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Imaginary Friends: Barcelona art show aims to connect with our inner child
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 05:00:05 GMT
Exhibition evoking childhood experiences brings together installations by nine artists
Nine leading contemporary artists have come together to create an interactive exhibition in Barcelona for kids – and anyone in touch with their inner child.
“Before the pandemic we had the idea of mounting an exhibition of contemporary art for people of all ages, something that children could relate to but also so that older people could relive the experience of being a child and participate as if they were children,” said Martina Millà, who jointly curated the show at the Fundació Joan Miró with Patrick Ronse, the artistic director of the Be-Part contemporary art platform in Belgium.
Continue reading...Down, but not out. As 1-0 defeats go this was the vaguely encouraging kind for Arsenal, who even in defeat will leave Germany with the knowledge that progress remains within their grasp. Lea Schüller’s towering header was the difference between the sides here, but over the 90 minutes Arsenal created enough chances to offer plenty of hope for the second leg at the Emirates Stadium.
The burning question, of course, is whether Arsenal will manage to take any of them. Twenty-five shots came and went for them, seven of them to the luckless Stina Blackstenius. But Bayern really did need to be at their resilient best in a pulsating second half, as an injury-depleted Arsenal managed to exert some serious pressure against a team that has conceded just four league goals all season. Caitlin Foord was probably Arsenal’s most dangerous player, cutting in off the left flank and creating all kinds of problems.
And the Allianz Arena was an imposing sight at kick-off, with its rolling waves of noise, its futuristic red lighting scheme, the smell of bratwurst wafting across a crowd that numbered a very healthy 20,000. Tactically and tonally there has always been a certain extra frisson to these big Champions League games, a sense of stepping into the unknown. This was the first time Bayern and Arsenal had ever met in a competitive game, and as well as they knew each other individually there was also a certain edginess to both sides at times that manifested itself in some scruffy touches and slightly frantic defending.
It was a pleasingly open game too, with little of the caution you often expect in a first leg. Schuller’s goal towards the end of the first half came from her fourth shot, as Bayern sought time and again to spring the Arsenal offside trap and set her free down the channels. In midfield Georgia Stanway and Sarah Zadrazil grappled for supremacy with Lia Wälti and Kim Little: sometimes figuratively, often literally. For Bayern, Glodis Viggósdóttir was titanic in defence, particularly as Arsenal stepped up their assault in the second half.
Far-right rhetoric and tactics are being imported wholesale from the UK into Ireland. The effects on Irish politics are yet to be seen
After years of bucking the European trend, an organised anti-refugee backlash has finally hit Ireland. Recent protests involved threats to burn down a hotel housing refugees and, in a separate incident, there was a vigilante attack on a homeless migrant camp. These ugly scenes followed months of protests led by the far right and simmering community tensions over the provision of local accommodation to refugees. But where has this come from?
Not previously high on the agenda of voters more concerned with a crumbling, two-tier healthcare system and a chronic housing crisis, a recent poll found that a small majority (56%) of Irish respondents believe the country has accepted too many refugees over the past year.
Colin Gannon is an Irish journalist based in London
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com
Continue reading...Verdict by hardline Tory MPs follows decision by DUP to also oppose Windsor framework
Rishi Sunak is set to push his revamped Northern Ireland protocol through the Commons despite hardline Conservative Brexiters rejecting the plan as an unacceptable failure that does not deliver any of its stated claims.
The verdict of the European Research Group (ERG), which followed a similar rejection by the Democratic Unionist party on Monday, means Sunak is likely to face a Tory rebellion over the revised post-Brexit trade arrangements in Northern Ireland on Wednesday, although it appears unlikely to be significant.
Continue reading...Rishi Sunak’s attitude ‘much more responsible’ than that of Boris Johnson, says former EU negotiator
The EU’s former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has praised the agreement on Northern Ireland between the union and the British government as a positive step that turns a page in relations between the two sides.
In an interview with the Guardian, the veteran French politician said the Windsor framework agreement signed by Rishi Sunak and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, last month, “operationalised” the Northern Ireland protocol he had negotiated with the British government in 2019. “There was a spirit of goodwill for the first time in three years, to find solutions that are concrete, operational and realistic.”
Continue reading...The Chelsea manager, Emma Hayes, has told her players they cannot win their Women’s Champions League quarter-final in the first leg against Lyon at the Groupama Stadium on Wednesday, but they can “absolutely lose it”.
Hayes’s team face the eight-time winners and defending champions who have not been in perfect form this season, having endured a heavy 5-1 defeat at home against Arsenal during the group stages. But key players who were injured earlier in the campaign, such as the Australia defender Ellie Carpenter, are back in Lyon’s squad and it has led to a flawless run of games. Lyon have not dropped any points in any competition since they drew 0-0 with Juventus in the Champions League group stage in December.
Continue reading...Russian leader reacts to comments by UK defence minister that Britain will supply armour-piercing rounds to Kyiv
Vladimir Putin has sought to exploit a British statement that it would supply Ukraine with tank shells made with depleted uranium, arguing that the delivery of the armour-piercing weapons would prompt a Russian response.
The Russian leader’s comments, made during the visit to Moscow by his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, came in response to a parliamentary answer given by a junior British defence minister in the House of Lords on Monday.
Continue reading...President Macron’s decision to force through his pension reforms without a vote damages French democracy
A few months before sweeping to power in the 2017 presidential election, Emmanuel Macron published a memoir-cum-personal manifesto, Revolution. In it, he made the case for rebellion against allegedly outmoded institutions and ideas that were holding back France. Six years on, it is the popular revolts against Mr Macron’s own policies which have taken centre-stage.
Recent months have seen some of the largest protests in the history of the Fifth Republic, as Mr Macron has sought to push through a deeply unpopular plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. On Monday, his government survived a related parliamentary motion of no confidence by the skin of its teeth. This followed the president’s controversial – though constitutional – decision to use executive powers to get his way, bypassing a vote in the national assembly that he thought he might lose.
Continue reading...Uncollected rubbish piled up over half of Paris is but one sign of discontent with a president many think isn’t listening to them
Renaud, 49, leaned out of the window of his Paris bin lorry, which was being held in its depot by a barricade of strikers. “Emmanuel Macron doesn’t seem to be listening to the anger out there,” he said. “People don’t think we’re in a democracy any more.”
A refuse-truck driver for 22 years, Renaud had watched as his garbage processing plant was blocked for the 15th day of a rubbish-collection strike that has all but submerged half of Paris under 10,000 tonnes of waste. He couldn’t afford to strike and risk losing his daily income but understood the rage over Macron’s decision to use executive powers to push through an unpopular rise in the French pension age to 64 without a vote in parliament.
Continue reading...But US warns against ‘any tactical move by Russia to freeze the war on its own terms’
Vladimir Putin has welcomed China’s proposals for peace in Ukraine at a joint press conference with Xi Jinping in Moscow – a plan the west has warned would allow the Kremlin to “freeze” its territorial gains in the country.
Speaking at the Kremlin during a joint news conference after the second day of talks with China’s president Xi Jinping, Putin said Beijing’s peace plan “correlates to the point of view of the Russian Federation” and said that Ukraine’s western allies so far have shown no interest in it.
Continue reading...Defence team had argued David Hunter’s confession should be ruled inadmissible as evidence in trial
A court in Cyprus has ruled that the confession of a retired Northumberland coalminer accused of murdering his terminally ill wife was obtained lawfully and can be used in evidence against him.
In what will amount to a major setback for David Hunter, 75, who has campaigned to be tried on the lesser charge of manslaughter, Judge Michalis Droussiotis announced that statements of admission made by the Briton were admissible.
Continue reading...Russian cruise missiles destroyed in Crimea blast; Xi Jinping meets Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on day two of state visit
Russian cruise missiles intended for use by Moscow’s Black Sea fleet have been destroyed in an explosion in the city of Dzhankoi in the north of the Crimean peninsula, Ukraine’s defence ministry has said. Ihor Ivin, the Russian-installed head of the Dzhankoi administration, was quoted as saying the city had come under attack from drones, and that a 33-year-old man had suffered a shrapnel injury from a downed drone.
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are holding a second set of talks on Tuesday. The Chinese president’s trip to Moscow has been viewed as a major boost for his strategic partner Putin. The Chinese leader is expected to continue to position himself as a potential peacemaker in the Ukraine war during his two-day visit to Russia – his first state visit since Putin’s invasion.
Xi met Russian prime minister Mikhail Mishustin on Tuesday morning, and invited both Mishustin and Putin to visit China later this year.
China’s state media has extensively and positively covered the visit. Most coverage has focused on Xi’s comments and talking about how strong the relationship is. None of the pieces mentioned the recent ICC arrest warrant for the Russian president over alleged war crimes committed in Ukraine.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken criticised Xi on Monday for providing “diplomatic cover” for Russia to continue committing war crimes. Blinken said the visit “suggests that China feels no responsibility to hold the Kremlin accountable for the atrocities committed in Ukraine.” Blinken voiced scepticism over China’s “peace” proposals to end the Ukraine conflict, warning they could be a “stalling tactic” to help Russian troops on the ground in Ukraine.
Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida has arrived for talks with Zelenskiy. Kishida and Zelenskiy are expected to discuss Japanese support for the reconstruction of Ukraine. Kishida, who is to chair the Group of Seven summit in May, is the only G-7 leader who hasn’t visited Ukraine and was under pressure to do so at home.
Japan has continued to import Russian timber worth US$414m since the start of the war in Ukraine, according to a London-based NGO, which accused Tokyo of “helping to bankroll Putin’s bloody war” despite joining other countries in imposing sanctions on the Kremlin.
Iryna Vereshchuk, who is one of Ukraine’s deputy prime ministers and is the minister of reintegration of temporarily occupied territories, has said there is no confirmed time agreed for a mooted call between Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Xi.
Ukraine is holding its defence of the besieged eastern city of Bakhmut as Russian forces attempted to advance to the city centre, a Ukrainian general has said. There was intense fighting along the eastern frontline, he said on Tuesday.
Continue reading...The New York Times is reporting that a US citizen’s phone was hacked by the Predator spyware.
A U.S. and Greek national who worked on Meta’s security and trust team while based in Greece was placed under a yearlong wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service and hacked with a powerful cyberespionage tool, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and officials with knowledge of the case.
The disclosure is the first known case of an American citizen being targeted in a European Union country by the advanced snooping technology, the use of which has been the subject of a widening scandal in Greece. It demonstrates that the illicit use of spyware is spreading beyond use by authoritarian governments against opposition figures and journalists, and has begun to creep into European democracies, even ensnaring a foreign national working for a major global corporation...
Chinese and Russian leaders to discuss Ukraine in formal talks after friendly dinner, while Fumio Kishida meets Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv
Xi Jinping has invited Vladimir Putin to visit China this year in a symbolic show of support after the international criminal court issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s president over accusations of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children.
The Chinese leader extended the invitation during a meeting on Tuesday morning with the Russian prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, as part of his state visit to Moscow.
Continue reading...Kyiv claims cruise missiles hit in city of Dzhankoi, in attack Russian-installed official blames on drone
Russian cruise missiles of the type used by its Black Sea navy to target Ukraine have been destroyed in an explosion in the Crimean logistics hub of Dzhankoi, according to Ukrainian military intelligence.
The strike appeared to have come from a drone, with a video of the explosion showing it was immediately preceded by a loudly buzzing engine, similar in sound to Iranian-made kamikaze drones used previously to attack Ukraine.
Continue reading...Moody’s Investors Service on Tuesday revised its outlook on Swiss bank UBS AG UBSCH:UBSG to negative from stable, after a similar move by S&P Global Ratings on Monday.UBS agreed to take over Credit Suisse in a $3.25 billion deal announced on Sunday and brokered by the Swiss government and central bank. The tie-up “poses significant financial, cultural and franchise related integration challenges for UBSG, including: the need to retain key CSG personnel while the transaction is underway; the need to minimize the loss of overlapping clients in its Swiss banking and wealth management businesses; and the need to unify the cultures of two somewhat different organizations while ensuring that overall risk appetite and controls are both enhanced and or maintained at levels defined by UBSG,” said a team at Moody’s led by Alessandro Roccati,senior vice president, Financial Institutions Group. He added that “creditor protection at UBSG is expected to remain strong, supported by UBSG’s robust capitalization, strong global wealth management franchise and leading position in Swiss banking.” Shares of UBS rose 3.5% in Europe and U.S.-listed shares were 3% higher.
Market Pulse Stories are Rapid-fire, short news bursts on stocks and markets as they move. Visit MarketWatch.com for more information on this news.
A new series of long-distance hikes in Calabria take in captivating scenery and the legacy and legends of eco-conscious Francis of Paola, the first recorded vegan
A new sculpture appeared in a square in the town of Paola, Calabria, in April last year. It’s not the usual man on a horse, or even anything with legs; it’s a many-times-lifesize trout in grey stone – all fins, bulgy eyes and pout.
The unusual monument was erected to commemorate a miracle performed by the town’s patron saint, Francis. (He was actually made a saint in 1519, but Covid delayed the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of his canonisation.) This Saint Francis followed in the spiritual – and, for a time, literal – footsteps of his better-known predecessor, Francis of Assisi, but dialled up his reverence for the natural world and became one of the first recorded vegans.
Continue reading...Chinese leader expected to position himself as peacemaker but US condemns Xi for providing ‘diplomatic cover’ for atrocities in Ukraine
Xi Jinping said China was ready with Russia “to stand guard over the world order based on international law” as he arrived for a state visit to Moscow that comes days after Vladimir Putin was made the subject of an arrest warrant by the international criminal court.
The Chinese leader is expected to position himself as a potential peacemaker in the Ukraine war during his two-day visit to Russia – his first state visit since Putin’s invasion. For his part, the Russian president will be hoping to project unity in the face of western isolation, as the US condemned Xi for providing “diplomatic cover” for Moscow to continue to commit further crimes in Ukraine.
Continue reading...Home secretary’s claims of ‘constructive’ talks regarding Strasbourg’s injunctions disputed by legal scholars
Legal experts have cast doubt on the UK’s claims of “possible reforms” to European court of human rights procedures that stopped an asylum seeker from being deported to Rwanda last year.
During a two-day visit to the country’s capital, Kigali, Suella Braverman told a selected group of government-friendly papers that she was “encouraged” by the government’s “constructive” talks with Strasbourg to overhaul court injunctions. An ECHR injunction last June prevented an Iraqi national from being deported from the UK to the east African country.
Continue reading...
Dead, and in a jacket and tie. That’s how he was on 1 December 1948, when two men found him slumped against a retaining wall on the beach at Somerton, a suburb of Adelaide, Australia.
The Somerton Man’s body was found on a beach in 1948. Nobody came forward to identify him.
JAMES DURHAM
Police distributed a photograph, but no one came forward to claim the body. Eyewitnesses reported having seen the man, whom the newspapers dubbed the Somerton Man and who appeared to be in his early 40s, lying on the beach earlier, perhaps at one point moving his arm, and they had concluded that he was drunk. The place of death led the police to treat the case as a suicide, despite the apparent lack of a suicide note. The presence of blood in the stomach, a common consequence of poisoning, was noted at the autopsy. Several chemical assays failed to identify any poison; granted, the methods of the day were not up to the task.
The place on Somerton Beach where the man was found dead is marked with an X.
NEWS CORP./ALAMY
Policemen recovered the man’s suitcase from the Adelaide city railway station and examined its contents.
NEWS CORP./ALAMY
The man’s fingerprints, taken after autopsy, were sent to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, which found no match.
DEREK ABBOTT
There was speculation of foul play. Perhaps the man was a spy who had come in from the cold; 1948 was the year after the Cold War got its name. This line of thought was strengthened, a few months later, by codelike writings in a book that came to be associated with the case.
These speculations aside, the idea that a person could simply die in plain view and without friends or family was shocking. This was a man with an athletic build, wearing a nice suit, and showing no signs of having suffered violence. The problem nagged many people over the years, and eventually it took hold of me. In the late 2000s, I began working on the Somerton Man mystery, devoting perhaps 10 hours a week to the research over the course of about 15 years.
Throughout my career, I have always been interested in cracking mysteries. My students and I used computational linguistics to identify which of the three authors of The Federalist Papers—Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay—was responsible for any given essay. We tried using the same method to confirm authorship of Biblical passages. More recently, we’ve been throwing some natural-language processing techniques into an effort to decode the Voynich Manuscript, an early 15th-century document written in an unknown language and an unknown script. These other projects yield to one or another key method of inquiry. The Somerton Man problem posed a broader challenge.
My one great advantage has been my access to students and to scientific instruments at the University of Adelaide, where I am a professor of electrical and electronic engineering. In 2009, I established a working group at the university’s Center for Biomedical Engineering.
One question surrounding the Somerton Man had already been solved by sleuths of a more literary bent. In 1949, a pathologist had found a bit of paper concealed in one of the dead man’s pockets, and on it were printed the words Tamám Shud, the Persian for “finished.” The phrase appears at the end of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, a poem that remains popular to this day.
The police asked the public for copies of the book in which the final page had been torn out. A man found such a book in his car, where apparently it had been thrown in through an open window. The book proved a match.
The back cover of the book also included scribbled letters, which were at first thought to constitute an encrypted message. But statistical tests carried out by my team showed that it was more likely a string of the initial letters of words. Through computational techniques, we eliminated all of the cryptographic codes known in the 1940s, leaving as a remaining possibility a one-time pad, in which each letter is based on a secret source text. We ransacked the poem itself and other texts, including the Bible and the Talmud, but we never identified a plausible source text. It could have been a pedestrian aide-mémoire—to list the names of horses in an upcoming race, for example. Moreover, our research indicates that it doesn’t have the structural sophistication of a code. The Persian phrase could have been the man’s farewell to the world: his suicide note.
Also scribbled on the back cover was a telephone number that led to one Jo Thomson, a woman who lived merely a five-minute walk from where the Somerton Man had been found. Interviewers then and decades later reported that she had seemed evasive; after her death, some of her relatives and friends said they speculated that she must have known the dead man. I discovered a possible clue: Thomson’s son was missing his lateral incisors, the two teeth that normally flank the central incisors. This condition, found in a very small percentage of the population, is often congenital; oddly, the Somerton Man had it, too. Were they related?
And yet the attempt to link Thomson to the body petered out. Early in the investigation, she told the police that she had given a copy of the Rubáiyát to a lieutenant in the Australian Army whom she had known during the war, and indeed, that man turned out to own a copy. But Thomson hadn’t seen him since 1945, he was very much alive, and the last page of his copy was still intact. A trail to nowhere, one of many that were to follow.
We engineers in the 21st century had several other items to examine. First was a plaster death mask that had been made six months after the man died, during which time the face had flattened. We tried several methods to reconstruct its original appearance: In 2013 we commissioned a picture by Greg O’Leary, a professional portrait artist. Then, in 2020, we approached Daniel Voshart, who designs graphics for Star Trek movies. He used a suite of professional AI tools to create a lifelike reconstruction of the Somerton Man. Later, we obtained another reconstruction by Michael Streed, a U.S. police sketch artist. We published these images, together with many isolated facts about the body, the teeth, and the clothing, in the hope of garnering insights from the public. No luck.
As the death mask had been molded directly off the Somerton Man’s head, neck, and upper body, some of the man’s hair was embedded in the plaster of Paris—a potential DNA gold mine. At the University of Adelaide, I had the assistance of a hair forensics expert, Janette Edson. In 2012, with the permission of the police, Janette used a magnifying glass to find where several hairs came together in a cluster. She was then able to pull out single strands without breaking them or damaging the plaster matrix. She thus secured the soft, spongy hair roots as well as several lengths of hair shaft. The received wisdom of forensic science at the time held that the hair shaft would be useless for DNA analysis without the hair root.
Janette performed our first DNA analysis in 2015 and, from the hair root, was able to place the sample within a maternal genetic lineage, or haplotype, known as “H,” which is widely spread around Europe. (Such maternally inherited DNA comes not from the nucleus of a cell but from the mitochondria.) The test therefore told us little we hadn’t already known. The concentration of DNA was far too low for the technology of the time to piece together the sequencing we needed.
Fortunately, sequencing tools continued to improve. In 2018, Guanchen Li and Jeremy Austin, also at the University of Adelaide, obtained the entire mitochondrial genome from hair-root material and narrowed down the maternal haplotype to H4a1a1a.
However, to identify Somerton Man using DNA databases, we needed to go to autosomal DNA—the kind that is inherited from both parents. There are more than 20 such databases, 23andMe and Ancestry being the largest. These databases require sequences of from 500,000 to 2,000,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”). The concentration levels of autosomes in the human cell tend to be much lower than those of the mitochondria, and so Li and Austin were able to obtain only 50,000 SNPs, of which 16,000 were usable. This was a breakthrough, but it still wasn’t good enough to work on a database.
In 2022, at the suggestion of Colleen Fitzpatrick, a former NASA employee who had trained as a nuclear physicist but then became a forensic genetics expert, I sent a hair sample to Astrea Forensics, a DNA lab in the United States. This was our best hair-root sample, one that I had nervously guarded for 10 years. The result from Astrea came back—and it was a big flop.
Seemingly out of options, we tried a desperate move. We asked Astrea to analyze a 5-centimeter-long shaft of hair that had no root at all. Bang! The company retrieved 2 million SNPs. The identity of the Somerton Man was now within our reach.
So why did the rootless shaft work in our case?
The DNA analysis that police use for standard crime-solving relies on only 20 to 25 short tandem repeats (STRs) of DNA. That’s fine for police, who mostly do one-to-one matches to determine whether the DNA recovered at a crime scene matches a suspect’s DNA.
But finding distant cousins of the Somerton Man on genealogical databases constitutes a one-to-many search, and for that you typically need around 500,000 markers. For these genealogical searches, SNPs are used because they contain information on ethnicity and ancestry generally. Note that SNPs have around 50 to 150 base pairs of nucleotides, whereas typical STRs tend to be longer, containing 80 to 450 base pairs. The hair shaft contains DNA that is mostly fragmented, so it’s of little use when you’re seeking longer STR segments but it’s a great source of SNPs. So this is why crime forensics traditionally focused on the root and ignored the shaft, although this practice is now changing very slowly.
Another reason the shaft was such a trove of DNA is that keratin, its principal component, is a very tough protein, and it had protected the DNA fragments lodged within it. The 74-year-old soft spongy hair root, on the other hand, had not protected the DNA to the same extent. We set a world record for obtaining a human identification, using forensic genealogy, from the oldest piece of hair shaft. Several police departments in the United States now use hair shafts to retrieve DNA, as I am sure many will start to do in other countries, following our example.
Libraries of SNPs can be used to untangle the branching lines of descent in a family tree. We uploaded our 2 million SNPs to GEDmatch Pro, an online genealogical database located in Lake Worth, Fla. (and recently acquired by Qiagen, a biotech company based in the Netherlands). The closest match was a rather distant relative based in Victoria, Australia. Together with Colleen Fitzpatrick, I built out a family tree containing more than 4,000 people. On that tree we found a Charles Webb, son of a baker, born in 1905 in Melbourne, with no date of death recorded.
Charles never had children of his own, but he had five siblings, and I was able to locate some of their living descendants. Their DNA was a dead match. I also found a descendant of one of his maternal aunts, who agreed to undergo a test. When a positive result came through on 22 July 2022, we had all the evidence we needed. This was our champagne moment.
In late 2021, police in South Australia ordered an exhumation of the Somerton Man’s body for a thorough analysis of its DNA. At the time we prepared this article, they had not yet confirmed our result, but they did announce that they were “cautiously optimistic” about it.
All at once, we were able to fill in a lot of blank spaces. Webb was born on 16 November 1905, in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, and educated at a technical college, now Swinburne University of Technology. He later worked as an electrical technician at a factory that made electric hand drills. Our DNA tests confirmed he was not related to Thomson’s son, despite the coincidence of their missing lateral incisors.
We discovered that Webb had married a woman named Dorothy Robinson in 1941 and had separated from her in 1947. She filed for divorce on grounds of desertion, and the divorce lawyers visited his former place of work, confirming that he had quit around 1947 or 1948. But they could not determine what happened to him after that. The divorce finally came through in 1952; in those days, divorces in Australia were granted only five years after separation.
At the time of Webb’s death his family had become quite fragmented. His parents were dead, a brother and a nephew had died in the war, and his eldest brother was ill. One of his sisters died in 1955 and left him money in her will, mistakenly thinking he was still alive and living in another state. The lawyers administering the will were unable to locate Charles.
We got more than DNA from the hair: We also vaporized a strand of hair by scanning a laser along its length, a technique known as laser ablation. By performing mass spectrometry on the vapor, we were able to track Webb’s varying exposure to lead. A month before Webb’s death, his lead level was high, perhaps because he had been working with the metal, maybe soldering with it. Over the next month’s worth of hair growth, the lead concentration declined; it reached its lowest level at his death. This might be a sign that he had moved.
With a trove of photographs from family albums and other sources, we were able to compare the face of the young Webb with the artists’ reconstructions we had commissioned in 2013 and 2021 and the AI reconstruction we had commissioned in 2020. Interestingly, the AI reconstruction had best captured his likeness.
A group photograph, taken in 1921, of the Swinburne College football team, included a young Webb. Clues found in newspapers show that he continued to participate in various sports, which would explain the athletic condition of his body.
What’s interesting about solving such a case is how it relies on concepts that may seem counterintuitive to forensic biologists but are quite straightforward to an electronics engineer. For example, when dealing with a standard crime scene that uses only two dozen STR markers, one observes very strict protocols to ensure the integrity of the full set of STRs. When dealing with a case with 2 million SNPs, by contrast, things are more relaxed. Many of the old-school STR protocols don’t apply when you have access to a lot of information. Many SNPs can drop out, some can even be “noise,” the signal may not be clean—and yet you can still crack the case!
Engineers understand this concept well. It’s what we call graceful degradation—when, say, a few flipped bits on a digital video signal are hardly noticed. The same is true for a large SNP file.
And so, when Astrea retrieved the 2 million SNPs, the company didn’t rely on the traditional framework for DNA-sequencing reads. It used a completely different mathematical framework, called imputation. The concept of imputation is not yet fully appreciated by forensics experts who have a biological background. However, for an electronics engineer, the concept is similar to error correction: We infer and “impute” bits of information that have dropped out of a received digital signal. Such an approach is not possible with a few STRs, but when handling over a million SNPs, it’s a different ball game.
Much of the work on identifying Charles Webb from his genealogy had to be done manually because there are simply no automated tools for the task. As an electronics engineer, I now see possible ways to make tools that would speed up the process. One such tool my team has been working on, together with Colleen Fitzpatrick, is software that can input an entire family tree and represent all of the birth locations as colored dots on Google Earth. This helps to visualize geolocation when dealing with a large and complex family.
The Somerton Man case still has its mysteries. We cannot yet determine where Webb lived in his final weeks or what he was doing. Although the literary clue he left in his pocket was probably an elliptical suicide note, we cannot confirm the exact cause of death. There is still room for research; there is much we do not know.
This article appears in the April 2023 print issue as “Finding Somerton Man.”
Former prime minister says he believes evidence shows he did not recklessly mislead parliament over Partygate
Boris Johnson claims there is no document showing that he was given “any warning or advice” than any No 10 event may have broken Covid rules. He says:
It is clear from that investigation that there is no evidence at all that supports an allegation that I intentionally or recklessly misled the house. The only exception is the assertions of the discredited Dominic Cummings, which are not supported by any documentation.
There is not a single document that indicates that I received any warning or advice that any event broke or may have broken the rules or guidance. In fact, the evidence before the committee demonstrates that those working at No 10 at the time shared my honest belief that the rules and guidance were being followed.
I accept that the House of Commons was misled by my statements that the rules and guidance had been followed completely at No 10. But when the statements were made, they were made in good faith and on the basis of what I honestly knew and believed at the time.
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Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Inspired by the hardiness of bumblebees, MIT researchers have developed repair techniques that enable a bug-sized aerial robot to sustain severe damage to the actuators, or artificial muscles, that power its wings—but to still fly effectively.
[ MIT ]
This robot gripper is called DragonClaw, and do you really need to know anything else?
“Alas, DragonClaw wins again!”
[ AMTL ]
Here’s a good argument for having legs on a robot:
And here’s a less-good argument for having legs on a robot. But it’s still impressive!
[ ANYbotics ]
Always nice to see drones getting real work done! Also, when you offer your drone up for power-line inspections and promise that it won’t crash into anything, that’s confidence.
[ Skydio ]
Voxel robots have been extensively simulated because they’re easy to simulate, but not extensively built because they’re hard to build. But here are some that actually work.
[ Paper ]
Thanks, Bram!
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a promising approach to developing controllers for quadrupedal robots. We explore an alternative to the position-based RL paradigm, by introducing a torque-based RL framework, where an RL policy directly predicts joint torques at a high frequency, thus circumventing the use of a PD controller. The proposed learning torque control framework is validated with extensive experiments, in which a quadruped is capable of traversing various terrain and resisting external disturbances while following user-specified commands.
[ Berkeley ]
In this work we show how bioinspired, 3D-printed snakeskins enhance the friction anisotropy and thus the slithering locomotion of a snake robot. Experiments have been conducted with a soft pneumatic snake robot in various indoor and outdoor settings.
[ Paper ]
For bipedal humanoid robots to successfully operate in the real world, they must be competent at simultaneously executing multiple motion tasks while reacting to unforeseen external disturbances in real time. We propose Kinodynamic Fabrics as an approach for the specification, solution, and simultaneous execution of multiple motion tasks in real time while being reactive to dynamism in the environment.
The RPD 35 from Built Robotics is the world’s first autonomous piling system. It combines four steps—layout, pile distribution, pile driving, and as-builts—into one package. With the RPD 35, a two-person crew can install pile more productivity than traditional methods.
[ Built Robotics ]
This work contributes a novel and modularized learning-based method for aerial robots navigating cluttered environments containing thin, hard-to-perceive obstacles without assuming access to a map or the full pose estimation of the robot.
[ ARL ]
Thanks, Kostas!
The video shows a use case developed by the FZI with the assistance of the KIT: the multirobot retrieval of hazardous materials using two FZI robots as well as a KIT virtual-reality environment.
[ FZI ]
Satisfying.
[ Soft Robtics ]
A year has passed since the launch of the ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover mission was put on hold, but the work has not stopped for the ExoMars teams in Europe. In this program, the ESA Web TV crew travel back to Turin, Italy, to talk to the teams and watch as new tests are being conducted with the rover’s Earth twin, Amalia, while the real rover remains carefully stored in an ultraclean room.
[ ESA ]
Camilo Buscaron, chief technologist at AWS Robotics, sits down with Ramon Roche in this Behind the Tech episode to share his storied career in the robotics industry. Camilo explains how AWS provides a host of services for robotics developers from simulation and streaming to basic real-time cloud storage.
[ Behind the Tech ]
The U.S. has a long and disturbing habit of ignoring the violence it commits overseas as well as at home.
The post Americans Don’t Care About the Iraqi Dead. They Don’t Even Care About Their Own. appeared first on The Intercept.
Tesla’s investor day on 1 March began with a rambling, detailed discourse on energy and the environment before transitioning into a series of mostly predictable announcements and boasts. And then, out of nowhere, came an absolute bombshell: “We have designed our next drive unit, which uses a permanent-magnet motor, to not use any rare-earth elements at all,” declared Colin Campbell, Tesla’s director of power-train engineering.
It was a stunning disclosure that left most experts in permanent magnetism wary and perplexed. Alexander Gabay, a researcher at the University of Delaware, states flatly: “I am skeptical that any non-rare-earth permanent magnet could be used in a synchronous traction motor in the near future.” And at Uppsala University, in Sweden, Alena Vishina, a physicist, elaborates, “I’m not sure it’s possible to use only rare-earth-free materials to make a powerful and efficient motor.”
The problem here is physics, which not even Tesla can alter.
And at a recent magnetics conference Ping Liu, a professor at the University of Texas, in Arlington, asked other researchers what they thought of Tesla’s announcement. “No one fully understands this,” he reports. (Tesla did not respond to an e-mail asking for elaboration of Campbell’s comment.)
Tesla’s technical prowess should never be underestimated. But on the other hand, the company—and in particular, its CEO—has a history of making sporadic sensational claims that don’t pan out (we’re still waiting for that US $35,000 Model 3, for example).
The problem here is physics, which not even Tesla can alter. Permanent magnetism occurs in certain crystalline materials when the spins of electrons of some of the atoms in the crystal are forced to point in the same direction. The more of these aligned spins, the stronger the magnetism. For this, the ideal atoms are ones that have unpaired electrons swarming around the nucleus in what are known as 3d orbitals. Tops are iron, with four unpaired 3d electrons, and cobalt, with three.
But 3d electrons alone are not enough to make superstrong magnets. As researchers discovered decades ago, magnetic strength can be greatly improved by adding to the crystalline lattice atoms with unpaired electrons in the 4f orbital—notably the rare-earth elements neodymium, samarium, and dysprosium. These 4f electrons enhance a characteristic of the crystalline lattice called magnetic anisotropy—in effect, they promote adherence of the magnetic moments of the atoms to the specific directions in the crystal lattice. That, in turn, can be exploited to achieve high coercivity, the essential property that lets a permanent magnet stay magnetized. Also, through several complex physical mechanisms, the unpaired 4f electrons can amplify the magnetism of the crystal by coordinating and stabilizing the spin alignment of the 3d electrons in the lattice.
Since the 1980s, a permanent magnet based on a compound of neodymium, iron, and boron (NdFeB), has dominated high-performance applications, including motors, smartphones, loudspeakers, and wind-turbine generators. A 2019 study by Roskill Information Services, in London, found that more than 90 percent of the permanent magnets used in automotive traction motors were NdFeB.
So if not rare-earth permanent magnets for Tesla’s next motor, then what kind? Among experts willing to speculate, the choice was unanimous: ferrite magnets. Among the non-rare-earth permanent magnets invented so far, only two are in large-scale production: ferrites and another type called Alnico (aluminum nickel cobalt). Tesla isn’t going to use Alnico, a half-dozen experts contacted by IEEE Spectrum insisted. These magnets are weak and, more important, the world supply of cobalt is so fraught that they make up less than 2 percent of the permanent-magnet market.
There are more than a score of permanent magnets that use no rare-earth elements, or don’t use much of them. But none of these have made an impact outside the laboratory.
Ferrite magnets, based on a form of iron oxide, are cheap and account for nearly 30 percent of the permanent-magnet market by sales. But they, too, are weak (one major use is holding refrigerator doors shut). A key performance indicator of a permanent magnet is its maximum energy product, measured in megagauss-oersteds (MGOe). It reflects both the strength of a magnet as well as its coercivity. For the type of NdFeB commonly used in automotive traction motors, this value is generally around 35 MGOe. For the best ferrite magnets, it is around 4.
“Even if you get the best-performance ferrite magnet, you will have performance about five to 10 times below neodymium-iron-boron,” says Daniel Salazar Jaramillo, a magnetics researcher at the Basque Center for Materials, Applications, and Nanostructures, in Spain. So compared to a synchronous motor built with NdFeB magnets, one based on ferrite magnets will be much larger and heavier, much weaker, or some combination of the two.
To be sure, there are more than a score of other permanent magnets that use no rare-earth elements or don’t use much of them. But none of these have made an impact outside the laboratory. The list of attributes needed for a commercially successful permanent magnet includes high field strength, high coercivity, tolerance of high temperatures, good mechanical strength, ease of manufacturing, and lack of reliance on elements that are scarce, toxic, or problematic for some other reason. All of the candidates today fail to tick one or more of these boxes.
Iron-nitride magnets, such as this one from startup Niron Magnetics, are among the most promising of an emerging crop of permanent magnets that do not use rare-earth elements.Niron Magnetics
But give it a few more years, say some researchers, and one or two of these could very well break through. Among the most promising: iron nitride, Fe16N2. A Minneapolis startup, Niron Magnetics, is now commercializing technology that was pioneered with funding from ARPA-E by Jian Ping Wang at the University of Minnesota in the early 2000s, after earlier work at Hitachi. Niron’s executive vice president, Andy Blackburn, told Spectrum that the company intends to introduce its first product late in 2024. Blackburn says it will be a permanent magnet with an energy product above 10 MGOe, for which he anticipates applications in loudspeakers and sensors, among others. If it succeeds, it will be the first new commercial permanent magnet since NdFeB, 40 years ago, and the first commercial non-rare-earth permanent magnet since strontium ferrite, the best ferrite type, 60 years ago.
