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Garmin Forerunner 255 Review: Great Running Watch
Sun, 29 Jan 2023 12:00:00 +0000
Garmin's latest wearable for runners and triathletes adds a new Morning Report to track your daily fitness.
Match ID: 0 Score: 35.71 source: www.wired.com age: 4 days
qualifiers: 25.00 fitness, 10.71 athlete
‘Watch this creep’: the women exposing gym harassment on TikTok
Thu, 02 Feb 2023 06:00:52 GMT
The hashtag ‘gym weirdos’ has received nearly 2m views as women covertly record their experiences
Women have long been hyper-vigilant about unwanted male attention at the gym. But before smartphones, the sense they were being stared at was more of a feeling than a certainty.
Now catching perceived offenders in action has become its own sport on TikTok, with women covertly leaving their phones on record and then watching the resulting video to see who was staring at their behind while they were doing squats.
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Shares of Desktop Metal Inc. DM jumped 6.5% toward a two-month high in premarket trading Thursday, after the Boston-based 3D printing company said it would lay off about 15% of its employees and close four facilities. The moves are part of a cost-cutting plan, of which the company doubled its targeted annual savings to $100 million in 2023. The job cuts could affect about 205 employees, as the company had 1,370 employees at the end of 2021, according to the latest annual report. “These cost reductions will help us improve margins and reduce costs to accelerate our path to profitability,” said Chief Executive Ric Fulop. “The additive manufacturing industry continues to mature and expand even in a challenging macroeconomic environment.” The stock has tumbled 25.0% over the past three months, while the S&P 500 SPX has gained 9.6%.
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.
‘Pig butchering’ crypto scams, where victims are wooed for months before being fleeced, are ruining people’s lives. But how are criminal gangs exploiting trafficking victims – and using fake UK firms – to steal millions of pounds?
It can start on a dating app, social media – or even a language learning app. A stranger starts a conversation that over weeks or even months blooms into an online friendship or more. At some point the chat turns to cryptocurrency. Well-known platforms or reputable virtual wallets are discussed and investments are made. By the time the victim realises they have been scammed, they have lost their savings.
The Observer journalist Shanti Das started investigating these so-called “pig butchering scams” with Niamh McIntyre of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. She tells Nosheen Iqbal how criminal gangs in China exploit trafficking victims to defraud people around the globe. And how the pair discovered that more than 150 fake UK firms were being used to allay victims’ suspicions.
Continue reading...Geraghty exudes the conspiratorial mindset that afflicts conservative thinking.
The post Meet New Washington Post Columnist Jim Geraghty and His Malfunctioning Noggin appeared first on The Intercept.
A bankruptcy filing revealed new information about how the crypto exchange spent money on consultants, think tanks, and business relationships.
The post New FTX Filing Pulls Back the Curtain on Sam Bankman-Fried’s Massive Influence-Peddling Operation appeared first on The Intercept.
Gold futures settled lower on Thursday to tally back-to-back losses. Prices for the precious metal had traded higher overnight and early Thursday, but gold gave up those gains with buyers and sellers “jockeying” for positions as prices pave a path toward what will likely be the last rate hike by the Federal Reserve, if there’s a hike at all, said Adam Koos, president at Libertas Wealth Management Group. Gold for April delivery GCJ23 fell $12, or 0.6%, to settle at $1,930.80 an ounce on Comex after trading as high as $1,975.20.
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.
Hints by Bank of England that rates may have peaked leaves those remortgaging in a quandary
The rush towards tracker mortgages that began even before Thursday’s interest rate rise could well become a stampede after the Bank of England signalled that rates may be reaching their peak after 10 consecutive increases. It leaves those remortgaging right now in a big quandary.
While UK mortgage buyers have traditionally favoured fixed-rate deals with their set monthly repayments, about 1.7 million owner-occupiers holding mortgages are still on tracker deals, with monthly payments rising and falling according to the level of the Bank base rate.
Continue reading...Report finds states are failing to calculate financial benefits of smaller initiatives, including increased employment and social inclusion
Increasing the frequency of local bus routes in underprivileged suburbs can provide a better return on taxpayer investment “by a considerable margin” than projects such as Melbourne’s suburban rail loop, researchers have found.
According to the paper by researchers at the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne, state governments in Australia are far more likely to spend billions on major infrastructure projects such as highways and new rail lines than smaller projects because the time savings they deliver are easier to quantify, which makes it easier to attract political support.
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Continue reading...U.S. Reps. David Cicilline, D-R.I., and Ken Buck, R-Colo., on Thursday announced the formation of a Congressional Antitrust Caucus, designed for "holding Big Tech and monopolies accountable, promoting healthy competition in the economy, and advocating for hardworking and law-abiding consumers and business owners." The bipartisan caucus said it intends to focus on hearings with American innovators harmed by Big Tech, and a continued push for legislation.
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.
Hike of 0.5 percentage points lifts rates to 14-year high, but BoE says shorter and shallower recession now more likely
The Bank of England raised interest rates for a tenth consecutive time on Thursday from 3.5% to 4%, but said inflation may have peaked and a recession in the UK would be shorter and shallower than previously feared.
Piling more pressure on mortgage payers and businesses struggling to pay off their loans, the Bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) said the 0.5-percentage point rise was needed after private sector wages had risen more than the central bank’s previous forecasts.
Continue reading...“As we speak, oil is spilling in my community every day, people are dying.”
The post 13,000 People From the Niger Delta Just Sued Shell for Years of Oil Spills appeared first on The Intercept.
Host Jordan Smith and journalist Rebecca Nagle discuss the Indian Child Welfare Act challenge and why it could imperil all of Indian Law.
The post Dissent Episode Three: How an Adoption Case Could Unravel Tribal Sovereignty appeared first on The Intercept.
Russian fighters clash with rebels as Kremlin tries to extend power in mineral rich country
Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group have sustained heavy casualties in a new surge of fighting between government troops and rebels over the control of lucrative goldmines in Central African Republic (CAR).
The clashes come amid increasing instability in the anarchic, resource-rich country, which in recent years has become one of Russia’s main hubs of influence in sub-Saharan Africa.
Continue reading...  | submitted by /u/777fer [link] [comments] |
The Nasdaq posted its best day of gains since November on Thursday, as stock-market bulls cheered the Federal Reserve's decision a day before to raise interest rates by a smaller 25 basis point increment and embraced hints that a pause in rate hikes could be coming in a few months. The S&P 500 index rose about 1.5%, while the Nasdaq Composite Index jumped 3.3%, its best daily percentage gain since Nov. 30, according to Dow Jones Market Index. Both stock-market gauges surged in the final moments of trade. On the flip side, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed about 39 points, or 0.1%, ending near 34,053, after posting back-to-back gains this week.
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.
Even on the company’s broader metric, the greener stuff came out at only one-third of total expenditure
The chief executive has changed at Shell but the song remains the same. The energy transition will be “balanced” and “we intend to remain disciplined while delivering compelling shareholder returns,” declared Wael Sawan. Translation: the company will not use the sudden arrival of spectacular financial riches to boost spending on renewables.
Being “disciplined” is, of course, an admirable ambition when presented starkly and without context. No chief executive of any company is ever likely to tell investors that the plan is to take wild punts on projects with little prospect of a decent return. But there is a world of nuance between the extremes.
Continue reading...An inflationary environment makes care home collapses more probable, given the way they’re financing themselves
When Britain’s largest care home operator, Southern Cross, collapsed in 2011, it heaped anxiety on elderly residents and ignited a debate about the role of private finance in the sector. The company had sold off most of its freehold properties to landlords, leaving it with a £230m annual rental bill. Many of these properties were locked into 30-year leases with increasing rents. The bulk of the company’s income came from local authorities, so when councils clamped down on spending, Southern Cross buckled. “This model doesn’t work through hard times,” its chief executive said.
Those times seem to have returned. A new report warns that the UK care system now risks sleepwalking into a crisis of rising costs because of how care homes are financed. Investors are piling into the sector, and have spent an estimated £7.5bn buying up healthcare properties over the last five years. The authors estimate that up to half of for-profit care home groups are leasing their homes from landlords. This is a ticking timebomb, they argue: as rents rise in line with inflation, some care home operators may have to increase their fees, even while landlords’ profits soar. They estimate that care home landlords are making £515m in profit annually.
Continue reading...Directive comes as energy minister expresses ‘horror’ at claims British Gas contractor allegedly broke into vulnerable customers’ homes
The energy minister has expressed “horror” at revelations about a British Gas contractor allegedly breaking into vulnerable customers’ homes as the market watchdog Ofgem warned all suppliers against forcibly installing prepayment meters.
Graham Stuart met Chris O’Shea, the chief executive of Centrica, which owns British Gas, and demanded urgent answers to issues raised by a Times investigation into the firm’s practices, which has prompted ministerial fury.
Continue reading...Shares of Gilead Sciences Inc. GILD rose more than 5% in the extended session Thursday after the pharma company reported fourth-quarter earnings and sales above Wall Street expectations, saying higher sales elsewhere took the sting of falling revenue for its COVID-19 drug. Gilead earned $1.6 billion, or $1.30 a share, compared with $376 million, or 30 cents a share, in the year-ago period in 2021. Adjusted for one-time items, Gilead earned $1.67 a share. Gilead’s revenue rose 2% to $7.4 billion, mostly thanks to higher sales in for its oncology, HIV and hepatitis C drugs, which offset lower sales of COVID-19’s Veklury. Analysts polled by FactSet expected Gilead to report adjusted EPS of $1.51 on sales of $6.6 billion. The company guided for full-year product sales between $26 billion and $26.5 billion, and per-share adjusted earnings between $6.60 and $7. Separately, Gilead said its board has authorized a 2.7% increase in the company’s dividend to 75 cents a share, payable on March 30 to stockholders of record at the close of business on March 15.
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.
Atlassian Corp.’s TEAM stock fell more than 13% after market close Thursday after the software maker reported a widening second-quarter loss. The company reported a net loss of $205 million, or 80 cents a share, compared with a net loss of $22.3 million, or 9 cents a share in the same period last year. The second-quarter net loss includes a non-recurring income tax charge of $83.1 million, which increased net loss per share by 32 cents. On an adjusted basis, Atlassian earned 45 cents a share, up from 43 cents a share in the same period last year. Analysts surveyed by FactSet were looking for earnings of 30 cents a share. The company reported revenue of $872.7 million, up from $688.5 million in the prior year’s quarter. Analysts surveyed by FactSet were looking for revenue of $850 million. Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar said the company’s sales growth was driven by subscription revenue that grew 40% year-over-year. “2023 will be all about helping our customers navigate these challenging times, absorbing the macro-driven impacts on our business, and setting Atlassian up for long-term success,” he said, in a statement.
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.
Former UK PM’s brother quits board of Elara Capital days after it was accused of using funds to manipulate share prices
Jo Johnson, the younger brother of the former prime minister Boris Johnson, has resigned as a director of a London-based investment bank allegedly linked to the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s crisis-ridden business empire.
Lord Johnson, a former Conservative minister who was given a peerage by his brother in 2020, resigned from the board of Elara Capital on Wednesday just days after Elara was accused of using Mauritius-based funds to manipulate the share price of Adani-linked companies and obscure their ultimate ownership.
Continue reading...The British Gas scandal about vulnerable people being forced on to prepayment meters is just the latest cruelty in this crisis
Elderly ladies make easy pickings. Single parents, the new recruit was told, are also a mainstay of the trade. So harden your heart to their pleading, even if they do have tiny children, because: “If every single mum that starts getting a bit teary you’re going to walk away from, you won’t be earning any bonus.” Just get yourself inside the house and fit that prepayment meter, even though it will cut off their gas if they can’t afford to keep their credit topped up, leaving them to shiver in the dark.
The advice above, given to a Times reporter working undercover for a company employed by British Gas to deal with customers falling behind on their bills, is spine-chilling, and yet it should come as no surprise. Three weeks ago, this newspaper reported a warning from Citizens Advice about vulnerable people – for whom energy suppliers are supposed to make exceptions – being inappropriately forced on to expensive pay-as-you-go meters after falling behind with electricity or gas bills.
Continue reading...Playboy parent PLBY Group Inc. PLBY said Thursday it has completed a capital raise totaling $65 million and will use most of the proceeds to repay senior debt. The company completed a $50 million rights offering and a $15 million registered direct offering. The company’s biggest shareholder Rizvi Traverse Management and its Chief Executive Ben Kohn fully exercised their basic and over-subscription privileges in the rights offering, which was over-subscribed. “As a result, together with the separate registered direct offering, we were able to raise $65 million of new capital, which will allow us to access flexibility under our credit agreement to improve our capital structure,” Kohn said in a statement. The company will now focus on long-term strategic initiatives, including its Playboy and Honey Birdette direct-to-consumer businesses and the creator-led digital platform, he added. The company will continue to streamline costs as it enters the Year of the Rabbit in China, a key market where its iconic bunny-in-profile logo appears on many products. The stock was up 4% Thursday and has gained 14% in the year to date, while the S&P 500 SPX has gained 8%.
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.
The idea is nothing new in other countries, but the UK has been slow to develop housing schemes for older LGBTQ+ people. Now it’s becoming apparent how many people want or need it
When the clocks struck midnight on new year’s eve and rang in 2023, Steve Busby was on the rooftop of a fancy apartment block in central London watching fireworks light up the Thames. The weeks leading up to Christmas had been a heady mix of meals, drinks, celebrations and friends, most of whom live in the same building of luxurious flats overlooking Westminster, a stone’s throw from Vauxhall, Waterloo and Tate Britain. Not exactly your average retirement home, then – and indeed Busby, a 72-year-old gay man, would never have considered moving to one of those. “What would I do? Risk coming out, or lie about who I am? I knew I could never do it.”
Busby spent his working life running a business selling handmade silk ties all over the world, but “retirement saw my world change – it was isolating,” he says. Having never married or had children, he had been alone for a few years when the pandemic stopped him from even seeing friends. “It was dreadful,” he says. “Then a friend told me about Tonic. I came to an open day, saw the facilities and the flat, and I knew I wanted to move in and stay here for the rest of my life.”
Continue reading...Shares of Okta Inc. OKTA surged 6.5% in premarket trading Thursday, after the provider of identity management software for businesses said it would lay off about 300 employees as part of a cost-cutting plan. With 6,037 employees as of Oct. 31, the job cuts would reduce Okta’s workforce by about 5%. The company said it will recognize a restructuring charge of about $15 million for severance and benefits costs, which will primarily be paid out in the first quarter of fiscal 2024, which ends in April. “We entered fiscal 2023 with a growth plan based on the demand we experienced in the prior year. This led us to overhire for the macroeconomic reality we’re in today. In addition, in the first half of FY23, we faced our own execution challenges. I wish I had responded sooner, but we’re doing the best we can today to adjust to this reality,” Chief Executive Todd McKinnon said in a letter to employees. The stock has soared 49.5% over the past three months through Wednesday, while the S&P 500 SPX has gained 9.6%.
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.
