east of Reno, Nevada, Tesla is drilling into recently laid asphalt to install more electric vehicle chargers in the parking lot of the Gigafactory. The company has hired so many new workers in recent years that it needs more space to let them charge their Nissan Leafs, Chevy Bolts, Toyota Priuses, and, of course, Teslas. But before long, those chargers will be ripped right back out, along with the asphalt, and moved to a new spot to make room for more factory space.

Delta says the Atlanta airport’s Terminal F has become the “first biometric terminal” in the United States where passengers can use facial recognition technology “from curb to gate.”

Following the unveiling of the Rivian R1T all-electric pickup truck, we took a closer look at what is becoming one of the most anticipated EVs scheduled to come out in the next two years.

Here’s a ton of pictures, videos, and GIFs of the Rivian R1T, and why I ordered one.

Continue reading “Closer look at Rivian’s R1T all-electric pickup truck and why I ordered it” »

A few years back, we heard about Mobile Recon Systems’ KittyHawk, a large-ish quadcopter that could carry three GoPro cameras. Well, the Kentucky-based company has now announced the new Dauntless UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), which can lift and transport over 200 lb (90 kg).

Volvo is about to launch its first-ever commercial operation using its driverless truck technology. A deal with a Norwegian mining firm will see six of its autonomous vehicles carry limestone between the mine and a port in an operation aimed at boosting productivity and reliability, as well as safety.

All of today’s computing takes its root from the world of “bits”, where a transistor bit, which lies at the heart of any computing chip, can only be in one of two electrical states: on or off. When on, the bit takes on a value of “1” and when off, it takes on a value of “0”, constraining the bit to only one of two (binary) values. All tasks performed by a computer-like device, whether a simple calculator or a sophisticated computer, are constrained by this binary rule.

Eight bits make up what is called a “byte”. Today, our computing is based on increasing the number of bytes into kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and so on. All computing advances we have had thus far, including artificially intelligent programmes, and driverless cars are ultimately reduced to the binary world of the bit.

This is a natural extension of western thought; for centuries, western philosophy has followed the principles of Aristotelian logic, which is based on the law of identity (A is A), the law of contradiction (A is not non-A), and the law of the excluded middle (A cannot be both A and non-A at the same time, just as non-A cannot be both non-A and A at the same time).

Continue reading “Opinion: Some months ago, I introduced the idea of quantum computing in this column” »

Galaxies are found uniformly everywhere in the Universe, except in the Milky Way’s plane. Here’s why.