Niron’s first offering will be followed in 2025 by a magnet with an energy product above 30 MGOe, according to Blackburn. For this he makes a rather bold prediction: “It’ll have as good or better flux than neodymium. It’ll have the coercivity of a ferrite, and it’ll have the temperature coefficients of samarium cobalt”—better than NdFeB. If the magnet really manages to combine all those attributes (a big if), it would be very well suited for use in the traction motors of electric vehicles.
There will be more to come, Blackburn declares. “All these new nanoscale-engineering capabilities have allowed us to create materials that would have been impossible to make 20 years ago,” he says.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s budget cuts led to the release of a man who went on to be accused in the killings.
The post Top Cop Scapegoats Reform DA for Double Murder in Austin appeared first on The Intercept.
Ally’s criticism will be hard to dismiss as UK tries to push through £120m migrant scheme
Britain’s closest ally, the US, has criticised Rwanda’s dire human rights record, describing conditions in the country’s detention centres as harsh to life-threatening.
The British home secretary, Suella Braverman, took a group of journalists on a trip last week to reveal details of her £120m scheme to send all migrants arriving in the UK through irregular means to Rwanda whether they claim asylum or not. The legality of the scheme is due to be tested shortly in the UK court of appeal.
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With migrant deaths at record highs, researchers say intensified border militarization is making a deadly problem much worse.
The post Mapping Project Reveals Locations of U.S. Border Surveillance Towers appeared first on The Intercept.
Timing is controversial given actions of Israel’s far-right government towards settlements and judiciary
The UK and Israel have signed a long-term agreement strengthening ties in the fields of defence, security and technology following plans announced last year to put relations between the two countries on an elevated footing.
The timing of Tuesday’s agreement is controversial since it will be seen as a mark of approval for Israel’s far-right government, which has put settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank at the top of its agenda and faces a massive backlash over plans to neuter the role of the judiciary.
Continue reading...Human rights campaigners condemn bill introducing capital and life imprisonment sentences
MPs in Uganda have passed a controversial anti-LGBTQ+ bill, which would make homosexual acts punishable by death, attracting strong condemnation from rights campaigners.
Nearly all of the 389 legislators voted late on Tuesday for the hardline anti-homosexuality bill, which introduces capital and life imprisonment sentences for gay sex and “recruitment, promotion and funding” of same-sex “activities”.
Continue reading...When the dust finally clears on Boris’s parties, his lawyer won’t be looking back on this as his finest hour
Just call me Mystic Meg. Why get Lord Pannick, one of the most expensive barristers in the country, to help with your defence when you can have me instead? I’m a lot cheaper for a start. And have far fewer typos in my copy. With me, the privileges committee would have been able to publish Boris Johnson’s Dodgy Dossier on Monday evening. There again, Guardian readers got to read it then anyway.
Mid-morning on Tuesday the Dodgy Dossier was finally released. And it was uncannily similar to the sketch I had written the day before. It just goes to show yet again that you can never go far wrong by thinking the worst of Boris. It also proves that even a £5,000 an hour brief can’t work miracles with duff material. When the dust finally clears on Boris’s parties, Pannick won’t be looking back on his involvement with the Convict as his finest hour. Still. As a brief, you win some, you lose some. And it was the taxpayer who was picking up the tab.
Continue reading...Kremlin toasts the Russian-Chinese partnership, which appears warm but far from equal
Standing alongside Xi Jinping in the 15th-century Chamber of Facets, one of the most historic ceremonial venues at the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin raised his glass of white wine.
He proceeded to make a toast to the “health of our great friend Xi and the deepening of the Russian-Chinese partnership”, before ending his speech with the phrase ganbei, Chinese for “empty glass”.
Continue reading...A new documentary charts the Canadian’s rivalry with his Ferrari teammate Didier Pironi that ended tragically in 1982
If the death of Gilles Villeneuve at the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder in 1982 left Formula One traumatised, it was infinitely harder on his wife Joann. More than 40 years on and the emotion still runs high as she recalls the controversial events of that season. So raw have been the wounds, it is only now she has felt able to address them and time has not assuaged the strength of her feelings.
Villeneuve, his wife and family and his former Ferrari teammate Didier Pironi are the subjects of Villeneuve Pironi: Racing’s Untold Tragedy, the newly released film on Sky Documentaries and Now TV. It is a superb feature, telling the gripping but tragic story of the two drivers whose relationship fell apart over the course of one race in 1982 at Imola shortly after which Villeneuve died and Pironi’s career ended in an horrific accident at Hockenheim. The documentary is even-handed and does its best to put both drivers’ sides of the story, but making it brought back the emotions of the time for Joann.
Continue reading...Jack Willis is hopeful he can continue to represent England after the World Cup as the openside flanker closes in on a new contract with Toulouse in the Top 14.
Willis was one of England’s standout players during the Six Nations, missing the first match against Scotland because of his Toulouse commitments before starting the four subsequent games of Steve Borthwick’s first campaign as the country’s head coach.
Continue reading...Between 2020 and 2021 cases of Candida auris doubled, with symptoms including antibiotic-resistant high fever with chills
Potentially deadly fungal infections with Candida auris are spreading rapidly in US healthcare facilities, with cases nearly doubling between 2020 and 2021, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday.
The number of cases rose by 44% to 476 in 2019, up from 330 in 2018, and subsequently by 59% to 756 in 2020 and by an additional 95% to 1,471 in 2021, the agency’s researchers reported on Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine.
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Nvidia Corp. NVDA said Tuesday it was launching four new platforms that allowed developers to build specialized artificial intelligence models. At Nvidia’s annual GTC developer conference, Chief Executive Jensen Huang introduced the L4 for AI video, the L40 for image generation, the H100 NVL for large language model deployment, and Grace Hopper for recommendation models. “The rise of generative AI is requiring more powerful inference computing platforms,” said Huang, Nvidia chief executive. “The number of applications for generative AI is infinite, limited only by human imagination.” Inference is the process by which a neural network makes predictions based on its training. Nvidia said that Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGGOOGL Google Cloud Platform is an early adopter of the L4, and was integrating it into its Vertex AI machine-learning platform, making it a “premium Nvidia AI cloud,” Huang said. Grace Hopper and the H100 NVL will be available in the second half of the year, while the L40 is available now, and the L4 is available in a private preview from Google.
Market Pulse Stories are Rapid-fire, short news bursts on stocks and markets as they move. Visit MarketWatch.com for more information on this news.
Singer tells Rolling Stone he sought therapy in wake of grief – and that as well as his forthcoming sixth album, he has two more records ready for release
Ed Sheeran has said that following the deaths of friends SBTV founder Jamal Edwards and the Australian cricketer Shane Warne in 2022, he “didn’t want to live any more”.
Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine ahead of the release of his sixth album, – (Subtract), he said: “I have had that throughout my life. You’re under the waves drowning. You’re just sort of in this thing. And you can’t get out of it.”
Continue reading...Success of AI-powered rivals ChatGPT and Bing Chat has forced its hand, but release brings risks for tech giant
Can Google save its golden goose or will it simply kill it trying? That’s the question that lurks behind the launch of the company’s Bard chatbot, hurriedly announced after the overnight success of ChatGPT in early 2023.
With Bard, Google has to walk a tightrope: offer users an experience that can compete with the AI-powered Bing Chat and ChatGPT without cannibalising its enormously profitable search business in the process.
Continue reading...Distributor gives no reason for cancellation, but Chinese censors have targeted Pooh before due to Xi Jinping comparisons
The screening of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, a British slasher film due to be released in Hong Kong this week, has been cancelled, its distributor said on Tuesday, without giving a reason for pulling it.
VII Pillars Entertainment said on its Facebook page that it was with “great regret” that the scheduled release of the film on 23 March had been cancelled. It did not give further details.
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Metal detecting can be a fun hobby, or it can be a task to be completed in deadly earnest—if the buried treasure you’re searching for includes landmines and explosive remnants of war. This is an enormous, dangerous problem: Something like 12,000 square kilometers worldwide are essentially useless and uninhabitable because of the threat of buried explosives, and thousands and thousands of people are injured or killed every year.
While there are many different ways of detecting mines and explosives, none of them are particularly quick or easy. For obvious reasons, sending a human out into a minefield with a metal detector is not the safest way of doing things. So, instead, people send anything else that they possibly can, from machines that can smash through minefields with brute force to well-trained rats that take a more passive approach by sniffing out explosive chemicals.
Because the majority of mines are triggered by pressure or direct proximity, a drone seems like it would be the ideal way of detecting them non-explosively. However, unless you’re only detecting over a perfectly flat surface (and perhaps not even then) your detector won’t be positioned ideally most of the time, and you might miss something, which is not a viable option for mine detection.
But now a novel combination of a metal detector and a drone with five degrees of freedom is under development at the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich. It may provide a viable solution to remote landmine detection, by using careful sensing and localization along with some twisting motors to keep the detector reliably close to the ground.
The really tricky part of this whole thing is making sure that the metal detector stays at the correct orientation relative to the ground surface so there’s no dip in its effectiveness. With a conventional drone, this wouldn’t work at all, because every time the drone moves in any direction but up or down, it has to tilt, which is going to also tilt anything that’s attached to it. Unless you want to mount your metal detector on some kind of (likely complicated and heavy) gimbal system, you need a drone that can translate its position without tilting, and happily, such a drone not only exists but is commercially available.
The drone used in this research is made by a company called Voliro, and it’s a tricopter that uses rotating thruster nacelles that move independently of the body of the drone. It may not shock you to learn that Voliro (which has, in the past, made some really weird flying robots) is a startup with its roots in the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, the same place where the mine-detecting drone research is taking place.
So, now that you have a drone that theoretically capable of making your metal detector work, you need to design the control system that makes it work in practice. The system needs to be able to pilot the drone across a 3D surface it has never seen before and which might include obstacles. Meanwhile, it must prioritize the alignment of the detector. The researchers combine GPS with inertial measurements from a lidar mounted on the drone for absolute position and state estimation, and then autonomously plots and executes a “boustrophedon coverage path” across an area of interest. “Boustrophedon,” which is not a word that I knew existed until just this minute, refers to something (usually writing) in which alternate lines are reversed (and mirrored). So, right to left, and then left to right.
Testing with metallic (non-explosive) targets showed that this system does very well, even in areas with obstacles, overhead occlusion, and significant slope. Whether it’s ultimately field-useful or not will require some further investigation, but because the platform itself is commercial off-the-shelf hardware, there’s a bit more room for optimism than there otherwise might be.
A research paper, “Resilient Terrain Navigation with a 5 DOF Metal Detector Drone” by Patrick Pfreundschuh, Rik Bähnemann, Tim Kazik, Thomas Mantel, Roland Siegwart, and Olov Andersson from the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, will be presented in May at ICRA 2023 in London.
Shares of Liberty Global PLC LBTYA tacked on 0.9% in morning trading Tuesday, putting them on track for a sixth straight gain, after the broadband, video and mobile communications company announced plans to buy the rest of the shares of Belgium-based cable television services company Telenet Group Holdings N.V. BE:TNETTLGHY that it doesn’t already own. Liberty currently owns 59.2% of Telenet’s outstanding shares, while Telenet’s market capitalization was recently EUR1.64 billion ($1.77 billion). Liberty intends to pay EUR22.00 for each share it doesn’t already own, which Liberty said represents a 59% premium to the March 15 closing price. Telenet’s board of directors voted unanimously to support Liberty’s buyout plans. “We believe an offer of EUR 22.00 per share provides a good opportunity for Telenet shareholders to monetize their investment at an attractive premium,” Liberty Chief Executive Mike Fries said. Liberty’s stock, which is headed for the longest win streak since the six-day stretch that ended July 22, 2022, has gained 2.5% year to date, while the S&P 500 SPX has advanced 4.0%.
Market Pulse Stories are Rapid-fire, short news bursts on stocks and markets as they move. Visit MarketWatch.com for more information on this news.
Héloïse Werner’s new piece, for mira, is in memory of the experimental musician who was her friend and collaborator. It is meditative and yet full of life, she writes
I first met Mira Calix six years ago. My group, The Hermes Experiment, got in touch with her to ask if she would be interested in writing us a new piece. We had come across her striking electronic music through the Nonclassical label and were excited at the idea of a potential collaboration. She replied quickly: “i’d love to do this – yes!” (she never used capital letters) and so Oliver Pashley, our clarinettist, and I met her for a coffee to discuss the commission.
I remember that first encounter so well: she was chilled, funny, vibrant, full of brilliant ideas and looking incredibly cool in her green bobble hat. The work she wrote for us is called DMe, a beautiful graphic score which is as much a piece of visual art as it is a piece of music combined with performance art. And that’s what I admired so much about Mira – her capacity to be so open to different art forms, different approaches, and yet to somehow make sense of it all as a whole. She also had this gift for bringing people together, whether through her work, friendships or the anti-Brexit marches that she would always rally the troops for.
Mira and I became friends and worked together on a number of other projects: for Secret Cinema, for the exhibition Good Grief, Charlie Brown! at Somerset House in London, and most recently on a new artwork for the exhibition Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules also at Somerset House which was curated by her partner, the brilliant artist Andy Holden.
Shutdown imposed as part of search for Amritpal Singh Sandhu, accused of disrupting communal harmony
Economic life in the north Indian state of Punjab has been paralysed by an internet shutdown, affecting 30 million people, imposed as part of a huge manhunt for a Sikh preacher fighting for a separate Sikh state.
Police have been searching for Amritpal Singh Sandhu, who is wanted for allegedly disrupting communal harmony, since Saturday.
Continue reading...The Russian and Chinese leaders have met more than 40 times in recent years, fortifying personal and formal relations
A visit by China’s president, Xi Jinping, to Moscow this week has shone a light on his strengthening relationship with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
The two leaders have met more than 40 times in recent years, growing increasingly familiar, and now refer to each other as “dear friends”. Xi has been described as a great friend by other world leaders before, including Robert Mugabe and Donald Trump, but does not always reciprocate the compliment like he has with Putin.
Continue reading...The shadow education secretary is determined to put childcare reform at the heart of Labour’s policy – and stop Jeremy Hunt stealing her thunder
Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s shadow education secretary, grew up in the kind of place where Liz Truss used to pretend she’d grown up: a terrace in Tyne and Wear with a disused railway line at one end and a flattened wasteland at the other, where a chemical plant used to be. “There was an air of decline about the place,” she says. “Youth unemployment was very high; as time went on the houses were increasingly in poor condition. Rotten windows, no heating upstairs. Yet at the same time, I was by no means the worst off.”
If she were a new-breed Tory, she would be tooting her own horn about her proximity to the beating heart of the British voter. But instead she is new-breed Labour: self-effacing, sometimes frustratingly so, practical, the kind of person who loses the credit when surrounded by people who constantly grab at it. Last week was a case in point: Phillipson has put childcare at the centre of Labour’s thinking, and made the education beat into something bigger than GCSE results and class sizes, able to carry the party’s values. Then Jeremy Hunt waltzed in with his budget and pinched the issue, or thought he did. More on that later.
Continue reading...Solicitor, 71, had been charged under national security law and was released to be treated for lung cancer
Hong Kong police have arrested a veteran pro-democracy politician who was out on bail for medical treatment after spending more than a year in detention on a subversion charge.
Albert Ho, 71, once led the city’s largest opposition group, the Democratic party, and runs his own law firm. Police handcuffed Ho and took him away from his home in a vehicle on Tuesday, a Reuters witness said.
Continue reading...Western governments are telling their staff to remove the popular social media app from their work phones amid security fears. Alex Hern reports on why time could be running out for TikTok’s current ownership model
The UK has joined the US, Canada and the EU in ordering its government officials to remove the TikTok app from their work devices amid fears of a security threat. Government officials in the west say that TikTok’s ownership by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance puts sensitive user data at risk of being accessed by the Chinese government.
As the Guardian’s UK technology editor Alex Hern tells Hannah Moore, the governments are not able to cite specific incidents to back up their ban but it forms part of an overall cooling in relations with China.
Continue reading...Mais de 100 afetados pela onda de demissões em empresas de tecnologia contam como o encanto virou decepção.
The post Demissões na Meta, Twitter, Google, XP e empresas de tecnologia têm ‘leve ameaça’, cortes durante licença e bônus menor para brasileiros appeared first on The Intercept.
Bezalel Smotrich’s comments come as far-right coalition pushes ahead with judiciary overhaul
An Israeli minister has claimed there is “no such thing” as a Palestinian people as Israel’s new coalition government, its most hardline ever, ploughed ahead with a part of its plan to overhaul the judiciary.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition said it was pushing a key part of the overhaul – which would give the coalition control over who becomes a justice or a judge – before the parliament takes a month’s holiday break next week.
Continue reading...The officially sanctioned conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 set a dangerous precedent.
The post Bush’s Iraq War Lies Created a Blueprint for Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
Discoveries that could help diabetics titled in honour of activist and journalist murdered in Amazon
Scientists in Brazil have found two new species of fermenting yeasts and named them after journalist Dom Phillips and activist Bruno Pereira, the two men murdered last year in the Amazon rainforest.
The discovery came from four isolates of the Spathaspora species, according to a paper published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.
Continue reading...
Com a saída de Amoedo para salvar sua biografia e a contratação de Leandro Narloch, partido mostra que quer abertamente se abraçar com a ultradireita.
The post O Novo não precisa mais disfarçar: já pode alinhar os sapatênis com os coturnos appeared first on The Intercept.
Clube classifica mulheres como ‘a vadia’ e ‘a caçadora de atenção de homens’ e leva homens a países vulneráveis em busca de sexo.
The post Coaches ensinam homens a conseguir sexo com técnicas inspiradas pelo traficante sexual de crianças e adolescentes appeared first on The Intercept.
“Miraculously, they still believe in the U.S. justice system and still want to tell their story to a U.S. jury.”
The post Iraqis Tortured by the U.S. in Abu Ghraib Never Got Justice appeared first on The Intercept.
As technology continues to evolve, STEM education is needed more than ever. With the vast technical expertise of its 400,000-plus members and volunteers, IEEE is a leader in engineering and technology education. Its technical societies and its councils, sections, and regional groups offer educational events and resources at every level to support technical professions and prepare the workforce of tomorrow.
IEEE offers many ways to support the educational needs of learners. For preuniversity students, the organization offers summer camps and other opportunities to explore science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. IEEE’s continuing education courses allow professionals to stay up to date on technology, keep their skills sharp, and learn new things.
From 2 to 8 April, IEEE is highlighting resources available to students, educators, and technical professionals with IEEE Education Week. The annual celebration highlights educational opportunities provided by the world’s largest technical professional association and its many organizational units, societies, and councils.
Here are some of the events and resources available during this year’s Education Week.
Climate Change: IEEE’s Role in Bringing Technology Solutions to Meet the Challenge
3 April, noon to 1 p.m. EDT
IEEE President and CEO Saifur Rahman kicks off Education Week with a session on how the organization can serve as a vital connection between policymakers and the engineering and technology communities in bringing technological solutions to meet the universal challenge of climate change. Rahman plans to share how IEEE is committed to helping mitigate the effects of climate change through pragmatic and accessible technical solutions, as well as by providing engineers and technologists with a neutral space for discussion and action. The webinar also addresses the importance of educating the energy workforce.
3 April, 9 to 10 a.m. EDT
IEEE REACH (Raising Engineering Awareness through the Conduit of History) provides teachers with resources to help them explain the history of technology and the roles played by engineers. During this webinar, participants can learn how REACH can enhance the classroom experience.
5 April, 11 to 11:45 a.m. EDT
Many people are sharing their expertise on TikTok, Youtube and other online platforms. When sharing knowledge in a multimedia-rich environment, there are research-proven principles that can be applied to enhance the presentation—which in turn promotes knowledge transfer. This webinar is designed to show participants how to apply the principles to their presentations.
Here are some additional offerings and resources available during IEEE Education Week.
For a list of webinars and events and more resources, visit the IEEE Education Week website.
IEEE-affiliated groups can participate in IEEE Education Week by offering events, resources, and special offers such as discounted courses. Additionally, a tool kit is available to help groups promote IEEE Education Week and their event through newsletters, social media, and more.
The Education Week website provides special offers and discounts as well. You also can support education programs by donating to the IEEE Foundation.
Check out the IEEE Education Week video to learn more.
You do not need to be a member to participate in IEEE Education Week; however, members receive discounted or free access to many of the events and resources.
If you’re not an IEEE member, now would be a great time to join.
New nuclear looks different, which requires new types of financing. New investment and partnerships are seemingly occurring every day across the industry, including SK Group’s $250million investment into Terrapower, and X-energy’s partnership with Dow Chemical.
What can be done to encourage financial investment and improve the economic viability and the ROI of SMRs? How does new nuclear differ, and how do we finance that?
Reuters Events latest report – Capital Funding, Financing & Economic Viability of SMRs – dives into the vehicles that will assist with advancing financing to support SMRs and advanced reactors deployment and commercialization. What to expect from the report:
Electric cars barely existed in 2010, when the Tesla Model S was still a glint in Elon Musk’s eye. Now more than 20 million EVs girdle the globe, according to BloombergNEF—and that count is expected to nearly quadruple to 77 million by 2025. A battery will be the high-voltage heart of each of those 77 million electric vehicles, and by far their most expensive component, setting off a worldwide race to ethically source their materials and crank up production to meet exploding demand.
EVs may have seized a record 5.8 percent of the United States market in 2022, according to J.D. Power, and could approach 11 percent of the global market this year. But experts still believe that better batteries, and many more of them, are a key to EVs reaching a market tipping point, even as Reuters projects automakers spending a whopping $1.2 trillion to develop and produce EVs through 2030.
IEEE Spectrum asked five industry experts to gaze deeply into their own crystal balls and outline what needs to happen in the EV battery space to wean the world off fossil-fueled transportation and onto the plug. Here’s what they said:
Upstart Lucid Motors hasn’t built many cars, but it’s built a reputation with the record-setting, 830-kilometer driving range of the Air Grand Touring Performance sedan. That range is a testament to Lucid’s obsessive pursuit of efficiency: The Air uses the same 2170-format cylindrical cells (supplied by Samsung SDI) as many EVs, but ekes out more miles via superior battery management, compact-yet-muscular power units and slippery aerodynamics.
Sophisticated chassis and battery design gives new life to “lesser” chemistries—especially lithium iron phosphate that’s the hottest thing in batteries around the world—that would otherwise be uncompetitive and obsolete.
One might think Lucid would call for every electric model to cover such vast distances. Instead, Lucid leaders see a bright future in cars that aim for maximum efficiency — rather than range per se — via smaller, more-affordable batteries.
Lucid’s latest Air Touring model is its most efficient yet on a per-mile basis. Now the world’s most aerodynamic production vehicle, with a 0.197 coefficient of drag, the Air Touring delivers an EPA-rated 7.44 kilometers from each onboard kilowatt hour. Yet propelling this full-size luxury barge still demands a 92 kWh battery aboard.
With all that in mind, the company is developing its next generation of batteries. Extrapolating from company targets, a future compact-size Lucid—think the size of Tesla Model 3 or Model Y—could decisively downsize its battery without sacrificing useful range.
“Our target is to improve efficiency even more,” Dlala says.
“If we do a 250-mile car, we could have a battery that’s just 40 kWh,” or less than half the size of the Air’s. That’s the same size battery as a relatively tiny, base-model Nissan Leaf, whose lesser efficiency translates to just 240 km of EPA-rated driving range.
Such compact batteries would not just save serious money for manufacturers and consumers. They would require fewer raw and refined materials., allowing automakers to theoretically build many more cars from a finite supply. That pack would also weigh about one-third as much as Lucid’s beefiest current battery. The upshot would be a chain of gains that would warm the heart of the most mass-conscious engineer: A lighter chassis to support the smaller battery, slimmer crash structures, downsized brakes. More useable space for passengers and cargo. All those savings would further boost driving range and performance.
This grand design, naturally, would demand an attendant burst of charger development. Once chargers are as ubiquitous and reliable as gas stations—and nearly as fast for fillups—“then I don’t need 400 miles of range,” Dlala says.
All this could grant the ultimate, elusive wish for EV makers: Price parity with internal-combustion automobiles.
“That combination of efficiency and infrastructure will allow us to create competitive prices versus internal combustion cars,” Dlala says.
Castilloux says that game-changing EV battery breakthroughs have to date been rare. Yet EV batteries are still central to automakers’ calculus, as they seek a sustainable, affordable supply in a period of explosive growth. In a marketplace starving for what they see as their rightful share of kilowatt-hours, smaller or less-connected automakers especially may go hungry.
“Everyone is competing for a limited supply,” says Ryan Castilloux. “That makes for a lumpy growth trajectory in EVs. It’s an immense challenge, and one that won’t go away until the growth slows and the supply side can keep up.”
“In recent decades, it wouldn’t have made sense to think of an automaker becoming a processing or mining company, but now with scarcity of supplies, they have to take drastic measures.”
—Ryan Castilloux, Adamas Intelligence
A battery industry that has succeeded in boosting nickel content for stronger performance, and cutting cobalt to reduce costs, has hit a wall of diminishing returns via chemistry alone. That leaves battery pack design as a new frontier: Castilloux lauds the push to eliminate “aluminum and other zombie materials” to save weight and space. The effort shows in innovations such as large-format cylindrical batteries with higher ratios of active material to surrounding cases—as well as so-called “cell-to-pack” or “pack-to-frame” designs. BMW’s critical “Neue Klasse” EVs, the first arriving in 2025, are just one example: Large-format cells, with no traditional cased modules required, fill an entire open floorpan and serve as a crash-resistant structural member.
“That becomes a low-cost way to generate big improvements in pack density and bolster the mileage of a vehicle,” Castillloux says.
That kind of sophisticated chassis and battery design can also help level the playing field, giving new life to “lesser” chemistries—especially lithium iron phosphate that’s the hottest thing in batteries around the world—that would otherwise be uncompetitive and obsolete.
“Things are moving in the right direction in North America and Europe, but it’s too little too late at the moment, and the West is collectively scrambling to meet demand.”
The drivetrain and battery of a Mercedes-Benz EQS electric vehicle on the assembly line at the Mercedes-Benz Group plant in Sindelfingen, Germany, on Monday, February 13, 2023. Krisztian Bocsi/Getty Images
The tragedy, Castilloux says, is that EV demand was anticipated for several years, “but the action is only happening now.”
“China was only one that acted on it, and is now a decade ahead of the rest of the world,” in both refining and processing battery materials, and cell production itself.
Tesla also got out in front of legacy automakers by thinking in terms of vertical integration, the need to control the entire supply chain, from lithium brine and cobalt mines to final production and recycling.
“In recent decades, it wouldn’t have made sense to think of an automaker becoming a processing or mining company, but now with scarcity of supplies, they have to take drastic measures.”
Automakers are racing to meet soaring EV demand and fill yawning gaps in the market, including building a homegrown supply chain of battery materials as well as batteries. In the United States alone, Atlas Public Policy tallies U.S. $128 billion in announced investments in EV and battery factories and recycling. That still leaves another blind spot: Charging infrastructure. Tesla’s dominant Superchargers aside, many experts cite a patchwork, notoriously unreliable charging network as a leading roadblock to mainstream EV adoption.
“Charging infrastructure is on our wish list of things that need to improve,” said Dan Nicholson, who helps lead General Motors’ new charger initiatives.
The 2021 U.S. Infrastructure Law is providing $7.5 billion to build a network of 500,000 EV chargers by 2030. But rather than own and operate their own chargers like Tesla—akin to automakers running chains of proprietary gas stations—GM, Ford and others argue that standardized, open-source chargers are critical to convince more Americans to kick the ICE habit. Those chargers must be available everywhere people live and work, Nicholson said, and open to drivers of any car brand.
It will help if those chargers actually work: A 2022 study showed nearly 25 percent of public chargers in the San Francisco Bay area—itself a mecca for EV ownership—weren’t functioning properly.
Automakers and battery manufacturers are on board with multiple solutions, including the stunning rise of lithium-iron-phosphate cells in Teslas, Fords and other models.
To fill gaps in public networks, GM is collaborating with EVGo on a national network of 2,000 DC fast-charging stalls, located at 500 Pilot and Flying J travel centers, most along major corridors. To reach people where they live, including people with no access to home charging, GM is tapping its more than 4,400 dealers to build up to 10 Level 2 charging stations each, at both dealers and key locations, including underserved urban and rural communities. Nicholson notes that 90 percent of the U.S. population lives within 16 kilometers of a GM dealer.
In his role as an SAE board member, Nicholson also supports future-proof standards for EVs, connectors and chargers. That includes the ISO 15118 international standard that defines two-way communication between EVs and chargers. That standard is key to “Plug and Charge,” the budding interoperability system that allows drivers of any EV to plug into any DC fast charger and simply be billed on the back end. That’s how Teslas have worked since 2012, though with the advantage of a closed system that need only recognize and communicate with Tesla models.
Nicholson said GM is also seeking “uptime guarantees” with charging collaborators. That will allow drivers to see in advance if a charger is operational, and to hold a spot.
“People need to be able to reserve a station, and know it’s going to work when they get there,” he said.
Despite an electric boom year in 2022, some analysts are downgrading forecasts of EV adoption, due to monkey wrenches of unpredictable demand, looming recession and supply-chain issues. S&P Global Mobility remains bullish, predicting that 42 percent of global buyers will choose an EV in 2030, within sight of President Biden’s goal of 50-percent EV penetration.
“That’s a lot of growth, but there are plenty of people who won’t move along as quickly,” Brinley said. Pushing EVs to a market majority will require stars to align. Brinley says the most critical key is a continued explosion of new EV models at every price point—including SUVs and pickups that are the lifeblood of U.S. buyers.
Regarding batteries, Brinley says ICE manufacturers with an existing manufacturing footprint, labor force and know-how could find an advantage over relative newcomers. The issue will be how well the likes of General Motors and Ford can manage the transition, from scaling back on ICE production to retraining workers — fewer of whom may be required to produce batteries and motors than ICE powertrains. In February, Ford announced a new $3.5 billion plant in Michigan to build LFP batteries, licensing tech from China’s CATL, currently the world’s largest lithium-ion producer.
“Some (legacy) automakers will use LFP for certain use cases, and solid-state in development could change the dynamic again,” Brinley says. “But for the time being, you need both batteries and engines, because people will be buying both,” Brinley says.
At some point, Brinley says, it’s a zero-sum game: A flat global market for cars can’t comfortably accommodate both types of powertrains.
“ICE sales have to come down for BEV sales to come up,” Brinley says. “And that’s going to make for a wild market in the next few years.”
NanoGraf is among several start-ups wishing for not just longer-lasting batteries, but a stable, competitive North American supply chain to counter China’s battery dominance. The Inflation Reduction Act has spurred an unprecedented tsunami of homegrown investment, by requiring robust domestic sourcing of batteries and battery materials as a condition of EV tax breaks for manufacturers and consumers. That includes a $35-per-kWh tax credit on every lithium-ion cell produced, and a $7,500 consumer tax break on eligible EVs.
Connor Hund says NanoGraf aims to onshore production of its silicon-anode material at a new Chicago facility beginning in Q2 this year. The company, whose backers include the Department of Defense, claims to have created the most energy-dense 18650 cylindrical cell yet, at 3.8 amp-hours. The technology key is a pre-lithiated core that allows an anode silicon percentage as high as 25 percent, versus cells that typically top out at 5-to-7 percent silicon.
“There’s certainly room to boost the range of EVs by 20, 30 or even 50 percent by using silicon,” he says.
But whether it’s NanoGraf, or the drive toward large-format 4680 cylindrical cells led by Tesla and Panasonic, scaling up to mass production remains a major hurdle. NanoGraf plans enough initial capacity for 35 to 50 tonnes of its anode materials. But it would need 1,000 tonnes annually to crack the automotive space, with its now-bottomless appetite for batteries—at competitive cost with what automakers currently pay for cells from China, South Korea or elsewhere.
“It’s so cutthroat in that space, and there’s a scale you have to reach,” Hund says.
One wish is being granted: No one is waiting for a magic bullet in technology, including from solid state batteries that many experts now insist won’t be ready for automobiles until 2030 or later. Instead, automakers and battery manufacturers are on board with multiple solutions, including the stunning rise of LFP cells in Teslas, Fords and other models.
“There’s a shortage of all these materials, not enough nickel, cobalt or manganese, so companies targeting different consumers with different solutions is really helpful.”
Western countries have struggled to take a holistic view of everything that’s required, especially when incumbent solutions from China are available. It’s not just raw materials, anodes or cathodes, but the cells, modules, electrolyte and separators.
“You need companies onshoring all those components to have a robust U.S. supply chain,” he says. “We need everyone upstream and downstream of us, whether it’s the graphite, electrolyte or separator. Everyone is just one piece of the puzzle.”
Hund says safer batteries should also be on the industry wish-list, as high-profile fires in Teslas and other models threaten to sully EVs reputation or keep skeptical consumers on the fence.
“We can’t have batteries self-discharging at the rate they are now,” he says, especially with automakers gearing up around the world for their biggest EV invasion yet.
“Getting ahead of this now, versus pushing millions of cars onto the road and dealing with safety later, is very important.”
Update 14 March 2023: This story was corrected to reflect that Lucid’s Air Touring model carries a 92 kWh battery. (A previous version of this story stated that the battery’s capacity was 112 kWh.)
Each January, the editors of IEEE Spectrum offer up some predictions about technical developments we expect to be in the news over the coming year. You’ll find a couple dozen of those described in the following special report. Of course, the number of things we could have written about is far higher, so we had to be selective in picking which projects to feature. And we’re not ashamed to admit, gee-whiz appeal often shaped our choices.
For example, this year’s survey includes an odd pair of new aircraft that will be taking to the skies. One, whose design was inspired by the giant airships of years past, is longer than a football field; the other, a futuristic single-seat vertical-takeoff craft powered by electricity, is about the length of a small car.
While some of the other stories might not light up your imagination as much, they highlight important technical issues the world faces—like the challenges of shifting from fossil fuels to a hydrogen-based energy economy or the threat that new plutonium breeder reactors in China might accelerate the proliferation of nuclear weapons. So whether you prefer reading about topics that are heavy or light (even lighter than air), you should find something here to get you warmed up for 2023.
This article appears in the January 2023 print issue.
Top Tech 2023: A Special Report
Preview exciting technical developments for the coming year.
Can This Company Dominate Green Hydrogen?
Fortescue will need more electricity-generating capacity than France.
Pathfinder 1 could herald a new era for zeppelins
A New Way to Speed Up Computing
Blue microLEDs bring optical fiber to the processor.
The Personal-Use eVTOL Is (Almost) Here
Opener’s BlackFly is a pulp-fiction fever dream with wings.
Baidu Will Make an Autonomous EV
Its partnership with Geely aims at full self-driving mode.
China Builds New Breeder Reactors
The power plants could also make weapons-grade plutonium.
Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence
Lasers should be cheap enough to use against drones.
A Cryptocurrency for the Masses or a Universal ID?
What Worldcoin’s killer app will be is not yet clear.
The company’s Condor chip will boast more than 1,000 qubits.
Vagus-nerve stimulation promises to help treat autoimmune disorders.
New satellites can connect directly to your phone.
The E.U.’s first exascale supercomputer will be built in Germany.
A dozen more tech milestones to watch for in 2023.
If electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft do manage to revolutionize transportation, the date of 5 October 2011, may live on in aviation lore. That was the day when a retired mechanical engineer named Marcus Leng flew a home-built eVTOL across his front yard in Warkworth, Ont., Canada, startling his wife and several of his friends.
“So, take off, flew about 6 feet above the ground, pitched the aircraft towards my wife and the two couples that were there, who were behind automobiles for protection, and decided to do a skidding stop in front of them. Nobody had an idea that this was going to be happening,” recalls Leng.