An earlier version of this article had an incorrect FactSet consensus number for 2023 adjusted EPS. It has been corrected. Quest Diagnostics Inc. DGX posted net income of $101 million, or 87 cents a share, for the fourth quarter, down from $390 million, or $3.12 a share, in the year-earlier period. Adjusted per-share earnings came to $1.98, ahead of the $1.91 FactSet consensus. Revenue fell 15% to $2.333 billion from $2.744 billion a year ago, also ahead of the $2.257 billion FactSet consensus. The revenue decline was mostly due to a slump in COVID-19 testing revenues, which fell 74.6% to $184 million from $722 million as the pandemic eased from the omicron peak in late 2021. Base business revenue grew 6.3% to $2.149 billion. “In 2023, our focus is on growing our base business and increasing our efforts to drive productivity and expand margins. Our guidance for the full year reflects continued growth in the base business, tailwinds from recent Medicare reimbursement changes, investments to accelerate growth, and declining COVID-19 revenues,” Chief Executive Jim Davis said in a statement. The Secaucus, N.J.-based company is now expecting 2023 revenue of $8.83 billion to $9.03 billion, while FactSet is expecting $9.29 billion. It expects adjusted EPS of $8.40 to $9.00, compared with a FactSet consensus of $8.69. The stock was slightly lower premarket but has gained 9% in the last 12 months, outperforming the S&P 500 SPX which has fallen 10%.
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.
We’re keen to hear how house price reductions and rising mortgage interest rates have affected home owners and prospective buyers
The average UK house price fell for the fourth month in a row in December, according to Halifax, and demand for mortgages has collapsed to its lowest level since the 2020 national lockdown as potential homebuyers are deterred by rising interest rates.
We’d like to hear from people in the UK how their plans – to buy, sell, renovate or in any other way – have been affected by reduced house prices recently.
Continue reading...Inertia on the NHS and obstinacy on strikes have left the equivocating PM clinging to a life raft
After the mayhem, after Liz Truss blew up the economy, the only way was up. Things could only get better – or so you would have thought. But Rishi Sunak’s 100 days to steady the ship have left him and his party clinging to a life raft.
Yesterday the half a million public servants out on strike were largely backed by voters unwilling to see the pay of nurses, teachers and the rest fall behind inflation and below the private sector.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...The energy industry is turning waste from dairy farms into renewable natural gas – but will it actually reduce emissions?
On an early August afternoon at Pinnacle Dairy, a farm located near the middle of California’s long Central Valley, 1,300 Jersey cows idle in the shade of open-air barns. Above them whir fans the size of satellites, circulating a breeze as the temperature pushes 100F (38C). Underfoot, a wet layer of feces emits a thick stench that hangs in the air. Just a tad unpleasant, the smell represents a potential goldmine.
The energy industry is transforming mounds of manure into a lucrative “carbon negative fuel” capable of powering everything from municipal buses to cargo trucks. To do so, it’s turning to dairy farms, which offer a reliable, long-term supply of the material. Pinnacle is just one of hundreds across the state that have recently sold the rights to their manure to energy producers.
Continue reading...
From the moment we wake up and reach for our smartphones and throughout the day as we text each other, upload selfies to social media, shop, commute, work, work out, watch streaming media, pay bills, and travel, and even while we’re sleeping, we spew personal data like jets sketching contrails across the sky.
An astonishing amount of that data is recorded, stored, analyzed, and shared by media companies looking to pitch you content and ads, retailers aiming to sell you more of what you’ve already bought, and potential distant relatives hitting you up on genealogy sites. And sometimes, if you’re suspected of participating in illegal activities, that data can bring you under the scrutiny of law enforcement officials.
Contributing Editor Mark Harris spent months poring over court documents and other records to understand how the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies exploited vast troves of data to conduct the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history: into the violent overtaking of the Capitol building on 6 January 2021.
The events of that day unfolded on live television watched by millions. But in order for investigators to identify suspects amidst a mob of thousands, it had to cast a very wide net and sought the cooperation of tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Snap and carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile. As Harris painstakingly documents in “How the Police Exploited the Capitol Rioters’ Digital Records,” some of the information the FBI used was intentionally shared by rioters on social media, while other information was gleaned from the kind of data we all heedlessly cast off during the course of the day, like the order for pizza that landed one group of rioters in hot water or the automated license-plate readings that were cited in 20 cases.
“In the eternal struggle between security and privacy, the best that digital-rights activists can hope for is to watch the investigators as closely as they are watching us.” —Mark Harris
The ability to ingest multiple data streams and analyze them to trace rioters’ journeys to, through, and back from the Capitol has led to 950 arrests, with more than half leading to guilty pleas and 40 to guilty verdicts as of this writing. But as the privacy advocates Harris interviewed point out, while these tools helped law enforcement hold some people accountable for their actions that day, those same tools can be used by the state against law-abiding citizens, not just in the United States, but anywhere. And the data we make available (knowingly or not), often for the sake of convenience or as the price of admission, leaves us vulnerable to bad actors, be they governments, corporations, or individuals.
The writer David Brin foretold a version of our current panopticon in his 1998 book The Transparent Society. In it, he acknowledges the risks of surveillance technology but contends that the very ubiquity of that technology is in itself a safeguard against abuse by giving everyone the ability to shine a light on the dark corners of individual and institutional behavior: His stance jibes with Harris’s final observation: “In the eternal struggle between security and privacy, the best that digital-rights activists can hope for is to watch the investigators as closely as they are watching us.”
But as Brin points out, watching the watchers isn’t enough to guarantee a free and open society. As data-driven prosecutions for the 6 January insurrection continue, it’s worth considering the linkage Brin makes between liberty and accountability, which he says, “is the one fundamental ingredient on which liberty thrives. Without the accountability that derives from openness—enforceable upon even the mightiest individuals and institutions—how can freedom survive?”
There’s a handful of robotics companies currently working on what could be called general-purpose humanoid robots. That is, human-size, human-shaped robots with legs for mobility and arms for manipulation that can (or, may one day be able to) perform useful tasks in environments designed primarily for humans. The value proposition is obvious—drop-in replacement of humans for dull, dirty, or dangerous tasks. This sounds a little ominous, but the fact is that people don’t want to be doing the jobs that these robots are intended to do in the short term, and there just aren’t enough people to do these jobs as it is.
We tend to look at claims of commercializable general-purpose humanoid robots with some skepticism, because humanoids are really, really hard. They’re still really hard in a research context, which is usually where things have to get easier before anyone starts thinking about commercialization. There are certainly companies out there doing some amazing work toward practical legged systems, but at this point, “practical” is more about not falling over than it is about performance or cost effectiveness. The overall approach toward solving humanoids in this way tends to be to build something complex and expensive that does what you want, with the goal of cost reduction over time to get it to a point where it’s affordable enough to be a practical solution to a real problem.
Apptronik, based in Austin, Texas, is the latest company to attempt to figure out how to make a practical general-purpose robot. Its approach is to focus on things like cost and reliability from the start, developing (for example) its own actuators from scratch in a way that it can be sure will be cost effective and supply-chain friendly. Apptronik’s goal is to develop a platform that costs well under US $100,000 of which it hopes to be able to deliver a million by 2030, although the plan is to demonstrate a prototype early this year. Based on what we’ve seen of commercial humanoid robots recently, this seems like a huge challenge. And in part two of this story (to be posted tomorrow
), we will be talking in depth to Apptronik’s cofounders to learn more about how they’re going to make general-purpose humanoids happen.
First, though, some company history. Apptronik spun out from the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016, but the company traces its robotics history back a little farther, to 2015’s DARPA Robotics Challenge. Apptronik’s CTO and cofounder, Nick Paine, was on the NASA-JSC Valkyrie DRC team, and Apptronik’s first contract was to work on next-gen actuation and controls for NASA. Since then, the company has been working on robotics projects for a variety of large companies. In particular, Apptronik developed Astra, a humanoid upper body for dexterous bimanual manipulation that’s currently being tested for supply-chain use.
But Apptronik has by no means abandoned its NASA roots. In 2019, NASA had plans for what was essentially going to be a Valkyrie 2, which was to be a ground-up redesign of the Valkyrie platform. As with many of the coolest NASA projects, the potential new humanoid didn’t survive budget prioritization for very long, but even at the time it wasn’t clear to us why NASA wanted to build its own humanoid rather than asking someone else to build one for it considering how much progress we’ve seen with humanoid robots over the last decade. Ultimately, NASA decided to move forward with more of a partnership model, which is where Apptronik fits in—a partnership between Apptronik and NASA will help accelerate commercialization of Apollo.
“We recognize that Apptronik is building a production robot that’s designed for terrestrial use,” says NASA’s Shaun Azimi, who leads the Dexterous Robotics Team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “From NASA’s perspective, what we’re aiming to do with this partnership is to encourage the development of technology and talent that will sustain us through the Artemis program and looking forward to Mars.”
Apptronik is positioning Apollo as a high-performance, easy-to-use, and versatile system. It is imagining an “iPhone of robots.”
“Apollo is the robot that we always wanted to build,” says Jeff Cardenas, Apptronik cofounder and CEO. This new humanoid is the culmination of an astonishing amount of R&D, all the way down to the actuator level. “As a company, we’ve built more than 30 unique electric actuators,” Cardenas explains. “You name it, we’ve tried it. Liquid cooling, cable driven, series elastic, parallel elastic, quasi-direct drive…. And we’ve now honed our approach and are applying it to commercial humanoids.”
Apptronik’s emphasis on commercialization gives it a much different perspective on robotics development than you get when focusing on pure research the way that NASA does. To build a commercial product rather than a handful of totally cool but extremely complex bespoke humanoids, you need to consider things like minimizing part count, maximizing maintainability and robustness, and keeping the overall cost manageable. “Our starting point was figuring out what the minimum viable humanoid robot looked like,” explains Apptronik CTO Nick Paine. “Iteration is then necessary to add complexity as needed to solve particular problems.”
This robot is called Astra. It’s only an upper body, and it’s Apptronik’s first product, but (not having any legs) it’s designed for manipulation rather than dynamic locomotion. Astra is force controlled, with series-elastic torque-controlled actuators, giving it the compliance necessary to work in dynamic environments (and particularly around humans). “Astra is pretty unique,” says Paine. “What we were trying to do with the system is to approach and achieve human-level capability in terms of manipulation workspace and payload. This robot taught us a lot about manipulation and actually doing useful work in the world, so that’s why it’s where we wanted to start.”
While Astra is currently out in the world doing pilot projects with clients (mostly in the logistics space), internally Apptronik has moved on to robots with legs. The following video, which Apptronik is sharing publicly for the first time, shows a robot that the company is calling its Quick Development Humanoid, or QDH:
QDH builds on Astra by adding legs, along with a few extra degrees of freedom in the upper body to help with mobility and balance while simplifying the upper body for more basic manipulation capability. It uses only three different types of actuators, and everything (from structure to actuators to electronics to software) has been designed and built by Apptronik. “With QDH, we’re approaching minimum viable product from a usefulness standpoint,” says Paine, “and this is really what’s driving our development, both in software and hardware.”
“What people have done in humanoid robotics is to basically take the same sort of architectures that have been used in industrial robotics and apply those to building what is in essence a multi-degree-of-freedom industrial robot,” adds Cardenas. “We’re thinking of new ways to build these systems, leveraging mass manufacturing techniques to allow us to develop a high-degree-of-freedom robot that’s as affordable as many industrial robots that are out there today.”
Cardenas explains that a major driver for the cost of humanoid robots is the number of different parts, the precision machining of some specific parts, and the resulting time and effort it then takes to put these robots together. As an internal-controls test bed, QDH has helped Apptronik to explore how it can switch to less complex parts and lower the total part count. The plan for Apollo is to not use any high-precision or proprietary components at all, which mitigates many supply-chain issues and will help Apptronik reach its target price point for the robot.
Apollo will be a completely new robot, based around the lessons Apptronik has learned from QDH. It’ll be average human size: about 1.75 meters tall, weighing around 75 kilograms, with the ability to lift 25 kg. It’s designed to operate untethered, either indoors or outdoors. Broadly, Apptronik is positioning Apollo as a high-performance, easy-to-use, and versatile robot that can do a bunch of different things. It is imagining an “iPhone of robots,” where apps can be created for the robot to perform specific tasks. To extend the iPhone metaphor, Apptronik itself will make sure that Apollo can do all of the basics (such as locomotion and manipulation) so that it has fundamental value, but the company sees versatility as the way to get to large-scale deployments and the cost savings that come with them.
“I see the Apollo robot as a spiritual successor to Valkyrie. It’s not Valkyrie 2—Apollo is its own platform, but we’re working with Apptronik to adapt it as much as we can to space use cases.”
—Shaun Azimi, NASA Johnson Space Center
The challenge with this app approach is that there’s a critical mass that’s required to get it to work—after all, the primary motivation to develop an iPhone app is that there are a bajillion iPhones out there already. Apptronik is hoping that there are enough basic manipulation tasks in the supply-chain space that Apollo can leverage to scale to that critical-mass point. “This is a huge opportunity where the tasks that you need a robot to do are pretty straightforward,” Cardenas tells us. “Picking single items, moving things with two hands, and other manipulation tasks where industrial automation only gets you to a certain point. These companies have a huge labor challenge—they’re missing labor across every part of their business.”
While Apptronik’s goal is for Apollo to be autonomous, in the short to medium term, its approach will be hybrid autonomy, with a human overseeing first a few and eventually a lot of Apollos with the ability to step in and provide direct guidance through teleoperation when necessary. “That’s really where there’s a lot of business opportunity,” says Paine. Cardenas agrees. “I came into this thinking that we’d need to make Rosie the robot before we could have a successful commercial product. But I think the bar is much lower than that. There are fairly simple tasks that we can enter the market with, and then as we mature our controls and software, we can graduate to more complicated tasks.”
Apptronik is still keeping details about Apollo’s design under wraps, for now. We were shown renderings of the robot, but Apptronik is understandably hesitant to make those public, since the design of the robot may change. It does have a firm date for unveiling Apollo for the first time: SXSW, which takes place in Austin in March.
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Apoiadores de atos golpistas, sojeiros lucraram com valorização – e avançaram por uma área equivalente ao território do Sergipe.
The post Com Bolsonaro, preço das terras dobrou em capitais do agronegócio em Mato Grosso appeared first on The Intercept.
Programa do governo da Bahia usa tecnologia para mapear crimes e premiar redução de mortes violentas – mas exclui estatísticas de violência policial nos monitoramentos.
The post Como manchas de calor e prêmios em dinheiro ajudam a tornar a polícia mais violenta na periferia de Salvador appeared first on The Intercept.
The five largest auto manufacturers will face massive U.S. patent fees within the next five years. This report examines auto industry lapse trends and how a company’s decisions on keeping, selling or pruning patents can greatly impact its cost savings and revenue generation opportunities.
Patent lapse strategies can help companies in any industry out-maneuver the competition. Volume 2 of the U.S. Patent Lapse Series highlights how such decisions, especially during uncertain economic times, can impact the bottom line exponentially within a few years.
Download the report to find out:
Get the insights.
“Electric cars will not save the climate. It is completely wrong,” Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), has stated.
If Birol were from Maine, he might have simply observed, “You can’t get there from here.”
This is not to imply in any way that electric vehicles are worthless. Analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) argues that EVs are the quickest means to decarbonize motorized transport. However, EVs are not by themselves in any way going to achieve the goal of net zero by 2050.
There are two major reasons for this: first, EVs are not going to reach the numbers required by 2050 to hit their needed contribution to net zero goals, and even if they did, a host of other personal, social and economic activities must be modified to reach the total net zero mark.
For instance, Alexandre Milovanoff at the University of Toronto and his colleagues’ research (which is described in depth in a recent Spectrum article) demonstrates the U.S. must have 90 percent of its vehicles, or some 350 million EVs, on the road by 2050 in order to hit its emission targets. The likelihood of this occurring is infinitesimal. Some estimates indicate that about 40 percent of vehicles on US roads will be ICE vehicles in 2050, while others are less than half that figure.
