Lifeboat Foundation

A lava flow on Kilauea was moving at the speed of 300 yards per hour on Saturday.

Red is the highest level of alert to aviation, meaning that either an eruption is forecast to be imminent with significant emission of ash into the atmosphere likely — as is the case currently in Hawaii — or an eruption is underway with significant emission of ash into the atmosphere. Either way, this could mean disruptions are possible in aviation around the big island of Hawaii for the foreseeable future, depending on what happens.

Ash clouds from volcanoes can clog the engines of airplanes and cause them to malfunction — or stop working altogether. According to this article from the World Organization of Volcano Observatories:

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk outlined plans to use The Boring Company’s hyperloop to link city centers to spaceports, which in turn will be used to transport humans across the planet in under an hour using the SpaceX BFR as an “Earth-to-Earth” transit system.

The power of the cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning is making smart cities and data-based Location of Things navigation a reality. Join the Principal Product Manager for Microsoft Azure Maps and others and learn how advanced location technology will revolutionize everything from autonomous cars to connected cities. Don’t miss this VB Live event!

Register here for free.

Location data is the foundation of technology: It’s what binds a device and a user, a user and the environment they’re in. And as location data moves to the cloud and gets smarter, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the number of potential applications for smart location data is exploding, says Chris Pendleton, Principal PM for Azure Maps. We’re on the threshold of creating a smarter society, built on the hundreds of millions of connected devices that together create The Location of Things.

Continue reading “How Microsoft is using location data to map the future (VB Live)” »

Asia-focused English-language publication that brings you insights about business, finance, economic and political newsand analysis for Asia, by Asia on asia.nikkei.com

Billionaire Elon Musk says he’s almost completed a tunnel under a Los Angeles suburb to test a novel transportation system that would scoot commuters underground on electric sleds called skates.

Musk tweeted Thursday that, pending regulatory approvals, free rides will be offered to the public in a few months. He also posted an Instagram video of the interior of the tunnel.

Last year, the Hawthorne City Council approved an approximately 2-mile (3.2-kilometer) test tunnel from Musk’s SpaceX rocket plant to a point east of Los Angeles International Airport.

We’ve all dreamed of owning, or at the very least being a passenger of, a flying car. It’s the sci-fi dream that never transpired — until recently, that is. With a growing emphasis of developing flying taxis among several different companies, one wonders if the revolutionary Tesla Motors has plans to join in on this new venture.

Could Elon Musk’s random tweet from late last year be an indicator of Tesla’s interest in flying cars and their joining of this brand new “space race?”

Taking the road less traveled is extremely difficult for self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles rely on highly visible lane markings, as well as detailed 3D maps in order to navigate their environment safely. Which is why most of the major companies have eschewed testing on unmapped rural roads in favor of suburbs and cities.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new system that allows self-driving cars to drive on roads they’ve never been on before without 3D maps. Called MapLite, the system combines simple GPS data that you’d find on Google Maps with a series of sensors that observe the road conditions.

Continue reading “MIT built a self-driving car that can navigate unmapped country roads” »

ULA has picked the RL10, an engine manufactured by Aerojet Rocketdyne, to propel the upper stage of its next generation rocket, the Vulcan It’s a big hardware decision for ULA, but the company has yet to make a much more anticipated choice for the vehicle: which will be the main engine?