But as he looked to set his craft down, he saw a wing starting to dig into his lawn. “Uh-oh, this is not good,” he thought. “The aircraft is going to spin out of control. But what instead happened was the propulsion systems revved up and down so rapidly that as the aircraft did that skidding turn, that wing corner just dragged along my lawn exactly in the direction I was holding the aircraft, and then came to a stable landing,” says Leng. At that point, he knew that such an aircraft was viable “because to have that sort of an interference in the aircraft and for the control systems to be able to control it was truly remarkable.”
It was the second time anyone, anywhere had ever flown an eVTOL aircraft.
Today, some 350 organizations in 48 countries are designing, building, or flying eVTOLs, according to the Vertical Flight Society. These companies are fueled by more than US $7 billion and perhaps as much as $10 billion in startup funding. And yet, 11 years after Leng’s flight, no eVTOLs have been delivered to customers or are being produced at commercial scale. None have even been certified by a civil aviation authority in the West, such as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration or the European Union Aviation Safety Agency.
But 2023 looks to be a pivotal year for eVTOLs. Several well-funded startups are expected to reach important early milestones in the certification process. And the company Leng founded, Opener, could beat all of them by making its first deliveries—which would also be the first for any maker of an eVTOL.
Today, some 350 organizations in 48 countries are designing, building, or flying eVTOLs, according to the Vertical Flight Society.
As of late October, the company had built at its facility in Palo Alto, Calif., roughly 70 aircraft—considerably more than are needed for simple testing and evaluation. It had flown more than 30 of them. And late in 2022, the company had begun training a group of operators on a state-of-the-art virtual-reality simulator system.
Opener’s highly unusual, single-seat flier is intended for personal use rather than transporting passengers, which makes it almost unique. Opener intends to have its aircraft classified as an “ultralight,” enabling it to bypass the rigorous certification required for commercial-transport and other aircraft types. The certification issue looms as a major unknown over the entire eVTOL enterprise, at least in the United States, because, as the blog Jetlaw.com noted last August, “the FAA has no clear timeline or direction on when it will finalize a permanent certification process for eVTOL.”
Opener’s strategy is not without risks, either. For one, there’s no guarantee that the FAA will ultimately agree that Opener’s aircraft, called BlackFly, qualifies as an ultralight. And not everyone is happy with this approach. “My concern is, these companies that are saying they can be ultralights and start flying around in public are putting at risk a $10 billion [eVTOL] industry,” says Mark Moore, founder and chief executive of Whisper Aero in Crossville, Tenn. “Because if they crash, people won’t know the difference” between the ultralights and the passenger eVTOLs, he adds. “To me, that’s unacceptable.” Previously, Moore led a team at NASA that designed a personal-use eVTOL and then served as engineering director at Uber’s Elevate initiative.
A BlackFly eVTOL took off on 1 October, 2022, at the Pacific Airshow in Huntington Beach, Calif. Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Opener’s aircraft is as singular as its business model. It’s a radically different kind of aircraft, and it sprang almost entirely from Leng’s fertile mind.
“As a kid,” he says, “I already envisioned what it would be like to have an aircraft that could seamlessly do a vertical takeoff, fly, and land again without any encumbrances whatsoever.” It was a vision that never left him, from a mechanical-engineering degree at the University of Toronto, management jobs in the aerospace industry, starting a company and making a pile of money by inventing a new kind of memory foam, and then retiring in 1996 at the age of 36.
The fundamental challenge to designing a vertical-takeoff aircraft is endowing it with both vertical lift and efficient forward cruising. Most eVTOL makers achieve this by physically tilting multiple large rotors from a vertical rotation axis, for takeoff, to a horizontal one, for cruising. But the mechanism for tilting the rotors must be extremely robust, and therefore it inevitably adds substantial complexity and weight. Such tilt-rotors also entail significant compromises and trade-offs in the size of the rotors and their placement relative to the wings.
Read about author Glenn Zorpette’s flight in a BlackFly here
Opener’s BlackFly ingeniously avoids having to make those trade-offs and compromises. It has two wings, one in front and one behind the pilot. Affixed to each wing are four motors and rotors—and these never change their orientation relative to the wings. Nor do the wings move relative to the fuselage. Instead, the entire aircraft rotates in the air to transition between vertical and horizontal flight.
To control the aircraft, the pilot moves a joystick, and those motions are instantly translated by redundant flight-control systems into commands that alter the relative thrust among the eight motor-propellers.
Visually, it’s an astounding aircraft, like something from a 1930s pulp sci-fi magazine. It’s also a triumph of engineering.
Leng says the journey started for him in 2008, when “I just serendipitously stumbled upon the fact that all the key technologies for making electric VTOL human flight practical were coming to a nexus.”
The journey that made Leng’s dream a reality kicked into high gear in 2014 when a chance meeting with investor Sebastian Thrun at an aviation conference led to Google cofounder Larry Page investing in Leng’s project.
Leng started in his basement in 2010, spending his own money on a mélange of home-built and commercially available components. The motors were commercial units that Leng modified himself, the motor controllers were German and off the shelf, the inertial-measurement unit was open source and based on an Arduino microcontroller. The batteries were modified model-aircraft lithium-polymer types.
“The main objective behind this was proof of concept,” he says.“I had to prove it to myself, because up until that point, they were just equations on a piece of paper. I had to get to the point where I knew that this could be practical.”
After his front-yard flight in 2011, there followed several years of refining and rebuilding all of the major components until they achieved the specifications Leng wanted. “Everything on BlackFly is from first principles,” he declares.
The motors started out generating 160 newtons (36 pounds) of static thrust. It was way too low. “I actually tried to purchase motors and motor controllers from companies that manufactured those, and I specifically asked them to customize those motors for me, by suggesting a number of changes,” he says. “I was told that, no, those changes won’t work.”
So he started designing his own brushless AC motors. “I did not want to design motors,” says Leng. “In the end, I was stunned at how much improvement we could make by just applying first principles to this motor design.”
Eleven years after Leng’s flight, no eVTOLs have been delivered to customers or are being produced at commercial scale.
To increase the power density, he had to address the tendency of a motor in an eVTOL to overheat at high thrust, especially during hover, when cooling airflow over the motor is minimal. He began by designing a system to force air through the motor. Then he began working on the rotor of the motor (not to be confused with the rotor wings that lift and propel the aircraft). This is the spinning part of a motor, which is typically a single piece of electrical steel. It’s an iron alloy with very high magnetic permeability.
By layering the steel of the rotor, Leng was able to greatly reduce its heat generation, because the thinner layers of steel limited the eddy currents in the steel that create heat. Less heat meant he could use higher-strength neodymium magnets, which would otherwise become demagnetized. Finally, he rearranged those magnets into a configuration called a Halbach array. In the end Leng’s motors were able to produce 609 newtons (137 lbs.) of thrust.
Overall, the 2-kilogram motors are capable of sustaining 20 kilowatts, for a power density of 10 kilowatts per kilogram, Leng says. It’s an extraordinary figure. One of the few motor manufacturers claiming a density in that range is H3X Technologies, which says its HPDM-250 clocks in at 12 kw/kg.
The brain of the BlackFly consists of three independent flight controllers, which calculate the aircraft’s orientation and position, based on readings from the inertial-measurement units, GPS receivers, and magnetometers. They also use pitot tubes to measure airspeed. The flight controllers continually cross-check their outputs to make sure they agree. They also feed instructions, based on the operator’s movement of the joystick, to the eight motor controllers (one for each motor).
Equipped with these sophisticated flight controllers, the fly-by-wire BlackFly is similar in that regard to the hobbyist drones that rely on processors and clever algorithms to avoid the tricky manipulations of sticks, levers, and pedals required to fly a traditional fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft.
That sophisticated, real-time control will allow a far larger number of people to consider purchasing a BlackFly when it becomes available. In late November, Opener had not disclosed a likely purchase price, but in the past the company had suggested that BlackFly would cost as much as a luxury SUV. So who might buy it? CEO Ken Karklin points to several distinct groups of potential buyers who have little in common other than wealth.
There are early tech adopters and also people who are already aviators and are “passionate about the future of electric flight, who love the idea of being able to have their own personal vertical-takeoff-and-landing, low-maintenance, clean aircraft that they can fly in rural and uncongested areas,” Karklin says. “One of them is a business owner. He has a plant that’s a 22-mile drive but would only be a 14-mile flight, and he wants to install charging infrastructure on either end and wants to use it to commute every day. We love that.”
Others are less certain about how, or even whether, this market segment will establish itself. “When it comes to personal-use eVTOLs, we are really struggling to see the business case,” says Sergio Cecutta, founder and partner at SMG Consulting, where he studies eVTOLs among other high-tech transportation topics. “I’m not saying they won’t sell. It’s how many will they sell?” He notes that Opener is not the only eVTOL maker pursuing a path to success through the ultralight or some other specialized FAA category. As of early November, the list included Alauda Aeronautics, Air, Alef, Bellwether Industries, Icon Aircraft, Jetson, Lift Aircraft, and Ryse Aero Technologies.
What makes Opener special? Both Karklin and Leng emphasize the value of all that surrounds the BlackFly aircraft. For example, there are virtual-reality-based simulators that they say enable them to fully train an operator in 10 to 15 hours. The aircraft themselves are heavily instrumented: “Every flight, literally, there’s over 1,000 parameters that are recorded, some of them at 1,000 hertz, some 100 Hz, 10 Hz, and 1 Hz,” says Leng. “All that information is stored on the aircraft and downloaded to our database at the end of the flight. When we go and make a software change, we can do what’s called regression testing by running that software using all the data from our previous flights. And we can compare the outputs against what the outputs were during any specific flight and can automatically confirm that the changes that we’ve made are without any issues. And we can also compare, to see if they make an improvement.”
Ed Lu, a former NASA astronaut and executive at Google, sits on Opener’s safety-review board. He says what impressed him most when he first met the BlackFly team was “the fact that they had based their entire development around testing. They had a wealth of flight data from flying this vehicle in a drone mode, an unmanned mode.” Having all that data was key. “They could make their decisions based not on analysis, but after real-world operations,” Lu says, adding that he is particularly impressed by Opener’s ability to manage all the flight data. “It allows them to keep track of every aircraft, what sensors are in which aircraft, which versions of code, all the way down to the flights, to what happened in each flight, to videos of what’s happening.” Lu thinks this will be a huge advantage once the aircraft is released into the “real” world.
Karklin declines to comment on whether an ultralight approval, which is governed by what the FAA designates “ Part 103,” might be an opening move toward an FAA type certification in the future. “This is step one for us, and we are going to be very, very focused on personal air vehicles for recreational and fun purposes for the foreseeable future,” he says. “But we’ve also got a working technology stack here and an aircraft architecture that has considerable utility beyond the realm of Part-103 [ultralight] aircraft, both for crewed and uncrewed applications.” Asked what his immediate goals are, Karklin responds without hesitating. “We will be the first eVTOL company, we believe, in serial production, with a small but steadily growing revenue and order book, and with a growing installed base of cloud-connected aircraft that with every flight push all the telemetry, all the flight behavior, all the component behavior, all the operator-behavior data representing all of this up to the cloud, to be ingested by our back office, and processed. And that provides us a lot of opportunity.”
This article appears in the January 2023 print issue as “Finally, an eVTOL You Can Buy Soonish.”
Top Tech 2023: A Special Report
Preview exciting technical developments for the coming year.
Can This Company Dominate Green Hydrogen?
Fortescue will need more electricity-generating capacity than France.
Pathfinder 1 could herald a new era for zeppelins
A New Way to Speed Up Computing
Blue microLEDs bring optical fiber to the processor.
The Personal-Use eVTOL Is (Almost) Here
Opener’s BlackFly is a pulp-fiction fever dream with wings.
Baidu Will Make an Autonomous EV
Its partnership with Geely aims at full self-driving mode.
China Builds New Breeder Reactors
The power plants could also make weapons-grade plutonium.
Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence
Lasers should be cheap enough to use against drones.
A Cryptocurrency for the Masses or a Universal ID?
What Worldcoin’s killer app will be is not yet clear.
The company’s Condor chip will boast more than 1,000 qubits.
Vagus-nerve stimulation promises to help treat autoimmune disorders.
New satellites can connect directly to your phone.
The E.U.’s first exascale supercomputer will be built in Germany.
A dozen more tech milestones to watch for in 2023.
Video:
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Recently, Andreas Mogensen, now getting ready for his ‘Huginn’ mission to the ISS in 2023, stopped by ESA’s ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, to meet with some of the experts who keep our satellites flying.
Andreas usually works at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston as an ISS ‘capcom’, and we don’t often see him in Europe. A few months back, while returning to Germany for some training at ESA’s Astronaut Centre in Cologne, we seized the opportunity to ask him if he’d like to stop over in Darmstadt for a look behind the scenes at mission control, and he immediately answered, ‘yes’!
Andreas’ studied aeronautical engineering with a focus on ‘guidance, navigation and control of spacecraft’ and we thought he’d be delighted to meet with the teams at mission control doing precisely that sort of work for our robotic missions.
We figured he’d also enjoy meeting colleagues from our Space Safety programme, especially the ones working on space debris and space weather, as these are crucial areas that influence the daily life of astronauts on the ISS.
Andreas met with Bruno Sousa and Julia Schwartz, who help keep Solar Orbiter healthy and on track on its mission to gather the closest-ever images of the Sun, observe the solar wind and our Star’s polar regions, helping unravel the mysteries of the solar cycle.
He also met with Stijn Lemmens, one of the analysts keeping tabs on the space debris situation in orbit, and Melanie Heil, a scientist helping ESA understand how space weather and our active Sun can affect missions in orbit and crucial infrastructure – like power grids – on ground.
We hope you enjoy this lively and informative day at mission control as much as Andreas and the teams at ESOC did!
At Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif., Lighter Than Air (LTA) Research is floating a new approach to a technology that saw its rise and fall a century ago: airships. Although airships have long since been supplanted by planes, LTA, which was founded in 2015 by CEO Alan Weston, believes that through a combination of new materials, better construction techniques, and technological advancements, airships are poised to—not reclaim the skies, certainly—but find a new niche.
Although airships never died off entirely—the Goodyear blimps, familiar to sports fans, are proof of that—the industry was already in decline by 1937, the year of the Hindenburg disaster. By the end of World War II, airships couldn’t compete with the speed airplanes offered, and they required larger crews. Today, what airships still linger serve primarily for advertising and sightseeing.
LTA’s Pathfinder 1 carries bigger dreams than hovering over a sports stadium, however. The company sees a natural fit for airships in humanitarian and relief missions. Airships can stay aloft for long periods of time, in case ground conditions aren’t ideal, have a long range, and carry significant payloads, according to Carl Taussig, LTA’s chief technical officer.
Pathfinder’s cigar-shaped envelope is just over 120 meters in length and 20 meters in diameter. While that dwarfs Goodyear’s current, 75-meter Wingfoot One, it’s still only half the length of the Hindenburg. LTA expects Pathfinder 1 to carry approximately 4 tonnes of cargo, in addition to its crew, water ballast, and fuel. The airship will have a top speed of 65 knots, or about 120 kilometers per hour—on par with the Hindenburg—with a sustained cruise speed of 35 to 40 knots (65 to 75 km/h).
It may not seem much of an advance to be building an airship that flies no faster than the Hindenburg. But Pathfinder 1 carries a lot of new tech that LTA is betting will prove key to an airship resurgence.
For one, airships used to be constructed around riveted aluminum girders, which provided the highest strength-to-weight ratio available at the time. Instead, LTA will be using carbon-fiber tubes attached to titanium hubs. As a result, Pathfinder 1’s primary structure will be both stronger and lighter.
Pathfinder 1’s outer covering is also a step up from past generations. Airships like the 1930s’ Graf Zeppelin had coverings made out of doped cotton canvas. The dope painted on the fabric increased its strength and resiliency. But canvas is still canvas. LTA has instead built its outer coverings out of a three-layer laminate of synthetics. The outermost layer is DuPont’s Tedlar, which is a polyvinyl fluoride. The middle layer is a loose weave of fire-retardant aramid fibers. The inner layer is polyester. “It’s very similar to what’s used in a lot of racing sailboats,” says Taussig. “We needed to modify that material to make it fire resistant and change a little bit about its structural performance.”
LTA Research
But neither the materials science nor the manufacturing advances will take primary credit for LTA’s looked-for success, according to Taussig—instead, it’s the introduction of electronics. “Everything’s electric on Pathfinder,” he says. “All the actuation, all the propulsion, all the actual power is all electrically generated. It’s a fully electric fly-by-wire aircraft, which is not something that was possible 80 years ago.” Pathfinder 1 has 12 electric motors for propulsion, as well as four tail fins with steering rudders controlled by its fly-by-wire system. (During initial test flights, the airship will be powered by two reciprocating aircraft engines).
There’s one other piece of equipment making an appearance on Pathfinder 1 that wasn’t available 80 years ago: lidar. Installed at the top of each of Pathfinder 1’s helium gas cells is an automotive-grade lidar. “The lidar can give us a point cloud showing the entire internal hull of that gas cell,” says Taussig, which can then be used to determine the gas cell’s volume accurately. In flight, the airship’s pilots can use that information, as well as data about the helium’s purity, pressure, and temperature, to better keep the craft pitched properly and to avoid extra stress on the internal structure during flight.
Although LTA’s initial focus is on humanitarian applications, there are other areas where airships might shine one day. “An airship is kind of a ‘tweener,’ in between sea cargo and air freight,” says Taussig. Being fully electric, Pathfinder 1 is also greener than traditional air- or sea-freight options.
After completing Pathfinder 1’s construction late in 2022, LTA plans to conduct a series of ground tests on each of the airship’s systems in the first part of 2023. Once the team is satisfied with those tests, they’ll move to tethered flight tests and finally untethered flight tests over San Francisco’s South Bay later in the year.
The company will also construct an approximately 180-meter-long airship, Pathfinder 3 at its Akron Airdock facility in Ohio. Pathfinder 3 won’t be ready to fly in 2023, but its development shows LTA’s aspirations for an airship renaissance is more than just hot air.
This article appears in the January 2023 print issue as “The Return of the Airship.”
Top Tech 2023: A Special Report
Preview exciting technical developments for the coming year.
Can This Company Dominate Green Hydrogen?
Fortescue will need more electricity-generating capacity than France.
Pathfinder 1 could herald a new era for zeppelins
A New Way to Speed Up Computing
Blue microLEDs bring optical fiber to the processor.
The Personal-Use eVTOL Is (Almost) Here
Opener’s BlackFly is a pulp-fiction fever dream with wings.
Baidu Will Make an Autonomous EV
Its partnership with Geely aims at full self-driving mode.
China Builds New Breeder Reactors
The power plants could also make weapons-grade plutonium.
Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence
Lasers should be cheap enough to use against drones.
A Cryptocurrency for the Masses or a Universal ID?
What Worldcoin’s killer app will be is not yet clear.
The company’s Condor chip will boast more than 1,000 qubits.
Vagus-nerve stimulation promises to help treat autoimmune disorders.
New satellites can connect directly to your phone.
The E.U.’s first exascale supercomputer will be built in Germany.
A dozen more tech milestones to watch for in 2023.
The technical challenge of missile defense has been compared with that of hitting a bullet with a bullet. Then there is the still tougher economic challenge of using an expensive interceptor to kill a cheaper target—like hitting a lead bullet with a golden one.
Maybe trouble and money could be saved by shooting down such targets with a laser. Once the system was designed, built, and paid for, the cost per shot would be low. Such considerations led planners at the Pentagon to seek a solution from Lockheed Martin, which has just delivered a 300-kilowatt laser to the U.S. Army. The new weapon combines the output of a large bundle of fiber lasers of varying frequencies to form a single beam of white light. This laser has been undergoing tests in the lab, and it should see its first field trials sometime in 2023. General Atomics, a military contractor in San Diego, is also developing a laser of this power for the Army based on what’s known as the distributed-gain design, which has a single aperture.
Both systems offer the prospect of being inexpensive to use. The electric bill itself would range “from US $5 to $10,” for a pulse lasting a few seconds, says Michael Perry, the vice president in charge of laser systems for General Atomics.
Why are we getting ray guns only now, more than a century after H.G. Wells imagined them in his sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds? Put it down partly to the rising demand for cheap antimissile defense, but it’s mainly the result of technical advances in high-energy lasers.
The old standby for powerful lasers employed chemical reactions in flowing gas. That method was clumsy, heavy, and dangerous, and the laser itself became a flammable target for enemies to attack. The advantage was that these chemical lasers could be made immensely powerful, a far cry from the puny pulsed ruby lasers that wowed observers back in the 1960s by punching holes in razor blades (at power levels jocularly measured in “gillettes”).
“With lasers, if you can see it, you can kill it.” —Robert Afzal, Lockheed Martin
By 2014, fiber lasers had reached the point where they could be considered for weapons, and one 30-kW model was installed on the USS Ponce, where it demonstrated the ability to shoot down speedboats and small drones at relatively close range. The 300-kW fiber lasers being employed now in the two Army projects emit about 100 kW in optical power, enough to burn through much heftier targets (not to mention quite a few gillettes) at considerable distances.
“A laser of that class can be effective against a wide variety of targets, including cruise missiles, mortars, UAVs, and aircraft,” says Perry. “But not reentry vehicles [launched by ballistic missiles].” Those are the warheads, and to ward them off, he says, you’d probably have to hit the rocket when it’s still in the boost phase, which would mean placing your laser in orbit. Laser tech is still far from performing such a feat.
Even so, these futuristic weapons will no doubt find plenty of applications in today’s world. Israel made news in April by field-testing an airborne antimissile laser called Iron Beam, a play on the name Iron Dome, the missile system it has used to down rockets fired from Gaza. The laser system, reportedly rated at about 100 kW, is still not in service and hasn’t seen combat, but one day it may be able to replace some, if not all, of Iron Dome’s missiles with photons. Other countries have similar capabilities, or say they do. In May, Russia said it had used a laser to incinerate a Ukrainian drone from 5 kilometers away, a claim that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, derided.
A missile is destroyed by a low-power, 2013 version of Lockheed Martin’s fiber laser www.youtube.com
Not all ray guns must be lasers, though. In March, Taiwan News reported that Chinese researchers had built a microwave weapon that in principle could be placed in orbit from where its 5-megawatt pulses could fry the electronic heart of an enemy satellite. But making such a machine in the lab is quite different from operating it in the field, not to mention in outer space, where supplying power and removing waste heat constitute major problems.
Because lasers performance falls off in bad weather, they can’t be relied on by themselves to defend critically important targets. They must instead be paired with kinetic weapons—missiles or bullets—to create a layered defense system.
“With lasers, if you can see it, you can kill it; typically rain and snow are not big deterrents,” says Robert Afzal, an expert on lasers at Lockheed Martin. “But a thundercloud—that’s hard.”
Afzal says that the higher up a laser is placed, the less interference it will face, but there is a trade-off. “With an airplane you have the least amount of resources—least volume, least weight—that is available to you. On a ship, you have a lot more resources available, but you’re in the maritime atmosphere, which is pretty hazy, so you may need a lot more power to get to the target. And the Army is in between: It deals with closer threats, like rockets and mortars, and they need a deep magazine, because they deal with a lot more targets.”
In every case, the point is to use expensive antimissile missiles only when you must. Israel opted to pursue laser weapons in part because its Iron Dome missiles cost so much more than the unguided, largely homemade rockets they defend against. Some of the military drones that Russia and Ukraine are now flying wouldn’t break the budget of the better-heeled sort of hobbyist. And it would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed to shoot them from the sky with projectiles so costly that you went broke.
This article appears in the January 2023 print issue as “Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence .”
Top Tech 2023: A Special Report
Preview exciting technical developments for the coming year.
Can This Company Dominate Green Hydrogen?
Fortescue will need more electricity-generating capacity than France.
Pathfinder 1 could herald a new era for zeppelins
A New Way to Speed Up Computing
Blue microLEDs bring optical fiber to the processor.
The Personal-Use eVTOL Is (Almost) Here
Opener’s BlackFly is a pulp-fiction fever dream with wings.
Baidu Will Make an Autonomous EV
Its partnership with Geely aims at full self-driving mode.
China Builds New Breeder Reactors
The power plants could also make weapons-grade plutonium.
Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence
Lasers should be cheap enough to use against drones.
A Cryptocurrency for the Masses or a Universal ID?
What Worldcoin’s killer app will be is not yet clear.
The company’s Condor chip will boast more than 1,000 qubits.
Vagus-nerve stimulation promises to help treat autoimmune disorders.
New satellites can connect directly to your phone.
The E.U.’s first exascale supercomputer will be built in Germany.
A dozen more tech milestones to watch for in 2023.
They’re all doing great, thanks for asking.
The post The Architects of the Iraq War: Where Are They Now? appeared first on The Intercept.
“I think that we need to see what has actually transpired.”
The post Senators Aren’t Ready to Blame Themselves for Silicon Valley Bank Implosion appeared first on The Intercept.
Civilians are being killed by Russian weapons just like in Ukraine, says special rapporteur Tom Andrews in call for global action
Myanmar is a “failing state” and the crisis is getting exponentially worse, a UN special rapporteur for the country has warned, urging countries to adopt the same unified resolve that followed the invasion of Ukraine.
“The same types of weapons that are killing Ukrainians are killing people in Myanmar,” Tom Andrews, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, told the Guardian in an interview, citing the supply of Russian weapons to the junta since the coup two years ago. The junta relies heavily on aircraft from China and Russia, and has increasingly resorted to airstrikes to attempt to quell determined resistance forces.
Continue reading...Empresa São Cleófas Energias Renováveis prevê a instalação de 372 aerogeradores no sertão do Seridó, onde há bens arqueológicos de 9 mil anos e comunidades quilombolas.
The post Projeto de energia eólica ameaça destruir passado e futuro do Brasil numa tacada só appeared first on The Intercept.
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A year has passed since the launch of the ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover mission was put on hold, but the work has not stopped for the ExoMars teams in Europe.
In this programme, the ESA Web TV crew travel back to Turin, Italy to talk to the teams and watch as new tests are being conducted with the rover’s Earth twin Amalia while the real rover remains carefully stored in an ultra-clean room.
The 15-minute special programme gives an update on what happened since the mission was cancelled in 2022 because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the plan ahead, the new challenges, the latest deep drilling test and the stringent planetary protection measures in place.
ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover has unique drilling capabilities and an on-board science laboratory unrivalled by any other mission in development. Its twin rover Amalia was back on its wheels and drilled down 1.7 metres into a martian-like ground in Italy – about 25 times deeper than any other rover has ever attempted on Mars. The rover also collected samples for analysis under the watchful eye of European science teams.
ESA, together with international and industrial partners, is reshaping the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Mission with new European elements, including a lander, and a target date of 2028 for the trip to Mars.
The newly shaped Rosalind Franklin Mission will recover one of the original objectives of ExoMars – to create an independent European capability to access the surface of Mars with a sophisticated robotic payload.
More information: https://www.esa.int/ExoMars
The Red Planet has always been on the horizon for space exploration.
The European Commission wants Europe to boost its share of global semiconductor production to 20 percent by 2030, from 10 percent today. To that end, it is forwarding plans for more than €43 billion in public and private investment through a European Chips Act. To accomplish that increase in chip capacity, the legislation will approve appropriations for R&D, incentivize manufacturing, and take steps to make the supply chain more secure. Jo De Boeck, chief strategy officer and executive vice president at the Belgium-based nanoelectronics R&D center Imec, explained a proposed R&D structure and its likely impact to engineers at the 2023 IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) last month in San Francisco. The R&D segment relies on the establishment of advanced pilot line facilities, to enable a path from laboratory breakthrough to fab production, and a network of competence centers, to build up capacity for semiconductor design. De Boeck spoke with IEEE Spectrum’s Samuel K. Moore at ISSCC.
IEEE Spectrum: What would you say are Europe’s strengths today in semiconductor manufacturing?
Jo De Boeck: Well, manufacturing holds quite a few things. So first and foremost, I think of semiconductor manufacturing equipment and materials. Think of [Netherlands-based extreme-ultraviolet lithography maker], ASML. If you move up to the manufacturing part, you have some of our integrated device manufacturers [IDMs] in analog and analog mixed-signal and power devices, which is, of course, quite a very important area of devices and production to be in. But clearly—and that’s part of the reason for the Chips Act—there’s no European manufacturing presence at the most advanced technology nodes.That said, how much of the focus should be on getting that cutting-edge logic versus building on the strengths that you already have?
De Boeck: Well, if it means focusing on one is losing on the other, I think that’s a bad choice to make. I think it’s important, first of all, to keep a long enough view in mind. 2030 is like tomorrow in this industry. So if we’re looking at getting 20 percent production in Europe by 2030 and you would aim that toward being leading edge, you’re in a hard place already. Before fabs are built and technology is transferred, it will be close to the end of the decade. So we need to look further out whilst continuing to build on the strengths that are there, such as the IDMs that are producing the goodies that we just discussed.
I think the important part is to find a way to keep up the capacity of the R&D and to start training people on the design of the leading-edge nodes. If there’s no demand [from chip-design firms], there will be no economical reason to build a fab [in Europe].
You talked about building “capacity to innovate.” Could you just start by explaining what’s meant by that?
De Boeck: The capacity for innovation in the case of our industry means two things—the design and the technology. And they need to go hand in hand. They need to be really close to each other. One area of the capacity will be on the design platform, and that design platform will be in the cloud, accessible from many places. The idea is that there will be design capacity in each and every member state through competence centers.
The design capacity is then balanced by the innovation in semiconductor technology. That will be carried out in larger facilities, because there needs to be focused investments there. These will be connected to competence centers for specific expertises and for design enablement on a pilot line. So the pilot line/competence center combination is the innovation capacity.
You also mentioned virtual prototyping as part of the plan. Please explain what you mean by that and what its role is.
De Boeck: I can explain by the example of back-side power delivery network technology. [Ed: This is a technology expected to debut in two or three years that delivers power to transistors from beneath the silicon instead of from above as is done now.] It’s something where the design community needs to get its hands on to do system-level exploration to see how, for instance, a back-side power distribution network could help the performance of a circuit improve. All of this requires this interplay between technology, electronic design automation vendors, and the design community. This has to be done first at a modeling and virtual prototyping phase, before you can make full silicon.
You stressed the importance of full-stack innovation. Please explain.
De Boeck: Full-stack means different things to different disciplines. But take, for example, the interplay between sensing and compute in the car of the future. That, of course, will involve a high-performance computer that needs to talk to the environment whether we’re talking to the other traffic elements—pedestrians, bicycles, cars, etc.—or understanding weather conditions That will require a lot of sensors in the car whose data must be fused by the computer. If you don’t know how this data will enter the sensor fusion engine, how much preprocessing you want to do on the sensor, you may be focusing on a suboptimal solution when developing your sensor or system architecture. Maybe you need to have a neural network on your radar to convert the raw data to early information before sending it to the central engine where it’s going to be combined with the camera input and whatever else is needed to build a full picture around the car or in its environment. A situation like that will require every element of that full stack to be co-optimized.
How can the EU Chips Act actually help make that happen?
De Boeck: Well, I think in general terms, it could stimulate collaboration. It could help to create awareness and start training people in this context because you need youngsters to start looking at the challenges in this particular way.
A new era of lunar exploration is on the rise, with dozens of Moon missions planned for the coming decade. Europe is in the forefront here, contributing to building the Gateway lunar station and the Orion spacecraft – set to return humans to our natural satellite – as well as developing its large logistic lunar lander, known as Argonaut. As dozens of missions will be operating on and around the Moon and needing to communicate together and fix their positions independently from Earth, this new era will require its own time.
The 19-seater Dornier 228 propeller plane that took off into the cold blue January sky looked ordinary at first glance. Spinning its left propeller, however, was a 2-megawatt electric motor powered by two hydrogen fuel cells—the right side ran on a standard kerosene engine—making it the largest aircraft flown on hydrogen to date. Val Miftakhov, founder and CEO of ZeroAvia, the California startup behind the 10-minute test flight in Gloucestershire, England, called it a “historical day for sustainable aviation.”
Los Angeles–based Universal Hydrogen plans to test a 50-seat hydrogen-powered aircraft by the end of February. Both companies promise commercial flights of retrofitted turboprop aircraft by 2025. French aviation giant Airbus is going bigger with a planned 2026 demonstration flight of its iconic A380 passenger airplane, which will fly using hydrogen fuel cells and by burning hydrogen directly in an engine. And Rolls Royce is making headway on aircraft engines that burn pure hydrogen.
The aviation industry, responsible for some 2.5 percent of global carbon emissions, has committed to net-zero emissions by 2050. Getting there will require several routes, including sustainable fuels, hybrid-electric engines, and battery-electric aircraft.
Hydrogen is another potential route. Whether used to make electricity in fuel cells or burned in an engine, it combines with oxygen to emit water vapor. If green hydrogen scales up for trucks and ships, it could be a low-cost fuel without the environmental issues of batteries.
Flying on hydrogen brings storage and aircraft-certification challenges, but aviation companies are doing the groundwork now for hydrogen flight by 2035. “Hydrogen is headed off to the sky, and we’re going to take it there,” says Amanda Simpson, vice president for research and technology at Airbus Americas.
The most plentiful element, hydrogen is also the lightest—key for an industry fighting gravity—packing three times the energy of jet fuel by weight. The problem with hydrogen is its volume. For transport, it has to be stored in heavy tanks either as a compressed high-pressure gas or a cryogenic liquid.
ZeroAvia is using compressed hydrogen gas, since it is already approved for road transport. Its test airplane had two hydrogen fuel cells and tanks sitting inside the cabin, but the team is now thinking creatively about a compact system with minimal changes to aircraft design to speed up certification in the United States and Europe. The fuel cells’ added weight could reduce flying range, but “that’s not a problem, because aircraft are designed to fly much further than they’re used,” says vice president of strategy James McMicking.
The company has backing from investors that include Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos; partnerships with British Airways and United Airlines; and 1,500 preorders for its hydrogen-electric power-train system, half of which are for smaller, 400-kilometer-range 9- to 19-seaters.
By 2027, ZeroAvia plans to convert larger, 70-seater turboprop aircraft with twice the range, used widely in Europe. The company is developing 5-MW electric motors for those, and it plans to switch to more energy-dense liquid hydrogen to save space and weight. The fuel is novel for the aviation industry and could require a longer regulatory approval process, McMicking says.
Next will come a 10-MW power train for aircraft with 100 to 150 seats, “the workhorses of the industry,” he says. Those planes—think Boeing 737—are responsible for 60 percent of aviation emissions. Making a dent in those with hydrogen will require much more efficient fuel cells. ZeroAvia is working on proprietary high-temperature fuel cells for that, McMicking says, with the ability to reuse the large amounts of waste heat generated. “We have designs and a technology road map that takes us into jet-engine territory for power,” he says.
Universal Hydrogen
Universal Hydrogen, which counts Airbus, GE Aviation, and American Airlines among its strategic investors, is placing bets on liquid hydrogen. The startup, “a hydrogen supply and logistics company at our core,” wants to ensure a seamless delivery network for hydrogen aviation as it catches speed, says founder and CEO Paul Eremenko. The company sources green hydrogen, turns it into liquid, and puts it in relatively low-tech insulated aluminum tanks that it will deliver via road, rail, or ship. “We want them certified by the Federal Aviation Administration for 2025, which means they can’t be a science project,” he says.
The cost of green hydrogen is expected to be on par with kerosene by 2025, Eremenko says. But “there’s nobody out there with an incredible hydrogen-airplane solution. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem.”
To crack it, Universal Hydrogen partnered with leading fuel-cell-maker Plug Power to develop a few thousand conversion kits for regional turboprop airplanes. The kits swap the engine in its streamlined housing (also known as nacelle) for a fuel-cell stack, power electronics, and a 2-MW electric motor. While the company’s competitors use batteries as buffers during takeoff, Eremenko says Universal uses smart algorithms to manage fuel cells, so they can ramp up and respond quickly. “We are the Nespresso of hydrogen,” he says. “We buy other people’s coffee, put it into capsules, and deliver to customers. But we have to build the first coffee machine. We’re the only company incubating the chicken and egg at the same time.”