For the U.S. to hit the 90 percent EV target, sales of all new ICE vehicles across the U.S. must cease by 2038 at the latest, according to research company BloombergNEF (BNEF). Greenpeace, on the other hand, argues that sales of all diesel and petrol vehicles, including hybrids, must end by 2030 to meet such a target. However, achieving either goal would likely require governments offering hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, in EV subsidies to ICE owners over the next decade, not to mention significant investments in EV charging infrastructure and the electrical grid. ICE vehicle households would also have to be convinced that they would not be giving activities up by becoming EV-only households.
As a reality check, current estimates for the number of ICE vehicles still on the road worldwide in 2050 range from a low of 1.25 billion to more than 2 billion.
Even assuming that the required EV targets were met in the U.S. and elsewhere, it still will not be sufficient to meet net zero 2050 emission targets. Transportation accounts for only 27 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the U.S.; the sources of the other 73 percent of GHG emissions must be reduced as well. Even in the transportation sector, more than 15 percent of the GHG emissions are created by air and rail travel and shipping. These will also have to be decarbonized.
Nevertheless, for EVs themselves to become true zero emission vehicles, everything in their supply chain from mining to electricity production must be nearly net-zero emission as well. Today, depending on the EV model, where it charges, and assuming it is a battery electric and not a hybrid vehicle, it may need to be driven anywhere from 8,400 to 13,500 miles, or controversially, significantly more to generate less GHG emissions than an ICE vehicle. This is due to the 30 to 40 percent increase in emissions EVs create in comparison to manufacturing an ICE vehicle, mainly from its battery production.
In states (or countries) with a high proportion of coal-generated electricity, the miles needed to break-even climb more. In Poland and China, for example, an EV would need to be driven 78,700 miles to break-even. Just accounting for miles driven, however, BEVs cars and trucks appear cleaner than ICE equivalents nearly everywhere in the U.S. today. As electricity increasingly comes from renewables, total electric vehicle GHG emissions will continue downward, but that will take at least a decade or more to happen everywhere across the U.S. (assuming policy roadblocks disappear), and even longer elsewhere.
Given that EVs, let alone the rest of the transportation sector, likely won’t hit net zero 2050 targets, what additional actions are being advanced to reduce GHG emissions?
A high priority, says IEA’s Birol, is investment in across-the-board energy-related technology research and development and their placement into practice. According to Birol, “IEA analysis shows that about half the reductions to get to net zero emissions in 2050 will need to come from technologies that are not yet ready for market.”
Many of these new technologies will be aimed at improving the efficient use of fossil fuels, which will not be disappearing anytime soon. The IEA expects that energy efficiency improvement, such as the increased use of variable speed electric motors, will lead to a 40 percent reduction in energy-related GHG emissions over the next twenty years.
But even if these hoped for technological improvements arrive, and most certainly if they do not, the public and businesses are expected to take more energy conscious decisions to close what the United Nations says is the expected 2050 “emissions gap.” Environmental groups foresee the public needing to use electrified mass transit, reduce long-haul flights for business as well as pleasure), increase telework, walk and cycle to work or stores, change their diet to eat more vegetables, or if absolutely needed, drive only small EVs. Another expectation is that homeowners and businesses will become “fully electrified” by replacing oil, propane and gas furnaces with heat pumps along with gas fired stoves as well as installing solar power and battery systems.
Dronning Louise’s Bro (Queen Louise’s Bridge) connects inner Copenhagen and Nørrebro and is frequented by many cyclists and pedestrians every day.Frédéric Soltan/Corbis/Getty Images
Underpinning the behavioral changes being urged (or encouraged by legislation) is the notion of rejecting the current car-centric culture and completely rethinking what personal mobility means. For example, researchers at University of Oxford in the U.K. argue that, “Focusing solely on electric vehicles is slowing down the race to zero emissions.” Their study found “emissions from cycling can be more than 30 times lower for each trip than driving a fossil fuel car, and about ten times lower than driving an electric one.” If just one out of five urban residents in Europe permanently changed from driving to cycling, emissions from automobiles would be cut by 8 percent, the study reports.
Even then, Oxford researchers concede, breaking the car’s mental grip on people is not going to be easy, given the generally poor state of public transportation across much of the globe.
How willing are people to break their car dependency and other energy-related behaviors to address climate change? The answer is perhaps some, but maybe not too much. A Pew Research Center survey taken in late 2021 of seventeen countries with advanced economies indicated that 80 percent of those surveyed were willing to alter how then live and work to combat climate change.
However, a Kanter Public survey of ten of the same countries taken at about the same time gives a less positive view, with only 51 percent of those polled stating they would alter their lifestyles. In fact, some 74 percent of those polled indicated they were already “proud of what [they are] currently doing” to combat climate change.
What both polls failed to explore are what behaviors specifically would respondents being willing to permanently change or give up in their lives to combat climate change?
For instance, how many urban dwellers, if told that they must forever give up their cars and instead walk, cycle or take public transportation, would willingly agree to doing so? And how many of those who agreed, would also consent to go vegetarian, telework, and forsake trips abroad for vacation?
It is one thing to answer a poll indicating a willingness to change, and quite another to “walk the talk” especially if there are personal, social or economic inconveniences or costs involved. For instance, recent U.S. survey information shows that while 22 percent of new car buyers expressed interest in a battery electric vehicle (BEV), only 5 percent actually bought one.
Granted, there are several cities where living without a vehicle is doable, like Utrecht in the Netherlands where in 2019 48 percent of resident trips were done by cycling or London, where nearly two-thirds of all trips taken that same year were are made by walking, cycling or public transportation. Even a few US cities it might be livable without a car.
The world’s largest bike parking facility, Stationsplein Bicycle Parking near Utrecht Central Station in Utrecht, Netherlands has 12,500 parking places.Abdullah Asiran/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
However, in countless other urban areas, especially across most of the U.S., even those wishing to forsake owning a car would find it very difficult to do so without a massive influx of investment into all forms of public transport and personal mobility to eliminate the scores of US transit deserts.
As Tony Dutzik of the environmental advocacy group Frontier Group has written that in the U.S. “the price of admission to jobs, education and recreation is owning a car.” That’s especially true if you are a poor urbanite. Owning a reliable automobile has long been one of the only successful means of getting out of poverty.
Massive investment in new public transportation in the U.S. in unlikely, given its unpopularity with politicians and the public alike. This unpopularity has translated into aging and poorly-maintained bus, train and transit systems that few look forward to using. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the current state of American public transportation a grade of D- and says today’s $176 billion investment backlog is expected to grow to $250 billion through 2029.
While the $89 billion targeted to public transportation in the recently passed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will help, it also contains more than $351 billion for highways over the next five years. Hundreds of billions in annual investment are needed not only to fix the current public transport system but to build new ones to significantly reduce car dependency in America. Doing so would still take decades to complete.
Yet, even if such an investment were made in public transportation, unless its service is competitive with an EV or ICE vehicle in terms of cost, reliability and convenience, it will not be used. With EVs costing less to operate than ICE vehicles, the competitive hurdle will increase, despite the moves to offer free transit rides. Then there is the social stigma attached riding public transportation that needs to be overcome as well.
A few experts proclaim that ride-sharing using autonomous vehicles will separate people from their cars. Some even claim such AV sharing signals the both the end of individual car ownership as well as the need to invest in public transportation. Both outcomes are far from likely.
Other suggestions include redesigning cities to be more compact and more electrified, which would eliminate most of the need for personal vehicles to meet basic transportation needs. Again, this would take decades and untold billions of dollars to do so at the scale needed. The San Diego, California region has decided to spend $160 billion as a way to meet California’s net zero objectives to create “a collection of walkable villages serviced by bustling (fee-free) train stations and on-demand shuttles” by 2050. However, there has been public pushback over how to pay for the plan and its push to decrease personal driving by imposing a mileage tax.
According to University of Michigan public policy expert John Leslie King, the challenge of getting to net zero by 2050 is that each decarbonization proposal being made is only part of the overall solution. He notes, “You must achieve all the goals, or you don’t win. The cost of doing each is daunting, and the total cost goes up as you concatenate them.”
Concatenated costs also include changing multiple personal behaviors. It is unlikely that automakers, having committed more than a trillion dollars so far to EVs and charging infrastructure, are going to support depriving the public of the activities they enjoy today as a price they pay to shift to EVs. A war on EVs will be hard fought.
The cost concatenation problem arises not only at a national level, but at countless local levels as well. Massachusetts’ new governor Maura Healey, for example, has set ambitious goals of having at least 1 million EVs on the road, converting 1 million fossil-fuel burning furnaces in homes and buildings to heat-pump systems, and the state achieving a 100 percent clean electricity supply by 2030.
The number of Massachusetts households that can afford or are willing to buy an EV and or convert their homes to a heat pump system in the next eight years, even with a current state median household income of $89,000 and subsidies, is likely significantly smaller than the targets set. So, what happens if by 2030, the numbers are well below target, not only in Massachusetts, but other states like California, New York, or Illinois that also have aggressive GHG emission reduction targets?
Will governments move from encouraging behavioral changes to combat climate change or, in frustration or desperation, begin mandating them? And if they do, will there be a tipping point that spurs massive social resistance?
For example, dairy farmers in the Netherlands have been protesting plans by the government to force them to cut their nitrogen emissions. This will require dairy farms to reduce their livestock, which will make it difficult or impossible to stay in business. The Dutch government estimates 11,200 farms must close, and another 17,600 to reduce their livestock numbers. The government says farmers who do not comply will have their farms taken away by forced buyouts starting in 2023.
California admits getting to a zero-carbon transportation system by 2045 means car owners must travel 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and even more by 2045. If drivers fail to do so, will California impose weekly or monthly driving quotas, or punitive per mile driving taxes, along with mandating mileage data from vehicles ever-more connected to the Internet? The San Diego backlash over a mileage tax may be just the beginning.
“EVs,” notes King, “pull an invisible trailer filled with required major lifestyle changes that the public is not yet aware of.”
When it does, do not expect the public to acquiesce quietly.
In the final article of the series, we explore potential unanticipated consequences of transitioning to EVs at scale.
World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.’s WWE stock fell 2.2% after market close Thursday after the company’s fourth-quarter results came in below analysts’ top- and bottom-line estimates. Net income was $38.8 million, or 45 cents a share, down from $60.9 million, or 73 cents a share in the prior year’s quarter, which the company attributed to a decrease in operating performance. On an adjusted basis, WWE earned 52 cents a share, down from 67 cents a share in the prior year’s quarter. Analysts surveyed by FactSet were looking for earnings of 58 cents a share. Revenue was $325.3 million, up from $310.3 million in the prior year’s quarter. Analysts surveyed by FactSet were looking for revenue of $334 million. WWE’s operating income was $62.7 million, a decrease of 22% from the same period last year. The company said the increase in revenue was offset by an increase in operating expenses, primarily driven by higher costs to support the creation of content. “In 2023, we’re focused on continuing to execute on our key operational initiatives, such as the domestic licensing of our flagship programs, Raw and SmackDown, as well as the international licensing of our content in key markets,” said WWE CEO Nick Khan, in a statement. “At the same time, we’re focused on the review of strategic alternatives that we announced earlier this year, with the goal of maximizing value for all shareholders.” WWE is targeting Adjusted OIBDA of $395 million to $410 million for the full year 2023, which it says would be an all-time record for the company. WWE also expects to generate record revenue in 2023.
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Skechers USA Inc. SKX stock fell 2.5% in after-market trades Thursday after the footwear company projected it would fall short of first-quarter and full-year 2023 profit estimates. For the first quarter, Skechers expects earnings of 55 cents to 60 cents a share, below the analyst estimate of 86 cents a share, according to data compiled by FactSet. For 2023, Skechers expects earnings of $2.80 to $3.00 a share, below the analyst forecast of $3.09 a share. Skechers reported fourth-quarter net income of $75.5 million, or 48 cents a share, down 81% from $402.4 million, or $2.56 a share, in the year-ago quarter. Adjusted earnings in the latest quarter totaled 48 cents a share, ahead of the estimate of 37 cents a share. Sales rose 13.5% to $1.88 billion, ahead of the analyst target of $1.77 billion.
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Star players moving (or not) between top rivals is a hot potato, especially Arsenal’s bid for Manchester United’s Alessia Russo
Arsenal’s late bid for the Manchester United forward Alessia Russo and Chelsea’s reported interest in Arsenal’s Katie McCabe stirred the pot. Players moving between rival clubs is far more common in women’s football than in men’s football. Short-term contracts have been the norm, and big-money transfers are a relatively new phenomenon. In the past, often the short deals players were on would expire and they would move for free. With one-year deals and a lack of benefits the norm in the semi-professional and amateur games, it was hard to begrudge players taking whatever opportunity came their way.
Continue reading...The Dow Jones Industrial Average's selloff, in the face of a big rally in the broader stock market, is mostly the fault of one company's stock. UnitedHealth Group Inc. shares tumbled 5.7% in afternoon trading, in the wake of lower-than-expected Medicare Advantage rates proposed in 2024. The health insurer's stock price drop of $28.41, which would be the second-biggest in its history behind only the record $47.00 selloff on March 16, 2020, was shaving about 187 points off the Dow's price. Meanwhile, the Dow was down 201 points, or 06%, with 18 of 30 components losing ground. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 rallied 0.9% and the Nasdaq Composite surged 2.4%. And the number of advancing stocks were outnumbering decliners 1,970 to 1,001 on the NYSE and 2,930 to 1,276 on the Nasdaq.
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Shares of the three technology behemoths reporting quarterly results after the closing bell are surging in afternoon trading Thursday, enough to boost their collective market capitalizations by about $233 billion. Apple Inc.’s stock AAPL is surging 3.3% toward a 2 1/2-month high, Alphabet Inc.’s stock GOOGLGOOG is running up 6.4% toward a five-month high and Amazon.com Inc. shares AMZN are hiking up 6.8% toward d 3 1/2-month high. All the stock are outperforming the S&P 500 SPX, which is rallying 1.3%. Based on the companies’ share counts reported in their previous audited quarterly filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the stocks’ price gains are boosting the market caps of Apple by $77.00 billion, Google-parent Alphabet by $82.96 billion and Amazon by $73.04 billion.
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For 23 years, REDDOG officers regularly terrorized poor Black neighborhoods and Black residents of Atlanta.
The post In Memphis, Tyre Nichols Beating Carries Echoes of Atlanta REDDOG Unit appeared first on The Intercept.
Lazard Ltd LAZ stock is up nearly 5% after the investment bank said it’s more optimistic about macroeconomic conditions; it also beat its fourth-quarter revenue target but missed on adjusted profit. “Although the near-term outlook remains uncertain, we are cautiously optimistic regarding an improvement in the macroeconomic environment going into the second half of this year,” CEO Kenneth Marc Jacobs said on a call with analysts. Recent data shows that price increases are beginning to moderate, he said. “Since the beginning of the year, we’ve noted an increase in M&A dialogue while market sentiment seems to be improving.” Jacobs said that as the M&A market picks up, “we are well-positioned to capitalize on the recovery and gain market share.” The bank’s fourth-quarter net income dropped by 80% to $42 million, or 44 cents a share, from $210 million, or $1.86 a share, in the year-ago quarter. Adjusted profit fell to 69 cents a share from $1.92 a share and missed the estimate of 80 cents a share in a survey of analysts by FactSet. Lazard’s fourth-quarter revenue fell 31% to $671 million, but beat the Wall Street target of $670 million.
