Tesla has unveiled a new Roadster, the new version of its original sports car at a launch event in Hawthorne, California, on Nov. 16
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It’s the fastest production car ever made, according to Elon Musk, with speeds of just 1.9 seconds for 0 to 60 4.2 seconds for 0 to 100. It can handle a quarter-mile in 8.9 seconds.
“This is the base model,” Musk said, then went on to mention that its top speed is above 250 mph. and it has a 200 kWh battery pack that offers 630 miles of highway driving range.
It’s also a 2 by 2 four-seater, and it’s available in 2020 starting at $200,000, with the first 1,000 sold being Founder’s Series models that will retail for $250,000 apiece.
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Tesla released its new Semi truck at a launch event in Hawthorne, California, on Nov. 16
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The Semi can accelerate from zero to sixty in just five seconds, and haul 80,000 pounds. Unlike other trucks, the Tesla Semi places the driver in the center of the front vehicle. Instead of the usual levers, two touchscreens are placed beside the steering wheel. It will also be semi-autonomous, capable of keeping lane and braking on its own.
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The truck will have a range of 500 miles when fully charged. Plugging into one of Tesla’s fast-chargers for 30 minutes will give the Semi a 400-mile range. The Semi will be built on a truck chassis with components from Tesla’s Model 3 line, the mass-market vehicle the company plans to make in huge volumes (about 500,000 per year after 2018).
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The first deliveries of the semi are expected in 2019, the same year production begins. In May, Musk said the truck will exploit manufacturing efficiencies of the Model 3, making it “a very compelling product that has low unit cost.”
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Boston Dynamics has shown off its new version of SpotMini, but now it’s also catching us up with its bipedal Atlas bot, the most humanoid of its creations.
Atlas can now jump from elevated block to elevated block, and do a complete about-face in the air. It can leap pretty high, and also do a backflip – and then celebrate its backflipping ability.
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Research from @nvidia has taken neural network image synthesis to much higher visual definition than has previously been achieved.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are artificial intelligence algorithms that use unsupervised learning.
Typically, a GAN consists of two networks; a generator and a discriminator. The generator is trained to produce a sample image, and the discriminator is trained to asses whether the image is from the training set or a fake from the generator.
In the image above, you can see the progress of the network being trained over the course of 19 days. You can also witness a loop of generated faces transitioning one to the next in the latent space.
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Boston Dynamics ‘new’ SpotMini robot looks ready for a walk
The all-electric quadruped is built for “offices, homes and outdoors.”
Boston Dynamics isn’t a part of Google/Alphabet anymore, but that won’t stand in the way. Described only as the “new SpotMini” it looks sleeker and more production ready than any version we’ve seen before. There’s no creepy manipulator arm mounted on top and it’s covered in plastic, revealing only a set of 3D vision cameras on the exterior.
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Installation by @royrobotiks features a collection of wind-powered music boxes (which you can make yourself):
A cluster of windmills is installed above the heads of the pedestrians on a public square in Namur, Belgium. Once the wind blows, each propeller powers a little music box that plays “Für Elise”. Since all music boxes are driven asynchronously, the single notes and chords of Beethoven’s iconic music piece are constantly re-arranged. The result is a wind powered sound installation which scrambles the original and permanently produces new compositions based on one of the world’s most well known melodies.
So I’ve been reading about historic glass-techniques for my archaeology course and I’ve become obsessed with uranium-glass. It was popular in the United States up until the Cold War, when uranium stopped being commercially available because the US government was stocking huge amounts of it for use in nuclear weapons. It’s kind of funny to imagine people in 1880s-1940s eating dinner off of glowing dishes.
In this week’s Q&A on the ABC, the American cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson gushed about the prospects of mining in space, and the benefits that might afford humanity.
How about mining an asteroid for natural resources? […] There are more natural resources on asteroids than have ever been mined in the history of the Earth. So in 100 years […] all wars over limited resources are over because we have access to the unlimited resources of our back yard and that new back yard is our solar system.
Is this really plausible? What can we mine in space? And will it really deliver world peace, or just another realm for competition and conflict? Perhaps a look at the immediate past and near future may help us answer some of these questions.
Simulations and analysis provide new atomic-scale clues to material’s enhanced hydrogen storage properties
A powdery mix of metal nanocrystals wrapped in single-layer sheets of carbon atoms, developed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), shows promise for safely storing hydrogen for use with fuel cells for passenger vehicles and other uses. And now, a new study provides insight into the atomic details of the crystals’ ultrathin coating and how it serves as selective shielding while enhancing their performance in hydrogen storage.
The study, led by Berkeley Lab researchers, drew upon a range of Lab expertise and capabilities to synthesize and coat the magnesium crystals, which measure only 3-4 nanometers (billionths of a meter) across; study their nanoscale chemical composition with X-rays; and develop computer simulations and supporting theories to better understand how the crystals and their carbon coating function together.
The science team’s findings could help researchers understand how similar coatings could also enhance the performance and stability of other materials that show promise for hydrogen storage applications. The research project is one of several efforts within a multi-lab R&D effort known as the Hydrogen Materials – Advanced Research Consortium (HyMARC) established as part of the Energy Materials Network by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fuel Cell Technologies Office in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