This rendering of an Airbus A380 demonstrator flight (presently slated for 2026) reveals current designs on an aircraft that’s expected to fly using fuel cells and by burning hydrogen directly in the engine. Airbus
Fuel cells have a few advantages over a large central engine. They allow manufacturers to spread out smaller propulsion motors over an aircraft, giving them more design freedom. And because there are no high-temperature moving parts, maintenance costs can be lower. For long-haul aircraft, however, the weight and complexity of high-power fuel cells makes hydrogen-combustion engines appealing.
Airbus is considering both fuel-cell and combustion propulsion for its ZEROe hydrogen aircraft system. It has partnered with German automotive fuel-cell-maker Elring Klinger and, for direct combustion engines, with CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and Safran. Burning liquid hydrogen in today’s engines is still expected to require slight modifications, such as a shorter combustion chamber and better seals.
Airbus is also evaluating hybrid propulsion concepts with a hydrogen-engine-powered turbine and a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered motor on the same shaft, says Simpson, of Airbus Americas. “Then you can optimize it so you use both propulsion systems for takeoff and climb, and then turn one off for cruising.”
The company isn’t limiting itself to simple aircraft redesign. Hydrogen tanks could be stored in a cupola on top of the plane, pods under the wings, or a large tank at the back, Simpson says. Without liquid fuel in the wings, as in traditional airplanes, she says, “you can optimize wings for aerodynamics, make them thinner or longer. Or maybe a blended-wing body, which could be very different. This opens up the opportunity to optimize aircraft for efficiency.” Certification for such new aircraft could take years, and Airbus isn’t expecting commercial flights until 2035.
Conventional aircraft made today will be around in 2050 given their 25- to 30-year life-span, says Robin Riedel, an analyst at McKinsey & Co. Sustainable fuels are the only green option for those. He says hydrogen could play a role there, through “power-to-liquid technology, where you can mix hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide to make aviation fuel.”
Even then, Riedel thinks hydrogen will likely be a small part of aviation’s sustainability solution until 2050. “By 2070, hydrogen is going to play a much bigger role,” he says. “But we have to get started on hydrogen now.” The money that Airbus and Boeing are putting into hydrogen is a small fraction of aerospace, he says, but big airlines investing in hydrogen companies or placing power-train orders “shows there is desire.”
The aviation industry has to clean up if it is to grow, Simpson says. Biofuels are a stepping-stone, because they reduce only carbon emissions, not other harmful ones. “If we’re going to move towards clean aviation, we have to rethink everything from scratch and that’s what ZEROe is doing,” she says. “This is an opportunity to make not an evolutionary change but a truly revolutionary one.”
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00:02:18
Terrae Novae is ESA’s exploration programme.
Terrae Novae is not only literally about exploring new worlds, but by describing the limitless opportunities for discovery, economic growth and inspiration it also expresses our ambitions for Europe’s future innovators, scientists and explorers.
This video shows the many exploration activities ESA is conducting or has planned in our Solar System, from the International Space Station to the Moon with the European Service Module and lunar Gateway modules for Artemis, and on to Mars with the Mars Sample Return campaign.
For more on ESA’s human and robotic exploration strategy see: https://www.esa.int/terraenovae
For about as long as engineers have talked about beaming solar power to Earth from space, they’ve had to caution that it was an idea unlikely to become real anytime soon. Elaborate designs for orbiting solar farms have circulated for decades—but since photovoltaic cells were inefficient, any arrays would need to be the size of cities. The plans got no closer to space than the upper shelves of libraries.
That’s beginning to change. Right now, in a sun-synchronous orbit about 525 kilometers overhead, there is a small experimental satellite called the Space Solar Power Demonstrator One (SSPD-1 for short). It was designed and built by a team at the California Institute of Technology, funded by donations from the California real estate developer Donald Bren, and launched on 3 January—among 113 other small payloads—on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
“To the best of our knowledge, this would be the first demonstration of actual power transfer in space, of wireless power transfer,” says Ali Hajimiri, a professor of electrical engineering at Caltech and a codirector of the program behind SSPD-1, the Space Solar Power Project.
The Caltech team is waiting for a go-ahead from the operators of a small space tug to which it is attached, providing guidance and attitude control. If all goes well, SSPD-1 will spend at least five to six months testing prototype components of possible future solar stations in space. In the next few weeks, the project managers hope to unfold a lightweight frame, called DOLCE (short for Deployable on-Orbit ultraLight Composite Experiment), on which parts of future solar arrays could be mounted. Another small assembly on the spacecraft contains samples of 32 different types of photovoltaic cells, intended to see which would be most efficient and robust. A third part of the vehicle contains a microwave transmitter, set up to prove that energy from the solar cells can be sent to a receiver. For this first experiment, the receivers are right there on board the spacecraft, but if it works, an obvious future step would be to send electricity via microwave to receivers on the ground.
Caltech’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator, shown orbiting Earth in this artist’s conception, was launched on 3 January.Caltech
One can dismiss the 50-kilogram SSPD-1 as yet another nonstarter, but a growing army of engineers and policymakers take solar energy from space seriously. Airbus, the European aerospace company, has been testing its own technology on the ground, and government agencies in China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States have all mounted small projects. “Recent technology and conceptual advances have made the concept both viable and economically competitive,” said Frazer-Nash, a British engineering consultancy, in a 2021 report to the U.K. government. Engineers working on the technology say microwave power transmissions would be safe, unlike ionizing radiation, which is harmful to people or other things in its path.
No single thing has happened to start this renaissance. Instead, say engineers, several advances are coming together.
For one thing, the cost of launching hardware into orbit keeps dropping, led by SpaceX and other, smaller companies such as Rocket Lab. SpaceX has a simplified calculator on its website, showing that if you want to launch a 50-kg satellite into sun-synchronous orbit, they’ll do it for US $275,000.
Meanwhile, photovoltaic technology has improved, step by step. Lightweight electronic components keep getting better and cheaper. And there is political pressure as well: Governments and major companies have made commitments to decarbonize in the battle against global climate change, committing to renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels.
Most solar power, at least for the foreseeable future, will be Earth-based, which will be cheaper and easier to maintain than anything anyone can launch into space. Proponents of space-based solar power say that for now, they see it as best used for specialty needs, such as remote outposts, places recovering from disasters, or even other space vehicles.
But Hajimiri says don’t underestimate the advantages of space, such as unfiltered sunlight that is far stronger than what reaches the ground and is uninterrupted by darkness or bad weather—if you can build an orbiting array light enough to be practical.
Most past designs, dictated by the technology of their times, included impossibly large truss structures to hold solar panels and wiring to route power to a central transmitter. The Caltech team would dispense with all that. An array would consist of thousands of independent tiles as small as 100 square centimeters, each with its own solar cells, transmitter, and avionics. They might be loosely connected, or they might even fly in formation.
Time-lapse images show the experimental DOLCE frame for an orbiting solar array being unfolded in a clean room.Caltech
“The analogy I like to use is that it’s like an army of ants instead of an elephant,” says Hajimiri. Transmission to receivers on the ground could be by phased array—microwave signals from the tiles synchronized so that they can be aimed with no moving parts. And the parts—the photovoltaic cells with their electronics—could perhaps be so lightweight that they’re flexible. New algorithms could keep their signals focused.
“That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about,” said Harry Atwater, a coleader of the Caltech project, as SSPD-1 was being planned. “Really gossamer-like, ultralight, the limits of mass-density deployable systems.”
If it works out, in 30 years maybe there could be orbiting solar power fleets, adding to the world’s energy mix. In other words, as a recent report from Frazer-Nash concluded, this is “a potential game changer.”
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The mission to return martian samples back to Earth will see a European 2.5 metre-long robotic arm pick up tubes filled with precious soil from Mars and transfer them to a rocket for an historic interplanetary delivery.
The sophisticated robot, known as the Sample Transfer Arm or STA, will play a crucial role in the success of the Mars Sample Return campaign.
The Sample Transfer Arm is conceived to be autonomous, highly reliable and robust. The robot can perform a large range of movements with seven degrees of freedom, assisted by two cameras and a myriad of sensors. It features a gripper – akin to a hand – that can capture and handle the sample tubes at different angles.
The robotic arm will land on Mars to retrieve the sample tubes NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently collecting from the surface. Able to “see”, “feel” and take autonomous decisions, its high level of dexterity allows the arm to extract the tubes from the rover, pick them up from the martian ground, insert them into a container and close the lid before lifting-off from Mars.
ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) will rendezvous with the container filled with martian samples and bring the material back to Earth.
The joint endeavour between NASA and ESA aims to bring back martian samples to the best labs in our planet by 2033.
Follow the latest news about Mars Sample Return on Twitter and read all about it on the blog To Mars and Back.
More about the Sample Transfer Arm
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Did you know that ESA is researching human hibernation for long distance spaceflight to Mars or beyond?
Hibernating astronauts could be the best way to save mission costs, reduce the size of spacecraft by a third and keep crew healthy on their way to Mars. An ESA-led investigation suggests that human hibernation goes beyond the realm of science-fiction and may become a game-changing technique for space travel.
When packing for a return flight to the Red Planet, space engineers account for around two years’ worth of food and water for the crew.
Torpor during hibernation is an induced state that reduces the metabolic rate of an organism. This ‘suspended animation’ is a common mechanism in animals who wish to preserve energy.
Reducing the metabolic rate of a crew en route to Mars down to 25% of the normal state would dramatically cut down the amount of supplies and habitat size, making long-duration exploration more feasible.
Mimicking therapeutic torpor, the idea of putting human into a state of hibernation, has been around in hospitals since the 1980s – doctors can induce hypothermia to reduce metabolism during long and complex surgeries. However, it is not an active reduction of energy and misses most of the advantages of torpor. Studies on hibernation to visit other planets could offer new potential applications for patient care on Earth.
Animals hibernate to survive periods of cold and food or water scarcity, reducing their heart rate, breathing and other vital functions to a fraction of their normal life, while body temperature lowers close to ambient temperature. Tardigrades, frogs and reptiles are very good at it.
Lower testosterone levels seem to aid long hibernation in mammals, estrogens in humans strongly regulate energy metabolism.
With the crew at rest for long periods, artificial intelligence will come into play during anomalies and emergencies.
The possibilities of hibernation for medical use is of particular interest to the European research community and could transform how we approach many severe illnesses.
Inducing torpor is already used in some medical environments such as surgical theathers to replace anesthesia in those patients allergic to anesthetic drugs.
The step to space research is closer than you might think. Get involved with spaceflight research via https://www.esa.int/spaceflightAO. Find out about our commercial partnerships and opportunities in human and robotic exploration via https://www.esa.int/explorationpartners to run your research in microgravity as well.
Update 4 Nov. 2:45 p.m. EDT: Rocket Lab says its launch was successful, but booster recovery was not. It says it lost telemetry signals from the descending first stage during reentry.
“As standard procedure, we pull the helicopter from the recovery zone if this happens,” a company spokesperson said.
“If at first you don’t succeed….” Rocket Lab, the space launch company with two launchpads on the New Zealand coast, almost did succeed in May at something very difficult: To make its Electron booster reusable (and therefore far less expensive to fly), it tried catching the used first stage—in midair—with a helicopter as it descended by parachute toward the Pacific Ocean.
It came oh-so-close. On its first try, Rocket Lab’s helicopter successfully snagged the parachute with a hook at the end of a long cable—a remarkable piece of planning and flying. But the pilot, in the company’s words, “detected different load characteristics than previously experienced in testing,” and let the rocket fall in the water for a ship to recover it.
So try, try again. Rocket Lab is now making a new recovery attempt, this time with a rocket carrying an atmospheric-research satellite for the Swedish National Space Agency. If the helicopter can catch and hold onto the booster, it will fly it back to Rocket Lab’s production complex near Auckland for possible reuse.
“We’re eager to get the helicopter back out there,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s CEO and founder.
During Rocket Lab’s launch on 2 May 2022, the helicopter was able to catch the Electron rocket booster, but load issues forced the pilot to let the rocket fall to the water.Rocket Lab
“No changes since the May recovery,” said Morgan Bailey of Rocket Lab in an email to IEEE Spectrum, “but our team has carried out a number of capture rehearsals with test stages in preparation for this launch.”
Satellite operators are watching closely because, after Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Rocket Lab has established itself as a contender in space launches, especially for companies and government agencies with smaller payloads. This is its 32nd Electron launch since 2017. “They’ve become a major player,” said Chad Anderson of Space Capital, a venture capital firm.
Many of the world’s launch bases have historically been near the ocean for good reason: If rockets failed, open water is a relatively safe place for debris to fall. That’s why the United States uses coastal Florida and California, and the European Space Agency uses Kourou, French Guiana, on the northern coast of South America. Rocket Lab started in New Zealand and is expanding to the Virginia coast.
The downside is that saltwater and rocket hardware don’t mix very well; the water is corrosive, and cleanup is expensive. SpaceX goes to great lengths to land its boosters on barges or back at Cape Canaveral; Rocket Lab, whose boosters are smaller, can change its commercial space business dramatically if helicopter recoveries become routine.
The name of the mission for its first booster-recovery attempt was a playful “There and Back Again”; the second, suggested by an American space enthusiast, is “Catch Me if You Can.”
Here’s the plan: The Electron rocket, 18 meters tall, lifts off over the southern Pacific, aiming to place the satellite in a sun-synchronous orbit 585 kilometers high. The first stage, which made up 80 percent of the vehicle’s mass at launch, burns out after the first 70 km. Two minutes and 32 seconds into the flight, it drops off, following a long arc that, on past flights, would have sent it crashing into the ocean, about 280 km downrange.
This artist's conception envisions the helicopter, having successfully snagged the booster's parachute, carrying it back to dry land. A recovery ship is on standby. Rocket Lab
But Rocket Lab has equipped it with heat shielding, a guidance computer and control thrusters, protecting and steering it as it falls tailfirst at up to 8,300 kilometers per hour. Temperatures reach 2,400 °C as it’s slowed by the thickening air around it.
At an altitude of 13 km a small drogue parachute is deployed, followed by a main chute less than a minute later. They slow the booster’s descent to about 36 km/h.
The helicopter, a Sikorsky S-92, is waiting in the landing zone, trailing a grappling hook on a long cable. If all goes well, the helicopter flies over the descending rocket and snags the parachute cables about 2,000 meters above the ocean’s surface. Then it flies back to land with the rocket hanging underneath.
“The main advantage of air capture is that we’re not cleaning salt water out of it,” said Rocket Lab’s Bailey in an earlier interview. “We’re still in the test phase part of the program, and in terms of time and cost savings, that’ll be determined.”
But engines recovered from the ocean after previous launches have been refurbished and test-fired successfully, says Rocket Lab. Like many engineering efforts, it’s a step at a time.
“Being able to refly Electron without too much rework is the aim of the game,” says the company. “If we can achieve high level performance with engine parts recovered from the ocean, imagine what we can do with returned dry engines.”
For Synopsys Chief Executive Aart de Geus, running the electronic design automation behemoth is similar to being a bandleader. He brings together the right people, organizes them into a cohesive ensemble, and then leads them in performing their best.
De Geus, who helped found the company in 1986, has some experience with bands. The IEEE Fellow has been playing guitar in blues and jazz bands since he was an engineering student in the late 1970s.
Much like jazz musicians improvising, engineers go with the flow at team meetings, he says: One person comes up with an idea, and another suggests ways to improve it.
“There are actually a lot of commonalities between my music hobby and my other big hobby, Synopsys,” de Geus says.
Employer
Synopsys
Title
CEO
Member grade
Fellow
Alma mater
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Synopsys is now the largest supplier of software that engineers use to design chips, employing about 20,000 people. The company reported US $1.36 billion in revenue in the first quarter of this year.
De Geus is considered a founding father of electronic design automation (EDA), which automates chip design using synthesis and other tools. It was pioneered by him and his team in the 1980s. Synthesis revolutionized digital design by taking the high-level functional description of a circuit and automatically selecting the logic components (gates) and constructing the connections (netlist) to build the circuit. Virtually all large digital chips manufactured today are largely synthesized, using software that de Geus and his team developed.
“Synthesis changed the very nature of how digital chips are designed, moving us from the age of computer-a ided design (CAD) to electronic design automation (EDA),” he says.
During the past three and a half decades, logic synthesis has enabled about a 10 millionfold increase in chip complexity, he says. For that reason, Electrical Business magazine named him one of the 10 most influential executives in 2002, as well as its 2004 CEO of the Year.
Born in Vlaardingen, Netherlands, de Geus grew up mostly in Basel, Switzerland. He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1978 from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, known as EPFL, in Lausanne.
In the early 1980s, while pursuing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, de Geus joined General Electric in Research Triangle Park, N.C. There he developed tools to design logic with multiplexers, according to a 2009 oral history conducted by the Computer History Museum. He and a designer friend created gate arrays with a mix of logic gates and multiplexers.
That led to writing the first program for synthesizing circuits optimized for both speed and area, known as SOCRATES. It automatically created blocks of logic from functional descriptions, according to the oral history.
“The problem was [that] all designers coming out of school used Karnaugh maps, [and] knew NAND gates, NOR gates, and inverters,” de Geus explained in the oral history. “They didn’t know multiplexers. So designing with these things was actually difficult.” Karnaugh maps are a method of simplifying Boolean algebra expressions. With NAND and NOR universal logic gates, any Boolean expression can be implemented without using any other gate.
SOCRATES could write a function and 20 minutes later, the program would generate a netlist that named the electronic components in the circuit and the nodes they connected to. By automating the function, de Geus says, “the synthesizer typically created faster circuits that also used fewer gates. That’s a big benefit because fewer is better. Fewer ultimately end up in [a] smaller area on a chip.”
With that technology, circuit designers shifted their focus from gate-level design to designs based on hardware description languages.
Eventually de Geus was promoted to manager of GE’s Advanced Computer-Aided Engineering Group. Then, in 1986, the company decided to leave the semiconductor business. Facing the loss of his job, he decided to launch his own company to continue to enhance synthesis tools.
He and two members of his GE team, David Gregory and Bill Krieger, founded Optimal Solutions in Research Triangle Park. In 1987 the company was renamed Synopsys and moved to Mountain View, Calif.
De Geus says he picked up his management skills and entrepreneurial spirit as a youngster. During summer vacations, he would team up with friends to build forts, soapbox cars, and other projects. He usually was the team leader, he says, the one with plenty of imagination.
“An entrepreneur creates a vision of some crazy but, hopefully, brilliant idea,” he says, laughing. The vision sets the direction for the project, he says, while the entrepreneur’s business side tries to convince others that the idea is realistic enough.
“The notion of why it could be important was sort of there,” he says. “But it is the passion that catalyzes something in people.”
That was true during his fort-building days, he says, and it’s still true today.
“Synthesis changed the very nature of how digital designs are being constructed.”
“If you have a good team, everybody chips in something,” he says. “Before you know it, someone on the team has an even better idea of what we could do or how to do it. Entrepreneurs who start a company often go through thousands of ideas to arrive at a common mission. I’ve had the good fortune to be on a 37-year mission with Synopsys.”
At the company, de Geus sees himself as “the person who makes the team cook. It’s being an orchestrator, a bandleader, or maybe someone who brings out the passion in people who are better in both technology and business. As a team, we can do things that are impossible to do alone and that are patently proven to be impossible in the first place.”
He says a few years ago the company came up with the mantra “Yes, if …” to combat a slowly growing “No, because …” mindset.
“‘Yes, if …’ opens doors, whereas the ‘No, because …’ says, ‘Let me prove that it’s not possible,’” he says. “‘Yes, if … ’ leads us outside the box into ‘It’s got to be possible. There’s got to be a way.’”
De Geus says his industry is going through “extremely challenging times—technically, globally, and business-wise—and the ‘If … ’ part is an acknowledgment of that. I found it remarkable that once a group of people acknowledge [something] is difficult, they become very creative. We’ve managed to get the whole company to embrace ‘Yes, if …’
“It is now in the company’s cultural DNA.”
One of the issues Synopsys is confronted with is the end of Moore’s Law, de Geus says. “But no worries,” he says. “We are facing an unbelievable new era of opportunity, as we have moved from ‘Classic Moore’ scale complexity to ‘SysMoore,’ which unleashes systemic complexity with the same Moore’s Law exponential ambition!”
He says the industry is moving its focus from single chips to multichip modules, with chips closely placed together on top of a larger, “silicon interposer” chip. In some cases, such as for memory, chips are stacked on top of each other.
“How do you make the connectivity between those chips as fast as possible? How can you technically make these pieces work? And then how can you make it economically viable so it is producible, reliable, testable, and verifiable? Challenging, but so powerful,” he says. “Our big challenge is to make it all work together.”
Pursuing engineering was a calling for de Geus. Engineering was the intersection of two things he loved: carrying out a vision and building things. Notwithstanding the recent wave of tech-industry layoffs, he says he believes engineering is a great career.
“Just because a few companies have overhired or are redirecting themselves doesn’t mean that the engineering field is in a downward trend,” he says. “I would argue the opposite, for sure in the electronics and software space, because the vision of ‘smart everything’ requires some very sophisticated capabilities, and it is changing the world!”
During the Moore’s Law era, one’s technical knowledge has had to be deep, de Geus says.
“You became really specialized in simulation or in designing a certain type of process,” he says. “In our field, we need people who are best in class. I like to call them six-Ph.D.-deep engineers. It’s not just schooling deep; it’s schooling and experientially deep. Now, with systemic complexity, we need to bring all these disciplines together; in other words we now need six-Ph.D.-wide engineers too.”
To obtain that type of experience, he recommends university students should get a sense of multiple subdisciplines and then “choose the one that appeals to you.”
“For those who have a clear sense of their own mission, it’s falling in love and finding your passion,” he says. But those who don’t know which field of engineering to pursue should “engage with people you think are fantastic, because they will teach you things such as perseverance, enthusiasm, passion, what excellence is, and make you feel the wonder of collaboration.” Such people, he says, can teach you to “enjoy work instead of just having a job. If work is also your greatest hobby, you’re a very different person.”
De Geus says engineers must take responsibility for more than the technology they create.
“I always liked to say that ‘he or she who has the brains to understand should have the heart to help.’” With the growing challenges the world faces, I now add that they should also have the courage to act,” he says. “What I mean is that we need to look and reach beyond our field, because the complexity of the world needs courageous management to not become the reason for its own destruction.”
He notes that many of today’s complexities are the result of fabulous engineering, but the “side effects—and I am talking about CO2, for example—have not been accounted for yet, and the engineering debt is now due.”
De Geus points to the climate crisis: “It is the single biggest challenge there is. It’s both an engineering and a social challenge. We need to figure out a way to not have to pay the whole debt. Therefore, we need to engineer rapid technical transitions while mitigating the negatives of the equation. Great engineering will be decisive in getting there.”
Nearly 90% of the multibillion-dollar federal lobbying apparatus in the United States serves corporate interests. In some cases, the objective of that money is obvious. Google pours millions into lobbying on bills related to antitrust regulation. Big energy companies expect action whenever there is a move to end drilling leases for federal lands, in exchange for the tens of millions they contribute to congressional reelection campaigns.
But lobbying strategies are not always so blunt, and the interests involved are not always so obvious. Consider, for example, a 2013 ...
ChatGPT has wowed the world with the depth of its knowledge and the fluency of its responses, but one problem has hobbled its usefulness: It keeps hallucinating.
Yes, large language models (LLMs) hallucinate, a concept popularized by Google AI researchers in 2018. Hallucination in this context refers to mistakes in the generated text that are semantically or syntactically plausible but are in fact incorrect or nonsensical. In short, you can’t trust what the machine is telling you.
That’s why, while OpenAI’s Codex or Github’s Copilot can write code, an experienced programmer still needs to review the output—approving, correcting, or rejecting it before allowing it to slip into a code base where it might wreak havoc.
High school teachers are learning the same. A ChatGPT-written book report or historical essay may be a breeze to read but could easily contain erroneous “facts” that the student was too lazy to root out.
Hallucinations are a serious problem. Bill Gates has mused that ChatGPT or similar large language models could some day provide medical advice to people without access to doctors. But you can’t trust advice from a machine prone to hallucinations.
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and one of the creators of ChatGPT, says he’s confident that the problem will disappear with time as large language models learn to anchor their responses in reality. OpenAI has pioneered a technique to shape its models’ behaviors using something called reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF).
RLHF was developed by OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind team in 2017 as a way to improve reinforcement learning when a task involves complex or poorly defined goals, making it difficult to design a suitable reward function. Having a human periodically check on the reinforcement learning system’s output and give feedback allows reinforcement-learning systems to learn even when the reward function is hidden.
For ChatGPT, data collected during its interactions are used to train a neural network that acts as a “reward predictor,” which reviews ChatGPT’s outputs and predicts a numerical score that represents how well those actions align with the system’s desired behavior—in this case, factual or accurate responses.
Periodically, a human evaluator checks ChatGPT responses and chooses those that best reflect the desired behavior. That feedback is used to adjust the reward-predictor neural network, and the updated reward-predictor neural network is used to adjust the behavior of the AI model. This process is repeated in an iterative loop, resulting in improved behavior. Sutskever believes this process will eventually teach ChatGPT to improve its overall performance.
“I’m quite hopeful that by simply improving this subsequent reinforcement learning from the human feedback step, we can teach it to not hallucinate,” said Sutskever, suggesting that the ChatGPT limitations we see today will dwindle as the model improves.
But Yann LeCun, a pioneer in deep learning and the self-supervised learning used in large language models, believes there is a more fundamental flaw that leads to hallucinations.
“Large language models have no idea of the underlying reality that language describes,” he said, adding that most human knowledge is nonlinguistic. “Those systems generate text that sounds fine, grammatically, semantically, but they don’t really have some sort of objective other than just satisfying statistical consistency with the prompt.”
Humans operate on a lot of knowledge that is never written down, such as customs, beliefs, or practices within a community that are acquired through observation or experience. And a skilled craftsperson may have tacit knowledge of their craft that is never written down.
“Language is built on top of a massive amount of background knowledge that we all have in common, that we call common sense,” LeCun said. He believes that computers need to learn by observation to acquire this kind of nonlinguistic knowledge.
“There is a limit to how smart they can be and how accurate they can be because they have no experience of the real world, which is really the underlying reality of language,” said LeCun. “Most of what we learn has nothing to do with language.”
“We learn how to throw a basketball so it goes through the hoop,” said Geoff Hinton, another pioneer of deep learning. “We don’t learn that using language at all. We learn it from trial and error.”
But Sutskever believes that text already expresses the world. “Our pretrained models already know everything they need to know about the underlying reality,” he said, adding that they also have deep knowledge about the processes that produce language.
While learning may be faster through direct observation by vision, he argued, even abstract ideas can be learned through text, given the volume—billions of words—used to train LLMs like ChatGPT.
Neural networks represent words, sentences, and concepts through a machine-readable format called an embedding. An embedding maps high-dimensional vectors—long strings of numbers that capture their semantic meaning—to a lower-dimensional space, a shorter string of numbers that is easier to analyze or process.
By looking at those strings of numbers, researchers can see how the model relates one concept to another, Sutskever explained. The model, he said, knows that an abstract concept like purple is more similar to blue than to red, and it knows that orange is more similar to red than purple. “It knows all those things just from text,” he said. While the concept of color is much easier to learn from vision, it can still be learned from text alone, just more slowly.
Whether or not inaccurate outputs can be eliminated through reinforcement learning with human feedback remains to be seen. For now, the usefulness of large language models in generating precise outputs remains limited.
“Most of what we learn has nothing to do with language.”
Mathew Lodge, the CEO of Diffblue, a company that uses reinforcement learning to automatically generate unit tests for Java code, said that “reinforcement systems alone are a fraction of the cost to run and can be vastly more accurate than LLMs, to the point that some can work with minimal human review.”
Codex and Copilot, both based on GPT-3, generate possible unit tests that an experienced programmer must review and run before determining which is useful. But Diffblue’s product writes executable unit tests without human intervention.
“If your goal is to automate complex, error-prone tasks at scale with AI—such as writing 10,000 unit tests for a program that no single person understands—then accuracy matters a great deal,” said Lodge. He agrees that LLMs can be great for freewheeling creative interaction, but he cautions that the last decade has taught us that large deep-learning models are highly unpredictable, and making the models larger and more complicated doesn’t fix that. “LLMs are best used when the errors and hallucinations are not high impact,” he said.
Nonetheless, Sutskever said that as generative models improve, “they will have a shocking degree of understanding of the world and many of its subtleties, as seen through the lens of text.”
In 2001, a team of engineers at a then-obscure R&D company called AC Propulsion quietly began a groundbreaking experiment. They wanted to see whether an electric vehicle could feed electricity back to the grid. The experiment seemed to prove the feasibility of the technology. The company’s president, Tom Gage, dubbed the system “vehicle to grid” or V2G.
The concept behind V2G had gained traction in the late 1990s after California’s landmark zero-emission-vehicle (ZEV) mandate went into effect and compelled automakers to commercialize electric cars. In V2G, environmental-policy wonks saw a potent new application of the EV that might satisfy many interests. For the utilities, it promised an economical way of meeting rising demand for electricity. For ratepayers, it offered cheaper and more reliable electricity services. Purveyors of EVs would have a new public-policy rationale backing up their market. And EV owners would become entrepreneurs, selling electricity back to the grid.
AC Propulsion’s experiment was timely. It occurred in the wake of the California electricity crisis of 2000 and 2001, when mismanaged deregulation, market manipulation, and environmental catastrophe combined to unhinge the power grid. Some observers thought V2G could prevent the kinds of price spikes and rolling blackouts then plaguing the Golden State. Around the same time, however, General Motors and other automakers were in the process of decommissioning their battery EV fleets, the key component of V2G.
AC Propulsion’s president, Tom Gage, explains the company’s vehicle-to-grid technology at a 2001 conference in Seattle. Photo-illustration: Max-o-matic; photo source: Alec Brooks
The AC Propulsion experiment thus became an obscure footnote in the tortuous saga of the green automobile. A decade later, in the 2010s, the battery EV began an astounding reversal of fortune, thanks in no small part to the engineers at ACP, whose electric-drive technology informed the development of the Roadster, the car that launched Tesla Motors. By the 2020s, automakers around the world were producing millions of EVs a year. And with the revival of the EV, the V2G concept was reborn.
If a modern electronics- and software-laden car can be thought of as a computer on wheels, then an electric car capable of discharging electricity to the grid might be considered a power plant on wheels. And indeed, that’s how promoters of vehicle-to-grid technology perceive the EV.
Keep in mind, though, that electricity’s unique properties pose problems to anyone who would make a business of producing and delivering it. Electricity is a commodity that is bought and sold, and yet unlike most other commodities, it cannot easily be stored. Once electricity is generated and passes into the grid, it is typically used almost immediately. If too much or too little electricity is present in the power grid, the network can suddenly become unbalanced.
At the turn of the 20th century, utilities promoted the use of electric truck fleets to soak up excess electricity. Photo-illustration: Max-o-matic; photo source: M&N/Alamy
Some operators of early direct-current power plants at the turn of the 20th century solved the problem of uneven power output from their generators by employing large banks of rechargeable lead-acid batteries, which served as a kind of buffer to balance the flow of electrons. As utilities shifted to more reliable alternating-current systems, they phased out these costly backup batteries.
Then, as electricity entrepreneurs expanded power generation and transmission capacity, they faced the new problem of what to do with all the cheap off-peak, nighttime electricity they could now produce. Utilities reconsidered batteries, not as stationary units but in EVs. As the historian Gijs Mom has noted, enterprising utility managers essentially outsourced the storage of electricity to the owners and users of the EVs then proliferating in northeastern U.S. cities. Early utility companies like Boston Edison and New York Edison organized EV fleets, favoring electric trucks for their comparatively capacious batteries.
In the early years of the automobile, battery-powered electric cars were competitive with cars fueled by gasoline and other types of propulsion.Photo-illustration: Max-o-matic; image source: Shawshots/Alamy
The problems of grid management that EVs helped solve faded after World War I. In the boom of the 1920s, U.S. utility barons such as Samuel Insull massively expanded the country’s grid systems. During the New Deal era, the federal government began funding the construction of giant hydropower plants and pushed transmission into rural areas. By the 1950s, the grid was moving electricity across time zones and national borders, tying in diverse sources of supply and demand.
The need for large-scale electrochemical energy storage as a grid-stabilizing source of demand disappeared. When utilities considered storage technology at all in the succeeding decades, it was generally in the form of pumped-storage hydropower, an expensive piece of infrastructure that could be built only in hilly terrain.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that the electric car reemerged as a possible solution to problems of grid electricity. In 1997, Willett Kempton, a professor at the University of Delaware, and Steve Letendre, a professor at Green Mountain College, in Vermont, began publishing a series of journal articles that imagined the bidirectional EV as a resource for electricity utilities. The researchers estimated that, if applied to the task of generating electricity, all of the engines in the U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet would produce around 16 times the output of stationary power plants. Kempton and Letendre also noted that the average light vehicle was used only around 4 percent of the time. Therefore, they reasoned, a fleet of bidirectional EVs could be immensely useful to utilities, even if it was only a fraction the size of the conventional vehicle fleet.
AC Propulsion cofounder Wally Rippel converted a Volkswagen microbus into an electric vehicle while he was still a student at Caltech. Photo-illustration: Max-o-matic; photo source: Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library
The engineers at AC Propulsion (ACP) were familiar with the basic precepts of bidirectional EV power. The company was the brainchild of Wally Rippel and Alan Cocconi, Caltech graduates who had worked in the late 1980s and early 1990s as consultants for AeroVironment, then a developer of lightweight experimental aircraft. The pair made major contributions to the propulsion system for the Impact, a battery-powered concept car that AeroVironment built under contract for General Motors. Forerunner of the famous EV1, the Impact was regarded as the most advanced electric car of its day, thanks to its solid-state power controls, induction motor, and integrated charger. The vehicle inspired California’s ZEV mandate, instituted in 1990. As Cocconi told me, the Impact was bidirectional-capable, although that function wasn’t fully implemented.
AeroVironment had encouraged its engineers to take creative initiative in developing the Impact, but GM tightly managed efforts to translate the idiosyncratic car into a production prototype, which rankled Cocconi and Rippel. Cocconi was also dismayed by the automaker’s decision to equip the production car with an off-board rather than onboard charger, which he believed would limit the car’s utility. In 1992, he and Rippel quit the project and, with Hughes Aircraft engineer Paul Carosa, founded ACP, to further develop battery electric propulsion. The team applied their technology to a two-seat sportscar called the tzero, which debuted in January 1997.
Electric Car tzero 0-60 3.6 sec faster than Tesla Roadster www.youtube.com
Through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, ACP sold its integrated propulsion systems to established automakers, including Honda, Volkswagen, and Volvo, for use in production models being converted into EVs. For car companies, this was a quick and cheap way to gain experience with battery electric propulsion while also meeting any quota they may have been subject to under the California ZEV mandate.
By the turn of the millennium, however, selling EV propulsion systems had become a hard way to make a living. In early 2000, when GM announced it had ceased production of the EV1, it signaled that the automaking establishment was abandoning battery electric cars. ACP looked at other ways of marketing its technology and saw an opportunity in the California electricity crisis then unfolding.
Traditionally, the electricity business combined several discrete services, including some designed to meet demand and others designed to stabilize the network. Since the 1930s, these services had been provided by regulated, vertically integrated utilities, which operated as quasi-monopolies. The most profitable was peaking power—electricity delivered when demand was highest. The less-lucrative stabilization services balanced electricity load and generation to maintain system frequency at 60 hertz, the standard for the United States. In a vertically integrated utility, peaking services essentially subsidized stabilization services.
With deregulation in the 1990s, these aggregated services were unbundled and commodified. In California, regulators separated generation from distribution and sold 40 percent of installed capacity to newly created independent power producers that specialized in peaking power. Grid-stabilization functions were reborn as “ancillary services.” Major utilities were compelled to purchase high-cost peaking power, and because retail prices were capped, they could not pass their costs on to consumers. Moreover, deregulation disincentivized the construction of new power plants. At the turn of the millennium, nearly 20 percent of the state’s generating capacity was idled for maintenance.