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Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders will give the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced on Thursday. Sanders, a former White House press secretary in the Trump administration, took office in January and said in a statement: “I am grateful for this opportunity to address the nation and contrast the GOP’s optimistic vision for the future against the failures of President Biden and the Democrats.”
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The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported on Thursday that domestic natural-gas supplies fell by 151 billion cubic feet for the week ended Jan. 27. That compared with an average analyst forecast for a decline of 146 billion cubic feet, according to a survey conducted by S&P Global Commodity Insights. The latest data, however, included a revision to stocks for the week ended Jan. 20, the EIA said. It upwardly revised that week’s total to 2.734 trillion cubic feet from 2.729 trillion. Total working gas stocks in storage for the latest week was at 2.583 trillion cubic feet, up 222 billion cubic feet from a year ago and 163 billion cubic feet above the five-year average, the government said. Following the data, March natural gas NGH23 was up 6.9 cents, or 2.8%, at $2.537 per million British thermal units on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices traded at $2.535 before the supply data.
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President Joe Biden on Thursday said Brian Deese, who heads the White House's National Economic Council, is departing. Biden said in a statement that he's grateful to Deese's family "for letting us borrow Brian" and he knows "they're excited to welcome him home." Lael Brainard, the vice chair of the Federal Reserve, has emerged as a contender to take Deese's job, though others are also under consideration.
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Shares of Hanesbrands Inc. HBI plummeted 20.7% in morning trading Thursday, putting them on track for the worst one-day performance in nearly 15 years, after the T-shirt and underwear seller eliminated its dividend and warned of a surprise first-quarter loss. The company reported before the opening bell fourth-quarter adjusted profit, which excludes nonrecurring items, of 7 cents a share, down from 44 cents a share, a year ago and below the FactSet consensus of 8 cents, while sales dropped 15.9% to $1.47 billion but was in line with expectations. For the first quarter, the company expects an adjusted per-share loss of 9 cents to 4 cents, compared with the FactSet consensus for earnings per share of 14 cents, as the company expects “muted” consumer demand amid economic uncertainty and margin pressure as it sells through the rest of its higher-cost inventory. Hanesbrands said it was eliminating its dividend, so it can use all of its free cash flow to accelerate the pay down of debt. The company last paid a quarterly dividend of 15 cents a share in November. At current stock prices, the annual dividend rate implied a dividend yield of 8.69%, which is more than 5 times the implied dividend yield for the S&P 500 SPX of 1.64%. The stock, which was on track for the biggest one-day selloff since the record 23.9% plunge on Dec. 11, 2008, has plunged 56.3% over the past 12 months while the S&P 500 has lost 9.6%.
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U.S. stocks opened higher Thursday, with the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite extending its sharp rise in the wake of the Federal Reserve slowing its pace of interest rate hikes. The Dow Jones Industrial Average edged up 0.1% soon after the opening bell, while the S&P 500 rose 1% and the Nasdaq Composite gained 2%, according to FactSet data, at last check. The U.S. central bank announced Wednesday that it was raising its benchmark rate by a quarter of a percentage point, downshifting from a rate hike of a half-point percentage point in December as it continues tightening monetary policy to bring down high inflation. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said during his press conference Wednesday that the "disinflationary" process is underway.
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Shares of Motorsport Games Inc. MSGM tumbled 22.1% in premarket trading Thursday, after the Florida-based racing game developer and esports ecosystem company is taking advantage of a 14-fold spike higher in two days to sell stock. The company announced an agreement is issue and sell 144,366 shares $23.50 a share, in a direct offering, for proceeds of $3.39 million. The offering comes after the stock skyrocketed 1,307% in two days, to close Wednesday at a one-year high of $37.00, up from Monday’s close of $2.63. The rally comes after the company said it regained full compliance with Nasdaq listing requirement. The stock has now gained 8.2% over the past 12 months while the S&P 500 SPX has lost 10.2%.
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Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the veteran San Francisco Democrat who was speaker of the U.S. House till Republicans secured narrow control of the chamber last month, said she'll back fellow House Democrat Adam Schiff in his recently declared Senate run, on the condition that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, 89, opts not to seek re-election next year, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Feinstein, a former mayor of San Francisco, was first elected to the Senate in 1992. Pelosi, 82, late last year gave up her spot among Democratic leadership in the House and was tapped as speaker emerita. Rep. Katie Porter, who like Schiff represents a congressional district in Southern California, has also declared her candidacy for the Senate seat.
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Mineralys Therapeutics Inc. MLYS has set terms for its initial public offering, in which the Pennsylvania-based hypertension treatment company looks to raise up to $160 million. the company is offering 10 million shares in the IPO, which is expected to price between $14 and $16 a share. With 37.06 million shares outstanding expected after the IPO, the expected pricing could value the biopharmaceutical company at up to $592.9 million. The stock is expected to list on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol “MLYS.” BoA Securities, Evercore ISI, Stifel, Guggenheim Securities, Credit Suisse and Wells Fargo Securities are the underwriters. The company reported a net loss of $20.7 million on no revenue in the nine months ended Sept. 30, after a loss of $12.3 million on no revenue in the same period a year ago. The company is looking to go public at a time when investors appear to be warming up to IPO stocks, as the iShares Biotechnology exchange-traded fund IBB has gained 7.2% over the past three months, while the Renaissance IPO ETF IPO has run up 12.6% and the S&P 500 SPX has climbed 9.6%.
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Pono Capital Corp. PONO will close its previously announced acquisition of Japanese flying motorbike maker ALI Technologies Inc., as early as Friday for trading on the Nasdaq, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Under the deal, Delaware-based Aerwins Technologies, which is the U.S. unit of ALI Technologies, will own the company. Pono Capital announced the acquisition in September for $600 million in stock with plans to trade under the symbol AWIN.
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The director of The Sixth Sense and Signs answers your questions about Rupert Grint, Bruce Willis, spoilers and dealing with grief
Rupert Grint has become a muse of sorts for you. What do you think he brings to his roles that other actors don’t? Mayfieldblue
I’m always looking for a buoyant actor: someone who naturally entertains, who’s very colourful and beautiful to watch and has as many muscles in humour as in drama and poignancy. That’s rare. Rupert has that, coupled with his kindness and incredible professionalism. He’s just the easiest human being to work with. It’s a tricky thing, what we ask actors to do. Sometimes that comes with complications as human beings. With Rupert: zero. He’s a Navy Seal: comes in and can do anything you ask him to.
I have a theory that you enjoy complete artistic freedom. Am I right that you’ve moved away from huge-budget blockbuster films in order to retain more freedom? balders1
Yes. Maybe it’s the immigrant-Indian-wanting-to-please-everybody thing. There’s something about me that gets triggered by taking a lot of money and then wanting to please the person that gave me that money. That isn’t healthy. So I pay for the movies and we do them with as small a budget as possible. That allows me to take unusual swings, both in the stories that I’m telling and in the way I’m telling them. And that freedom lets me hear myself better.
Shares of Genius Group Ltd. GNS soared 28.1% toward a 5 1/2-month high in premarket trading Thursday, after the the Singapore-based education company, said it will reward its shareholders by issuing a $10 blockchain-based digital discount coupon, or non-fungible token (NFT), for each share they own. First, the company said it began the application process to dual list its shares on Upstream, which is a trading app for NFTs and digital securities. Once that’s completed, the company will issue the $10 NFT coupons to shareholders. Then shareholders can redeem the NFT coupons for Genius Education Merits (GEMs) on GeniusU, the company’s Edtech platform. The stock had jumped onto trader screens in mid-January, as it skyrocketed after the company said it was going after alleged illegal trading in the shares through naked short selling. The stock has blasted 1,504.6% year to date, while the S&P 500 SPX has gained a mere 7.3%.
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Canada Goose Holdings Inc. GOOS stock fell 8% in premarket trades after the clothing brand said its adjusted earnings fell well short of estimates. The company also cut its 2023 earnings view because of the impact of COVID-19 in China and “slowing momentum in North America set against a tough macro-economic backdrop.” Canada Goose said its third-quarter earnings fell to C$134.9 million, or C$1.28 a share, from C$151.3 million, or C$1.40 a share, in the year-ago quarter. Adjusted earnings totaled C$1.27 a share, well below the analyst estimate of C$1.60 a share. Revenue dropped by 1.6% to C$576.7 million, and missing the analyst forecast of C$621.6 million. Looking ahead, Canada Goose now expects adjusted 2023 profit of 92 cents to C$1.03 a share, compared to its earlier estimate of C$1.31 to C$1.62 a share. Analysts currently expect Canada Goose to report 2023 adjusted earnings of C1.42 a share.
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Shares of Bristol Myers Squibb Co. BMY gained 0.9% in premarket trading on Thursday after the company announced better-than-expected earnings for the fourth quarter of 2022. Bristol Myers Squibb had a profit of $2.0 billion, or 95 cents per share, in the fourth quarter, down from $2.3 billion, or $1.07 per share, in the same quarter in 2021. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.82, against the FactSet consensus of $1.73. Bristol Myers Squibb had revenue of $11.4 billion for the quarter, down from $11.9 billion in the same quarter in 2021. The FactSet consensus was $11.2 billion. The company blamed the revenue loss of exclusivity on products like Revlimid, its multiple myeloma treatment, which had $2.2 billion in sales for the fourth quarter of 2022, compared with $3.3 billion in the final three months of 2021. The consensus was $1.9 billion. Bristol said it expects to have adjusted EPS of $7.95 to $8.25 in 2023. The company’s stock is up 9.9% over the past year, while the broader S&P 500 SPX is down 7.9%.
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Eli Lilly & Co.’s LLY stock fell 2.3% before market open Thursday after the biopharmaceutical giant’s fourth-quarter revenue came in below analysts’ expectations. The company reported net income of $1.938 billion, or $2.14 a share, up from net income of $1.726 billion, or $1.90 a share, in the year-earlier period. Adjusted per-share earnings came to $2.09, ahead of the FactSet consensus of $1.78. Revenue fell to $7.302 billion, down from almost $8 billion a year ago. Analysts surveyed by FactSet were looking for revenue of $7.332 billion. The company now sees full-year adjusted EPS of $8.35 to $8.55. Analysts surveyed by FactSet are looking for full year adjusted earnings of $8.35 a share. The company still sees 2023 revenue of $30.3 billion to $30.8 billion. The FactSet consensus is for 2023 revenue of $30.5 billion. “2023 is an inflection point for Lilly – a chance to expand our impact on patients and growth potential as an R&D-driven biopharma company,” said Eli Lilly’s CEO David A. Ricks, in a statement. “Over the course of this critical year, we hope to launch as many as four new medicines for challenging diseases, while advancing our next generation of molecules currently in Phase 3.”
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Shares of ConocoPhillips COP edged up 0.3% in premarket trading, after the energy exploration and production company reported fourth-quarter profit and production that rose, as realized prices increased, but fell a bit shy of expectations. Net income rose to $3.2 billion, or $2.61 a share, from $2.6 billion, or $1.98 a share, in the year-ago period. Excluding nonrecurring items, adjusted EPS of $2.71 was below the FactSet consensus of $2.72. Production increased 9.3% to 1,758 thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day (Mboed), but was just shy of the FactSet consensus of 1,764 Mboed. The total average realized price grew 8.4% to $71.05 per barrel of oil equivalent (BOE), and since production remains unhedged, the company realized the entirety of changes in market prices. The company does not report revenue or sales in its quarterly press releases. The company expects 2023 capital expenditures of $10.7 billion to $11.3 billion, and production of 1.76 million to 1.80 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (Mmboed). The stock has declined 7.0% over the past three months through Wednesday while the Energy Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund XLE has slipped 0.6% and the S&P 500 SPX has gained 9.6%.
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Cardinal Health Inc. CAH said Thursday it swung to a second-quarter loss of $130 million, or 50 cents a share, from a profit of $49 million, or 17 cent a share in the year-ago quarter. The company reported adjusted net income of $1.32 a share, ahead of the Wall Street forecast of $1.14 a share, according to estimates compiled by FactSet. Revenue increased by 13% to $51.5 billion, ahead of the analyst estimate of $50.72 billion. Looking ahead, Cardinal Health said it raised its forecast for adjusted earnings per share to $5.20 to $5.50 from its earlier view of $5.05 to $5.40. Analysts are expecting earnings of $5.32 a share. Cardinal Health stock is down 1.5% in 2023, compared to a 7.3% increase by the S&P 500 SPX.
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Hershey Co. HSY topped expectations with its latest earnings and outlook Thursday morning, noting that unit pricing contributed to retail sales growth in its most recent period. The company notched fourth-quarter net income of $396.3 million, or $1.92 a share, up from $335.6 million, or $1.62 a share, in the year-earlier period. On an adjusted basis, Hershey earned $2.02 a share, up from $1.69 a share a year before, while analysts tracked by FactSet were modeling $1.77 a share. Revenue climbed to $2.65 billion from $2.33 billion a year prior, whereas the FactSet consensus was for $2.58 billion. The company capped off “one of its strongest years in history despite record inflation, continued supply chain disruptions and macroeconomic uncertainty for many consumers,” Chief Executive Michele Buck said in a release, as annual revenue increased 16% to $10.4 billion. For the full year, Hershey anticipates 6% to 8% in net-sales growth, along with a 9% to 11% increased in adjusted earnings per share. Analysts tracked by FactSet were modeling $11.04 billion in revenue, up 5.9% from 2022 levels, and $8.96 in adjusted EPS, up 5.2% from what Hershey reported for 2022.
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The specialized division that included SCORPION, the anti-crime unit responsible for beating Tyre Nichols.
The post What $28 Million Bought the Memphis Police Department appeared first on The Intercept.
Ex-ministro da Justiça, preso por não conter atos terroristas em Brasília, é entendido como personagem central em uma série de movimentos antidemocráticos no país.
The post Não foi só omissão: Anderson Torres é peça-chave em vários atos golpistas, aponta PF appeared first on The Intercept.
A big spender on right-wing causes, investor Andrew Intrater gave seed money to a group formed to oust a reform-minded district attorney.
The post George Santos Benefactor Bankrolled Group Opposing LA’s Progressive Prosecutor appeared first on The Intercept.
As Europe’s most infamous migrant camp burned to the ground on the island of Lesbos in 2020, two Syrian friends evaded police to stay. Living in a post-apocalyptic graveyard, Ayham and Khalil now race against local scrap metal collectors to find what they can, which they are forced to sell at a reduced price. With what little money they make they buy food and cook together, dreaming of Aleppo before the civil war forced them to leave and waiting for an end to their bureaucratic limbo. From their shared tent their friendship endures, despite their impossible circumstances
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In parts of the United States, using the term “systemic racism” to refer to persistent discrimination against Black people has become a political flash point. To some ears, it sounds like an attack on the country and the local community. Several states have enacted laws that ban, or would appear to ban, discussing the concept in public schools and colleges, and even private workplaces. But racial-equity consultant Tynesia Boyea-Robinson uses the term with an engineer’s precision. When she first heard the phrase, she recalled her training in quality control in the transportation unit of GE Research, in Erie, Pa. And, sure enough, a lightbulb went on in her head: The system could be reengineered. “Oh my God, we can fix this!” she thought. “I don’t think everybody else sees it that way.”