General Motors’ Impact debuted at the 1990 Los Angeles Auto Show. It was regarded as the most advanced electric vehicle of its era.Photo-illustration: Max-o-matic; photo source: Alec Brooks
The newly marketized grid was highly unstable, and in 2000 and 2001, things came to a head. Hot weather caused a demand spike, and the accompanying drought (the beginning of the multidecade southwestern megadrought) cut hydropower capacity. As Californians turned on their air conditioners, peaking capacity had to be kept in operation longer. Then market speculators got into the act, sending wholesale prices up 800 percent and bankrupting Pacific Gas & Electric. Under these combined pressures, grid reliability eroded, resulting in rolling blackouts.
With the grid crippled, ACP’s Gage contacted Kempton to discuss whether bidirectional EV power could help. Kempton identified frequency regulation as the optimal V2G market because it was the most profitable of the ancillary services, constituting about 80 percent of what the California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit set up to manage the deregulated grid, then spent on such services.
The result was a demonstration project, a task organized by Alec Brooks, manager of ACP’s tzero production. Like Rippel and Cocconi, Brooks was a Caltech graduate and part of the close-knit community of EV enthusiasts that emerged around the prestigious university. After earning a Ph.D. in civil engineering in 1981, Brooks had joined AeroVironment, where he managed the development of Sunraycer, an advanced solar-powered demonstration EV built for GM, and the Impact. He recruited Rippel and Cocconi for both jobs. During the 1990s, Brooks formed a team at AeroVironment that provided support for GM’s EV programs until he too tired of the corporate routine and joined ACP in 1999.
Before cofounding AC Propulsion, Alan Cocconi worked on Sunraycer, a solar-powered car for GM. Here, he’s testing the car’s motor-drive power electronics.Photo-illustration: Max-o-matic; photo source: Alec Brooks
Working with Gage and Kempton, and consulting with the ISO, Brooks set out to understand how the EV might function as a utility resource.
ACP adapted its second-generation AC-150 drivetrain, which had bidirectional capability, for this application. As Cocconi recalled, the bidirectional function had originally been intended for a different purpose. In the 1990s, batteries had far less capacity than they do today, and for the small community of EV users, the prospect of running out of juice and becoming stranded was very real. In such an emergency, a bidirectional EV with charge to spare could come to the rescue.
With funding from the California Air Resources Board, the team installed an AC-150 drive in a Volkswagen Beetle. The system converted AC grid power to DC power to charge the battery and could also convert DC power from the battery to AC power that could feed both external stand-alone loads and the grid. Over the course of the project, the group successfully demonstrated bidirectional EV power using simulated dispatch commands from the ISO’s computerized energy-management system.
This pair of graphs shows how AC Propulsion’s AC-150 drivetrain performed in a demonstration of grid frequency regulation. The magenta line in the upper graph tracks grid frequency centered around 60 hertz. The lower graph indicates power flowing between the grid and the drivetrain; a negative value means power is being drawn from the grid, while a positive value means power is being sent back to the grid.
Photo-illustration: Max-o-matic; photo source: Alec Brooks
The experiment demonstrated the feasibility of the vehicle-to-grid approach, yet it also revealed the enormous complexities involved in deploying the technology. One unpleasant surprise, Brooks recalled, came with the realization that the electricity crisis had artificially inflated the ancillary-services market. After California resolved the crisis—basically by re-regulating and subsidizing electricity—the bubble burst, making frequency regulation as a V2G service a much less attractive business proposition.
The prospect of integrating EV storage batteries into legacy grid systems also raised concerns about control. The computers responsible for automatically signaling generators to ramp up or down to regulate frequency were programmed to control large thermoelectric and hydroelectric plants, which respond gradually to signals. Batteries, by contrast, respond nearly instantaneously to commands to draw or supply power. David Hawkins, an engineer who served as a chief aide to the ISO’s vice president of operations and advised Brooks, noted that the responsiveness of batteries had unintended consequences when they were used to regulate frequency. In one experiment involving a large lithium-ion battery, the control computer fully charged or discharged the unit in a matter of minutes, leaving no spare capacity to regulate the grid.
In principle, this problem might have been solved with software to govern the charging and discharging. The main barrier to V2G in the early 2000s, it turns out, was that the battery EV would have to be massively scaled up before it could serve as a practical energy-storage resource. And the auto industry had just canceled the battery EV. In its place, automakers promised the fuel-cell electric car, a type of propulsion system that does not easily lend itself to bidirectional power flow.
The dramatic revival of the battery EV in the late 2000s and early 2010s led by Tesla Motors and Nissan revived prospects for the EV as a power-grid resource. This EV renaissance spawned a host of R&D efforts in bidirectional EV power, including ECOtality and the Mid-Atlantic Grid Interactive Cars Consortium. The consortium, organized by Kempton in conjunction with PJM, the regional transmission organization responsible for much of the eastern United States, used a car equipped with an AC-150 drivetrain to further study the use of V2G in the frequency-regulation market.
Over time, however, the research focus in bidirectional EV applications shifted from the grid to homes and commercial buildings. In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, for instance, Nissan developed and marketed a vehicle-to-building (V2B) charging system that enabled its Leaf EV to provide backup power.
In 2001, AC Propulsion engineers installed an AC-150 drivetrain in a Volkswagen Beetle to demonstrate the feasibility of V2G technology for regulating frequency on the power grid.Photo-illustration: Max-o-matic; photo source: Alec Brooks
The automaker later entered an R&D partnership with Fermata Energy, a Virginia-based company that develops bidirectional EV power systems. Founded by the entrepreneur and University of Virginia researcher David Slutzky in 2010, Fermata considered and then ruled out the frequency-regulation market, on the grounds that it was too small and unscalable.
Slutsky now believes that early markets for bidirectional EV power will emerge in supplying backup power and supplementing peak loads for individual commercial buildings. Those applications will require institutional fleets of EVs. Slutzky and other proponents of EV power have been pressing for a more favorable regulatory environment, including access to the subsidies that states such as California offer to users of stationary storage batteries.
Advocates believe that V2G can help pay for EV batteries. While interest in this idea seems likely to grow as EVs proliferate, the prospect of electric car owners becoming power entrepreneurs appears more distant. Hawkins, the engineer who advised Brooks, holds that the main barriers to V2G are not so much technological as economic: Viable markets need to emerge. The everyday participant in V2G, he argues, would face the difficult task of attempting to arbitrage the difference between wholesale and retail prices while still paying the retail rate. In principle, EV owners could take advantage of the same feed-in tariffs and net-metering schemes designed to enable homeowners to sell surplus solar power back to the grid. But marketing rooftop solar power has proven more complicated and costly for suburbanites than initially assumed, and the same would likely hold true for EV power.
Another major challenge is how to balance the useful lifetime of EV batteries in transportation and non-vehicle applications. That question turns on understanding how EV batteries will perform and age in stationary-power roles. Users would hardly be further ahead, after all, if they substantially degraded their batteries in the act of paying them off. Grid managers could also face problems if they come to depend on EV batteries that prove unreliable or become unavailable as driving patterns change.
In short, the core conundrum of V2G is the conflict of interest that comes from repurposing privately owned automobiles as power plants. Scaling up this technology will require intimate collaboration between automaking and electricity-making, enterprises with substantially different revenue models and systems of regulation. At the moment, the auto industry does not have a clear interest in V2G.
On the other hand, rising electricity demand, concerns about fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, and climate change, and the challenges of managing intermittent renewable energy have all created new justifications for bidirectional EV power. With the proliferation of EVs over the last decade, more demonstrations of the technology are being staged for a host of applications—sometimes expressed as V2X, or vehicle-to-everything. Some automakers, notably Nissan and now Ford, already sell bidirectional EVs, and others are experimenting with the technology. Enterprises are emerging to equip and manage demonstrations of V2B, V2G, and V2X for utilities and big institutional users of electricity. Some ambitious pilot projects are underway, notably in the Dutch city of Utrecht.
Back in 2002, at the end of their experiment, the engineers at AC Propulsion concluded that what V2G really needed was a powerful institutional champion. They went on to make further important contributions to EV technology. Brooks and Rippel worked for the nascent Tesla Motors, while Cocconi continued at ACP until a cancer diagnosis led him to reevaluate his life. In the mid-2000s, Cocconi sold his stake in the company and devoted himself to aviation, his first love, developing remote-controlled solar-powered aircraft. The rebirth of the battery electric car in the 2010s and 2020s reaffirmed the efforts of these three visionary pioneers.
A strong V2G patron has yet to emerge. Nevertheless, the idea of an off-the-shelf energy storage unit that also provides transportation and pays for itself is likely to remain attractive enough to sustain ongoing interest. Who knows? The electric car might still one day become a power plant on wheels.
The author thanks Alec Brooks, Alan Cocconi, David Hawkins, David Slutzky, and Wally Rippel for sharing their experiences. Parts of this article are adapted from the author’s new book, Age of Auto Electric (MIT Press, 2022).
Researchers have developed a range of analog and other unconventional machine learning systems in the expectation that they will prove vastly more energy efficient than today’s computers. But training these AIs to do their tasks has been a big stumbling block. Researchers at NTT Device Technology Labs and the University of Tokyo now say they’ve come up with a training algorithm (announced by NTT last month) that goes a long way toward letting these systems meet their promise.
Their results, established on an optical analog computer, represent progress towards obtaining the potential efficiency gains that researchers have long sought from “unconventional” computer architectures.
Modern AI programs use a biologically-inspired architecture called an artificial neural network to execute tasks like image recognition or text generation. The strength of connections between artificial neurons, which control the outputs of the computation, must be modified or trained using standard algorithms. The most prominent of these algorithms is called backpropagation, which updates the connection strengths to reduce the network’s errors, while it processes trial data. Because adjustments to some parameters depend on adjustments to others, there is a need for active information passing and routing by the computer.
As Spectrum has elsewhere explained, “Error backpropagation is like running inference in reverse, moving from the last layer of the network back to the first layer; weight update then combines information from the original forward inference run with these backpropagated errors to adjust the network weights in a way that makes the model more accurate.”
Alternative computing architectures, which trade complexity for efficiency, often cannot perform the information passing required by the algorithm. As a consequence, the trained parameters of the network must be obtained from an independent physics simulation of the entire hardware setup and its information processing. But creating simulations of sufficient quality can itself be challenging.
“We found that it was very hard and tough to apply backpropagation algorithms to our device,” said Katsuma Inoue of NTT Device Technology Labs, one of the researchers involved in the study. “There always existed a gap between the mathematical model and the real device, owing to several factors, such as physical noise and inaccurate modeling.”
The difficulty of implementing backpropagation led the authors to study and implement an alternative training algorithm. It builds on an algorithm called direct feedback alignment (DFA), first introduced in a paper from 2016. That algorithm reduced the need to pass information during training and therefore the extent to which the physical system needs to be simulated. The authors’ new “augmented DFA” algorithm entirely removes the need for any detailed device simulation.
To study and test the algorithm, they implemented it on an optical analog computer. In it, the connections between neurons are represented as intensities of light traveling through a ring of optical fiber instead of as digitally represented numbers. The connections of the neural network are represented with the intensities in a light beam that is passed through a ring-shaped optical fiber.
“It’s an absolutely essential demonstration,” said Daniel Brunner of the FEMTO-ST Institute, a French public research organization. Brunner develops photonic unconventional computers of a similar sort used by the researchers in the study. “The beauty of this particular algorithm is that it is not too difficult to implement in hardware—which is why this is so important.”
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Agilicious is a co-designed hardware and software framework tailored to autonomous, agile quadrotor flight, which has been developed and used since 2016 at the Robotics and Perception Group of the University of Zurich. Agilicious is completely open-source and open hardware and supports both model-based and neural-network-based controllers!
[ Agilicious ]
Flexiv’s adaptive robot masseur fuses force control, computer vision, and artificial intelligence to emulate the skill and dexterity of a human massage therapist.
[ Flexiv ]
Freely inspired by Jean de la Fontaine’s “The Wolf and the Lamb”, Coperni’s fashion show in Paris. features the Spot robots from Boston Dynamics in relation with human beings. Unlike the original fable written in the 17th century, which raises questions relating to the balance of power between the human groups that make up society, Coperni reinterprets the story and transposes it to the year of 2023 with a positive vision of the future. The figure of the wolf is replaced by Spot robots, whereas the lambs by human beings. The fashion show tells the story of their meeting, their mutual taming and their cohabitation. The show presents Coperni’s vision which is that there is neither a dominant nor a dominated, but that the mankind and machine live in harmony.
[ Coperni ]
Meet the third-generation prototype Honda Autonomous Work Vehicle (AWV), a new category of capable work vehicle that can operate autonomously in a variety of dynamic work environments. The Honda AWV has the potential to bring greater efficiencies, enhanced workforce productivity, and better environmental performance to the construction industry, and to other industries seeking an autonomous off-road solution.
[ Honda ]
Skydio’s partnership with WeRobotics provides microgrant scholarships to Flying Labs across the globe, with Nepal Flying Labs being selected as a recipient for their project to create a digital twin of Changu Narayan Temple, the oldest temple in Kathmandu Valley, dating back to the 5th Century.
[ Skydio ]
This is perhaps the jauntiest gait I have ever seen in a humanoid robot.
[ GitHub ]
Interesting “autoloader” for Wing delivery drones.
[ Wing ]
In this video, we showcase how robots can learn from human experts to master complex task sequencing in various manufacturing processes, such as surface finishing and composite layup. We demonstrate how robots can learn the expert’s task sequencing policies for composite layup task and perform execution on a brand new test part.
[ USC Viterbi ]
We present a sim-to-real learning-based approach for real-world humanoid locomotion. We do not use state estimation, dynamics models, trajectory optimization, reference trajectories, or pre-computed gait libraries. Our controller is trained with large-scale model-free reinforcement learning on an ensemble of randomized environments in simulation and deployed to the real world in a zero-shot fashion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a fully learning-based method for real-world full-sized humanoid locomotion.
[ Paper ]
Roboball? Roboball.
[ Texas A&M ]
This work addresses the problem of active collaborative localization of robot teams with unknown data association. In particular, it involves positioning a small number of identical unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) at desired positions so that an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can, through unlabelled measurements of UGVs, uniquely determine its global pose. This work enables robust localization in perceptually challenged GPS-denied environments, thus paving the road for large-scale multi-robot navigation and mapping.
[ UPenn ]
This work presents a multi-segment vine robot that can navigate complex paths without interacting with its environment. This is achieved by a new steering method that selectively actuates each single pouch at the tip, providing high degrees of freedom with few control inputs.
[ Paper ]
TBNET and DEEP Robotics deployed Jueying X20 quadruped robot with two high-precision surveying and mapping equipment. It has completed on-site data collection in the complex terrain of real scenes such as indoor and outdoor construction sites, electric tower groups, railways, underground garages, and ancient buildings.
[ DeepRobotics ]
Here’s a quick look at RoMeLa’s novel robotic limb EEMMMa (Elastic Extending Mechanism for Mobility and Manipulation), a long-reach steel tentacle that can both extend and bend. It can be used to deploy grappling hooks for climbing, and morph its shape to bend around obstacles. This can allow it to place cameras and retrieve samples from hard-to-reach places. The limb’s unique tape spring construction results in a versatile, lightweight, and compact system. This can enable future mobile robots to move easily and safely through highly unstructured terrain such as forests or cave systems.
[ RoMeLa ]
Micro Robots are a revolutionary new technology that could change how we interact with the world around us. For the first time, a collaborative research team of electrical and computer engineers, with support from NSF, has installed electronic brains on solar-powered microbots the size of a human hair. One of the biggest challenges is their small size-requiring external control, such as a computer or smartphone, limiting their range and making the bots difficult to manipulate remotely until now.
[ NSF ]
A team of scientists, engineers, and designers embark on an Arctic expedition to test space technology. The MIT Space Exploration Initiative expedition in Svalbard was not simply a space analog mission, but an experience to learn how to help enable better access to remote regions from the far corners of planet Earth, to the Moon, and Mars.
[ MIT ]
The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, has the most advanced autonomous driving capability ever flown to Mars. Having such an advanced capability contributes to the rover’s challenging mission to discover signs of life that may have existed on Mars in a distant past. This talk provides an overview on the current research and development efforts on robotics autonomy at JPL, with an emphasis on enhancing the safety, efficiency, and performance of robotic mobility through the applications of risk-aware decision making and machine learning.
[ JPL ]
An interactive webinar discussing the potential and the path toward general-purpose robotic manipulation. This will be the first in a series, hosted by Northwestern’s Center for Robotics and Biosystems, devoted to this grand challenge of robotics.
[ Northwestern ]
Despite tech giants including Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia investing billions of dollars in the development of the metaverse, it is still little more than a fantasy. Making it a reality is likely to require breakthroughs in a range of sectors such as storage, modeling, and communication.
To spur progress in the advancement of those technologies, the IEEE Standards Association has launched the Persistent Computing for Metaverse initiative. As part of the IEEE’s Industry Connections Program, it will bring together experts from both industry and academia to help map out the innovations that will be needed to make the metaverse a reality.
Although disparate virtual-reality experiences exist today, the metaverse represents a vision of an interconnected and always-on virtual world that can host thousands, if not millions, of people simultaneously. The ultimate goal is for the virtual world to become so realistic that it is almost indistinguishable from the real one.
Today’s technology is a long way from making that possible, says Yu Yuan, president of the IEEE Standards Association. The Institute spoke with Yuan to find out more about the initiative and the key challenges that need to be overcome. His answers have been edited for clarity.
The Institute: What is persistent computing?
Yu Yuan: I have been working in virtual reality and multimedia for more than 20 years, I just didn’t call my work metaverse. After metaverse became a buzzword, I asked myself, ‘What’s the difference between metaverse and VR?’ My answer is: persistence, or the ability to leave traces in a virtual world.
Persistent computing refers to the combination of all the technologies needed to support the development and operation of a persistent virtual world. In other words, a metaverse. There are different kinds of VR experiences, but many of them are one-time events. Similar to how video games work, every time a user logs in, the entire virtual world resets. But users in the metaverse can leave traces. For example, they can permanently change the virtual world by destroying a wall or building a new house. Those changes have to be long-lasting so there will be a meaningful virtual society or meaningful economy in that virtual world.
What are the key components that are required to make persistent computing possible?
Yuan: The first is storage. In most of today’s video games, users can destroy a building, only for it to be restored the next time the user logs in to the game. But in a persistent virtual world the current status of the virtual world needs to be stored constantly. Users can create or destroy something in that world and the next time they log in, those changes will still be there. These kinds of things have to be properly stored—which means a very large amount of data needs to be stored.
It’s also important to support persistence from a modeling perspective because, as we can imagine, people will demand higher and higher quality experiences. To do this we need a larger scale in the future as well as finer granularity, or more detail, to make those virtual objects and environments more realistic.
“The metaverse is a truly long-term vision. We may need another 15 to 20 years, or even longer, to make it happen.”
That also requires technology to support upgrading the virtual world on the fly. For example, let’s say the building block of your virtual world would be at the brick level, but later, along with the advancement of technologies, we may be able to bring that detail level to grains of sand.
Along with that upgrade the buildings that users created before will have to be maintained. So that raises some challenges, like: How can we support modeling and operation of virtual worlds without interruption, providing continuous experiences for the users?
You say you need a lot more storage to maintain all the information. But does that just mean more powerful memory technologies, or is it more complicated than that?
Yuan: Larger storage capacity and low power consumption will be necessary. This may also be an important factor, because some people are concerned that the metaverse will consume lots of energy, making the entire thing not sustainable. But we also need to address some other issues.
Let’s say the ultimate goal for the metaverse is to be able to create virtual universes that are indistinguishable from a real physical universe. In order to simulate and store, for example, a million virtual atoms, how many physical atoms do we need? That is ultimately one of the questions we need to answer in terms of connecting the universe of atoms to the universe of bits. We will hit a wall in terms of how many physical atoms we need to create an equal or larger number of virtual atoms. That requires not only innovations in storage, computation, and communications technology in general but also some special innovations in modeling, and engines dedicated for the metaverse. It could be some data-compression technology, but that’s just one of the directions we need to explore.
I think communications are equally important. Most people believe the metaverse means lots of users—which means we will definitely need innovations in communications to support real-time, massive user experiences. If we are talking about supporting a million users in a virtual city, we definitely need some disruptive innovations from the communications perspective. That’s also an integral component of persistent computing.
How will the issues that you’ve identified be solved?
Yuan: That’s part of the mission for the Persistent Computing for Metaverse Initiative. It serves as a platform for information exchange and discussions on the gaps in today’s existing technologies.
Maybe we already have most of the technologies in place, but we just need to find a way to integrate them together. Or maybe there are gaps where we need to do R&D on some particular subarea of technology. With this gap analysis, we will know what other innovations are needed—which could provide some direction for academia and industry.
The initiative plans to host events, publish white papers with its findings, and propose new standards.
A lot of the development in the space is happening internally in companies. Is there an appetite to collaborate, or is there a danger that everyone is racing to set up walled gardens?
Yuan: I wouldn’t say that it’s a danger, but I don’t think it’s efficient. That’s why I think standards will play a leading role to help pave the way for the metaverse. We need to develop standards to identify gaps and set up road maps for the industry. The industry will then have some basis for discussion and how we can work together to make this happen. Working together is also important so that companies aren’t reinventing wheels in different silos.
I think the metaverse will have a profound impact on all industries.
Is a lot of this kind of pie-in-the sky at the moment? Are we still a long way from persistent virtual worlds?
Yuan: The metaverse is a truly long-term vision. We may need another 15 to 20 years, or even longer, to make it happen. I believe the metaverse should be indistinguishable from our current universe, and to do that we need to address many grand challenges. Some of these include how to create a persistent virtual universe and how to make our perception realistic enough. Currently we are using XR [extended reality] devices, but eventually we may need innovations in brain-machine interface or neural interface technologies to be able to comprehensively take over the interface between our consciousness and the virtual world. But along with this long-term development there are also preliminary embodiments of the metaverse that can be useful and generate value for industry and for consumers.
Scientists today reported that they’ve observed room-temperature superconductivity. Superconductivity is a rarefied state of matter in which electrical resistance in a material drops to zero while its electrical and magnetic capacity vastly expands. Until now, the phenomenon has been observed only at cryogenic temperatures or phenomenally high pressures. Such a discovery, if confirmed, could open pathways to a range of applications including lossless electric transmission, high-efficiency electric motors, maglev trains, and low-cost magnets for MRI and nuclear fusion.
However, the caveats attached to today’s announcement are considerable. While the researchers say their material retains its coveted lossless properties at temperatures up to 20.6 ºC, it still requires substantial pressure (10 kilobars, or 9,900 atmospheres). Today’s publication is also tarnished by the fact that the scientists behind the discovery, publishing their work in today’s issue of the journal Nature, have retracted a previous paper on room-temperature superconductivity because of its unconventional data-reduction methods.
The primary researcher Ranga Dias—assistant professor in the departments of mechanical engineering and physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester—said the retracted research paper has since been revised to accommodate the criticisms and accusations. Originally published in Nature as well, the revised version is back under peer review with Nature, Dias said.
“We’ve made an open-door policy. We [allowed] everybody to come to our lab and see how we do the measurements.”
—Ranga Dias, University of Rochester
Last fall, when the group’s previous paper (reporting similarly compelling results involving a much higher-pressure material inside a diamond anvil) was retracted, many criticisms and even allegations of misconduct dogged the team across the science press. “I think this is a real problem,” Jorge Hirsch, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, told Science at the time. “You cannot leave it as, ‘Oh, it’s a difference of opinion.’ ”
Contacted by Spectrum, Hirsch said his views today—alleging misconduct—have only strengthened since then. According to him, some of Dias’s group’s reported data was allegedly computer-generated—a feat that Hirsch’s team says they can reproduce out to seven-digit accuracy. “When you read the paper, it superficially looks great. ... [And] if this is true it is an incredible breakthrough, worthy of a Nobel Prize. But when you look more carefully several warning signals become apparent,” Hirsch said via email.
Venkat Viswanathan, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, said the degree of controversy the retraction merited may have been overstated. “It was unfortunate what happened,” he said. “But a lot of people seized on it. If people took a serious look at the work itself and all that’s transpired since, I think the data is still solid. It’s still very attractive for superconductivity.”
Paul C.W. Chu, professor of physics and founding director at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston, said he has seen many claims of high-temperature superconductivity in his more than half century in the field. Many such claims did not pan out. (He has also, in his time, grabbed headlines for high-temperature superconductivity claims—in his case, claims that were true and advanced the field.)
Spectrum spoke with Chu hours after Dias’s group had presented their findings to this year’s March Meeting of the American Physical Society, the same meeting that in 1987 Chu had legendarily presented some of his own groundbreaking superconducting discoveries. Chu said he is especially cautious about the Dias group’s background subtraction methods. Background subtraction is not uncommon in the field, he said. But in this case, the signal is small compared to the noise. So, he said, “the background subtraction has to take place carefully.”
Still, Chu continued, “It is a very nice experiment. This is definitely significant, if it is proven to be real.”
According to James Walsh, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, some of the controversy behind the group’s findings may be related to the challenges posed by the medium itself. “High-pressure science imposes experimental difficulties that simply don’t exist with traditional methods,” he told Spectrum via email. “It is hard to overstate the skill and ingenuity of the high-pressure community that has made magnetism and resistivity data accessible at all.”
Because of the increased scrutiny occasioned by the Dias group’s publication history—as well as the outsized significance of the group’s new finding—Dias said that his team has abided by increased levels of transparency and repeatability.
“The history of materials science has shown us that technological leaps can often be traced back to the announcement of a newly discovered material with outstanding properties.”
—James Walsh, University of Massachusetts Amherst
“We’ve made an open-door policy,” Dias said. “We [allowed] everybody to come to our lab and see how we do the measurements. During the review process, we shared all our data with the referees.”
He added that in collecting data for their revised previous paper, the researchers collaborated with officials from Argonne and Brookhaven National Laboratories. “We did the measurements in front of a live audience,” Dias said. “They showed the superconducting transition. We are collaborating with both labs to understand the material properties and understand the exact structure of the material.” (A spokesperson for Argonne, contacted by Spectrum, said that U.S. Department of Energy policy prohibits them from speaking about research appearing in papers that their group did not author.)
The centerpiece material in the present research—the putative 10-kilobar superconductor—is sure to be the subject of a flurry of both controversy and at least short-term interest. The recipe for what the team calls “reddmatter” (a Star Trek reference) involves hydrogen, nitrogen and the 71st element on the periodic table, lutetium (Lu).
Carnegie Mellon’s Viswanathan said today’s discovery may represent the biggest gold rush on lutetium in the rare earth’s entire history. “He has singlehandedly spiked the metals index for this element,” he said of Dias.
Walsh, of the University of Massachusetts, expressed enthusiasm for the material itself—named for its ruby red hue in its high-pressure state. “The history of materials science has shown us that technological leaps can often be traced back to the announcement of a newly discovered material with outstanding properties,” he said via email. “It would be hard to argue that a result like this should not qualify.”
These microphotographs show the lutetium nitrogen hydrogen material (a.k.a. “reddmatter”) that researchers report superconducts at high pressures. Curiously, also at high pressures the previously blue material turns ruby red.Ranga Dias/University of Rochester
Of course, a result like this also requires highly pressurized cells, which might only swap the cryogenic equipment required for present-day superconductors with a different kind of elaborate, expensive, and unwieldy roomful of hardware. Chu says he will be collaborating with researchers investigating ways to transform rare-earth materials like the lutetium nitrogen hydrogen compound into superconductors that require substantially less pressure.
“These high-pressure cells interfere with measurements, and if you talk about applications, it’s not practical,” he said. “We want to see if we can stabilize it without pressure.”
Such notions have parallels in other fields. In semiconductor engineering, strained silicon transistors can retain in their lattice effective pressures three or more times as great as the pressures involved in the present material.
Eva Zurek, professor of chemistry at the University at Buffalo in New York state, said independent confirmations of the Dias group’s work are essential. But if the finding is validated, then she anticipates a challenging but not impossible road to develop a material that can perform at something close to ambient pressures as well as temperatures.
“If [the new finding is] proven to be true,” she said via email, “then I believe it would be relatively straightforward to either find ways to bring Lu-N-H to normal pressure/temperature conditions, or develop technologies where it may be used at very mild pressures.”
Update 13 March: The story was updated to include new remarks from Prof. Jorge Hirsch, a response to a call for comments that had arrived after this article was originally published.
On a gin-clear December day, I’m sitting under the plexiglass bubble of a radically new kind of aircraft. It’s a little past noon at the Byron Airport in northern California; in the distance, a jagged line of wind turbines atop rolling hills marks the Altamont Pass, blades spinning lazily. Above me, a cloudless blue sky beckons.
The aircraft, called BlackFly, is unlike anything else on the planet. Built by a Palo Alto, Calif., startup called Opener, it’s an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft with stubby wings fore and aft of the pilot, each with four motors and propellers. Visually, it’s as though an aerial speedster from a 1930s pulp sci-fi story has sprung from the page.
There are a couple of hundred startups designing or flying eVTOLs. But only a dozen or so are making tiny, technologically sophisticated machines whose primary purpose is to provide exhilarating but safe flying experiences to people after relatively minimal training. And in that group, Opener has jumped out to an early lead, having built dozens of aircraft at its facilities in Palo Alto and trained more than a score of people to fly them.
My own route to the cockpit of a BlackFly was relatively straightforward. I contacted the company’s CEO, Ken Karklin, in September 2022, pitched him on the idea of a story and video, and three months later I was flying one of his aircraft.
Well, sort of flying it. My brief flight was so highly automated that I was more passenger than pilot. Nevertheless, I spent about a day and a half before the flight being trained to fly the machine manually, so that I could take control if anything went wrong. For this training, I wore a virtual-reality headset and sat in a chair that tilted and gyrated to simulate flying maneuvers. To “fly” this simulation I manipulated a joystick that was identical to the one in the cockpit of a BlackFly. Opener’s chief operating officer, Kristina L. Menton, and engineer Wyatt Warner took turns patiently explaining the operations of the vehicle and giving me challenging tasks to complete, such as hovering and performing virtual landings in a vicious crosswind.
The BlackFly is entirely controlled by that joystick, which is equipped with a trigger and also topped by a thumb switch. To take off, I squeeze the trigger while simultaneously pushing forward on the switch. The machine leaps into the air with the sound of a million bees, and with a surge of giddy elation I am climbing skyward.
Much more so than an airplane or helicopter, the BlackFly taps into archetypal human yearnings for flight, the kind represented by magic carpets, the flying cars in “The Jetsons,” and even those Mountain Banshees in the movie “Avatar.” I’ve had several unusual experiences in aircraft, including flying on NASA’s zero-gravity-simulating “Vomit Comet,” and being whisked around in a BlackFly was definitely the most absorbing and delightful. Gazing out over the Altamont Pass from an altitude of about 60 meters, I had a feeling of joyous release—from Earth’s gravity and from earthly troubles.
For technical details about the BlackFly and to learn more about its origin, go here.
The BlackFly is also a likely harbinger of things to come. Most of the startups developing eVTOLs are building vehicles meant to carry several passengers on commercial runs of less than 50 kilometers. Although the plan is for these to be flown by pilots initially, most of the companies anticipate a day when the flights will be completely automated. So specialized aircraft such as the BlackFly—designed to be registered and operated as “ultralight” aircraft under aviation regulations—could provide mountains of invaluable data on highly and fully automated flying and perhaps even help familiarize people with the idea of flying without a pilot. Indeed, during my flight, dozens of sensors gathered gigabytes of data, to add to the large reservoir Opener has already collected during many hundreds of test flights so far.
As of late February 2023, Opener hadn’t yet announced a retail price or an official commercial release date for the aircraft, which has been under development and testing for more than a decade. I’ll be keeping an eye out for further news of the company. Long after my flight was over I was still savoring the experience, and hoping for another one.
Special thanks to IEEE.tv for collaborating on production of this video.
A covert team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media have been exposed in a new investigation. The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym 'Jorge'. In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team explained how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking methods to access Gmail and Telegram accounts
In this article, we explore the top 10 AI tools that are driving innovation and efficiency in various industries. These tools are designed to automate repetitive tasks, improve workflow, and increase productivity. The tools included in our list are some of the most advanced and widely used in the market, and are suitable for a variety of applications. Some of the tools focus on natural language processing, such as ChatGPT and Grammarly, while others focus on image and video generation, such as DALL-E and Lumen5. Other tools such as OpenAI Codex, Tabnine, Canva, Jasper AI,, and Surfer SEO are designed to help with specific tasks such as code understanding content writing and website optimization. This list is a great starting point for anyone looking to explore the possibilities of AI and how it can be applied to their business or project.
So let’s dive into
ChatGPT is a large language model that generates human-like responses to a variety of prompts. It can be used for tasks such as language translation, question answering, and text completion. It can handle a wide range of topics and styles of writing, and generates coherent and fluent text, but should be used with care as it may generate text that is biased, offensive, or factually incorrect.
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Overall, ChatGPT is a powerful tool for natural language processing, but it should be used with care and with an understanding of its limitations.
DALL-E is a generative model developed by OpenAI that is capable of generating images from text prompts. It is based on the GPT-3 architecture, which is a transformer-based neural network language model that has been trained on a massive dataset of text. DALL-E can generate images that are similar to a training dataset and it can generate high-resolution images that are suitable for commercial use.
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Overall, DALL-E is a powerful AI-based tool for generating images, it can be used for a variety of applications such as creating images for commercial use, gaming, and other creative projects. It is important to note that the generated images should be reviewed and used with care, as they may not be entirely original and could be influenced by the training data.
Lumen5 is a content creation platform that uses AI to help users create videos, social media posts, and other types of content. It has several features that make it useful for content creation and marketing, including:
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Overall, Lumen5 is a useful tool for creating content quickly and easily, it can help automate the process of creating videos, social media posts, and other types of content. However, the quality of the generated content may vary depending on the source material and it is important to review and edit the content before publishing it.
Grammarly is a writing-enhancement platform that uses AI to check for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors in the text. It also provides suggestions for improving the clarity, concision, and readability of the text. It has several features that make it useful for improving writing, including:
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OpenAI Codex is a system developed by OpenAI that can create code from natural language descriptions of software tasks. The system is based on the GPT-3 model and can generate code in multiple programming languages.
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Overall, OpenAI Codex is a powerful tool that can help automate the process of writing code and make it more accessible to non-technical people. However, the quality of the generated code may vary depending on the task description and it is important to review and test the code before using it in a production environment. It is important to use the tool as an aid, not a replacement for the developer's knowledge.
Tabnine is a code completion tool that uses AI to predict and suggest code snippets. It is compatible with multiple programming languages and can be integrated with various code editors.
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Overall, TabNine is a useful tool for developers that can help improve coding efficiency and reduce the time spent on writing code. However, it is important to review the suggestions provided by the tool and use them with caution, as they may not always be accurate or appropriate. It is important to use the tool as an aid, not a replacement for the developer's knowledge.
Jasper is a content writing and content generation tool that uses artificial intelligence to identify the best words and sentences for your writing style and medium in the most efficient, quick, and accessible way.
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Surfer SEO is a software tool designed to help website owners and digital marketers improve their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. The tool provides a variety of features that can be used to analyze a website's on-page SEO, including:
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Overall, Surfer SEO can be a useful tool for website owners and digital marketers looking to improve their SEO efforts. However, it is important to remember that it is just a tool and should be used in conjunction with other SEO best practices. Additionally, the tool is not a guarantee of better ranking.
Zapier is a web automation tool that allows users to automate repetitive tasks by connecting different web applications together. It does this by creating "Zaps" that automatically move data between apps, and can also be used to trigger certain actions in one app based on events in another app.
Features:
Pros:
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Overall, Zapier is a useful tool that can help users automate repetitive tasks and improve workflow. It can save time and increase productivity by connecting different web applications together. However, it may require some technical skills and some features may require a paid subscription. It is important to use the tool with caution and not to rely too much on it, to understand the apps better.
Compose AI is a company that specializes in developing natural language generation (NLG) software. Their software uses AI to automatically generate written or spoken text from structured data, such as spreadsheets, databases, or APIs.