Boyea-Robinson helps companies, government agencies, and other organizations meet goals for diversity and equity through her consulting firm, CapEQ. In October, her second book on this work, The Social Impact Advantage, was published. And she is the steward of Path to 15/55, an ambitious effort to deliver desperately needed capital to Black businesses across the United States. Since 2018, Boyea-Robinson has been assembling a coalition—including financial institutions, grassroots community groups, political and policy leaders, and corporate and philanthropic donors—to reprogram the systems of lending to and investing in these businesses.
Employer CapEQ
Title President and CEO
Alma mater Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering
Boyea-Robinson helps companies, government agencies, and other organizations meet goals for diversity and equity through her consulting firm, CapEQ. In October, her second book on this work, The Social Impact Advantage, was published. And she is the steward of Path to 15/55, an ambitious effort to deliver desperately needed capital to Black businesses across the United States. Since 2018, Boyea-Robinson has been assembling a coalition—including financial institutions, grassroots community groups, political and policy leaders, and corporate and philanthropic donors—to reprogram the systems of lending to and investing in these businesses.
Boyea-Robinson grew up in Cocoa Beach, Fla., where her father fixed satellites for the U.S. Air Force and her stepmother gave manicures in the family’s living room. In other circumstances, the straight As Boyea-Robinson earned at school and the lessons in mechanics her dad taught her might have ensured a trajectory toward a top STEM university. But her parents hadn’t gone to college and didn’t push her in that direction. Moreover, as the oldest, she was expected to help care for her four younger siblings. She expected to enroll at a community college until one of her stepmother’s clients pushed her to set her sights higher.
She attended Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, in Durham, N.C., where she earned a dual bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science. The curriculum was daunting, and she had to confront a persistent sense of being an outsider. But it was more than just the academics.
“There’s so many things about the culture of college that my parents couldn’t teach me,” she says. Adding to her initial anxiety was her status as one of the relatively few women at the engineering school—women made up just a quarter of the student body at Pratt—and there were even fewer Black students enrolled there (around 5 percent).
But when Boyea-Robinson graduated in 1999, she landed a plum information-management job at General Electric through the company’s prestigious leadership program. Though her anxiety about fitting in lingered, her career flourished. In 2003, she headed to Harvard Business School for an MBA that could give her upward trajectory an extra boost. Then her course changed when she took an internship at a nonprofit called Year Up. The organization helps prepare young adults, mostly poorer people of color, for entry-level IT jobs at large companies—jobs that recalled her first assignments at GE. “That student was me,” she says, “with different options and choices.”
Her assignment was to map out an expansion of Year Up from Boston to either Washington, D.C., or New York City. Boyea-Robinson pitched both. When she graduated in 2005, the nonprofit hired her to open the Washington location. She launched the first class in January 2006, and as she built Year Up’s presence in Washington, Boyea-Robinson’s work became a model for the organization nationwide, starting in New York later that year. Today, the nonprofit serves 16 metro areas and operates virtually in five others.
At Year Up, Boyea-Robinson began to hear about systemic racism, the biases that people collectively inject, consciously or not, into so many of the institutions and the rules governing society, leading to the disparate treatment of different groups of people. The knock-on effects from that discrimination exacerbate inequality—which then reinforces those biases in a sort of feedback loop. Thinking about all this, Boyea-Robinson concluded that she wanted to use systems engineering to tackle the problems of systemic racism on a larger scale.
Since launching CapEQ in 2011, Boyea-Robinson has worked with more than 50 clients, helping businesses such as Marriott and Nordstrom address their diversity and equity shortcomings. She has also worked with nonprofits and others seeking broader change, including those collaborating on Path to 15/55.
Path to 15/55 takes its premise from recent research by one of those organizations, the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, a trade group of nonprofits that make small loans to underserved entrepreneurs. The group found that if 15 percent of existing Black businesses could finance a single new employee, it would create US $55 billion in new economic activity. But Black entrepreneurs have been hobbled by the effects of an especially pernicious example of systemic racism. Until the 1960s, federal government policies explicitly prohibited Black people from buying homes in white neighborhoods and simultaneously decimated the value of Black neighborhoods. The result has been to deny most Black families the opportunity to build generational wealth on par with their white counterparts. Even today, Blacks are less likely to seek, or obtain, a home mortgage. Most small businesses are financed by savings or loans conditioned on good credit scores and a home that serves as collateral.
The coalition Boyea-Robinson assembled is pressing for systemic change on several levels. It’s pushing bankers and the financial industry at large to confront their own biases in lending. It also disseminates novel strategies for financing Black businesses to avoid the barriers that Black borrowers face, such as the use of credit scores to assess creditworthiness. The group will then rigorously collect data on which strategies work and which don’t to propagate what’s successful. Separately, it’s agitating for government policy changes to allow these new strategies to flourish.
Boyea-Robinson manages Path to 15/55 as if she were testing software with a feedback loop of its own. It starts with building awareness around a specific issue and forging alliances, or alignments, with like-minded organizations, which then go to work as communities of action to implement change.
“Everything we learn from communities of action becomes the information that we raise awareness on,” she says. “And the loop starts again: awareness, alignment, action. These are all unit tests that become systems tests.”
Boyea-Robinson still finds resistance to financing equity among bank loan officers. “The way racism shows up in lending is bankers saying that this work is not investable,” she says. “Shifting the narrative is why we spend so much time sharing reports and stories.”
Backed with a $250,000 grant from the Walmart Foundation, Path to 15/55 launched its first Community of Action in January. Piggybacking on work led by the Beneficial State Foundation, Boyea-Robinson has recruited five financial institutions to experiment with innovative ways to underwrite loans, and to build durable support within their organizations for the work—which, Boyea-Robinson says, is the only way these changes will stick. These institutions are expected to begin lending money by midyear. To lessen the risk of losses, Path to 15/55 will make the $1 million it has raised so far available for these loans.
And she’s joining forces with business accelerators to launch a second community of action, aimed at helping Black entrepreneurs buy existing businesses in corporate supply chains, later this year.
“Being able to kind of turbocharge work that is already compelling,” she says, “has been pretty exciting.”
This article appears in the February 2023 print issue as “Tynesia Boyea-Robinson.”
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Facebook parent company Meta bucks trend with better earnings than expected, as Apple sees first profit miss in seven years
The A-Team of big tech – Apple, Amazon and Alphabet – all delivered disappointing results on Thursday a day after Facebook owner Meta bucked the gloomy trend in technology, delivering better-than-expected results.
Apple shares slid more than 4% on Thursday after the company posted a disappointing first-quarter earnings report, including rare misses on revenue, profit and sales.
Continue reading...Graham Potter has admitted it will be challenging to maintain dressing-room harmony after Chelsea increased the size of their squad with their frantic January transfer business.
The club took their spending to more than £500m under the Todd Boehly-Clearlake Capital ownership when they broke the British transfer record by buying Enzo Fernández from Benfica for £106.8m on deadline day.
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As it happened: Prime minister speaks in interview on TalkTV to mark his 100th day in office
On the subject of Rishi Sunak reaching his 100th day in office, my colleague Jessica Elgot has a great assessment of how it’s going. Here is an extract.
After Liz Truss left office, polls suggested that voters wanted to keep an open mind about Sunak and rated him significantly higher than his party.
That is now beginning to turn. According to senior Labour figures, their most recent focus groups, with swing voters in Southampton, Dewsbury and Bury last week, were described as being “utterly brutal for Sunak”, with participants engaging in “open mockery” of the prime minister. Even the most pessimistic members of Keir Starmer’s team say they have seen a decisive shift.
In the coming weeks, our new stop the boats bill will change the law to send a message loud and clear.
If you come here illegally, you will be detained and removed.
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The tool Russian mercenaries used to kill a Syrian army deserter and others has become a violent meme, similar to the Punisher logo in the U.S.
The post The Grisly Cult of the Wagner Group’s Sledgehammer appeared first on The Intercept.
Sunak government under pressure after gas prices fuel ‘outrageous’ doubling of profits at Anglo-Dutch group
The government is under pressure to rethink its windfall tax on energy companies after Shell reported one of the largest profits in UK corporate history, with the surge in energy prices sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushing the oil company’s annual takings to $40bn (£32bn).
Opposition parties and trade unions described Shell’s bonanza, the biggest in its 115 year history, as “outrageous” and accused Rishi Sunak of letting fossil fuel companies “off the hook”.
Continue reading...Phone from 2007 with 2 megapixel camera and 8GB storage had sat on Karen Green’s shelf for years before she realized its worth
A first generation, unopened 2007 iPhone is expected to sell for more than $50,000 when it goes to auction on Thursday.
The phone, which has a 2 megapixel camera and 8GB of storage, was given to Karen Green as a gift when she got a new job, Business Insider reported.
Continue reading...Removal requires someone with experience, or you may be able to convert it into a less polluting appliance
Wood-burning stoves have become a key talking point in England as the cost of gas and electricity soars, and people have started to burn wood for heat.
The stoves have also become popular because of the cosy atmosphere they can lend a house, and many, especially in affluent urban areas, have noticed the distinctive wintry smell coming from chimneys as they walk around their neighbourhoods. Some people also believed burning wood must be better for the environment than using gas.
Continue reading...Powerhouses, levelling up, taking back control: the Labour leader says he is done with such ‘sticking plaster’ solutions
When the post-punk hero Mark E Smith intoned, more than 40 years ago, “the north will rise again”, he probably didn’t have in mind a constitutional commission chaired by Gordon Brown. But a lot has changed since 1980. Now even Britain’s political class in Westminster seems to have realised that the gaping socioeconomic divide between England’s north and south can be tackled only with root and branch reform.
Labour’s Report of the Commission on the UK’s Future is a genuinely radical set of proposals for combating regional inequality, and contrasts sharply with the Tories’ rather pitiful strategy for levelling up. Replacing the House of Lords with a democratic alternative, devolving control of transport, infrastructure and housing to local government, plans for moving large numbers of civil servants outside London – all these ideas suggest that Keir Starmer might just be serious about thoroughgoing reform of the most regionally unbalanced advanced economy in the world.
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Britain has been hit by a wave of stoppages this winter, as nurses, teachers and other public sector workers have gone on strike over pay and conditions. This has put them on a direct collision course with the government, which has introduced legislation to parliament to make it harder for workers to strike. Adam Sich and Maeve Shearlaw spent a month talking to workers on the picket lines and at protests to find out how the cost of living crisis is hitting them at home – and in their jobs
Continue reading...People from Niger delta areas of Ogale and Bille seeking justice in London’s high court
Nearly 14,000 people from two Nigerian communities are seeking justice in the high court in London against the fossil fuel giant Shell, claiming it is responsible for devastating pollution of their water sources and destruction of their way of life.
The individuals from the Niger delta area of Ogale, a farming community, lodged their claims last week, joining more than 2,000 people from the Bille area, a largely fishing community. In total 13,652 claims from individuals, and from churches and schools, are asking the oil giant to clean up the pollution which they say has devastated their communities. They are also asking for compensation for the resulting loss of their livelihoods. Their ability to farm and fish has been destroyed by the continuing oil spills from Shell operations, they claim.
Continue reading...Advisers argue he has made progress, but the new intake are frustrated and voters believe he is ‘out of touch’
Rishi Sunak has now survived 100 days as prime minister – a pretty small feat by historical standards but twice the length of his predecessor’s term. But the circumstances he inherited – the lack of mandate, plummeting polls and an economy in freefall – have deeply constrained what he is able to do with his time in office.
Inside No 10, key advisers argue that Sunak has already made significant progress, that the economy is starting to recover, that he has set out a clear stall with five pledges on inflation, national debt, the economy, immigration and the NHS, and that he has largely taken the Tory party infighting off the front pages.
Continue reading...Rishi Sunak entered Downing Street promising to calm the markets and stop the scandals, but 100 days in it’s proving a bumpy ride, reports Pippa Crerar
When Rishi Sunak entered Downing Street last October it followed one of the most chaotic periods in the Conservative party’s history. Boris Johnson had been ejected by his own MPs who then installed Liz Truss. When her economic plan sent financial markets into panic mode, her MPs got rid of her, too.
As the Guardian’s political editor, Pippa Crerar, tells Nosheen Iqbal, Sunak had three main tasks: restore calm to the economy, stop the stream of scandals within his party, and try to unite its warring factions. The evidence of the first 100 days is a mixed picture.
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A tiny radioactive capsule that was lost in the Australian outback for more than two weeks and posed a 'significant public health risk' has been found by the side of the road. The 8mm x 6mm capsule, which fell from a secure device on a truck travelling from a Rio Tinto mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia to Perth, was found south of the town of Newman. The Australian defence force is now verifying the device by its serial number. It is being stored at a secure location in Newman before being transported to Perth on Thursday, inside a lead container to shield people from radiation
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Continue reading...Leaked tax records suggest subsidiaries of international gas field contractors continued to make millions after the coup
In the two years since a murderous junta launched a coup in Myanmar, some of the world’s biggest oil and gas service companies continued to make millions of dollars from operations that have helped prop up the military regime, tax documents seen by the Guardian suggest.
The Myanmar military seized power in February 2021 and according to the United Nations special rapporteur on Myanmar, it is “committing war crimes and crimes against humanity daily”. More than 2,940 people, including children, pro-democracy activists and other civilians have been killed, according to Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
US oil services giant Halliburton’s Singapore-based subsidiary Myanmar Energy Services reported pre-tax profits of $6.3m in Myanmar in the year to September 2021, which includes eight months while the junta was in power.
Houston-headquartered oil services company Baker Hughes branch in Yangon reported pre-tax profits of $2.64m in the country in the six months to March 2022.
US firm Diamond Offshore Drilling reported $37m in fees to the Myanmar tax authority during the year to September 2021 and another $24.2m from then until March 2022.
Schlumberger Logelco (Yangon Branch), the Panama-based subsidiary of the US-listed world’s largest offshore drilling company, earned revenues of $51.7m in the year to September 2021 in Myanmar and as late as September 2022 was owed $200,000 in service fees from the junta’s energy ministry.
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With the combination of
requiring all new light-duty vehicles sold in New York State be zero-emission by 2035, investments in electric vehicles charging stations, and state and federal EV rebates, “you’re going to see that you have no more excuses” for not buying an EV, according to New York Governor Kathy Hochul.
Perhaps, but getting the vast majority of 111 million US households who own one or more light duty internal combustion vehicles to switch to EVs is going to take time. Even if interest in purchasing an EV is increasing, close to 70 percent of Americans are still leaning towards buying an ICE vehicles as their next purchase. In the UK, only 14 percent of drivers plan to purchase an EV as their next car.
Even when there is an expressed interest in purchasing a battery electric or hybrid vehicle, it often did not turn into an actual purchase. A 2022 CarGurus survey found that 35 percent of new car buyers expressed an interest in purchasing a hybrid, but only 13 percent eventually did. Similarly, 22 percent expressed interest in a battery electric vehicle (BEV), but only 5 percent bought one.
Each potential EV buyer assesses their individual needs against the benefits and risks an EV offers. However, until mainstream public confidence reaches the point where the perceived combination of risks of a battery electric vehicle purchase (range, affordability, reliability and behavioral changes) match that of an ICE vehicle, then EV purchases are going to be the exception rather than the norm.
Studies differ about how far drivers want to be able to go between charges. One Bloomberg study found 341 miles was the average range desired, while Deloitte Consulting’s 2022 Global Automotive Consumer Study found U.S. consumers want to be able to travel 518 miles on a fully charged battery in a BEV that costs $50,000 or less.