Features:
Pros:
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Overall, Compose AI's NLG software can be a useful tool for automating the process of creating written or spoken content from structured data. However, the quality of the generated content may vary depending on the data source, and it is essential to review the generated content before using it in a production environment. It is important to use the tool as an aid, not a replacement for the understanding of the data.
AI tools are becoming increasingly important in today's business and technology landscape. They are designed to automate repetitive tasks, improve workflow, and increase productivity. The top 10 AI tools included in this article are some of the most advanced and widely used in the market, and are suitable for various applications. Whether you're looking to improve your natural language processing, create high-resolution images, or optimize your website, there is an AI tool that can help. It's important to research and evaluate the different tools available to determine which one is the best fit for your specific needs. As AI technology continues to evolve, these tools will become even more powerful and versatile and will play an even greater role in shaping the future of business and technology.
Three days before astronauts left on Apollo 8, the first-ever flight around the moon, NASA’s safety chief, Jerome Lederer, gave a speech that was at once reassuring and chilling. Yes, he said, the United States’ moon program was safe and well-planned—but even so, “Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and one and one half million systems, subsystems, and assemblies. Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.”
The mission, in December 1968, was nearly flawless—a prelude to the Apollo 11 landing the next summer. But even today, half a century later, engineers wrestle with the sheer complexity of the machines they build to go to space. NASA’s Artemis I, its Space Launch System rocket mandated by Congress in 2010, endured a host of delays before it finally launched in November 2022. And Elon Musk’s SpaceX may be lauded for its engineering acumen, but it struggled for six years before its first successful flight into orbit.
Relativity envisions 3D-printing facilities someday on the Martian surface, fabricating much of what people from Earth would need to live there.
Is there a better way? An upstart company called Relativity Space is about to try one. Its Terran 1 rocket, the company says, has about a tenth as many parts as comparable launch vehicles do, because it is made through 3D printing. Instead of bending metal and milling and welding, engineers program a robot to deposit layers of metal alloy in place.
Relativity’s first rocket, the company says, is ready to go from launch complex 16 at Cape Canaveral, Fla. When it happens, the company says it will stream the liftoff on YouTube.
Artist’s concept of Relativity’s planned Terran R rocket. The company says it should be able to carry a 20,000-kilogram payload into low Earth orbit.Relativity
“Over 85 percent of the rocket by mass is 3D printed,” said Scott Van Vliet, Relativity’s head of software engineering. “And what’s really cool is not only are we reducing the amount of parts and labor that go into building one of these vehicles over time, but we’re also reducing the complexity, we’re reducing the chance of failure when you reduce the part count, and you streamline the build process.”
Relativity says it can put together a Terran rocket in two months, compared to two years for some conventionally built ones. The speed and cost of making a prototype—say, for wind-tunnel testing—are reduced because you tell the printer to make a scaled-down model. There is less waste because the process is additive. And if something needs to be modified, you reprogram the 3D printer instead of slow, expensive retooling.
Investors have noticed. The company says financial backers have included BlackRock, Y Combinator and the entrepreneur Mark Cuban.
“If you walk into any rocket factory today other than ours,” said Josh Brost, the company’s head of business development, “you still will see hundreds of thousands of parts coming from thousands of vendors, and still being assembled using lots of touch labor and lots of big-fix tools.”
Terran 1 Nose Cone Timelapse Check out this timelapse of our nose cone build for Terran 1. This milestone marks the first time we’ve created this unique shape ...
Terran 1, rated as capable of putting a 1,250-kilogram payload in low Earth orbit, is mainly intended as a test bed. Relativity has signed up a variety of future customers for satellite launches, but the first Terran 1 (“Terran” means “earthling”) will not carry a paying customer’s satellite. The first flight has been given the playful name “Good Luck, Have Fun”—GLHF for short. Eventually, if things are going well, Relativity will build a larger booster, called Terran R, which the company hopes will compete with the SpaceX Falcon 9 for launches of up to 20,000 kg. Relativity says the Terran R should be fully reusable, including the upper stage—something that other commercial launch companies have not accomplished. In current renderings, the rocket is, as the company puts it, “inspired by nature,” shaped to slice through the atmosphere as it ascends and comes back for recovery.
A number of Relativity’s top people came from Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, and, like Musk, they say their vision is a permanent presence on Mars. Brost calls it “the long-term North Star for us.” They say they can envision 3D-printing facilities someday on the Martian surface, fabricating much of what people from Earth would need to live there. “For that to happen,” says Brost, “you need to have manufacturing capabilities that are autonomous and incredibly flexible.”
Relativity’s fourth-generation Stargate 3D printer.Relativity
Just how Relativity will do all these things is a work in progress. The company says its 3D technology will help it work iteratively—finding mistakes as it goes, then correcting them as it prints the next rocket, and the next, and so on.
“In traditional manufacturing, you have to do a ton of work up front and have a lot of the design features done well ahead of time,” says Van Vliet. “You have to invest in fixed tooling that can often take years to build before you’ve actually developed an article for your launch vehicle. With 3D printing, additive manufacturing, we get to building something very, very quickly.”
The next step is to get the first rocket off the pad. Will it succeed? Brost says a key test will be getting through max q—the point of maximum dynamic pressure on the rocket as it accelerates through the atmosphere before the air around it thins out.
“If you look at history, at new space companies doing large rockets, there’s not a single one that’s done their first rocket on their first try. It would be quite an achievement if we were able to achieve orbit on our inaugural launch,” says Brost.
“I’ve been to many launches in my career,” he says, “and it never gets less exciting or nerve wracking to me.”
This sponsored article is brought to you by COMSOL.
History teaches that the Industrial Revolution began in England in the mid-18th century. While that era of sooty foundries and mills is long past, manufacturing remains essential — and challenging. One promising way to meet modern industrial challenges is by using additive manufacturing (AM) processes, such as powder bed fusion and other emerging techniques. To fulfill its promise of rapid, precise, and customizable production, AM demands more than just a retooling of factory equipment; it also calls for new approaches to factory operation and management.
That is why Britain’s Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) has enhanced its in-house metal powder bed fusion AM facility with a simulation model and app to help factory staff make informed decisions about its operation. The app, built using the Application Builder in the COMSOL Multiphysics software, shows the potential for pairing a full-scale AM factory with a so-called “digital twin” of itself.
“The model helps predict how heat and humidity inside a powder bed fusion factory may affect product quality and worker safety,” says Adam Holloway, a technology manager within the MTC’s modeling team. “When combined with data feeds from our facility, the app helps us integrate predictive modeling into day-to-day decision-making.” The MTC project demonstrates the benefits of placing simulation directly into the hands of today’s industrial workforce and shows how simulation could help shape the future of manufacturing.
“We’re trying to present the findings of some very complex calculations in a simple-to-understand way. By creating an app from our model, we can empower staff to run predictive simulations on laptops during their daily shifts.”
—Adam Holloway, MTC Technology Manager
To help modern British factories keep pace with the world, the MTC promotes high-value manufacturing throughout the United Kingdom. The MTC is based in the historic English industrial city of Coventry (Figure 2), but its focus is solely on the future. That is why the team has committed significant human and technical resources to its National Centre for Additive Manufacturing (NCAM).
“Adopting AM is not just about installing new equipment. Our clients are also seeking help with implementing the digital infrastructure that supports AM factory operations,” says Holloway. “Along with enterprise software and data connectivity, we’re exploring how to embed simulation within their systems as well.”
The NCAM’s Digital Reconfigurable Additive Manufacturing for Aerospace (DRAMA) project provides a valuable venue for this exploration. Developed in concert with numerous manufacturers, the DRAMA initiative includes the new powder bed fusion AM facility mentioned previously. With that mini factory as DRAMA’s stage, Holloway and his fellow simulation specialists play important roles in making its production of AM aerospace components a success.
What makes a manufacturing process “additive”, and why are so many industries exploring AM methods? In the broadest sense, an additive process is one where objects are created by adding material layer by layer, rather than removing it or molding it. A reductive or subtractive process for producing a part may, for example, begin with a solid block of metal that is then cut, drilled, and ground into shape. An additive method for making the same part, by contrast, begins with empty space! Loose or soft material is then added to that space (under carefully controlled conditions) until it forms the desired shape. That pliable material must then be solidified into a durable finished part.
Different materials demand different methods for generating and solidifying additive forms. For example, common 3D printers sold to consumers produce objects by unspooling warm plastic filament, which bonds to itself and becomes harder as it cools. By contrast, the metal powder bed fusion process (Ref. 1) begins with, as its name suggests, a powdered metal which is then melted by applied heat and re-solidified when it cools. A part produced via the metal powder bed fusion process can be seen in Figure 3.
“The market opportunities for AM methods have been understood for a long time, but there have been many obstacles to large-scale adoption,” Holloway says. “Some of these obstacles can be overcome during the design phase of products and AM facilities. Other issues, such as the impact of environmental conditions on AM production, must be addressed while the facility is operating.”
For instance, maintaining careful control of heat and humidity is an essential task for the DRAMA team. “The metal powder used for the powder bed fusion process (Figure 4) is highly sensitive to external conditions,” says Holloway. “This means it can begin to oxidize and pick up ambient moisture even while it sits in storage, and those processes will continue as it moves through the facility. Exposure to heat and moisture will change how it flows, how it melts, how it picks up an electric charge, and how it solidifies,” he says. “All of these factors can affect the resulting quality of the parts you’re producing.”
Careless handling of powdered metal is not just a threat to product quality. It can threaten the health and safety of workers as well. “The metal powder used for AM processes is flammable and toxic, and as it dries out, it becomes even more flammable,” Holloway says. “We need to continuously measure and manage humidity levels, as well as how loose powder propagates throughout the facility.”
To maintain proper atmospheric conditions, a manufacturer could augment its factory’s ventilation with a full climate control system, but that could be prohibitively expensive. The NCAM estimated that it would cost nearly half a million English pounds to add climate control to its relatively modest facility. But what if they could adequately manage heat and humidity without adding such a complicated system?
Perhaps using multiphysics simulation for careful process management could provide a cost-effective alternative. “As part of the DRAMA program, we created a model of our facility using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) capabilities of the COMSOL software. Our model (Figure 5) uses the finite element method to solve partial differential equations describing heat transfer and fluid flow across the air domain in our facility,” says Holloway. “This enabled us to study how environmental conditions would be affected by multiple variables, from the weather outside, to the number of machines operating, to the way machines were positioned inside the shop. A model that accounts for those variables helps factory staff adjust ventilation and production schedules to optimize conditions,” he explains.
The DRAMA team made their model more accessible by building a simulation app of it with the Application Builder in COMSOL Multiphysics (Figure 6). “We’re trying to present the findings of some very complex calculations in a simple-to-understand way,” Holloway explains. “By creating an app from our model, we can empower staff to run predictive simulations on laptops during their daily shifts.”
The app user can define relevant boundary conditions for the beginning of a factory shift and then make ongoing adjustments. Over the course of a shift, heat and humidity levels will inevitably fluctuate. Perhaps factory staff should alter the production schedule to maintain part quality, or maybe they just need to open doors and windows to improve ventilation. Users can change settings in the app to test the possible effects of actions like these. For example, Figure 8 presents isothermal surface plots that show the effect that opening the AM machines’ build chambers has on air temperature, while Figure 9 shows how airflow is affected by opening the facility doors.
While the current app is an important step forward, it does still require workers to manually input relevant data. Looking ahead, the DRAMA team envisions something more integral, and therefore, more powerful: a “digital twin” for its AM facility. A digital twin, as described by Ed Fontes in a 2019 post on the COMSOL Blog (Ref. 2), is “a dynamic, continuously updated representation of a real physical product, device, or process.” It is important to note that even the most detailed model of a system is not necessarily its digital twin.
“To make our factory environment model a digital twin, we’d first provide it with ongoing live data from the actual factory,” Holloway explains. “Once our factory model was running in the background, it could adjust its forecasts in response to its data feeds and suggest specific actions based on those forecasts.”
“We want to integrate our predictive model into a feedback loop that includes the actual factory and its staff. The goal is to have a holistic system that responds to current factory conditions, uses simulation to make predictions about future conditions, and seamlessly makes self-optimizing adjustments based on those predictions,” Holloway says. “Then we could truly say we’ve built a digital twin for our factory.”
As an intermediate step toward building a full factory-level digital twin, the DRAMA simulation app has already proven its worth. “Our manufacturing partners may already see how modeling can help with planning an AM facility, but not really understand how it can help with operation,” Holloway says. “We’re showing the value of enabling a line worker to open up the app, enter in a few readings or import sensor data, and then quickly get a meaningful forecast of how a batch of powder will behave that day.”
Beyond its practical insights for manufacturers, the overall project may offer a broader lesson as well: By pairing its production line with a dynamic simulation model, the DRAMA project has made the entire operation safer, more productive, and more efficient. The DRAMA team has achieved this by deploying the model where it can do the most good — into the hands of the people working on the factory floor.
Optical fiber has long since replaced copper wiring in core information networks. But that’s not the case for free-space optical (FSO) communications using optical lasers to transmit data through the air. Despite FSO having the potential to provide orders of magnitude more data capacity compared with that of the traditional radio-frequency communications space missions currently rely on, the technology has been stuck on the launch pad because of atmospheric interference that can absorb and scatter the signals, as well as the strict acquisition and tracking requirements for communicating between ground stations and orbiting satellites.
But now researchers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, in Western Australia, have developed a coherent FSO link operating at 1,550 nanometers across a turbulent atmosphere between an optical ground terminal and a retroreflector mounted on an airborne drone. Their findings were published this October in Scientific Reports.
“We’ve been able to maintain a robust single-mode fiber coupling resulting in an uninterrupted 100-gigabits-per-second optical-data link,” says Shane Walsh, team leader of the project. “We do this by tracking the drone at angular rates up to 1.5 degrees a second—the equivalent of tracking a satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO).”
With the greater data capacity of coherent communications and its compatibility with standard fiber optics, Walsh says the way is now open to developing terabits-per-second communications between LEO satellites and suitably equipped ground stations. “You can think of it as taking ground-to-space communications from dial-up speeds to superfast broadband speeds,” he adds.
“This multidisciplinary approach by the researchers and the test results are impressive,” says Alan Willner, a professor of electrical engineering specializing in optical communications at the University of Southern California. “They appear to have mitigated some of the key issues with free-space optical communications such as communicating through turbulence, and in pointing and tracking at speeds needed to communicate with low-orbiting satellites.”
Benjamin Dix-Matthews, who is researching the optics for the project, describes the setup used. A PlaneWave Instruments L-350 direct-drive mount is employed to enable tracking of the target. Attached to it is an optical breadboard housing the tracking and acquisition systems. These include a GPS module for initial tracking, a closed-loop machine-vision (MV) system that provides intermediate acquisition and tracking, and a tip-tilt adaptive optics (AO) system consisting of a 2-inch-diameter mirror connected to a commercial piezo tip/tilt platform.
“We’re reaching the limits in what we can do, at least not without a lot of pain, in communicating using radio frequencies. So we will likely adopt new optical technologies. And I don’t see any obvious showstoppers to further advances using the researchers’ approach.” —Alan Willner
“The tip/tilt AO system operates at 200 hertz,” says Dix-Matthews. “It plays a dual role of correcting beam wander of the outgoing beam to maintain pointing accuracy, and it also corrects the angle of arrival of the return beam to maintain fiber-coupling efficiency.”
Given the challenges “of tracking and dealing with turbulence, coupling light into a single-mode fiber is no easy matter,” says Willner. “That the researchers are able to do so is noteworthy.”
To test the technology, Walsh says they set up the terminal on the roof of the Institute’s physics building, 34 meters above sea level. To simulate the angular motion of a LEO satellite, they employed a drone outfitted with a gimbal-mounted corner cube retroreflector that returns the 1,550-nm signal, four green beacon LEDs for machine-vision tracking, and a camera for orienting the gimbal. Also included is GPS and a barometric altimeter to relay initial coordinates to the optical terminal.
The drone flew at an altitude of 120 meters at a line-of-sight distance of up to 700 meters for a laser-beam-folded link length of 1.4 kilometers. Initially, the gimbal was adjusted manually by the pilot so that the beacons were oriented toward the mount. At the next stage, the GPS module transmitted the drone’s position to the terminal computer, which enabled software to point the terminal at the target. With the target located, the MV loop closed and the mount-pointing was adjusted to track the drone beacons. The tip/tilt loop was then closed to provide fine-scale tracking. The MV and tip/tilt loops were run concurrently to maintain tracking and to correct for beam wander and wind buffeting.
“We conducted some 30 test flights, flying the drone in passes simulating the tracking rates needed for free-space optical links to satellites in LEO,” says Walsh. “And in spite of atmospheric turbulence and macroscopic motion, we were able to sustain a 100-gigabit-per-second link.”
“There’s a good reason why space agencies and major corporations are interested in free-space optical communications,” says Willner. “We’re reaching the limits in what we can do, at least not without a lot of pain, in communicating using radio frequencies. So we will likely adopt new optical technologies. And I don’t see any obvious showstoppers to further advances using the researchers approach.”
The terminal needs to be optimized further, and the MV system will require changes for satellite use. Walsh says the next step is to test the technology with an aircraft flying at higher altitudes and after that, testing with a satellite would begin.
In addition, the researchers are developing a purpose-built optical-communications ground station that they believe will lead to the commercialization of the technology. To this end, they are working with three space-related companies in Australia, says Walsh. “So we anticipate receiving our first LEO downlink sometime in 2023, and hope to provide commercial high-data-rate coherent optical communications to and from space in the next few years.”
Are you looking for a way to create content that is both effective and efficient? If so, then you should consider using an AI content generator. AI content generators are a great way to create content that is both engaging and relevant to your audience.
There are a number of different AI content generator tools available on the market, and it can be difficult to know which one is right for you. To help you make the best decision, we have compiled a list of the top 10 AI content generator tools that you should use in 2022.
So, without further ado, let’s get started!
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Elon Musk, step aside. You may be the richest rich man in the space business, but you’re not first. Musk’s SpaceX corporation is a powerful force, with its weekly launches and visions of colonizing Mars. But if you want a broader view of how wealthy entrepreneurs have shaped space exploration, you might want to look at George Ellery Hale, James Lick, William McDonald or—remember this name—John D. Hooker.
All this comes up now because SpaceX, joining forces with the billionaire Jared Isaacman, has made what sounds at first like a novel proposal to NASA: It would like to see if one of the company’s Dragon spacecraft can be sent to service the fabled, invaluable (and aging) Hubble Space Telescope, last repaired in 2009.
Private companies going to the rescue of one of NASA’s crown jewels? NASA’s mantra in recent years has been to let private enterprise handle the day-to-day of space operations—communications satellites, getting astronauts to the space station, and so forth—while pure science, the stuff that makes history but not necessarily money, remains the province of government. Might that model change?
“We’re working on crazy ideas all the time,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s space science chief. "Frankly, that’s what we’re supposed to do.”
It’s only a six-month feasibility study for now; no money will change hands between business and NASA. But Isaacman, who made his fortune in payment-management software before turning to space, suggested that if a Hubble mission happens, it may lead to other things. “Alongside NASA, exploration is one of many objectives for the commercial space industry,” he said on a media teleconference. “And probably one of the greatest exploration assets of all time is the Hubble Space Telescope.”
So it’s possible that at some point in the future, there may be a SpaceX Dragon, perhaps with Isaacman as a crew member, setting out to grapple the Hubble, boost it into a higher orbit, maybe even replace some worn-out components to lengthen its life.
Aerospace companies say privately mounted repair sounds like a good idea. So good that they’ve proposed it already.
The Chandra X-ray telescope, as photographed by space-shuttle astronauts after they deployed it in July 1999. It is attached to a booster that moved it into an orbit 10,000 by 100,000 kilometers from Earth.NASA
Northrop Grumman, one of the United States’ largest aerospace contractors, has quietly suggested to NASA that it might service one of the Hubble’s sister telescopes, the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Chandra was launched into Earth orbit by the space shuttle Columbia in 1999 (Hubble was launched from the shuttle Discovery in 1990), and the two often complement each other, observing the same celestial phenomena at different wavelengths.
As in the case of the SpaceX/Hubble proposal, Northrop Grumman’s Chandra study is at an early stage. But there are a few major differences. For one, Chandra was assembled by TRW, a company that has since been bought by Northrop Grumman. And another company subsidiary, SpaceLogistics, has been sending what it calls Mission Extension Vehicles (MEVs) to service aging Intelsat communications satellites since 2020. Two of these robotic craft have launched so far. The MEVs act like space tugs, docking with their target satellites to provide them with attitude control and propulsion if their own systems are failing or running out of fuel. SpaceLogistics says it is developing a next-generation rescue craft, which it calls a Mission Robotic Vehicle, equipped with an articulated arm to add, relocate, or possibly repair components on orbit.
“We want to see if we can apply this to space-science missions,” says Jon Arenberg, Northrop Grumman’s chief mission architect for science and robotic exploration, who worked on Chandra and, later, the James Webb Space Telescope. He says a major issue for servicing is the exacting specifications needed for NASA’s major observatories; Chandra, for example, records the extremely short wavelengths of X-ray radiation (0.01–10 nanometers).
“We need to preserve the scientific integrity of the spacecraft,” he says. “That’s an absolute.”
But so far, the company says, a mission seems possible. NASA managers have listened receptively. And Northrop Grumman says a servicing mission could be flown for a fraction of the cost of a new telescope.
New telescopes need not be government projects. In fact, NASA’s chief economist, Alexander MacDonald, argues that almost all of America’s greatest observatories were privately funded until Cold War politics made government the major player in space exploration. That’s why this story began with names from the 19th and 20th centuries—Hale, Lick, and McDonald—to which we should add Charles Yerkes and, more recently, William Keck. These were arguably the Elon Musks of their times—entrepreneurs who made millions in oil, iron, or real estate before funding the United States’ largest telescopes. (Hale’s father manufactured elevators—highly profitable in the rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.) The most ambitious observatories, MacDonald calculated for his book The Long Space Age, were about as expensive back then as some of NASA’s modern planetary probes. None of them had very much to do with government.
To be sure, government will remain a major player in space for a long time. “NASA pays the cost, predominantly, of the development of new commercial crew vehicles, SpaceX’s Dragon being one,” MacDonald says. “And now that those capabilities exist, private individuals can also pay to utilize those capabilities.” Isaacman doesn’t have to build a spacecraft; he can hire one that SpaceX originally built for NASA.
“I think that creates a much more diverse and potentially interesting space-exploration future than we have been considering for some time,” MacDonald says.
So put these pieces together: Private enterprise has been a driver of space science since the 1800s. Private companies are already conducting on-orbit satellite rescues. NASA hasn’t said no to the idea of private missions to service its orbiting observatories.
And why does John D. Hooker’s name matter? In 1906, he agreed to put up US $45,000 (about $1.4 million today) to make the mirror for a 100-inch reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson, Calif. One astronomer made the Hooker Telescope famous by using it to determine that the universe, full of galaxies, was expanding.
The astronomer’s name was Edwin Hubble. We’ve come full circle.
Armageddon ruined everything. Armageddon—the 1998 movie, not the mythical battlefield—told the story of an asteroid headed straight for Earth, and a bunch of swaggering roughnecks sent in space shuttles to blow it up with a nuclear weapon.
“Armageddon is big and noisy and stupid and shameless, and it’s going to be huge at the box office,” wrote Jay Carr of the Boston Globe.
Carr was right—the film was the year’s second biggest hit (after Titanic)—and ever since, scientists have had to explain, patiently, that cluttering space with radioactive debris may not be the best way to protect ourselves. NASA is now trying a slightly less dramatic approach with a robotic mission called DART—short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. On Monday at 7:14 p.m. EDT, if all goes well, the little spacecraft will crash into an asteroid called Dimorphos, about 11 million kilometers from Earth. Dimorphos is about 160 meters across, and orbits a 780-meter asteroid, 65803 Didymos. NASA TV plans to cover it live.
DART’s end will be violent, but not blockbuster-movie-violent. Music won’t swell and girlfriends back on Earth won’t swoon. Mission managers hope the spacecraft, with a mass of about 600 kilograms, hitting at 22,000 km/h, will nudge the asteroid slightly in its orbit, just enough to prove that it’s technologically possible in case a future asteroid has Earth in its crosshairs.
“Maybe once a century or so, there’ll be an asteroid sizeable enough that we’d like to certainly know, ahead of time, if it was going to impact,” says Lindley Johnson, who has the title of planetary defense officer at NASA.
“If you just take a hair off the orbital velocity, you’ve changed the orbit of the asteroid so that what would have been impact three or four years down the road is now a complete miss.”
So take that, Hollywood! If DART succeeds, it will show there are better fuels to protect Earth than testosterone.
The risk of a comet or asteroid that wipes out civilization is really very small, but large enough that policymakers take it seriously. NASA, ordered by the U.S. Congress in 2005 to scan the inner solar system for hazards, has found nearly 900 so-called NEOs—near-Earth objects—at least a kilometer across, more than 95 percent of all in that size range that probably exist. It has plotted their orbits far into the future, and none of them stand more than a fraction of a percent chance of hitting Earth in this millennium.
The DART spacecraft should crash into the asteroid Dimorphos and slow it in its orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos. The LICIACube cubesat will fly in formation to take images of the impact.Johns Hopkins APL/NASA
But there are smaller NEOs, perhaps 140 meters or more in diameter, too small to end civilization but large enough to cause mass destruction if they hit a populated area. There may be 25,000 that come within 50 million km of Earth’s orbit, and NASA estimates telescopes have only found about 40 percent of them. That’s why scientists want to expand the search for them and have good ways to deal with them if necessary. DART is the first test.
NASA takes pains to say this is a low-risk mission. Didymos and Dimorphos never cross Earth’s orbit, and computer simulations show that no matter where or how hard DART hits, it cannot possibly divert either one enough to put Earth in danger. Scientists want to see if DART can alter Dimorphos’s speed by perhaps a few centimeters per second.
The DART spacecraft, a 1-meter cube with two long solar panels, is elegantly simple, equipped with a telescope called DRACO, hydrazine maneuvering thrusters, a xenon-fueled ion engine and a navigation system called SMART Nav. It was launched by a SpaceX rocket in November. About 4 hours and 90,000 km before the hoped-for impact, SMART Nav will take over control of the spacecraft, using optical images from the telescope. Didymos, the larger object, should be a point of light by then; Dimorphos, the intended target, will probably not appear as more than one pixel until about 50 minutes before impact. DART will send one image per second back to Earth, but the spacecraft is autonomous; signals from the ground, 38 light-seconds away, would be useless for steering as the ship races in.
The DART spacecraft separated from its SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle, 55 minutes after liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base, in California, 24 November 2021. In this image from the rocket, the spacecraft had not yet unfurled its solar panels.NASA
What’s more, nobody knows the shape or consistency of little Dimorphos. Is it a solid boulder or a loose cluster of rubble? Is it smooth or craggy, round or elongated? “We’re trying to hit the center,” says Evan Smith, the deputy mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which is running DART. “We don’t want to overcorrect for some mountain or crater on one side that’s throwing an odd shadow or something.”
So on final approach, DART will cover 800 km without any steering. Thruster firings could blur the last images of Dimorphos’s surface, which scientists want to study. Impact should be imaged from about 50 km away by an Italian-made minisatellite, called LICIACube, which DART released two weeks ago.
“In the minutes following impact, I know everybody is going be high fiving on the engineering side,” said Tom Statler, DART’s program scientist at NASA, “but I’m going be imagining all the cool stuff that is actually going on on the asteroid, with a crater being dug and ejecta being blasted off.”
There is, of course, a possibility that DART will miss, in which case there should be enough fuel on board to allow engineers to go after a backup target. But an advantage of the Didymos-Dimorphos pair is that it should help in calculating how much effect the impact had. Telescopes on Earth (plus the Hubble and Webb space telescopes) may struggle to measure infinitesimal changes in the orbit of Dimorphos around the sun; it should be easier to see how much its orbit around Didymos is affected. The simplest measurement may be of the changing brightness of the double asteroid, as Dimorphos moves in front of or behind its partner, perhaps more quickly or slowly than it did before impact.
“We are moving an asteroid,” said Statler. “We are changing the motion of a natural celestial body in space. Humanity’s never done that before.”
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| Image by vectorjuice on Freepik |
The James Webb Space Telescope, in just a few months of operation, has begun to change our view of the universe. Its images—more detailed than what was possible before—show space aglow with galaxies, some of them formed very soon after the big bang.
None of this would be possible without the work of a team led by Scott Acton, the lead wavefront sensing and control scientist for the Webb at Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Colorado. He and his colleagues developed the systems that align the 18 separate segments of the Webb’s primary mirror with its smaller secondary mirror and science instruments. To produce clear images in the infrared wavelengths the telescope uses, the segments have to be within tens of nanometers of the shape specified in the spacecraft design.
Acton grew up in Wyoming and spent more than 20 years on the Webb team. IEEE Spectrum spoke with Acton after his team had finished aligning the telescope’s optics in space. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Tell your story. What got you started?
Scott Acton: When I was seven-years-old, my dad brought home a new television. And he gave me the old television to take apart. I was just enthralled by what I saw inside this television. And from that moment on I was defined by electronics. You look inside an old television and there are mechanisms, there are smells and colors and sights and for a seven-year-old kid, it was just the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.
Fast-forward 25 years and I’m working in the field of adaptive optics. And eventually that led to wavefront sensing and controls, which led to the Webb telescope.
Called the Cosmic Cliffs, Webb’s seemingly three-dimensional picture looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. In reality, it is the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, and the tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high. NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI
Talk about your work getting the telescope ready for flight. You worked on it for more than 20 years.
Acton: Well, we had to invent all of the wavefront sensing and controls. None of that technology really existed in 2001, so we started from the ground up with concepts and simple experiments. Then more complicated, very complicated experiments and eventually something known as TRL 6 technology—Technology Readiness Level 6—which demonstrated that we could do this in a flightlike environment. And then it was a question of taking this technology, algorithms, understanding it and implementing it into very robust procedures, documentation, and software, so that it could then be applied on the flight telescope.
What was it like finally to launch?
Acton: Well, I’ve got to say, there was a lot of nervousness, at least on my part. I was thinking we had a 70 percent chance of mission success, or something like that. It’s like sending your kid off to college—this instrument that we’d been looking at and thinking about.
The Ariane 5 vehicle is so reliable. I didn’t think there was going to be any problem with it, but deployment starts, basically, minutes after launch. So, for me, the place to be was at a computer console [at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore].
And then there were a lot of things that had to work.
Acton: Yes, right. But there are some things that that are interesting. They have these things called nonexplosive actuators [used to secure the spacecraft during launch]. There are about 130 of them. And you actually can’t test them. You build them and they get used, basically, once. If you do reuse one, well, it’s now a different actuator because you have to solder it back together. So you can’t qualify the part, but what you can do is qualify the process.
We could have still had a mission if some didn’t fire, but most of them were absolutely necessary for the success of the mission. So just ask yourself, let’s suppose you want to have a 95 percent chance of success. What number raised to the 130th power is equal to 0.95? That number is basically one. These things had to be perfect.
I remember walking home one night, talking on the phone to my wife, Heidi, and saying, “If I’m wrong about this I’ve just completely screwed up the telescope.” She said, “Scott, that’s why you’re there.” That was her way of telling me to cowboy up. The responsibility had to come down to somebody and in that moment, it was me.
I think the public perception was that the Webb was in very good shape and the in-flight setup all went very well. Would you say that’s accurate?
Acton: Early on in the mission there were hiccups, but other than that, I’d say things just went beyond our wildest expectations. Part of that comes down to the fact that my team and I had commissioned the telescope 100 times in simulations. And we always made it a little harder. I think that served us well because when we got to the real telescope, it was quite robust. It just worked.
Take us through the process of aligning the telescope.
Acton: The first image we got back from the telescope was 2 February, in the middle of the night. Most people had gone home, but I was there, and a lot of other people were too. We just pointed the telescope at the Large Magellanic Cloud, which has lots and lots of stars in it, and took images on the near-infrared cameras. People were really happy to see these images because they were looking basically to make sure that the science instruments worked.
But some of us were really concerned with that image, because you could see some very significant astigmatism—stronger than we were expecting to see from our simulations. Later we would learn that the telescope’s secondary mirror was off in translation—about 1.5 millimeters along the deployment axis and about a millimeter in the other axis. And the primary mirror segments were clocked a bit from the perfectly aligned state.
Lee Feinberg, the telescope lead at NASA Goddard, texted me and said, “Scott, why can’t you just simulate this to see if you can get some images that bad?” So that morning I ran a simulation and was able to reproduce almost exactly what we were seeing in these images. We realized that we were not going to have any major problems with the wavefront.
Describe the cadence of your work during commissioning. What would a day be like?
Acton: One of the rules we set up very early on was that in terms of wavefront sensing and control, we would always have two people sitting in front of the computers at any given time. Anytime anything significant happened, I always wanted to make sure that I was there, so I got an apartment [near the institute in Baltimore]. From my door to the door of the of the Mission Operations Center was a 7-minute walk.
In this mosaic image stretching 340 light-years across, Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) displays the Tarantula Nebula star-forming region in a new light, including tens of thousands of never-before-seen young stars that were previously shrouded in cosmic dust.NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Webb ERO Production Team
There were certainly times during the process where it had a very large pucker factor, if you will. We couldn’t point the telescope reliably at the very beginning. And a lot of our software, for the early steps of commissioning, depended on the immutability of telescope pointing. We wanted to have the telescope repeatedly pointed to within a couple of arc-seconds and it was closer to 20 or 30. Because of that, some of the initial moves to align the telescope had to be calculated, if you will, by hand.
I remember walking home one night, talking on the phone to my wife, Heidi, and saying, “If I’m wrong about this I’ve just completely screwed up the telescope.” She said, “Scott, that’s why you’re there.” That was her way of telling me to cowboy up. The responsibility had to come down to somebody and in that moment, it was me.
But when the result came back, we could see the images. We pointed the telescope at a bright isolated star and then we could see, one at a time, 18 spots appearing in the middle of our main science detector. I remember a colleague saying, “I now believe we’re going to completely align the telescope.” He felt in his mind that if we could get past that step, that everything else was downhill.
You’re trying to piece together the universe. It’s hard to get it right, and very easy to make mistakes. But we did it.
Building the Webb was, of course, a big, complicated project. Do you think there are any particular lessons to be drawn from it that people in the future might find useful?
Acton: Here are a couple of really big ones that apply to wavefront sensing and control. One is that there are multiple institutions involved—Northrop Grumman, Ball Aerospace, the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Space Telescope Science Institute—and the complication of having all these institutional lines. It could have been very, very difficult to navigate. So very early on we decided not to have any lines. We were a completely badgeless team. Anybody could talk to anybody. If someone said, “No, I think this is wrong, you should do it this way,” even if they didn’t necessarily have contractual responsibility, everybody listened.
Another big lesson we learned was about the importance of the interplay between experimentation and simulation. We built a one-sixth scale model, a fully functional optical model of the telescope, and it’s still working. It allowed us, very early on, to know what was going to be difficult. Then we could address those issues in simulation. That understanding, the interplay between experimentation and modeling and simulations, was absolutely essential.
Recognizing of course, that it’s very early, do you yet have a favorite image?
Acton: My favorite image, so far, was one that was taken during the last real wavefront activity that we did as part of commissioning. It was called a thermal slew test. The telescope has a large sunshield, but the sunshield can be at different angles with respect to the sun. So to make sure it was stable, we aimed it at a bright star we used as a guide star, put it in one orientation, and stayed there for five or six days. And then we switched to a different orientation for five or six days. It turned out to be quite stable. But how do you know that the telescope wasn’t rolling about the guide star? To check this, we took a series of test images with the redundant fine-guidance sensor. As you can imagine, when you have a 6-1/2 meter telescope at L2 away from any competing light sources that is cooled to 50 kelvins, yes, it is sensitive. Even just one 20-minute exposure is going to just have unbelievable detail regarding the deep universe. Imagine what happens if you take 100 of those images and average them together. We came up with an image of just some random part of the sky.