Arguments over how much range is needed are contentious. There are some who argue that because
95 percent of American car trips are 30 miles or less, a battery range of 250 miles or less is all that is needed. They also point out that this would reduce the price of the EV, since batteries account for about 30 percent of an EVs total cost. In addition, using smaller batteries would allow more EVs to be built, and potentially relieve pressure on the battery supply chain. If longer trips are needed, well, “bring some patience and enjoy the charging experience” seems to be the general advice.
While perhaps logical, these arguments are not going to influence typical buying decisions much. The first question potential EV buyers are going to ask themselves is, “Am I going to be paying more for a compromised version of mobility?” says Alexander Edwards, President of Strategic Vision, a research-based consultancy that aims to understand human behavior and decision-making.
Driver’s side view of 2024 Chevrolet Equinox EV 3LT.Chevrolet
Edwards explains potential customers do not have range anxiety per se: If they believe they require a vehicle that must go 400 miles before stopping, “even if once a month, once a quarter, or once a year,” all vehicles that cannot meet that criteria will be excluded from their buying decision. Range anxiety, therefore, is more a concern for EV owners. Edwards points out that regarding range, most BEV owners own at least one ICE vehicle to meet their long-distance driving needs.
What exactly is the “range” of a BEV is itself becoming a heated point of contention. While ICE vehicles driving ranges are affected by weather and driving conditions, the effects are well-understood after decades of experience. This experience is lacking with non-EV owners. Extreme heat and cold negatively affect EV battery ranges and charging time, as do driving speeds and terrain.
Peter Rawlinson serves as the CEO and CTO of Lucid.Lucid
Some automakers are reticent to say how much range is affected under differing conditions. Others, like Ford’s CEO Jim Farley, freely admits, “If you’re pulling 10,000 pounds, an electric truck is not the right solution. And 95 percent of our customers tow more than 10,000 pounds.” GM, though, is promising it will meet heavier towing requirements with its 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV. However, Lucid Group CEO Peter Rawlinson in a non-too subtle dig at both Ford and GM said, “The correct solution for an affordable pickup truck today is the internal combustion engine.”
Ford’s Farley foresees that the heavy-duty truck segment will be sticking with ICE trucks for a while, as “it will probably go hydrogen fuel cell before it goes pure electric.” Many in the auto industry are warning that realistic BEV range numbers under varying conditions need to be widely published, else risk creating a backlash against EVs in general.
Range risk concerns obviously are tightly coupled to EV charging availability. Most charging is assumed to take place at home, but this is not an option for many home or apartment tenants. Even those with homes, their garages may not be available for EV charging. Scarce and unreliable EV charging opportunities, as well as publicized EV road trip horror stories, adds to both the potential EV owners’ current perceived and real range satisfaction risk.
Price is another EV purchase risk that is comparable to EV range. Buying a new car is the second most expensive purchase a consumer makes behind buying a house. Spending nearly 100 percent of an annual US median household income on an unfamiliar technology is not a minor financial ask.
That is one reason why legacy automakers and EV start-ups are attempting to follow Tesla’s success in the luxury vehicle segment, spending much of their effort producing vehicles that are “above the median average annual US household income, let alone buyer in new car market,” Strategic Vision’s Edwards says. On top of the twenty or so luxury EVs already or soon to be on the market, Sony and Honda recently announced that they would be introducing yet another luxury EV in 2026.
It is true that there are some EVs that will soon appear in the competitive price range of ICE vehicles like the low-end GM EV Equinox SUV presently priced around $30,000 with a 280-mile range. How long GM will be able to keep that price in the face of battery cost increases and inflationary pressure, is anyone’s guess. It has already started to increase the cost of its Chevrolet Bolt EVs, which it had slashed last year, “due to ongoing industry-related pricing pressures.”
The Lucid Air’s price ranges from $90,000 to $200,000 depending on options.Lucid.
Analysts believe Tesla intends to spark an EV price war before its competitors are ready for one. This could benefit consumers in the short-term, but could also have long-term downside consequences for the EV industry as a whole. Tesla fired its first shot over its competitors’ bows with a recently announced price cut from $65,990 to $52,990 for its basic Model Y, with a range of 330 miles. That makes the Model Y cost-competitive with Hyundai’s $45,500 IONIQ 5 e-SUV with 304 miles of range.
Tesla’s pricing power could be hard to counter, at least in the short term. Ford’s cheapest F-150 Lightning Pro is now $57,869 compared to $41,769 a year ago due to what Ford
says are “ongoing supply chain constraints, rising material costs and other market factors.” The entry level F-150 XL with an internal combustion engine has risen in the past year from about $29,990 to $33,695 currently.
Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis.Stellantis
Automakers like Stellantis, freely acknowledge that EVs are too expensive for most buyers, with Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares even warning that if average consumers can’t afford EVs as ICE vehicle sales are banned, “There is potential for social unrest.” However, other automakers like BMW are quite unabashed about going after the luxury market which it terms “white hot.” BMW’s CEO Oliver Zipse does say the company will not leave the “lower market segment,” which includes the battery electric iX1 xDrive30 that retails for A$82,900 in Australia and slightly lower elsewhere. It is not available in the United States.
Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Kallenius also believes luxury EVs will be a catalyst for greater EV adoption—eventually. But right now, 75 percent of its investment has been redirected at bringing luxury vehicles to market.
The fact that luxury EVs are more profitable no doubt helps keep automakers focused on that market. Ford’s very popular Mustang Mach-E is having trouble maintaining profitability, for instance, which has forced Ford to raise its base price from $43,895 to $46,895. Even in the Chinese market where smaller EV sales are booming, profits are not. Strains on profitability for automakers and their suppliers may increase further as battery metals prices increase, warns data analysis company S&P Global Mobility.
Jim Rowan, Volvo Cars’ CEO and President.Volvo Cars
As a result, EVs are unlikely to match ICE vehicle prices (or profits) anytime soon even for smaller EV models, says Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo, because of the ever increasing cost of batteries. Mercedes Chief Technology Officer Marcus Schäfer agrees and does not see EV/ICE price parity “with the [battery] chemistry we have today.” Volvo CEO Jim Rowan, disagrees with both of them, however, seeing ICE-EV price parity coming by 2025-2026.
Interestingly, a 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study predicted that as EVs became more widespread, battery prices would climb because the demand for lithium and other battery metals would rise sharply. As a result, the study indicated EV/ICE price parity was likely closer to 2030 with the expectation that new battery chemistries would be introduced by then.
Many argue, however, that total cost of ownership (TCO) should be used as the EV purchase decision criterion rather than sticker price. Total cost of ownership of EVs is generally less than an ICE vehicle over its expected life since they have lower maintenance costs and electricity is less expensive per mile than gasoline, and tax incentives and rebates help a lot as well.
However, how long it takes to hit the break-even point depends on many factors, like the cost differential of a comparable ICE vehicle, depreciation, taxes, insurance costs, the cost of electricity/petrol in a region, whether charging takes place at home, etc. And TCO rapidly loses it selling point appeal if electricity prices go up, however, as is happening in the UK and in Germany.
Even if the total cost of ownership is lower for an EV, a potential EV customer may not be interested if meeting today’s monthly auto payments is difficult. Extra costs like needing to install a fast charger at home, which can add several thousand dollars more, or higher insurance costs, which could add an extra $500-$600 a year, may also be seen as buying impediment and can change the TCO equation.
To perhaps distract wary EV buyers from range and affordability issues, the automakers have focused their efforts on highlighting EV performance. Raymond Roth, a director at financial advisory firm Stout Risius Ross, observes among automakers, “There’s this arms race right now of best in class performance” being the dominant selling point.
This “wow” experience is being pursued by every EV automaker. Mercedes CEO Kallenius, for example, says to convince its current luxury vehicle owners to an EV, “the experience for the customer in terms of the torque, the performance, everything [must be] fantastic.” Nissan, which seeks a more mass market buyer, runs commercials exclaiming, “Don’t get an EV for the ‘E’, but because it will pin you in your seat, sparks your imagination and takes your breath away.”
Ford believes it will earn $20 billion, Stellantis some $22.5 billion and GM $20 to $25 billion from paid software-enabled vehicle features by 2030.
EV reliability issues may also take one’s breath away. Reliability is “extremely important” to new-car buyers, according to a 2022 report from Consumer Reports (CR). Currently, EV reliability is nothing to brag about. CR’s report says that “On average, EVs have significantly higher problem rates than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles across model years 2019 and 2020.” BEVs dwell at the bottom of the rankings.
Reliability may prove to be an Achilles heel to automakers like GM and Ford. GM CEO Mary Barra has very publicly promised that GM would no longer build “ crappy cars.” The ongoing problems with the Chevy Bolt undercuts that promise, and if its new Equinox EV has issues, it could hurt sales. Ford has reliability problems of its own, paying $4 billion in warranty costs last year alone. Its e-Mustang has been subject to several recalls over the past year. Even perceived quality-leader Toyota has been embarrassed by wheels falling off weeks after the introduction of its electric bZ4X SUV, the first in a new series “bZ”—beyond zero—electric vehicles.
A Tesla caught up in a mudslide in Silverado Canyon, Calif., on March 10, 2021. Jae C. Hong/AP Photo
Troubles with vehicle electronics, which has plagued ICE vehicles as well for some time, seems even worse in EVs according to Consumer Report’s data. This should not be surprising, since EVs are packed with the latest electronic and software features to make them attractive, like new biometric capability, but they often do not work. EV start-up Lucid is struggling with a range of software woes, and software problems have pushed back launches years at Audi, Porsche and Bentley EVs, which are part of Volkswagen Group.
Another reliability risk-related issue is getting an EV repaired when something goes awry, or there is an accident. Right now, there is a dearth of EV-certified mechanics and repair shops. The
UK Institute of the Motor Industry (IMI) needs 90,000 EV-trained technicians by 2030. The IMI estimates that less than 7 percent of the country’s automotive service workforce of 200,000 vehicle technicians is EV qualified. In the US, the situation is not better. The National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence (ASE), which certifies auto repair technicians, says the US has 229,000 ASE-certified technicians. However, there are only some 3,100 certified for electric vehicles. With many automakers moving to reduce their dealership networks, resolving problems that over-the-air (OTA) software updates cannot fix might be troublesome.
Furthermore, the costs and time needed to repair an EV are higher than for ICE vehicles, according to the data analytics company CCC. Reasons include a greater need to use original equipment manufacturer (OEM) parts and the cost of scans/recalibration of the advanced driver assistance systems, which have been rising for ICE vehicles as well. Furthermore, technicians need to ensure battery integrity to prevent potential fires.
And some of batteries along with their battery management systems need work. Two examples: Recalls involving the GM Bolt and Hyundai Kona, with the former likely to cost GM $1.8 billion and Hyundai $800 million to fix, according to Stout’s 2021 Automotive Defect and Recall Report. Furthermore, the battery defect data compiled by Stout indicates “incident rates are rising as production is increasing and incidents commonly occur across global platforms,” with both design and manufacturing defects starting to appear.
For a time in New York City, one had to be a licensed engineer to drive a steam-powered auto. In some aspects, EV drivers return to these roots. This might change over time, but for now it is a serious issue.” —John Leslie King
CCC data indicate that when damaged, battery packs do need replacement after a crash, and more than 50 percent of such vehicles were deemed a total loss by the insurance companies. EVs also need to revisit the repair center more times after they’ve been repaired than ICE vehicles, hinting at the increased difficulty in repairing them. Additionally, EV tire tread wear needs closer inspection than on ICE vehicles. Lastly, as auto repair centers need to invest in new equipment to handle EVs, these costs will be passed along to customers for some time.
Electric vehicle and charging network cybersecurity is also growing as a perceived risk. A 2021 survey by insurance company HSB found that an increasing number of drivers, not only of EVs but ICE vehicles, are concerned about their vehicle’s security. Some 10 percent reported “a hacking incident or other cyber-attack had affected their vehicle,” HSB reported. Reports of charging stations being compromised are increasingly common.
The risk has reached the attention of the US Office of the National Cyber Director, which recently held a forum of government and automaker, suppliers and EV charging manufacturers focusing on “cybersecurity issues in the electric vehicle (EV) and electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) ecosystem.” The concern is that EV uptake could falter if EV charging networks are not perceived as being secure.
A sleeper risk that may explode into a massive problem is an EV owner’s right-to-repair their vehicle. In 2020, Massachusetts passed a law that allows a vehicle owner to take it to whatever repair shop they wish and gave independent repair shops the right to access the real-time vehicle data for diagnosis purposes. Auto dealers have sued to overturn the law, and some auto makers like Subaru and Kia have disabled the advanced telematic systems in cars sold in Massachusetts, often without telling new customers about it. GM and Stellantis have also said they cannot comply with the Massachusetts law, and are not planning to do so because it would compromise their vehicles’ safety and cybersecurity. The Federal Trade Commission is looking into the right-to-repair issue, and President Biden has come out in support of it.
Failure to change consumer behavior poses another major risk to the EV transition. Take charging. It requires a new consumer behavior in terms of understanding how and when to charge, and what to do to keep an EV battery healthy. The information on the care and feeding of a battery as well as how to maximize vehicle range can resemble a manual for owning a new, exotic pet. It does not help when an automaker like Ford tells its F-150 Lightning owners they can extend their driving range by relying on the heated seats to stay warm instead of the vehicle’s climate control system.
Keeping in mind such issues, and how one might work around them, increases a driver’s cognitive load—things that must be remembered in case they must be acted on. “Automakers spent decades reducing cognitive load with dash lights instead of gauges, or automatic instead of manual transmissions,” says University of Michigan professor emeritus John Leslie King, who has long studied human interactions with machines.
King notes, “In the early days of automobiles, drivers and chauffeurs had to monitor and be able to fix their vehicles. They were like engineers. For a time in New York City, one had to be a licensed engineer to drive a steam-powered auto. In some aspects, EV drivers return to these roots. This might change over time, but for now it is a serious issue.”
The first-ever BMW iX1 xDrive30, Mineral White metallic, 20“ BMW Individual Styling 869i BMW AG
This cognitive load keeps changing as well. For instance, “common knowledge” about when EV owners should charge is not set in concrete. The long-standing mantra for charging EV batteries has been do so at home from at night when electricity rates were low and stress on the electric grid was low. Recent research from Stanford University says this is wrong, at least for Western states.
Stanford’s research shows that electricity rates should encourage EV charging during the day at work or at public chargers to prevent evening grid peak demand problems, which could increase by as much as 25 percent in a decade. The Wall Street Journal quotes the study’s lead author Siobhan Powell as saying if everyone were charging their EVs at night all at once, “it would cause really big problems.”
Asking EV owners to refrain from charging their vehicles at home during the night is going to be difficult, since EVs are being sold on the convenience of charging at home. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg emphasized this very point when describing how great EVs are to own, “And the main charging infrastructure that we count on is just a plug in the wall.”
EV owners increasingly find public charging unsatisfying and is “one of the compromises battery electric vehicle owners have to make,” says Strategic Vision’s Alexander Edwards, “that drives 25 percent of battery electric vehicle owners back to a gas powered vehicle.” Fixing the multiple problems underlying EV charging will not likely happen anytime soon.
Another behavior change risk relates to automakers’ desired EV owner post-purchase buying behavior. Automakers see EV (and ICE vehicle) advanced software and connectivity as a gateway to a software-as-a-service model to generate new, recurring revenue streams across the life of the vehicle. Automakers seem to view EVs as razors through which they can sell software as the razor blades. Monetizing vehicle data and subscriptions could generate $1.5 trillion by 2030, according to McKinsey.