Scott Acton’s favorite Webb image: A test image of a random part of the sky, shot with the Webb’s fine-guidance sensor. The points with six-pointed diffraction patterns are stars; all other points are galaxies. NASA/CSA/FGS
I sent this image to James Larkin at UCLA, and he looked at it and estimated that that single image had 15,000 galaxies in it. Every one of those galaxies probably has between 100 [billion] and 200 billion stars.
I don’t talk about religion too much when it comes to this, but I must have had in my mind a Biblical reference to the stars singing. I pictured all of those galaxies as singing, as if this was a way for the universe to express joy that after all these years, we could finally see them. It was quite an emotional experience for me and for many people.
You realized that there was so much out there, and you weren’t even really looking for it yet? You were still phasing the telescope?
Acton: That’s right. I guess I I’m not sure what I expected. I figured you’d just see dark sky. Well, there is no dark sky. Dark sky is a myth. Galaxies are everywhere.
Finally, we got to our first diffraction-limited image [with the telescope calibrated for science observations for the first time]. And that’s the way the telescope is operating now.
Several days later, about 70 of us got together—astronomers, engineers, and other team members. A member of the team—his name is Anthony Galyer—and I had gone halves several years earlier and purchased a bottle of cognac from 1906, the year that James Webb was born. We toasted James Webb and the telescope that bears his name.
The race to deliver cellular calls from space passes two milestones this month and saw one major announcement last month. First, Apple will offer emergency satellite messaging on two of its latest iPhone models, the company announced on Wednesday. Second, AST SpaceMobile plans a launch on Saturday, 10 September, of an experimental satellite to test full-fledged satellite 5G service. In addition, T-Mobile USA and SpaceX intend to offer their own messaging and limited data service via the second generation of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation, as the two companies announced on 25 August.
Each contender is taking a different approach to space-based cellular service. The Apple offering uses the existing satellite bandwidth Globalstar once used for messaging offerings, but without the need for a satellite-specific handset. The AST project and another company, Lynk Global, would use a dedicated network of satellites with larger-than-normal antennas to produce a 4G, 5G, and someday 6G cellular signal compatible with any existing 4G-compatible phone (as detailed in other recent IEEE Spectrum coverage of space-based 5G offerings). Assuming regulatory approval is forthcoming, the technology would work first in equatorial regions and then across more of the planet as these providers expand their satellite constellations. T-Mobile and Starlink’s offering would work in the former PCS band in the United States. SpaceX, like AST and Lynk, would need to negotiate access to spectrum on a country-by-country basis.
Apple’s competitors are unlikely to see commercial operations before 2024.
“Regulators have not decided on the power limits from space, what concerns there are about interference, especially across national borders. There’s a whole bunch of regulatory issues that simply haven’t been thought about to date.”
—Tim Farrar, telecommunications consultant
The T-Mobile–Starlink announcement is “in some ways an endorsement” of AST and Lynk’s proposition, and “in other ways a great threat,” says telecommunications consultant Tim Farrar of Tim Farrar Associates in Menlo Park, Calif. AST and Lynk have so far told investors they expect their national mobile network operator partners to charge per use or per day, but T-Mobile announced that they plan to include satellite messaging in the 1,900-megahertz range in their existing services. Apple said their Emergency SOS via Satellite service would be free the first two years for U.S. and Canadian iPhone 14 buyers, but did not say what it would cost after that. For now, the Globalstar satellites it is using cannot offer the kind of broadband bandwidth AST has promised, but Globalstar has reported to investors orders for new satellites that might offer new capabilities, including new gateways.
Even under the best conditions—a clear view of the sky—users will need 15 seconds to send a message via Apple’s service. They will also have to follow onscreen guidance to keep the device pointed at the satellites they are using. Light foliage can cause the same message to take more than a minute to send. Ashley Williams, a satellite engineer at Apple who recorded the service’s announcement, also mentioned a data-compression algorithm and a series of rescue-related suggested auto-replies intended to minimize the amount of data that users would need to send during a rescue.
Meanwhile, AST SpaceMobile says it aims to launch an experimental satellite Saturday, 10 September, to test its cellular broadband offering.
Last month’s T-Mobile-SpaceX announcement “helped the world focus attention on the huge market opportunity for SpaceMobile, the only planned space-based cellular broadband network. BlueWalker 3, which has a 693 sq ft array, is scheduled for launch within weeks!” tweeted AST SpaceMobile CEO Abel Avellan on 25 August. The size of the array matters because AST SpaceMobile has so far indicated in its applications for experimental satellite licenses that it intends to use lower radio frequencies (700–900 MHz) with less propagation loss but that require antennas much larger than conventional satellites carry.
The size of the array will also make it more reflective, which has raised concerns among astronomers. The size of Starlink’s planned constellation has already provoked complaints among astronomers because it will interfere with their ability to observe space. Sky & Telescope magazine published on 1 September a call for both professional and amateur astronomers to observe the growing constellations of satellites to document the interference. Professional astronomy societies have lobbied U.S. government agencies and Congress on the issue and met with SpaceX officials in May to discuss a recent change that brightened satellites by 0.5 visual magnitudes.
So far government agencies have issued licenses for thousands of low-Earth-orbiting satellites, which have the biggest impact on astronomers. Even with the constellations starting to form, satellite-cellular telecommunications companies are still open to big regulatory risks. “Regulators have not decided on the power limits from space, what concerns there are about interference, especially across national borders. There’s a whole bunch of regulatory issues that simply haven’t been thought about to date,” Farrar says.
For a hiker with a twisted ankle, a messaging service that takes a while to connect and twinkles in and out of service as satellites fly by may be better than nothing, but early space-based cellular will not be a seamless way to connect to video calls from out at sea.
“User cooperation is in my view the single most critical aspect of whether this service will attract mass-market usage or people willing to pay a significant amount for this service,” Farrar says.
Update 5 Sept.: For now, NASA’s giant Artemis I remains on the ground after two launch attempts scrubbed by a hydrogen leak and a balky engine sensor. Mission managers say Artemis will fly when everything's ready—but haven't yet specified whether that might be in late September or in mid-October.
“When you look at the rocket, it looks almost retro,” said Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA. “Looks like we’re looking back toward the Saturn V. But it’s a totally different, new, highly sophisticated—more sophisticated—rocket, and spacecraft.”
Artemis, powered by the Space Launch System rocket, is America’s first attempt to send astronauts to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and technology has taken giant leaps since then. On Artemis I, the first test flight, mission managers say they are taking the SLS, with its uncrewed Orion spacecraft up top, and “stressing it beyond what it is designed for”—the better to ensure safe flights when astronauts make their first landings, currently targeted to begin with Artemis III in 2025.
But Nelson is right: The rocket is retro in many ways, borrowing heavily from the space shuttles America flew for 30 years, and from the Apollo-Saturn V.
Much of Artemis’s hardware is refurbished: Its four main engines, and parts of its two strap-on boosters, all flew before on shuttle missions. The rocket’s apricot color comes from spray-on insulation much like the foam on the shuttle’s external tank. And the large maneuvering engine in Orion’s service module is actually 40 years old—used on 19 space shuttle flights between 1984 and 1992.
“I have a name for missions that use too much new technology—failures.”
—John Casani, NASA
Perhaps more important, the project inherits basic engineering from half a century of spaceflight. Just look at Orion’s crew capsule—a truncated cone, somewhat larger than the Apollo Command Module but conceptually very similar.
Old, of course, does not mean bad. NASA says there is no need to reinvent things engineers got right the first time.
“There are certain fundamental aspects of deep-space exploration that are really independent of money,” says Jim Geffre, Orion vehicle-integration manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “The laws of physics haven’t changed since the 1960s. And capsule shapes happen to be really good for coming back into the atmosphere at Mach 32.”
Roger Launius, who served as NASA’s chief historian from 1990 to 2002 and as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution from then until 2017, tells of a conversation he had with John Casani, a veteran NASA engineer who managed the Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini probes to the outer planets.
“I have a name for missions that use too much new technology,” he recalls Casani saying. “Failures.”
The Artemis I flight is slated for about six weeks. (Apollo 11 lasted eight days.) The ship roughly follows Apollo’s path to the moon’s vicinity, but then puts itself in what NASA calls a distant retrograde orbit. It swoops within 110 kilometers of the lunar surface for a gravity assist, then heads 64,000 km out—taking more than a month but using less fuel than it would in closer orbits. Finally, it comes home, reentering the Earth’s atmosphere at 11 km per second, slowing itself with a heatshield and parachutes, and splashing down in the Pacific not far from San Diego.
If all four, quadruply redundant flight computer modules fail, there is a fifth, entirely separate computer onboard, running different code to get the spacecraft home.
“That extra time in space,” says Geffre, “allows us to operate the systems, give more time in deep space, and all those things that stress it, like radiation and micrometeoroids, thermal environments.”
There are, of course, newer technologies on board. Orion is controlled by two vehicle-management computers, each composed of two flight computer modules (FCMs) to handle guidance, navigation, propulsion, communications, and other systems. The flight control system, Geffre points out, is quad-redundant; if at any point one of the four FCMs disagrees with the others, it will take itself offline and, in a 22-second process, reset itself to make sure its outputs are consistent with the others’. If all four FCMs fail, there is a fifth, entirely separate computer running different code to get the spacecraft home.
Guidance and navigation, too, have advanced since the sextant used on Apollo. Orion uses a star tracker to determine its attitude, imaging stars and comparing them to an onboard database. And an optical navigation camera shoots Earth and the moon so that guidance software can determine their distance and position and keep the spacecraft on course. NASA says it’s there as backup, able to get Orion to a safe splashdown even if all communication with Earth has been lost.
But even those systems aren’t entirely new. Geffre points out that the guidance system’s architecture is derived from the Boeing 787. Computing power in deep space is limited by cosmic radiation, which can corrupt the output of microprocessors beyond the protection of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.
Beyond that is the inevitable issue of cost. Artemis is a giant project, years behind schedule, started long before NASA began to buy other launches from companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab. NASA’s inspector general, Paul Martin, testified to Congress in March that the first four Artemis missions would cost US $4.1 billion each—“a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable.”
Launius, for one, rejects the argument that government is inherently wasteful. “Yes, NASA’s had problems in managing programs in the past. Who hasn’t?” he says. He points out that Blue Origin and SpaceX have had plenty of setbacks of their own—they’re just not obliged to be public about them. “I could go on and on. It’s not a government thing per se and it’s not a NASA thing per se.”
So why return to the moon with—please forgive the pun—such a retro rocket? Partly, say those who watch Artemis closely, because it’s become too big to fail, with so much American money and brainpower invested in it. Partly because it turns NASA’s astronauts outward again, exploring instead of maintaining a space station. Partly because new perspectives could come of it. And partly because China and Russia have ambitions in space that threaten America’s.
“Apollo was a demonstration of technological verisimilitude—to the whole world,” says Launius. “And the whole world knew then, as they know today, that the future belongs to the civilization that can master science and technology.”
Update 7 Sept.: Artemis I has been on launchpad 39B, not 39A as previously reported, at Kennedy Space Center.
.webp "Marketing AI Tools") |
The marketing industry is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) as a way to save time and execute smarter, more personalized campaigns. 61% of marketers say AI software is the most important aspect of their data strategy.
If you’re late to the AI party, don’t worry. It’s easier than you think to start leveraging artificial intelligence tools in your marketing strategy. Here are 11 AI marketing tools every marketer should start using today.
Personalize is an AI-powered technology that helps you identify and produce highly targeted sales and marketing campaigns by tracking the products and services your contacts are most interested in at any given time. The platform uses an algorithm to identify each contact’s top three interests, which are updated in real-time based on recent site activity.
Key Features
Seventh Sense provides behavioral analytics that helps you win attention in your customers’ overcrowded email inboxes. Choosing the best day and time to send an email is always a gamble. And while some days of the week generally get higher open rates than others, you’ll never be able to nail down a time that’s best for every customer. Seventh Sense eases your stress of having to figure out the perfect send-time and day for your email campaigns. The AI-based platform figures out the best timing and email frequency for each contact based on when they’re opening emails. The tool is primarily geared toward HubSpot and Marketo customers
Key Features
Phrasee uses artificial intelligence to help you write more effective subject lines. With its AI-based Natural Language Generation system, Phrasee uses data-driven insights to generate millions of natural-sounding copy variants that match your brand voice. The model is end-to-end, meaning when you feed the results back to Phrasee, the prediction model rebuilds so it can continuously learn from your audience.
Key Features
HubSpot Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an integral tool for the Human Content team. It uses machine learning to determine how search engines understand and categorize your content. HubSpot SEO helps you improve your search engine rankings and outrank your competitors. Search engines reward websites that organize their content around core subjects, or topic clusters. HubSpot SEO helps you discover and rank for the topics that matter to your business and customers.
Key Features
When you’re limited to testing two variables against each other at a time, it can take months to get the results you’re looking for. Evolv AI lets you test all your ideas at once. It uses advanced algorithms to identify the top-performing concepts, combine them with each other, and repeat the process to achieve the best site experience.
Key Features
Acrolinx is a content alignment platform that helps brands scale and improves the quality of their content. It’s geared toward enterprises – its major customers include big brands like Google, Adobe, and Amazon - to help them scale their writing efforts. Instead of spending time chasing down and fixing typos in multiple places throughout an article or blog post, you can use Acrolinx to do it all right there in one place. You start by setting your preferences for style, grammar, tone of voice, and company-specific word usage. Then, Acrolinx checks and scores your existing content to find what’s working and suggest areas for improvement. The platform provides real-time guidance and suggestions to make writing better and strengthen weak pages.
Key features
MarketMuse uses an algorithm to help marketers build content strategies. The tool shows you where to target keywords to rank in specific topic categories, and recommends keywords you should go after if you want to own particular topics. It also identifies gaps and opportunities for new content and prioritizes them by their probable impact on your rankings. The algorithm compares your content with thousands of articles related to the same topic to uncover what’s missing from your site.
Key features:
Copilot is a suite of tools that help eCommerce businesses maintain real-time communication with customers around the clock at every stage of the funnel. Promote products, recover shopping carts and send updates or reminders directly through Messenger.
Key features:
Yotpo’s deep learning technology evaluates your customers’ product reviews to help you make better business decisions. It identifies key topics that customers mention related to your products—and their feelings toward them. The AI engine extracts relevant reviews from past buyers and presents them in smart displays to convert new shoppers. Yotpo also saves you time moderating reviews. The AI-powered moderation tool automatically assigns a score to each review and flags reviews with negative sentiment so you can focus on quality control instead of manually reviewing every post.
Key features:
Albert is a self-learning software that automates the creation of marketing campaigns for your brand. It analyzes vast amounts of data to run optimized campaigns autonomously, allowing you to feed in your own creative content and target markets, and then use data from its database to determine key characteristics of a serious buyer. Albert identifies potential customers that match those traits, and runs trial campaigns on a small group of customers—with results refined by Albert himself—before launching it on a larger scale.
Albert plugs into your existing marketing technology stack, so you still have access to your accounts, ads, search, social media, and more. Albert maps tracking and attribution to your source of truth so you can determine which channels are driving your business.
Key features:
There are many tools and companies out there that offer AI tools, but this is a small list of resources that we have found to be helpful. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to share them in the comments below this article. As marketing evolves at such a rapid pace, new marketing strategies will be invented that we haven't even dreamed of yet. But for now, this list should give you a good starting point on your way to implementing AI into your marketing mix.
Note: This article contains affiliate links, meaning we make a small commission if you buy any premium plan from our link.
There are lots of questions floating around about how affiliate marketing works, what to do and what not to do when it comes to setting up a business. With so much uncertainty surrounding both personal and business aspects of affiliate marketing. In this post, we will answer the most frequently asked question about affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way to make money by promoting the products and services of other people and companies. You don't need to create your product or service, just promote existing ones. That's why it's so easy to get started with affiliate marketing. You can even get started with no budget at all!
An affiliate program is a package of information you create for your product, which is then made available to potential publishers. The program will typically include details about the product and its retail value, commission levels, and promotional materials. Many affiliate programs are managed via an affiliate network like ShareASale, which acts as a platform to connect publishers and advertisers, but it is also possible to offer your program directly.
Affiliate networks connect publishers to advertisers. Affiliate networks make money by charging fees to the merchants who advertise with them; these merchants are known as advertisers. The percentage of each sale that the advertiser pays is negotiated between the merchant and the affiliate network.
Dropshipping is a method of selling that allows you to run an online store without having to stock products. You advertise the products as if you owned them, but when someone makes an order, you create a duplicate order with the distributor at a reduced price. The distributor takes care of the post and packaging on your behalf. As affiliate marketing is based on referrals and this type of drop shipping requires no investment in inventory when a customer buys through the affiliate link, no money exchanges hands.
Performance marketing is a method of marketing that pays for performance, like when a sale is made or an ad is clicked This can include methods like PPC (pay-per-click) or display advertising. Affiliate marketing is one form of performance marketing where commissions are paid out to affiliates on a performance basis when they click on their affiliate link and make a purchase or action.
Smartphones are essentially miniature computers, so publishers can display the same websites and offers that are available on a PC. But mobiles also offer specific tools not available on computers, and these can be used to good effect for publishers. Publishers can optimize their ads for mobile users by making them easy to access by this audience. Publishers can also make good use of text and instant messaging to promote their offers. As the mobile market is predicted to make up 80% of traffic in the future, publishers who do not promote on mobile devices are missing out on a big opportunity.
The best way to find affiliate publishers is on reputable networks like ShareASale Cj(Commission Junction), Awin, and Impact radius. These networks have a strict application process and compliance checks, which means that all affiliates are trustworthy.
An affiliate disclosure statement discloses to the reader that there may be affiliate links on a website, for which a commission may be paid to the publisher if visitors follow these links and make purchases.
Publishers promote their programs through a variety of means, including blogs, websites, email marketing, and pay-per-click ads. Social media has a huge interactive audience, making this platform a good source of potential traffic.
A super affiliate is an affiliate partner who consistently drives a large majority of sales from any program they promote, compared to other affiliate partners involved in that program. Affiliates make a lot of money from affiliate marketing Pat Flynn earned more than $50000 in 2013 from affiliate marketing.
Publishers can be identified by their publisher ID, which is used in tracking cookies to determine which publishers generate sales. The activity is then viewed within a network's dashboard.
Because the Internet is so widespread, affiliate programs can be promoted in any country. Affiliate strategies that are set internationally need to be tailored to the language of the targeted country.
Affiliate marketing can help you grow your business in the following ways:
One of the best ways to work with qualified affiliates is to hire an affiliate marketing agency that works with all the networks. Affiliates are carefully selected and go through a rigorous application process to be included in the network.
Affiliate marketing is generally associated with websites, but there are other ways to promote your affiliate links, including:
To build your affiliate marketing business, you don't have to invest money in the beginning. You can sign up for free with any affiliate network and start promoting their brands right away.
Commission rates are typically based on a percentage of the total sale and in some cases can also be a flat fee for each transaction. The rates are set by the merchant.
Who manages your affiliate program?
Some merchants run their affiliate programs internally, while others choose to contract out management to a network or an external agency.
Cookies are small pieces of data that work with web browsers to store information such as user preferences, login or registration data, and shopping cart contents. When someone clicks on your affiliate link, a cookie is placed on the user's computer or mobile device. That cookie is used to remember the link or ad that the visitor clicked on. Even if the user leaves your site and comes back a week later to make a purchase, you will still get credit for the sale and receive a commission it depends on the site cookies duration
The merchant determines the duration of a cookie, also known as its “cookie life.” The most common length for an affiliate program is 30 days. If someone clicks on your affiliate link, you’ll be paid a commission if they purchase within 30 days of the click.
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Imagine a world in which you can do transactions and many other things without having to give your personal information. A world in which you don’t need to rely on banks or governments anymore. Sounds amazing, right? That’s exactly what blockchain technology allows us to do.
It’s like your computer’s hard drive. blockchain is a technology that lets you store data in digital blocks, which are connected together like links in a chain.
Blockchain technology was originally invented in 1991 by two mathematicians, Stuart Haber and W. Scot Stornetta. They first proposed the system to ensure that timestamps could not be tampered with.
A few years later, in 1998, software developer Nick Szabo proposed using a similar kind of technology to secure a digital payments system he called “Bit Gold.” However, this innovation was not adopted until Satoshi Nakamoto claimed to have invented the first Blockchain and Bitcoin.
A blockchain is a distributed database shared between the nodes of a computer network. It saves information in digital format. Many people first heard of blockchain technology when they started to look up information about bitcoin.
Blockchain is used in cryptocurrency systems to ensure secure, decentralized records of transactions.
Blockchain allowed people to guarantee the fidelity and security of a record of data without the need for a third party to ensure accuracy.
To understand how a blockchain works, Consider these basic steps:
Let’s get to know more about the blockchain.
Blockchain records digital information and distributes it across the network without changing it. The information is distributed among many users and stored in an immutable, permanent ledger that can't be changed or destroyed. That's why blockchain is also called "Distributed Ledger Technology" or DLT.
Here’s how it works:
And that’s the beauty of it! The process may seem complicated, but it’s done in minutes with modern technology. And because technology is advancing rapidly, I expect things to move even more quickly than ever.
Even though blockchain is integral to cryptocurrency, it has other applications. For example, blockchain can be used for storing reliable data about transactions. Many people confuse blockchain with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum.
Blockchain already being adopted by some big-name companies, such as Walmart, AIG, Siemens, Pfizer, and Unilever. For example, IBM's Food Trust uses blockchain to track food's journey before reaching its final destination.
Although some of you may consider this practice excessive, food suppliers and manufacturers adhere to the policy of tracing their products because bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella have been found in packaged foods. In addition, there have been isolated cases where dangerous allergens such as peanuts have accidentally been introduced into certain products.
Tracing and identifying the sources of an outbreak is a challenging task that can take months or years. Thanks to the Blockchain, however, companies now know exactly where their food has been—so they can trace its location and prevent future outbreaks.
Blockchain technology allows systems to react much faster in the event of a hazard. It also has many other uses in the modern world.
Blockchain technology is safe, even if it’s public. People can access the technology using an internet connection.
Have you ever been in a situation where you had all your data stored at one place and that one secure place got compromised? Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to prevent your data from leaking out even when the security of your storage systems is compromised?
Blockchain technology provides a way of avoiding this situation by using multiple computers at different locations to store information about transactions. If one computer experiences problems with a transaction, it will not affect the other nodes.
Instead, other nodes will use the correct information to cross-reference your incorrect node. This is called “Decentralization,” meaning all the information is stored in multiple places.
Blockchain guarantees your data's authenticity—not just its accuracy, but also its irreversibility. It can also be used to store data that are difficult to register, like legal contracts, state identifications, or a company's product inventory.
Blockchain has many advantages and disadvantages.
I’ll answer the most frequently asked questions about blockchain in this section.
Blockchain is not a cryptocurrency but a technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible. It's a digital ledger that records every transaction seamlessly.
Yes, blockchain can be theoretically hacked, but it is a complicated task to be achieved. A network of users constantly reviews it, which makes hacking the blockchain difficult.
Coinbase Global is currently the biggest blockchain company in the world. The company runs a commendable infrastructure, services, and technology for the digital currency economy.
Blockchain is a decentralized technology. It’s a chain of distributed ledgers connected with nodes. Each node can be any electronic device. Thus, one owns blockhain.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, which is powered by Blockchain technology while Blockchain is a distributed ledger of cryptocurrency
Generally a database is a collection of data which can be stored and organized using a database management system. The people who have access to the database can view or edit the information stored there. The client-server network architecture is used to implement databases. whereas a blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, stored in a distributed system. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, timestamp and transaction information. Modification of data is not allowed due to the design of the blockchain. The technology allows decentralized control and eliminates risks of data modification by other parties.
Blockchain has a wide spectrum of applications and, over the next 5-10 years, we will likely see it being integrated into all sorts of industries. From finance to healthcare, blockchain could revolutionize the way we store and share data. Although there is some hesitation to adopt blockchain systems right now, that won't be the case in 2022-2023 (and even less so in 2026). Once people become more comfortable with the technology and understand how it can work for them, owners, CEOs and entrepreneurs alike will be quick to leverage blockchain technology for their own gain. Hope you like this article if you have any question let me know in the comments section
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Grammarly is a tool that checks for grammatical errors, spelling, and punctuation.it gives you comprehensive feedback on your writing. You can use this tool to proofread and edit articles, blog posts, emails, etc.
Grammarly also detects all types of mistakes, including sentence structure issues and misused words. It also gives you suggestions on style changes, punctuation, spelling, and grammar all are in real-time. The free version covers the basics like identifying grammar and spelling mistakes
whereas the Premium version offers a lot more functionality, it detects plagiarism in your content, suggests word choice, or adds fluency to it.
ProWritingAid is a style and grammar checker for content creators and writers. It helps to optimize word choice, punctuation errors, and common grammar mistakes, providing detailed reports to help you improve your writing.
ProWritingAid can be used as an add-on to WordPress, Gmail, and Google Docs. The software also offers helpful articles, videos, quizzes, and explanations to help improve your writing.
Here are some key features of ProWriting Aid:
Grammarly and ProWritingAid are well-known grammar-checking software. However, if you're like most people who can't decide which to use, here are some different points that may be helpful in your decision.
As both writing assistants are great in their own way, you need to choose the one that suits you best.
Both ProWritingAid and Grammarly are awesome writing tools, without a doubt. but as per my experience, Grammarly is a winner here because Grammarly helps you to review and edit your content. Grammarly highlights all the mistakes in your writing within seconds of copying and pasting the content into Grammarly’s editor or using the software’s native feature in other text editors.
Not only does it identify tiny grammatical and spelling errors, it tells you when you overlook punctuations where they are needed. And, beyond its plagiarism-checking capabilities, Grammarly helps you proofread your content. Even better, the software offers a free plan that gives you access to some of its features.
Are you searching for an ecomerce platform to help you build an online store and sell products?
In this Sellfy review, we'll talk about how this eCommerce platform can let you sell digital products while keeping full control of your marketing.
And the best part? Starting your business can be done in just five minutes.
Let us then talk about the Sellfy platform and all the benefits it can bring to your business.
Sellfy is an eCommerce solution that allows digital content creators, including writers, illustrators, designers, musicians, and filmmakers, to sell their products online. Sellfy provides a customizable storefront where users can display their digital products and embed "Buy Now" buttons on their website or blog. Sellfy product pages enable users to showcase their products from different angles with multiple images and previews from Soundcloud, Vimeo, and YouTube. Files of up to 2GB can be uploaded to Sellfy, and the company offers unlimited bandwidth and secure file storage. Users can also embed their entire store or individual project widgets in their site, with the ability to preview how widgets will appear before they are displayed.
Sellfy includes:
Sellfy is a powerful e-commerce platform that helps you personalize your online storefront. You can add your logo, change colors, revise navigation, and edit the layout of your store. Sellfy also allows you to create a full shopping cart so customers can purchase multiple items. And Sellfy gives you the ability to set your language or let customers see a translated version of your store based on their location.
Sellfy gives you the option to host your store directly on its platform, add a custom domain to your store, and use it as an embedded storefront on your website. Sellfy also optimizes its store offerings for mobile devices, allowing for a seamless checkout experience.
Sellfy allows creators to host all their products and sell all of their digital products on one platform. Sellfy also does not place storage limits on your store but recommends that files be no larger than 5GB. Creators can sell both standard and subscription-based products in any file format that is supported by the online marketplace. Customers can purchase products instantly after making a purchase – there is no waiting period.
You can organize your store by creating your product categories, sorting by any characteristic you choose. Your title, description, and the image will be included on each product page. In this way, customers can immediately evaluate all of your products. You can offer different pricing options for all of your products, including "pay what you want," in which the price is entirely up to the customer. This option allows you to give customers control over the cost of individual items (without a minimum price) or to set pricing minimums—a good option if you're in a competitive market or when you have higher-end products. You can also offer set prices per product as well as free products to help build your store's popularity.
Sellfy is ideal for selling digital content, such as ebooks. But it does not allow you to copyrighted material (that you don't have rights to distribute).
Sellfy offers several ways to share your store, enabling you to promote your business on different platforms. Sellfy lets you integrate it with your existing website using "buy now" buttons, embed your entire storefront, or embed certain products so you can reach more people. Sellfy also enables you to connect with your Facebook page and YouTube channel, maximizing your visibility.
Sellfy is a simple online platform that allows customers to buy your products directly through your store. Sellfy has two payment processing options: PayPal and Stripe. You will receive instant payments with both of these processors, and your customer data is protected by Sellfy's secure (PCI-compliant) payment security measures. In addition to payment security, Sellfy provides anti-fraud tools to help protect your products including PDF stamping, unique download links, and limited download attempts.
The Sellfy platform includes marketing and analytics tools to help you manage your online store. You can send email product updates and collect newsletter subscribers through the platform. With Sellfy, you can also offer discount codes and product upsells, as well as create and track Facebook and Twitter ads for your store. The software's analytics dashboard will help you track your best-performing products, generated revenue, traffic channels, top locations, and overall store performance.
To expand functionality and make your e-commerce store run more efficiently, Sellfy offers several integrations. Google Analytics and Webhooks, as well as integrations with Patreon and Facebook Live Chat, are just a few of the options available. Sellfy allows you to connect to Zapier, which gives you access to hundreds of third-party apps, including tools like Mailchimp, Trello, Salesforce, and more.
The free plan comes with:
Starter plan comes with:
The business plan comes with:
The premium plan comes with:
Sellfy has its benefits and downsides, but fortunately, the pros outweigh the cons.
In this article, we have taken a look at some of the biggest benefits associated with using sellfy for eCommerce. Once you compare these benefits to what you get with other platforms such as Shopify, you should find that it is worth your time to consider sellfy for your business. After reading this article all of your questions will be solved but if you have still some questions let me know in the comment section below, I will be happy to answer your questions.
Note: This article contains affiliate links which means we make a small commission if you buy sellfy premium plan from our link.
SEMrush and Ahrefs are among the most popular tools in the SEO industry. Both companies have been in business for years and have thousands of customers per month.
If you're a professional SEO or trying to do digital marketing on your own, at some point you'll likely consider using a tool to help with your efforts. Ahrefs and SEMrush are two names that will likely appear on your shortlist.
In this guide, I'm going to help you learn more about these SEO tools and how to choose the one that's best for your purposes.
What is SEMrush?
SEMrush is a popular SEO tool with a wide range of features—it's the leading competitor research service for online marketers. SEMrush's SEO Keyword Magic tool offers over 20 billion Google-approved keywords, which are constantly updated and it's the largest keyword database.
The program was developed in 2007 as SeoQuake is a small Firefox extension
Features
Ahrefs is a leading SEO platform that offers a set of tools to grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and monitor your niche. The company was founded in 2010, and it has become a popular choice among SEO tools. Ahrefs has a keyword index of over 10.3 billion keywords and offers accurate and extensive backlink data updated every 15-30 minutes and it is the world's most extensive backlink index database.
Features
Direct Comparisons: Ahrefs vs SEMrush
Now that you know a little more about each tool, let's take a look at how they compare. I'll analyze each tool to see how they differ in interfaces, keyword research resources, rank tracking, and competitor analysis.
User Interface
Ahrefs and SEMrush both offer comprehensive information and quick metrics regarding your website's SEO performance. However, Ahrefs takes a bit more of a hands-on approach to getting your account fully set up, whereas SEMrush's simpler dashboard can give you access to the data you need quickly.
In this section, we provide a brief overview of the elements found on each dashboard and highlight the ease with which you can complete tasks.
AHREFS
The Ahrefs dashboard is less cluttered than that of SEMrush, and its primary menu is at the very top of the page, with a search bar designed only for entering URLs.
Additional features of the Ahrefs platform include:
SEMRUSH
When you log into the SEMrush Tool, you will find four main modules. These include information about your domains, organic keyword analysis, ad keyword, and site traffic.
You'll also find some other options like
Both Ahrefs and SEMrush have user-friendly dashboards, but Ahrefs is less cluttered and easier to navigate. On the other hand, SEMrush offers dozens of extra tools, including access to customer support resources.
When deciding on which dashboard to use, consider what you value in the user interface, and test out both.
If you're looking to track your website's search engine ranking, rank tracking features can help. You can also use them to monitor your competitors.
Let's take a look at Ahrefs vs. SEMrush to see which tool does a better job.
The Ahrefs Rank Tracker is simpler to use. Just type in the domain name and keywords you want to analyze, and it spits out a report showing you the search engine results page (SERP) ranking for each keyword you enter.
Rank Tracker looks at the ranking performance of keywords and compares them with the top rankings for those keywords. Ahrefs also offers:
You'll see metrics that help you understand your visibility, traffic, average position, and keyword difficulty.
It gives you an idea of whether a keyword would be profitable to target or not.
SEMRush offers a tool called Position Tracking. This tool is a project tool—you must set it up as a new project. Below are a few of the most popular features of the SEMrush Position Tracking tool:
All subscribers are given regular data updates and mobile search rankings upon subscribing
The platform provides opportunities to track several SERP features, including Local tracking.
Intuitive reports allow you to track statistics for the pages on your website, as well as the keywords used in those pages.
Identify pages that may be competing with each other using the Cannibalization report.
Ahrefs is a more user-friendly option. It takes seconds to enter a domain name and keywords. From there, you can quickly decide whether to proceed with that keyword or figure out how to rank better for other keywords.
SEMrush allows you to check your mobile rankings and ranking updates daily, which is something Ahrefs does not offer. SEMrush also offers social media rankings, a tool you won't find within the Ahrefs platform. Both are good which one do you like let me know in the comment.
Keyword research is closely related to rank tracking, but it's used for deciding which keywords you plan on using for future content rather than those you use now.
When it comes to SEO, keyword research is the most important thing to consider when comparing the two platforms.
The Ahrefs Keyword Explorer provides you with thousands of keyword ideas and filters search results based on the chosen search engine.
Ahrefs supports several features, including:
SEMrush's Keyword Magic Tool has over 20 billion keywords for Google. You can type in any keyword you want, and a list of suggested keywords will appear.
The Keyword Magic Tool also lets you to:
Both of these tools offer keyword research features and allow users to break down complicated tasks into something that can be understood by beginners and advanced users alike.
If you're interested in keyword suggestions, SEMrush appears to have more keyword suggestions than Ahrefs does. It also continues to add new features, like the Keyword Gap tool and SERP Questions recommendations.
Both platforms offer competitor analysis tools, eliminating the need to come up with keywords off the top of your head. Each tool is useful for finding keywords that will be useful for your competition so you know they will be valuable to you.
Ahrefs' domain comparison tool lets you compare up to five websites (your website and four competitors) side-by-side.it also shows you how your site is ranked against others with metrics such as backlinks, domain ratings, and more.
Use the Competing Domains section to see a list of your most direct competitors, and explore how many keywords matches your competitors have.
To find more information about your competitor, you can look at the Site Explorer and Content Explorer tools and type in their URL instead of yours.
SEMrush provides a variety of insights into your competitors' marketing tactics. The platform enables you to research your competitors effectively. It also offers several resources for competitor analysis including:
Traffic Analytics helps you identify where your audience comes from, how they engage with your site, what devices visitors use to view your site, and how your audiences overlap with other websites.
SEMrush's Organic Research examines your website's major competitors and shows their organic search rankings, keywords they are ranking for, and even if they are ranking for any (SERP) features and more.
The Market Explorer search field allows you to type in a domain and lists websites or articles similar to what you entered. Market Explorer also allows users to perform in-depth data analytics on These companies and markets.
SEMrush wins here because it has more tools dedicated to competitor analysis than Ahrefs. However, Ahrefs offers a lot of functionality in this area, too. It takes a combination of both tools to gain an advantage over your competition.
When it comes to keyword data research, you will become confused about which one to choose.
Consider choosing Ahrefs if you
Consider SEMrush if you:
Both tools are great. Choose the one which meets your requirements and if you have any experience using either Ahrefs or SEMrush let me know in the comment section which works well for you.
Are you looking for a new graphic design tool? Would you like to read a detailed review of Canva? As it's one of the tools I love using. I am also writing my first ebook using canva and publish it soon on my site you can download it is free. Let's start the review.