VW thinks that it will generate “triple-digit-millions” in future sales through selling customized subscription services, like offering autonomous driving on a pay-per-use basis. It envisions customers would be willing to pay 7 euros per hour for the capability. Ford believes it will earn $20 billion, Stellantis some $22.5 billion and GM $20 to $25 billion from paid software-enabled vehicle features by 2030.
Already for ICE vehicles, BMW is reportedly offering an $18 a month subscription (or $415 for “unlimited” access) for heated front seats in multiple countries, but not the U.S. as of yet. GM has started charging $1,500 for a three-year “optional” OnStar subscription on all Buick and GMC vehicles as well as the Cadillac Escalade SUV whether the owner uses it or not. And Sony and Honda have announced their luxury EV will be subscription-based, although they have not defined exactly what this means in terms of standard versus paid-for features. It would not be surprising to see it follow Mercedes’ lead. The automaker will increase the acceleration of its EQ series if an owner pays a $1,200 a year subscription fee.
Essentially, automakers are trying to normalize paying for what used to be offered as standard or even an upgrade option. Whether they will be successful is debatable, especially in the U.S. “No one is going to pay for subscriptions,” says Strategic Vision’s Edwards, who points out that microtransactions are absolutely hated in the gaming community. Automakers risk a major consumer backlash by using them.
To get to EV at scale, each of the EV-related range, affordability, reliability and behavioral changes risks will need to be addressed by automakers and policy makers alike. With dozens of new battery electric vehicles becoming available for sale in the next two years, potential EV buyers now have a much great range of options than previously. The automakers who manage EV risks best— along with offering compelling overall platform performance—will be the ones starting to claw back some of their hefty EV investments.
No single risk may be a deal breaker for an early EV adopter, but for skeptical ICE vehicle owners, each risk is another reason not to buy, regardless of perceived benefits offered. If EV-only families are going to be the norm, the benefits of purchasing EVs will need to be above—and the risks associated with owning will need to match or be below—those of today’s and future ICE vehicles.
In the next articles of this series, we’ll explore the changes that may be necessary to personal lifestyles to achieve 2050 climate goals.
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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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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.
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.”
The end of Moore’s Law is looming. Engineers and designers can do only so much to miniaturize transistors and pack as many of them as possible into chips. So they’re turning to other approaches to chip design, incorporating technologies like AI into the process.
Samsung, for instance, is adding AI to its memory chips to enable processing in memory, thereby saving energy and speeding up machine learning. Speaking of speed, Google’s TPU V4 AI chip has doubled its processing power compared with that of its previous version.
But AI holds still more promise and potential for the semiconductor industry. To better understand how AI is set to revolutionize chip design, we spoke with Heather Gorr, senior product manager for MathWorks’ MATLAB platform.
How is AI currently being used to design the next generation of chips?
Heather Gorr: AI is such an important technology because it’s involved in most parts of the cycle, including the design and manufacturing process. There’s a lot of important applications here, even in the general process engineering where we want to optimize things. I think defect detection is a big one at all phases of the process, especially in manufacturing. But even thinking ahead in the design process, [AI now plays a significant role] when you’re designing the light and the sensors and all the different components. There’s a lot of anomaly detection and fault mitigation that you really want to consider.
Heather GorrMathWorks
Then, thinking about the logistical modeling that you see in any industry, there is always planned downtime that you want to mitigate; but you also end up having unplanned downtime. So, looking back at that historical data of when you’ve had those moments where maybe it took a bit longer than expected to manufacture something, you can take a look at all of that data and use AI to try to identify the proximate cause or to see something that might jump out even in the processing and design phases. We think of AI oftentimes as a predictive tool, or as a robot doing something, but a lot of times you get a lot of insight from the data through AI.
What are the benefits of using AI for chip design?
Gorr: Historically, we’ve seen a lot of physics-based modeling, which is a very intensive process. We want to do a reduced order model, where instead of solving such a computationally expensive and extensive model, we can do something a little cheaper. You could create a surrogate model, so to speak, of that physics-based model, use the data, and then do your parameter sweeps, your optimizations, your Monte Carlo simulations using the surrogate model. That takes a lot less time computationally than solving the physics-based equations directly. So, we’re seeing that benefit in many ways, including the efficiency and economy that are the results of iterating quickly on the experiments and the simulations that will really help in the design.
So it’s like having a digital twin in a sense?
Gorr: Exactly. That’s pretty much what people are doing, where you have the physical system model and the experimental data. Then, in conjunction, you have this other model that you could tweak and tune and try different parameters and experiments that let sweep through all of those different situations and come up with a better design in the end.
So, it’s going to be more efficient and, as you said, cheaper?
Gorr: Yeah, definitely. Especially in the experimentation and design phases, where you’re trying different things. That’s obviously going to yield dramatic cost savings if you’re actually manufacturing and producing [the chips]. You want to simulate, test, experiment as much as possible without making something using the actual process engineering.
We’ve talked about the benefits. How about the drawbacks?
Gorr: The [AI-based experimental models] tend to not be as accurate as physics-based models. Of course, that’s why you do many simulations and parameter sweeps. But that’s also the benefit of having that digital twin, where you can keep that in mind—it's not going to be as accurate as that precise model that we’ve developed over the years.
Both chip design and manufacturing are system intensive; you have to consider every little part. And that can be really challenging. It's a case where you might have models to predict something and different parts of it, but you still need to bring it all together.
One of the other things to think about too is that you need the data to build the models. You have to incorporate data from all sorts of different sensors and different sorts of teams, and so that heightens the challenge.
How can engineers use AI to better prepare and extract insights from hardware or sensor data?
Gorr: We always think about using AI to predict something or do some robot task, but you can use AI to come up with patterns and pick out things you might not have noticed before on your own. People will use AI when they have high-frequency data coming from many different sensors, and a lot of times it’s useful to explore the frequency domain and things like data synchronization or resampling. Those can be really challenging if you’re not sure where to start.
One of the things I would say is, use the tools that are available. There’s a vast community of people working on these things, and you can find lots of examples [of applications and techniques] on GitHub or MATLAB Central, where people have shared nice examples, even little apps they’ve created. I think many of us are buried in data and just not sure what to do with it, so definitely take advantage of what’s already out there in the community. You can explore and see what makes sense to you, and bring in that balance of domain knowledge and the insight you get from the tools and AI.
What should engineers and designers consider when using AI for chip design?
Gorr: Think through what problems you’re trying to solve or what insights you might hope to find, and try to be clear about that. Consider all of the different components, and document and test each of those different parts. Consider all of the people involved, and explain and hand off in a way that is sensible for the whole team.
How do you think AI will affect chip designers’ jobs?
Gorr: It’s going to free up a lot of human capital for more advanced tasks. We can use AI to reduce waste, to optimize the materials, to optimize the design, but then you still have that human involved whenever it comes to decision-making. I think it’s a great example of people and technology working hand in hand. It’s also an industry where all people involved—even on the manufacturing floor—need to have some level of understanding of what’s happening, so this is a great industry for advancing AI because of how we test things and how we think about them before we put them on the chip.
How do you envision the future of AI and chip design?
Gorr: It's very much dependent on that human element—involving people in the process and having that interpretable model. We can do many things with the mathematical minutiae of modeling, but it comes down to how people are using it, how everybody in the process is understanding and applying it. Communication and involvement of people of all skill levels in the process are going to be really important. We’re going to see less of those superprecise predictions and more transparency of information, sharing, and that digital twin—not only using AI but also using our human knowledge and all of the work that many people have done over the years.
Simple, effective solutions that can help lessen the impact of climate change already exist. Some of them still need to be implemented, though, while others need to be improved.
That’s according to 2023 IEEE President Saifur Rahman, who was among the speakers from engineering organizations at the COP27 event held in Egypt in November. The IEEE Life Fellow spoke during a session addressing the role of technology in delivering an equitable, sustainable, and low-carbon resilient world.
Rahman, a power expert and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech, is the former chair of the IEEE ad hoc committee on climate change. The committee was formed last year to coordinate the organization’s response to the global crisis.
About one-third of emissions globally are produced through electricity generation, and Rahman said his mission is to help reduce that amount through engineering solutions.
At COP27, he said that even though the first legally binding international treaty on climate change, known as the Paris Agreement, was adopted nearly a decade ago, countries have yet to come to a consensus on how to stop burning fossil fuels, among other issues. Some continue to burn coal, for example, because there are no other economically feasible choices for them.
“We as technologists from IEEE say, ‘If you keep to your positions, you’ll never get an agreement,’” he said. “We have come to offer this six-point portfolio of solutions that everybody can live with. We want to be a solution partner so we can have parties at the table to help solve this problem of high carbon emissions globally.”
The solutions Rahman outlined were the use of proven methods that reduce electricity usage, making coal plants more efficient, using hydrogen and other storage solutions, promoting more renewables, installing new types of nuclear reactors, and encouraging cross-border power transfers.
One action is to use less electricity, Rahman said, noting that dimming lights by 20 percent in homes, office buildings, hotels, and schools could save 10 percent of electricity. Most people wouldn’t even notice the difference in brightness, he said.
Another is switching to LEDs, which use at least 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs. LED bulbs cost about five times more, but they last longer, he said. He called on developed countries to provide financial assistance to developing nations to help them replace all their incandescent bulbs with LEDs.
Another energy-saving measure is to raise the temperature of air conditioners by 2 °C. This could save 10 percent of electricity as well, Rahman.
By better controlling lighting, heating, and cooling, 20 percent of energy could be saved without causing anyone to suffer, he said.
Shutting down coal power plants completely is unlikely to happen anytime soon, he predicted, especially since many countries are building new ones that have 40-year life spans. Countries that continue to burn coal should do so in high-efficiency power plants, he said.
One type is the ultrasupercritical coal-fired steam power plant. Conventional coal-fired plants, which make water boil to generate steam that activates a turbine, have an efficiency of about 38 percent. Ultrasupercritical plants operate at temperatures and pressures at which the liquid and gas phases of water coexist in equilibrium. It results in higher efficiencies: about 46 percent. Rahman cited the Eemshaven ultrasupercritical plant, in Groningen, Netherlands—which was built in 2014.
Another efficient option he pointed out is the combined cycle power plant. In its first stage, natural gas is burned in a turbine to make electricity. The heat from the turbine’s exhaust is used to produce steam to turn a turbine in the second stage. The resulting two-stage power plant is at least 25 percent more efficient than a single-stage plant.
“IEEE wants to be a solution partner, not a complaining partner, so we can have both parties at the table to help solve this problem of high carbon emissions globally.”
Another method to make coal-fired power plants more environmentally friendly is to capture the exhausted carbon dioxide and store it in the ground, Rahman said. Such carbon-capture systems are being used in some locations, but he acknowledges that the carbon sequestration process is too expensive for some countries.
To properly balance electricity supply and demand on the power grid, renewables should be integrated into energy generation, transmission, and distribution systems from the very start, Rahman said. He added that the energy from wind, solar, and hydroelectric plants should be stored in batteries so the electricity generated from them during off-peak hours isn’t wasted but integrated into energy grids.
He also said low-cost, low-carbon hydrogen fuel should be considered as part of the renewable energy mix. The fuel can be used to power cars, supply electricity, and heat homes, all with zero carbon emissions.
“Hydrogen would help emerging economies meet their climate goals, lower their costs, and make their energy grid more resilient,” he said.
Rahman conceded there’s a stigma that surrounds nuclear power plants because of accidents at Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and elsewhere. But, he said, without nuclear power, the concept of becoming carbon neutral by 2050 isn’t realistic.
“It’s not possible in the next 25 years except with nuclear power,” he said. “We don’t have enough solar energy and wind energy.”
Small modular reactors could replace traditional nuclear power plants. SMRs are easier and less expensive to build, and they’re safer than today’s large nuclear plants, Rahman said.
Though small, SMRs are powerful. They have an output of up to 300 megawatts of electricity, or about a quarter of the size of today’s typical nuclear plant.
The modular reactors are assembled in factories and shipped to their ultimate location, instead of being built onsite. And unlike traditional nuclear facilities, SMRs don’t need to be located near large bodies of water to handle the waste heat discharge.
SMRs have not taken off, Rahman says, because of licensing and technical issues.
Rahman emphasized the need for more cross-border power transfers, as few countries have enough electricity to supply to all their citizens. Many countries already do so.
“The United States buys power from Canada. France sells energy to Italy, Spain, and Switzerland,” Rahman said. “The whole world is one grid. You cannot transition from coal to solar and vice versa unless you transfer power back and forth.”
During the conference session, Rahman said an IEEE collection of 7,000 papers related to climate change is accessible from the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. IEEE also launched a website that houses additional resources.
None of the solutions IEEE proposed are new or untested, Rahman said, but his goal is to “provide a portfolio of solutions acceptable to and deployable in both the emerging economies and the developed countries—which will allow them to sit at the table together and see how much carbon emission can be saved by creative application of already available technologies so that both parties win at the end of the day.”
It seems we have no right to be on this planet without the permission of landowners, writes Peter Reilly; plus letters from Linda Gresham and Paul Dobbs
Re your report (Dartmoor national park to pay landowners to allow wild camping, 19 January), it seems the local authorities and courts ignore the principle that everyone has an equal right to life. It seems we have no right to be on this planet without the permission of landowners.
Nobody made the land or creates its value; it should be our common heritage. Centuries old economic injustice stems from private ownership of land by the few. It has led to an inexorable transfer of wealth to landowners, without them lifting a finger, except to raise rents. The only fair and practical solution is to tax land values, to transfer that unearned and undeserved wealth back to the many.
Peter Reilly
Chair, Labour Land Campaign
This sponsored article is brought to you by COMSOL.
The 1985 action-adventure TV series MacGyver showcased the life of Angus MacGyver, a secret agent who solved problems using items he had on hand. For example, in one episode, he made a heat shield out of used refrigerator parts. In another, he made a fishing lure with a candy wrapper. More than three decades later, the show still has relevance. The verb MacGyver, to design something in a makeshift or creative way, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015.
Try putting your MacGyver skills to the test: If you were handed some CDs, what would you make out of them? Reflective wall art, mosaic ornaments, or a wind chime, perhaps? What about a miniaturized water treatment plant?
This is what a team of engineers and researchers are doing at Eden Tech, a company based in Paris, France, that specializes in the development of microfluidics technology. Within their R&D department, Eden Cleantech, they are developing a compact, energy-saving water treatment system to help tackle the growing presence of micropollutants in wastewater. To analyze the performance of their AKVO system (named after the Latin word for water, aqua), which is made from CDs, Eden Tech turned to multiphysics simulation.
“There are many ways micropollutants make it into wastewater,” says Wei Zhao, a senior chemical engineer and chief product officer at Eden Tech. The rise of these microscopic chemicals in wastewater worldwide is a result of daily human activities. For instance, when we wash our hands with soap, wipe down our sinks with cleaning supplies, or flush medications out of our bodies, various chemicals are washed down the drain and end up in sewage systems. Some of these chemicals are classified as micropollutants, or contaminants of emerging concern (CECs). In addition to domestic waste, agricultural pollution and industrial waste are also to blame for the rise of micropollutants in our waterways.
Micropollutants are added to the world’s lakes, rivers, and streams every day. Many conventional wastewater treatment plants are not equipped to remove these potentially hazardous chemical residues from wastewater.
Unfortunately, many conventional wastewater treatment plants (WWTP, Figure 1) are not designed to remove these contaminants. Therefore, they are often reintroduced to various bodies of water, including rivers, streams, lakes, and even drinking water. Although the risk they pose to human and environmental health is not fully understood, the increasing number of pollution found in the world’s bodies of water is of concern.