Canva has a web version and also a mobile app
Canva is a free graphic design web application that allows you to create invitations, business cards, flyers, lesson plans, banners, and more using professionally designed templates. You can upload your own photos from your computer or from Google Drive, and add them to Canva's templates using a simple drag-and-drop interface. It's like having a basic version of Photoshop that doesn't require Graphic designing knowledge to use. It’s best for nongraphic designers.
Canva is a great tool for small business owners, online entrepreneurs, and marketers who don’t have the time and want to edit quickly.
To create sophisticated graphics, a tool such as Photoshop can is ideal. To use it, you’ll need to learn its hundreds of features, get familiar with the software, and it’s best to have a good background in design, too.
Also running the latest version of Photoshop you need a high-end computer.
So here Canva takes place, with Canva you can do all that with drag-and-drop feature. It’s also easier to use and free. Also an even-more-affordable paid version is available for $12.95 per month.
The product is available in three plans: Free, Pro ($12.99/month per user or $119.99/year for up to 5 people), and Enterprise ($30 per user per month, minimum 25 people).
To get started on Canva, you will need to create an account by providing your email address, Google, Facebook or Apple credentials. You will then choose your account type between student, teacher, small business, large company, non-profit, or personal. Based on your choice of account type, templates will be recommended to you.
You can sign up for a free trial of Canva Pro, or you can start with the free version to get a sense of whether it’s the right graphic design tool for your needs.
When you sign up for an account, Canva will suggest different post types to choose from. Based on the type of account you set up you'll be able to see templates categorized by the following categories: social media posts, documents, presentations, marketing, events, ads, launch your business, build your online brand, etc.
Start by choosing a template for your post or searching for something more specific. Search by social network name to see a list of post types on each network.
Next, you can choose a template. Choose from hundreds of templates that are ready to go, with customizable photos, text, and other elements.
You can start your design by choosing from a variety of ready-made templates, searching for a template matching your needs, or working with a blank template.
Inside the Canva designer, the Elements tab gives you access to lines and shapes, graphics, photos, videos, audio, charts, photo frames, and photo grids.The search box on the Elements tab lets you search everything on Canva.
To begin with, Canva has a large library of elements to choose from. To find them, be specific in your search query. You may also want to search in the following tabs to see various elements separately:
The Photos tab lets you search for and choose from millions of professional stock photos for your templates.
You can replace the photos in our templates to create a new look. This can also make the template more suited to your industry.
You can find photos on other stock photography sites like pexel, pixabay and many more or simply upload your own photos.
When you choose an image, Canva’s photo editing features let you adjust the photo’s settings (brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.), crop, or animate it.
When you subscribe to Canva Pro, you get access to a number of premium features, including the Background Remover. This feature allows you to remove the background from any stock photo in library or any image you upload.
The Text tab lets you add headings, normal text, and graphical text to your design.
When you click on text, you'll see options to adjust the font, font size, color, format, spacing, and text effects (like shadows).
Canva Pro subscribers can choose from a large library of fonts on the Brand Kit or the Styles tab. Enterprise-level controls ensure that visual content remains on-brand, no matter how many people are working on it.
Create an animated image or video by adding audio to capture user’s attention in social news feeds.
If you want to use audio from another stock site or your own audio tracks, you can upload them in the Uploads tab or from the more option.
Want to create your own videos? Choose from thousands of stock video clips. You’ll find videos that range upto 2 minutes
You can upload your own videos as well as videos from other stock sites in the Uploads tab.
Once you have chosen a video, you can use the editing features in Canva to trim the video, flip it, and adjust its transparency.
On the Background tab, you’ll find free stock photos to serve as backgrounds on your designs. Change out the background on a template to give it a more personal touch.
The Styles tab lets you quickly change the look and feel of your template with just a click. And if you have a Canva Pro subscription, you can upload your brand’s custom colors and fonts to ensure designs stay on brand.
If you have a Canva Pro subscription, you’ll have a Logos tab. Here, you can upload variations of your brand logo to use throughout your designs.
With Canva, you can also create your own logos. Note that you cannot trademark a logo with stock content in it.
With Canva, free users can download and share designs to multiple platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack and Tumblr.
Canva Pro subscribers can create multiple post formats from one design. For example, you can start by designing an Instagram post, and Canva's Magic Resizer can resize it for other networks, Stories, Reels, and other formats.
Canva Pro subscribers can also use Canva’s Content Planner to post content on eight different accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, and Tumblr.
Canva Pro allows you to work with your team on visual content. Designs can be created inside Canva, and then sent to your team members for approval. Everyone can make comments, edits, revisions, and keep track via the version history.
When it comes to printing your designs, Canva has you covered. With an extensive selection of printing options, they can turn your designs into anything from banners and wall art to mugs and t-shirts.
Canva Print is perfect for any business seeking to make a lasting impression. Create inspiring designs people will want to wear, keep, and share. Hand out custom business cards that leave a lasting impression on customers' minds.
The Canva app is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. The Canva app has earned a 4.9 out of five star rating from over 946.3K Apple users and a 4.5 out of five star rating from over 6,996,708 Google users.
In addition to mobile apps, you can use Canva’s integration with other Internet services to add images and text from sources like Google Maps, Emojis, photos from Google Drive and Dropbox, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Bitmojis, and other popular visual content elements.
In general, Canva is an excellent tool for those who need simple images for projects. If you are a graphic designer with experience, you will find Canva’s platform lacking in customization and advanced features – particularly vectors. But if you have little design experience, you will find Canva easier to use than advanced graphic design tools like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator for most projects. If you have any queries let me know in the comments section.
If you are looking for the best wordpress plugins, then you are at the right place. Here is the list of best wordpress plugins that you should use in your blog to boost SEO, strong your security and know every aspects of your blog . Although creating a good content is one factor but there are many wordpress plugins that perform different actions and add on to your success. So let's start
Those users who are serious about SEO, Yoast SEO will do the work for them to reach their goals. All they need to do is select a keyword, and the plugin will then optimize your page according to the specified keyword
Yoast offers many popular SEO WordPress plugin functions. It gives you real-time page analysis to optimize your content, images, meta descriptions, titles, and kewords. Yoast also checks the length of your sentences and paragraphs, whether you’re using enough transition words or subheadings, how often you use passive voice, and so on. Yoast tells Google whether or not to index a page or a set of pages too.
A website running WordPress can put a lot of strain on a server, which increases the chances that the website will crash and harm your business. To avoid such an unfortunate situation and ensure that all your pages load quickly, you need a caching plugin like WP Rocket.
WP Rocket plugin designed to increases your website speed. Instead of waiting for pages to be saved to cache, WP Rocket turns on desired caching settings, like page cache and gzip compression. The plugin also activates other features, such as CDN support and llazy image loadding, to enhance your site speed.
Wordfence Security is a WordPress firewall and security scanner that keeps your site safe from malicious hackers, spam, and other online threats. This Plugin comes with a web application firewall (WAF) called tthread Defence Feed that helps to prevents brute force attacks by ensuring you set stronger passwords and limiting login attempts. It searches for malware and compares code, theme, and plugin files with the records in the WordPress.org repository to verify their integrity and reports changes to you.
Wordfence security scanner provides you with actionable insights into your website's security status and will alert you to any potential threats, keeping it safe and secure. It also includes login security features that let you activate reCAPTCHA and two-factor authentication for your website.
Akismet can help prevent spam from appearing on your site. Every day, it automatically checks every comment against a global database of spam to block malicious content. With Akismet, you also won’t have to worry about innocent comments being caught by the filter or false positives. You can simply tell Akismet about those and it will get better over time. It also checks your contact form submissions against its global spam database and weed out unnecessary fake information.
Contact Form 7 is a plug-in that allows you to create contact forms that make it easy for your users to send messages to your site. The plug-in was developed by Takayuki Miyoshi and lets you create multiple contact forms on the same site; it also integrates Akismet spam filtering and lets you customize the styling and fields that you want to use in the form. The plug-in provides CAPTCHA and Ajax submitting.
When you’re looking for an easy way to manage your Google Analytics-related web tracking services, Monster Insights can help. You can add, customize, and integrate Google Analytics data with ease so you’ll be able to see how every webpage performs, which online campaigns bring in the most traffic, and which content readers engage with the most. It’s same as Google Analytics
It is a powerful tool to keep track of your traffic stats. With it, you can view stats for your active sessions, conversions, and bounce rates. You’ll also be able to see your total revenue, the products you sell, and how your site is performing when it comes to referrals.
MonsterInsights offers a free plan that includes basic Google Analytics integration, data insights, and user activity metrics.
Pretty Links is a powerful WordPress plugin that enables you to easily cloak affiliate links on your websiteIt even allows you to easily redirect visitors based on a specific request, including permanent 301 and temporary 302/307 redirects.
Pretty links also helps you to automatically shorten your url for your post and pages.
You can also enable auto-linking feature to automatically add affiliate links for certain keywords
We hope you’ve found this article useful. We appreciate you reading and welcome your feedback if you have it.
Ginger VS Grammarly: When it comes to grammar checkers, Ginger and Grammarly are two of the most popular choices on the market. This article aims to highlight the specifics of each one so that you can make a more informed decision about the one you'll use.
If you are a writer, you must have heard of Grammarly before. Grammarly has over 10M users across the globe, it's probably the most popular AI writing enhancement tool, without a doubt. That's why there's a high chance that you already know about Grammarly.
But today we are going to do a comparison between Ginger and Grammarly, So let's define Grammarly here. Like Ginger, Grammarly is an AI writing assistant that checks for grammatical errors, spellings, and punctuation. The free version covers the basics like identifying grammar and spelling mistakes
While the Premium version offers a lot more functionality, it detects plagiarism in your content, suggests word choice, or adds fluency to it.
Ginger is a writing enhancement tool that not only catches typos and grammatical mistakes but also suggests content improvements. As you type, it picks up on errors then shows you what’s wrong, and suggests a fix. It also provides you with synonyms and definitions of words and allows you to translate your text into dozens of languages.
In addition, the program provides a text reader, so you can gauge your writing’s conversational tone.
Grammarly and Ginger are two popular grammar checker software brands that help you to become a better writer. But if you’re undecided about which software to use, consider these differences:
Grammarly Score: 7/10
Ginger:4/10
So Grammarly wins here.
For companies with three or more employees, the Business plan costs $12.50/month for each member of your team.
Ginger Wins Here
While both writing assistants are fantastic in their ways, you need to choose the one you want.
For example, go for Grammarly if you want a plagiarism tool included.
Choose Ginger if you want to write in languages other than English. I will to the differences for you in order to make the distinctions clearer.
Which one you like let me know in the comments section also give your opinions in the comments section below.
Andrew Ng has serious street cred in artificial intelligence. He pioneered the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) to train deep learning models in the late 2000s with his students at Stanford University, cofounded Google Brain in 2011, and then served for three years as chief scientist for Baidu, where he helped build the Chinese tech giant’s AI group. So when he says he has identified the next big shift in artificial intelligence, people listen. And that’s what he told IEEE Spectrum in an exclusive Q&A.
Ng’s current efforts are focused on his company Landing AI, which built a platform called LandingLens to help manufacturers improve visual inspection with computer vision. He has also become something of an evangelist for what he calls the data-centric AI movement, which he says can yield “small data” solutions to big issues in AI, including model efficiency, accuracy, and bias.
Andrew Ng on...
The great advances in deep learning over the past decade or so have been powered by ever-bigger models crunching ever-bigger amounts of data. Some people argue that that’s an unsustainable trajectory. Do you agree that it can’t go on that way?
Andrew Ng: This is a big question. We’ve seen foundation models in NLP [natural language processing]. I’m excited about NLP models getting even bigger, and also about the potential of building foundation models in computer vision. I think there’s lots of signal to still be exploited in video: We have not been able to build foundation models yet for video because of compute bandwidth and the cost of processing video, as opposed to tokenized text. So I think that this engine of scaling up deep learning algorithms, which has been running for something like 15 years now, still has steam in it. Having said that, it only applies to certain problems, and there’s a set of other problems that need small data solutions.
When you say you want a foundation model for computer vision, what do you mean by that?
Ng: This is a term coined by Percy Liang and some of my friends at Stanford to refer to very large models, trained on very large data sets, that can be tuned for specific applications. For example, GPT-3 is an example of a foundation model [for NLP]. Foundation models offer a lot of promise as a new paradigm in developing machine learning applications, but also challenges in terms of making sure that they’re reasonably fair and free from bias, especially if many of us will be building on top of them.
What needs to happen for someone to build a foundation model for video?
Ng: I think there is a scalability problem. The compute power needed to process the large volume of images for video is significant, and I think that’s why foundation models have arisen first in NLP. Many researchers are working on this, and I think we’re seeing early signs of such models being developed in computer vision. But I’m confident that if a semiconductor maker gave us 10 times more processor power, we could easily find 10 times more video to build such models for vision.
Having said that, a lot of what’s happened over the past decade is that deep learning has happened in consumer-facing companies that have large user bases, sometimes billions of users, and therefore very large data sets. While that paradigm of machine learning has driven a lot of economic value in consumer software, I find that that recipe of scale doesn’t work for other industries.
It’s funny to hear you say that, because your early work was at a consumer-facing company with millions of users.
Ng: Over a decade ago, when I proposed starting the Google Brain project to use Google’s compute infrastructure to build very large neural networks, it was a controversial step. One very senior person pulled me aside and warned me that starting Google Brain would be bad for my career. I think he felt that the action couldn’t just be in scaling up, and that I should instead focus on architecture innovation.
“In many industries where giant data sets simply don’t exist, I think the focus has to shift from big data to good data. Having 50 thoughtfully engineered examples can be sufficient to explain to the neural network what you want it to learn.”
—Andrew Ng, CEO & Founder, Landing AI
I remember when my students and I published the first NeurIPS workshop paper advocating using CUDA, a platform for processing on GPUs, for deep learning—a different senior person in AI sat me down and said, “CUDA is really complicated to program. As a programming paradigm, this seems like too much work.” I did manage to convince him; the other person I did not convince.
I expect they’re both convinced now.
Ng: I think so, yes.
Over the past year as I’ve been speaking to people about the data-centric AI movement, I’ve been getting flashbacks to when I was speaking to people about deep learning and scalability 10 or 15 years ago. In the past year, I’ve been getting the same mix of “there’s nothing new here” and “this seems like the wrong direction.”
How do you define data-centric AI, and why do you consider it a movement?
Ng: Data-centric AI is the discipline of systematically engineering the data needed to successfully build an AI system. For an AI system, you have to implement some algorithm, say a neural network, in code and then train it on your data set. The dominant paradigm over the last decade was to download the data set while you focus on improving the code. Thanks to that paradigm, over the last decade deep learning networks have improved significantly, to the point where for a lot of applications the code—the neural network architecture—is basically a solved problem. So for many practical applications, it’s now more productive to hold the neural network architecture fixed, and instead find ways to improve the data.
When I started speaking about this, there were many practitioners who, completely appropriately, raised their hands and said, “Yes, we’ve been doing this for 20 years.” This is the time to take the things that some individuals have been doing intuitively and make it a systematic engineering discipline.
The data-centric AI movement is much bigger than one company or group of researchers. My collaborators and I organized a data-centric AI workshop at NeurIPS, and I was really delighted at the number of authors and presenters that showed up.
You often talk about companies or institutions that have only a small amount of data to work with. How can data-centric AI help them?
Ng: You hear a lot about vision systems built with millions of images—I once built a face recognition system using 350 million images. Architectures built for hundreds of millions of images don’t work with only 50 images. But it turns out, if you have 50 really good examples, you can build something valuable, like a defect-inspection system. In many industries where giant data sets simply don’t exist, I think the focus has to shift from big data to good data. Having 50 thoughtfully engineered examples can be sufficient to explain to the neural network what you want it to learn.
When you talk about training a model with just 50 images, does that really mean you’re taking an existing model that was trained on a very large data set and fine-tuning it? Or do you mean a brand new model that’s designed to learn only from that small data set?
Ng: Let me describe what Landing AI does. When doing visual inspection for manufacturers, we often use our own flavor of RetinaNet. It is a pretrained model. Having said that, the pretraining is a small piece of the puzzle. What’s a bigger piece of the puzzle is providing tools that enable the manufacturer to pick the right set of images [to use for fine-tuning] and label them in a consistent way. There’s a very practical problem we’ve seen spanning vision, NLP, and speech, where even human annotators don’t agree on the appropriate label. For big data applications, the common response has been: If the data is noisy, let’s just get a lot of data and the algorithm will average over it. But if you can develop tools that flag where the data’s inconsistent and give you a very targeted way to improve the consistency of the data, that turns out to be a more efficient way to get a high-performing system.
“Collecting more data often helps, but if you try to collect more data for everything, that can be a very expensive activity.”
—Andrew Ng
For example, if you have 10,000 images where 30 images are of one class, and those 30 images are labeled inconsistently, one of the things we do is build tools to draw your attention to the subset of data that’s inconsistent. So you can very quickly relabel those images to be more consistent, and this leads to improvement in performance.
Could this focus on high-quality data help with bias in data sets? If you’re able to curate the data more before training?
Ng: Very much so. Many researchers have pointed out that biased data is one factor among many leading to biased systems. There have been many thoughtful efforts to engineer the data. At the NeurIPS workshop, Olga Russakovsky gave a really nice talk on this. At the main NeurIPS conference, I also really enjoyed Mary Gray’s presentation, which touched on how data-centric AI is one piece of the solution, but not the entire solution. New tools like Datasheets for Datasets also seem like an important piece of the puzzle.
One of the powerful tools that data-centric AI gives us is the ability to engineer a subset of the data. Imagine training a machine-learning system and finding that its performance is okay for most of the data set, but its performance is biased for just a subset of the data. If you try to change the whole neural network architecture to improve the performance on just that subset, it’s quite difficult. But if you can engineer a subset of the data you can address the problem in a much more targeted way.
When you talk about engineering the data, what do you mean exactly?
Ng: In AI, data cleaning is important, but the way the data has been cleaned has often been in very manual ways. In computer vision, someone may visualize images through a Jupyter notebook and maybe spot the problem, and maybe fix it. But I’m excited about tools that allow you to have a very large data set, tools that draw your attention quickly and efficiently to the subset of data where, say, the labels are noisy. Or to quickly bring your attention to the one class among 100 classes where it would benefit you to collect more data. Collecting more data often helps, but if you try to collect more data for everything, that can be a very expensive activity.
For example, I once figured out that a speech-recognition system was performing poorly when there was car noise in the background. Knowing that allowed me to collect more data with car noise in the background, rather than trying to collect more data for everything, which would have been expensive and slow.
What about using synthetic data, is that often a good solution?
Ng: I think synthetic data is an important tool in the tool chest of data-centric AI. At the NeurIPS workshop, Anima Anandkumar gave a great talk that touched on synthetic data. I think there are important uses of synthetic data that go beyond just being a preprocessing step for increasing the data set for a learning algorithm. I’d love to see more tools to let developers use synthetic data generation as part of the closed loop of iterative machine learning development.
Do you mean that synthetic data would allow you to try the model on more data sets?
Ng: Not really. Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re trying to detect defects in a smartphone casing. There are many different types of defects on smartphones. It could be a scratch, a dent, pit marks, discoloration of the material, other types of blemishes. If you train the model and then find through error analysis that it’s doing well overall but it’s performing poorly on pit marks, then synthetic data generation allows you to address the problem in a more targeted way. You could generate more data just for the pit-mark category.
“In the consumer software Internet, we could train a handful of machine-learning models to serve a billion users. In manufacturing, you might have 10,000 manufacturers building 10,000 custom AI models.”
—Andrew Ng
Synthetic data generation is a very powerful tool, but there are many simpler tools that I will often try first. Such as data augmentation, improving labeling consistency, or just asking a factory to collect more data.
To make these issues more concrete, can you walk me through an example? When a company approaches Landing AI and says it has a problem with visual inspection, how do you onboard them and work toward deployment?
Ng: When a customer approaches us we usually have a conversation about their inspection problem and look at a few images to verify that the problem is feasible with computer vision. Assuming it is, we ask them to upload the data to the LandingLens platform. We often advise them on the methodology of data-centric AI and help them label the data.
One of the foci of Landing AI is to empower manufacturing companies to do the machine learning work themselves. A lot of our work is making sure the software is fast and easy to use. Through the iterative process of machine learning development, we advise customers on things like how to train models on the platform, when and how to improve the labeling of data so the performance of the model improves. Our training and software supports them all the way through deploying the trained model to an edge device in the factory.
How do you deal with changing needs? If products change or lighting conditions change in the factory, can the model keep up?
Ng: It varies by manufacturer. There is data drift in many contexts. But there are some manufacturers that have been running the same manufacturing line for 20 years now with few changes, so they don’t expect changes in the next five years. Those stable environments make things easier. For other manufacturers, we provide tools to flag when there’s a significant data-drift issue. I find it really important to empower manufacturing customers to correct data, retrain, and update the model. Because if something changes and it’s 3 a.m. in the United States, I want them to be able to adapt their learning algorithm right away to maintain operations.
In the consumer software Internet, we could train a handful of machine-learning models to serve a billion users. In manufacturing, you might have 10,000 manufacturers building 10,000 custom AI models. The challenge is, how do you do that without Landing AI having to hire 10,000 machine learning specialists?
So you’re saying that to make it scale, you have to empower customers to do a lot of the training and other work.
Ng: Yes, exactly! This is an industry-wide problem in AI, not just in manufacturing. Look at health care. Every hospital has its own slightly different format for electronic health records. How can every hospital train its own custom AI model? Expecting every hospital’s IT personnel to invent new neural-network architectures is unrealistic. The only way out of this dilemma is to build tools that empower the customers to build their own models by giving them tools to engineer the data and express their domain knowledge. That’s what Landing AI is executing in computer vision, and the field of AI needs other teams to execute this in other domains.
Is there anything else you think it’s important for people to understand about the work you’re doing or the data-centric AI movement?
Ng: In the last decade, the biggest shift in AI was a shift to deep learning. I think it’s quite possible that in this decade the biggest shift will be to data-centric AI. With the maturity of today’s neural network architectures, I think for a lot of the practical applications the bottleneck will be whether we can efficiently get the data we need to develop systems that work well. The data-centric AI movement has tremendous energy and momentum across the whole community. I hope more researchers and developers will jump in and work on it.
This article appears in the April 2022 print issue as “Andrew Ng, AI Minimalist.”
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the most popular digital assets today, capturing the attention of cryptocurrency investors, whales and people from around the world. People find it amazing that some users spend thousands or millions of dollars on a single NFT-based image of a monkey or other token, but you can simply take a screenshot for free. So here we share some freuently asked question about NFTs.
NFT stands for non-fungible token, which is a cryptographic token on a blockchain with unique identification codes that distinguish it from other tokens. NFTs are unique and not interchangeable, which means no two NFTs are the same. NFTs can be a unique artwork, GIF, Images, videos, Audio album. in-game items, collectibles etc.
A blockchain is a distributed digital ledger that allows for the secure storage of data. By recording any kind of information—such as bank account transactions, the ownership of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), or Decentralized Finance (DeFi) smart contracts—in one place, and distributing it to many different computers, blockchains ensure that data can’t be manipulated without everyone in the system being aware.
The value of an NFT comes from its ability to be traded freely and securely on the blockchain, which is not possible with other current digital ownership solutionsThe NFT points to its location on the blockchain, but doesn’t necessarily contain the digital property. For example, if you replace one bitcoin with another, you will still have the same thing. If you buy a non-fungible item, such as a movie ticket, it is impossible to replace it with any other movie ticket because each ticket is unique to a specific time and place.
One of the unique characteristics of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is that they can be tokenised to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought, sold and traded on the blockchain.
As with crypto-currency, records of who owns what are stored on a ledger that is maintained by thousands of computers around the world. These records can’t be forged because the whole system operates on an open-source network.
NFTs also contain smart contracts—small computer programs that run on the blockchain—that give the artist, for example, a cut of any future sale of the token.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) aren't cryptocurrencies, but they do use blockchain technology. Many NFTs are based on Ethereum, where the blockchain serves as a ledger for all the transactions related to said NFT and the properties it represents.5) How to make an NFT?
Anyone can create an NFT. All you need is a digital wallet, some ethereum tokens and a connection to an NFT marketplace where you’ll be able to upload and sell your creations
When you purchase a stock in NFT, that purchase is recorded on the blockchain—the bitcoin ledger of transactions—and that entry acts as your proof of ownership.
The value of an NFT varies a lot based on the digital asset up for grabs. People use NFTs to trade and sell digital art, so when creating an NFT, you should consider the popularity of your digital artwork along with historical statistics.
In the year 2021, a digital artist called Pak created an artwork called The Merge. It was sold on the Nifty Gateway NFT market for $91.8 million.
Non-fungible tokens can be used in investment opportunities. One can purchase an NFT and resell it at a profit. Certain NFT marketplaces let sellers of NFTs keep a percentage of the profits from sales of the assets they create.
Many people want to buy NFTs because it lets them support the arts and own something cool from their favorite musicians, brands, and celebrities. NFTs also give artists an opportunity to program in continual royalties if someone buys their work. Galleries see this as a way to reach new buyers interested in art.
There are many places to buy digital assets, like opensea and their policies vary. On top shot, for instance, you sign up for a waitlist that can be thousands of people long. When a digital asset goes on sale, you are occasionally chosen to purchase it.
To mint an NFT token, you must pay some amount of gas fee to process the transaction on the Etherum blockchain, but you can mint your NFT on a different blockchain called Polygon to avoid paying gas fees. This option is available on OpenSea and this simply denotes that your NFT will only be able to trade using Polygon's blockchain and not Etherum's blockchain. Mintable allows you to mint NFTs for free without paying any gas fees.
The answer is no. Non-Fungible Tokens are minted on the blockchain using cryptocurrencies such as Etherum, Solana, Polygon, and so on. Once a Non-Fungible Token is minted, the transaction is recorded on the blockchain and the contract or license is awarded to whoever has that Non-Fungible Token in their wallet.
You can sell your work and creations by attaching a license to it on the blockchain, where its ownership can be transferred. This lets you get exposure without losing full ownership of your work. Some of the most successful projects include Cryptopunks, Bored Ape Yatch Club NFTs, SandBox, World of Women and so on. These NFT projects have gained popularity globally and are owned by celebrities and other successful entrepreneurs. Owning one of these NFTs gives you an automatic ticket to exclusive business meetings and life-changing connections.
That’s a wrap. Hope you guys found this article enlightening. I just answer some question with my limited knowledge about NFTs. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to drop them in the comment section below. Also I have a question for you, Is bitcoin an NFTs? let me know in The comment section below
Are you a great Chrome user? That’s nice to hear. But first, consider whether or not there are any essential Chrome extensions you are currently missing from your browsing life, so here we're going to share with you 10 Best Chrome Extensions That Are Perfect for Everyone. So Let's Start.
When you have too several passwords to remember, LastPass remembers them for you.
This chrome extension is an easy way to save you time and increase security. It’s a single password manager that will log you into all of your accounts. you simply ought to bear in mind one word: your LastPass password to log in to all or any your accounts.
Features
MozBar is an SEO toolbar extension that makes it easy for you to analyze your web pages' SEO while you surf. You can customize your search so that you see data for a particular region or for all regions. You get data such as website and domain authority and link profile. The status column tells you whether there are any no-followed links to the page.You can also compare link metrics. There is a pro version of MozBar, too.
Grammarly is a real-time grammar checking and spelling tool for online writing. It checks spelling, grammar, and punctuation as you type, and has a dictionary feature that suggests related words. if you use mobile phones for writing than Grammerly also have a mobile keyboard app.
VidIQ is a SaaS product and Chrome Extension that makes it easier to manage and optimize your YouTube channels. It keeps you informed about your channel's performance with real-time analytics and powerful insights.
Features
ColorZilla is a browser extension that allows you to find out the exact color of any object in your web browser. This is especially useful when you want to match elements on your page to the color of an image.
Features
Honey is a chrome extension with which you save each product from the website and notify it when it is available at low price it's one among the highest extensions for Chrome that finds coupon codes whenever you look online.
Features
GMass (or Gmail Mass) permits users to compose and send mass emails using Gmail. it is a great tool as a result of you'll use it as a replacement for a third-party email sending platform. you will love GMass to spice up your emailing functionality on the platform.
It's a Chrome extension for geeks that enables you to highlight and save what you see on the web.
It's been designed by Notion, that could be a Google space different that helps groups craft higher ideas and collaborate effectively.
Features
If you are someone who works online, you need to surf the internet to get your business done. And often there is no time to read or analyze something. But it's important that you do it. Notion Web Clipper will help you with that.
WhatFont is a Chrome extension that allows web designers to easily identify and compare different fonts on a page. The first time you use it on any page, WhatFont will copy the selected page.It Uses this page to find out what fonts are present and generate an image that shows all those fonts in different sizes. Besides the apparent websites like Google or Amazon, you'll conjointly use it on sites wherever embedded fonts ar used.
Similar Web is an SEO add on for both Chrome and Firefox.It allows you to check web site traffic and key metrics for any web site, as well as engagement rate, traffic ranking, keyword ranking, and traffic source. this is often a good tool if you are looking to seek out new and effective SEO ways similarly as analyze trends across the web.
Features
I know everyone knows how to install extension in pc but most of people don't know how to install it in android phone so i will show you how to install it in android
1. Download Kiwi browser from Play Store and then Open it.
2. Tap the three dots at the top right corner and select Extension.
3. Click on (+From Store) to access chrome web store or simple search chrome web store and access it.
4. Once you found an extension click on add to chrome a message will pop-up asking if you wish to confirm your choice. Hit OK to install the extension in the Kiwi browser.
5. To manage extensions on the browser, tap the three dots in the upper right corner. Then select Extensions to access a catalog of installed extensions that you can disable, update or remove with just a few clicks.
Your Chrome extensions should install on Android, but there’s no guarantee all of them will work. Because Google Chrome Extensions are not optimized for Android devices.
We hope this list of 10 best chrome extensions that is perfect for everyone will help you in picking the right Chrome Extensions. We have selected the extensions after matching their features to the needs of different categories of people. Also which extension you like the most let me know in the comment section
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| (Photo Credit:- Exploding Topics) |
Some examples can be:
There’s no excuse not to try this website — it’s free and easy to use!
Visit Exploding Topics From Here
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| (Photo Credit:-Headline Studio) |
Headline Studio allows you to create catchy headlines for your content. After writing a title there is data on how often people view articles with similar titles and why they are involved with them.
This is a valuable tool when creating new blog posts because it generates catchy headlines for your blog post to catch a reader’s attention.
Visit Headline Studio From Here
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| (Photo Credit:- Answer The Public) |
Answer The public is an excellent tool for content creators. It gives you insight into what people are asking on social media sites and communities and lets you guess about topics that matter to your audience. Answer the public allows you to enter a keyword or topic related to your niche and it will show results with popular questions and keywords related to your topic. It's an amazing way to get insights into what people are searching online and allows you to identify topics driven by new blog posts or social media content on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter as well as the types of questions they ask and also want answers.
Visit Answer The Public From Here
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| (Photo Credit:-Surfer Seo) |
With this tool, content creators can quickly and easily check the ranking of their websites and those of other competitors. This tool allows you to see how your website compares to others in different categories, including:
Surfer Seo is free and the interface is very friendly. It's a great tool for anyone who wants to do quick competitor research or check their site's rankings at any time.
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| (Photo Credit:- Canva) |
Canva is a free graphic design platform that makes it easy to create invitations, business cards, mobile videos, Instagram posts, Instagram stories, flyers, and more with professionally designed templates. You can even upload your photos and drag and drop them into Canva templates. It's like having a basic version of Photoshop. You can also remove background from images with one click.
Canva offers thousands of free, professionally designed templates that can be customized with just a few clicks. Simply upload your photos to Canva, drag them into the template of your choice, and save the file to your computer.
It is free to use for basic use but if you want access to different fonts or more features, then you need to buy a premium plan.
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| (Photo Credit:- Facebook Audience Insights |
Facebook Audience Insights is a powerful tool for content creators when researching their target market. This can help you understand the demographics, interests, and behaviors of your target audience. This information helps determine the direction of your content so that it resonates with them. The most important tools to consider in Facebook Audience Insights are Demographics and Behavior. These two sections provide you with valuable information about your target market, such as their age and from where they belong, how much time they spend on social media per day, what devices they use to access it, etc.
There is another section of Facebook Audits that is very helpful. This will let you know the interests, hobbies, and activities that people in your target market are most interested in. You can use this information to create content for them about things they will be about as opposed to topics they may not be so keen on.
Visit Facebook Audience Insights From Here
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| (Photo Credit: Pixel |
Pexels is a warehouse for any content creator with millions of free royalty images who wants to find high-quality images that can be used freely without having to worry about permissions or licensing so you are free to use the photos in your content and also there is no watermark on photos
The only cons are that some photos contain people, and Pexels doesn't allow you to remove people from photos. Search your keyword and download as many as you want!
So there you have it. We hope that these specially curated websites will come in handy for content creators and small businesses alike. If you've got a site that should be on this list, let us know! And if you're looking for more content creator resources, then let us know in the comments section below
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| Photo:- Copy.ai |
First one on the list is copy.ai. It is an AI based copy writer tool. Basically what a copywriter tool does is, it gives you content that you can post on your blog or video when you give it a few descriptions about the topic you want content on.So copy ai can help you write instagram captions gives you blog idea, product descriptions, facebook content, startup ideas, viral ideas, a lot of things it can do, you just make an account in this website, then select a tool and fill in the necessary description and the AI will generate content on what you ask for.
For tutorials go to their official Youtube channel .An awesome tool that is going to be really handy in the future.
Hotpot.ai offers a collection of AI tools for designers, as well as for anyone, it has an “AI picture restorer” which removes scratches ,and basically restores your old photo into amazing pictures and makes it look brand new.
Ai picture colorizer , turns your black and white photo into color. And there is a background remover tool, picture enlarger and a lot more for designers, check it out,and explore all the tools.
Deep-nostalgia became very popular on the internet when people started
making reaction videos of their parents reacting to animated pictures of their grandparents. So deep - nostalgia is a very cool app, that will animate any photo of a person.
So what makes it really cool is that fact that you can upload an old photo of your family and see them animate and living. Which is pretty cool and creepy at the same time if they are dead already.. Really amazing service from myheritage, I created a lot of cool animations with my old photos as well as with the photos of my grandparents.
Having a nice looking profile picture is really important if you want that professional feel in your socials. Whether in linkedin or twitter having a
distinct and catchy profile picture can make all the difference. So that's where pfpmaker comes in. it a free online tool to create amazing professional profile pictures that fits you. It generates a lot of profile pictures and you can also make small changes to already created profile pictures if you want to,as well.
Speaking of brands, getting a good logo for your brand is the most frustrating
thing ever, so brandmark.io makes it super easy. It will create a logo for your brand within 2 clicks. So you goto this website. Type in your brand name and slogan if you have any, and give BRAND KEYWORDS that relate to your brand, then pick a color style and done, the ai will
generate amazing logos for you.You can also make minor edits to the suggested logos to better fit your needs as well. But to get that png you need to pay a hefty price, but if you are looking for some logo ideas, this is a great place to start.
Even in the previous websites, some had picture enlarger tools. This deep-image.ai is a dedicated image enlarger, which supports upto 4x enlargement for free. The UI is pretty good and the tool is pretty fast with amazing results.
Bigjpg does the same as deep-image.ai , but this service offers a little bit more options like if your photo is an artwork it scales image differently than normal photos and it supports upto 4x enlargement for free and you can also set noise reduction options. Very good tool,
Lumen5 is an online marketing video maker that makes it really easy to create branding or informational videos within a couple of clicks. They have really great templates and various aspect ratios for various social media platforms.
If you are struggling to find good names for your brand or youtube channel, give
namelix a try. It's an ai based name generator that will suggest good names for your brand depending on the keyword that you give.. Also logo for your brand. Pretty cool and an amazing piece of tool. So that's been it , those are my favourite free AI based tools that you can use right now,
Which one You like the most Let me know in the Comments below.
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