With this growing problem in mind, Eden Tech got to work on developing a solution, thus AKVO was born. Each AKVO CD core is designed to have a diameter of 15 cm and a thickness of 2 mm. One AKVO cartridge is composed of stacked CDs of varying numbers, combined to create a miniaturized factory. One AKVO core treats 0.5 to 2 m3 water/day, which means that an AKVO system composed of 10,000 CDs can treat average municipal needs. This raises the question: How can a device made from CDs decontaminate water?
A single AKVO system (Figure 2) consists of a customizable cartridge filled with stacked CDs that each have a microchannel network inscribed on them. It removes undesirable elements in wastewater, like micropollutants, by circulating the water in its microchannel networks. These networks are energy savvy because they only require a small pump to circulate and clean large volumes of water. The AKVO system’s cartridges can easily be replaced, with Eden Tech taking care of their recycling.
AKVO’s revolutionary design combines photocatalysis and microfluidics into one compact system. Photocatalysis, a type of advanced oxidation process (AOP), is a fast and effective way to remove micropollutants from wastewater. Compared to other AOPs, it is considered safer and more sustainable because it is powered by a light source. During photocatalysis, light is absorbed by photocatalysts that have the ability to create electron-hole pairs, which generate free hydroxyl radicals that are able to react with target pollutants and degrade them. The combination of photocatalysis and microfluidics for the treatment of wastewater has never been done before. “It is a very ambitious project,” said Zhao. “We wanted to develop an innovative method in order to provide an environmentally friendly, efficient way to treat wastewater.” AKVO’s current design did not come easy, as Zhao and his team faced several design challenges along the way.
When in use, a chemical agent (catalyst) and wastewater are dispersed through AKVO’s microchannel walls. The purpose of the catalyst, titanium dioxide in this case, is to react with the micropollutants and help remove them in the process. However, AKVO’s fast flow rate complicates this action. “The big problem is that [AKVO] has microchannels with fast flow rates, and sometimes when we put the chemical agent inside one of the channels’ walls, the micropollutants in the wastewater cannot react efficiently with the agent,” said Zhao. In order to increase the opportunity of contact between the micropollutants and the immobilized chemical agent, Zhao and his team opted to use a staggered herringbone micromixer (SHM) design for AKVO’s microchannel networks (Figure 3).
To analyze the performance of the SHM design to support chemical reactions for micropollutant degradation, Zhao used the COMSOL Multiphysics software.
In his work, Zhao built two different models in COMSOL Multiphysics (Figure 4), named the Explicit Surface Adsorption (ESA) model and the Converted Surface Concentration (CSC) model. Both of these models account for chemical and fluid phenomena.
In both models, Zhao found that AKVO’s SHM structure creates vortices in the flow moving through it, which enables the micropollutants and the chemical agent to have a longer reaction period and enhances the mass transfer between each fluid layer. However, the results of the ESA model displayed that the design purified about 50 percent of the micropollutants under treatment, fewer than what Zhao expected.
Unlike the ESA model (Figure 5), in the CSC model, it is assumed that there is no adsorption limitation. Therefore, as long as a micropollutant arrives at the surface of a catalyst, a reaction happens, which has been discussed in existing literature (Ref. 1). In this model, Zhao analyzed how the design performed for the degradation of six different micropollutants, including gemfibrozil, ciprofloxacin, carbamazepine, clofibric acid, bisphenol A, and acetaminophen (Figure 6). The results of this model were in line with what Zhao expected, with more than 95 percent of the micropollutants being treated.
“We are really satisfied with the results of COMSOL Multiphysics. My next steps will be focused on laboratory testing [of the AKVO prototype]. We are expecting to have our first prototype ready by the beginning of 2022,” said Zhao. The prototype will eventually be tested at hospitals and water treatment stations in the south of France.
Using simulation for this project has helped the Eden Tech team save time and money. Developing a prototype of a microfluidic system, like AKVO, is costly. To imprint microchannel networks on each of AKVO’s CDs, a microchannel photomask is needed. According to Zhao, to fabricate one photomask would cost about €3000 (3500 USD). Therefore, it is very important that they are confident that their system works well prior to its fabrication. “COMSOL Multiphysics has really helped us validate our models and our designs,” said Zhao.
In 2016, Switzerland introduced legislation mandating that wastewater treatment plants remove micropollutants from wastewater. Their goal? Filter out over 80 percent of micropollutants at more than 100 Swiss WWTPs. Following their lead, many other countries are currently thinking of how they want to handle the growing presence of these contaminants in their waterways. AKVO has the potential to provide a compact, environmentally friendly way to help slow this ongoing problem.
The next time you go to throw out an old CD, or any other household item for that matter, ask yourself: What would MacGyver do? Or, better yet: What would Eden Tech do? You might be holding the building blocks for their next innovative design.
MacGyver is a registered trademark of CBS Studios Inc. COMSOL AB and its subsidiaries and products are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or supported by CBS Studios Inc.
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.
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
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.
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.
Software engineer Bodhi Connolly took a BlackFly eVTOL aircraft for a twilight spin on 29 July 2022, at the EAA AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wis. Opener
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.
Former U.S. wildlife official Chris Serhveen lost faith in delisting when Montana’s GOP revealed its anti-bear “hysteria.”
The post A Biologist Fought to Remove Grizzlies From the Endangered Species List — Until Montana Republicans Changed His Mind appeared first on The Intercept.
A rocket built by Indian startup Skyroot has become the country’s first privately developed launch vehicle to reach space, following a successful maiden flight earlier today. The suborbital mission is a major milestone for India’s private space industry, say experts, though more needs to be done to nurture the fledgling sector.
The Vikram-S rocket, named after the founder of the Indian space program, Vikram Sarabhai, lifted off from the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Satish Dhawan Space Centre, on India’s east coast, at 11:30 a.m. local time (1 a.m. eastern time). It reached a peak altitude of 89.5 kilometers (55.6 miles), crossing the 80-km line that NASA counts as the boundary of space, but falling just short of the 100 km recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.
In the longer run, India’s space industry has ambitions of capturing a significant chunk of the global launch market.
Pawan Kumar Chandana, cofounder of the Hyderabad-based startup, says the success of the launch is a major victory for India’s nascent space industry, but the buildup to the mission was nerve-racking. “We were pretty confident on the vehicle, but, as you know, rockets are very notorious for failure,” he says. “Especially in the last 10 seconds of countdown, the heartbeat was racing up. But once the vehicle had crossed the launcher and then went into the stable trajectory, I think that was the moment of celebration.”
At just 6 meters (20 feet) long and weighing only around 550 kilograms (0.6 tonnes), the Vikram-S is not designed for commercial use. Today’s mission, called Prarambh, which means “the beginning” in Sanskrit, was designed to test key technologies that will be used to build the startup’s first orbital rocket, the Vikram I. The rocket will reportedly be capable of lofting as much as 480 kg up to an 500-km altitude and is slated for a maiden launch next October.
Skyroot cofounder Pawan Kumar Chandana standing in front of the Vikram-S rocket at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, on the east coast of India.Skyroot
In particular, the mission has validated Skyroot’s decision to go with a novel all-carbon fiber structure to cut down on weight, says Chandana. It also allowed the company to test 3D-printed thrusters, which were used for spin stabilization in Vikram-S but will power the upper stages of its later rockets. Perhaps the most valuable lesson, though, says Chandana, was the complexity of interfacing Skyroot's vehicle with ISRO’s launch infrastructure. “You can manufacture the rocket, but launching it is a different ball game,” he says. “That was a great learning experience for us and will really help us accelerate our orbital vehicle.”
Skyroot is one of several Indian space startups looking to capitalize on recent efforts by the Indian government to liberalize its highly regulated space sector. Due to the dual-use nature of space technology, ISRO has historically had a government-sanctioned monopoly on most space activities, says Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, director of the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation think tank, in New Delhi. While major Indian engineering players like Larsen & Toubro and Godrej Aerospace have long supplied ISRO with components and even entire space systems, the relationship has been one of a supplier and vendor, she says.
But in 2020, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a series of reforms to allow private players to build satellites and launch vehicles, carry out launches, and provide space-based services. The government also created the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (InSpace), a new agency designed to act as a link between ISRO and the private sector, and affirmed that private companies would be able to take advantage of ISRO’s facilities.
The first launch of a private rocket from an ISRO spaceport is a major milestone for the Indian space industry, says Rajagopalan. “This step itself is pretty crucial, and it’s encouraging to other companies who are looking at this with a lot of enthusiasm and excitement,” she says. But more needs to be done to realize the government’s promised reforms, she adds. The Space Activities Bill that is designed to enshrine the country’s space policy in legislation has been languishing in draft form for years, and without regulatory clarity, it’s hard for the private sector to justify significant investments. “These are big, bold statements, but these need to be translated into actual policy and regulatory mechanisms,” says Rajagopalan.
Skyroot’s launch undoubtedly signals the growing maturity of India’s space industry, says Saurabh Kapil, associate director in PwC’s space practice. “It’s a critical message to the Indian space ecosystem, that we can do it, we have the necessary skill set, we have those engineering capabilities, we have those manufacturing or industrialization capabilities,” he says.
The Vikram-S rocket blasting off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, on the east coast of India.Skyroot
However, crossing this technical milestone is only part of the challenge, he says. The industry also needs to demonstrate a clear market for the kind of launch vehicles that companies like Skyroot are building. While private players are showing interest in launching small satellites for applications like agriculture and infrastructure monitoring, he says, these companies will be able to build sustainable businesses only if they are allowed to compete for more lucrative government and defense-sector contacts.
In the longer run, though, India’s space industry has ambitions of capturing a significant chunk of the global launch market, says Kapil. ISRO has already developed a reputation for both reliability and low cost—its 2014 mission to Mars cost just US $74 million, one-ninth the cost of a NASA Mars mission launched the same week. That is likely to translate to India’s private space industry, too, thanks to a considerably lower cost of skilled labor, land, and materials compared with those of other spacefaring nations, says Kapil. “The optimism is definitely there that because we are low on cost and high on reliability, whoever wants to build and launch small satellites is largely going to come to India,” he says.
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 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!
Boss Mode: $99/Month
The utility of this service can be used for short-term or format business purposes such as product descriptions, website copy, market copy, and sales reports.
Free Trial – 7 days with 24/7 email support and 100 runs per day.
Pro Plan: $49 and yearly, it will cost you $420 i.e. $35 per month.
Wait! I've got a pretty sweet deal for you. Sign up through the link below, and you'll get (7,000 Free Words Plus 40% OFF) if you upgrade to the paid plan within four days.
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Just like Outranking, Frase is an AI that helps you research, create and optimize your content to make it high quality within seconds. Frase works on SEO optimization where the content is made to the liking of search engines by optimizing keywords and keywords.
Solo Plan: $14.99/Month and $12/Month if billed yearly with 4 Document Credits for 1 user seat.
Basic Plan: $44.99/month and $39.99/month if billed yearly with 30 Document Credits for 1 user seat.
Team Plan: $114.99/month and $99.99/month if billed yearly for unlimited document credits for 3 users.
*SEO Add-ons and other premium features for $35/month irrespective of the plan.
Article Forge is another content generator that operates quite differently from the others on this list. Unlike Jasper.ai, which requires you to provide a brief and some information on what you want it to write this tool only asks for a keyword. From there, it’ll generate a complete article for you.
What’s excellent about Article Forge is they provide a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can choose between a monthly or yearly subscription. Unfortunately, they offer a free trial and no free plan:
Basic Plan: $27/Month
This plan allows users to produce up to 25k words each month. This is excellent for smaller blogs or those who are just starting.
Standard Plan: $57/month)
Unlimited Plan: $117/month
It’s important to note that Article Forge guarantees that all content generated through the platform passes Copyscape.
Rytr.me is a free AI content generator perfect for small businesses, bloggers, and students. The software is easy to use and can generate SEO-friendly blog posts, articles, and school papers in minutes.
Cons
Pricing
Rytr offers a free plan that comes with limited features. It covers up to 5,000 characters generated each month and has access to the built-in plagiarism checker. If you want to use all the features of the software, you can purchase one of the following plans:
Saver Plan: $9/month, $90/year
Writesonic is a free, easy-to-use AI content generator. The software is designed to help you create copy for marketing content, websites, and blogs. It's also helpful for small businesses or solopreneurs who need to produce content on a budget.
Writesonic is free with limited features. The free plan is more like a free trial, providing ten credits. After that, you’d need to upgrade to a paid plan. Here are your options:
Short-form: $15/month
Features:
Long-Form: $19/month
CopySmith is an AI content generator that can be used to create personal and professional documents, blogs, and presentations. It offers a wide range of features including the ability to easily create documents and presentations.
CopySmith also has several templates that you can use to get started quickly.
CopySmith offers a free trial with no credit card required. After the free trial, the paid plans are as follows:
Starter Plan: $19/month
Hypotenuse.ai is a free online tool that can help you create AI content. It's great for beginners because it allows you to create videos, articles, and infographics with ease. The software has a simple and easy-to-use interface that makes it perfect for new people looking for AI content generation.
Special Features
Hypotenuse doesn’t offer a free plan. Instead, it offers a free trial period where you can take the software for a run before deciding whether it’s the right choice for you or not. Other than that, here are its paid options:
Starter Plan: $29/month
Growth Plan: $59/month
Enterprise – pricing is custom, so don’t hesitate to contact the company for more information.
Kafkai comes with a free trial to help you understand whether it’s the right choice for you or not. Additionally, you can also take a look at its paid plans:
Writer Plan: $29/month Create 100 articles per month. $0.29/article
Newsroom Plan $49/month – Generate 250 articles a month at $0.20 per article.
Printing Press Plan: $129 /month Create up to 1000 articles a month at roughly $0.13/article.
Industrial Printer Plan: ($199 a month) – Generate 2500 articles each month for $0.08/article.
Peppertype.ai is an online AI content generator that’s easy to use and best for small business owners looking for a powerful copy and content writing tool to help them craft and generate various content for many purposes.
Unfortunately, Peppertype.ai isn’t free. However, it does have a free trial to try out the software before deciding whether it’s the right choice for you. Here are its paid plans:
personal Plan:$35/Month
Team Plan: $199/month
Enterprise – pricing is custom, so please contact the company for more information.
It is no longer a secret that humans are getting overwhelmed with the daily task of creating content. Our lives are busy, and the process of writing blog posts, video scripts, or other types of content is not our day job. In comparison, AI writers are not only cheaper to hire, but also perform tasks at a high level of excellence. This article explores 10 writing tools that used AI to create better content choose the one which meets your requirements and budget but in my opinion Jasper ai is one of the best tools to use to make high-quality content.
If you have any questions ask in the comments section
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Note: This article contains affiliate links which means we make a small commission if you buy any premium plan from our link.
With the cost of advertising on social media increasing, email marketing is now more important than ever as a way to grow your business – as the founders of a preloved baby-clothes retailer discovered
Solicitor Anna Cargan wasn’t expecting to swap legal briefs for secondhand clothes permanently when she launched Buildabundle from her living room in 2018. The Cumbrian mum of three had started selling her children’s outgrown clothes on eBay to make some extra money, and friends and family members started giving her their children’s old clothes to sell too. “I could see there was a market of people who wanted to sell things but didn’t have time to do it,” she says. “And I thought there could be a business in there somewhere.”
Children can outgrow seven clothing sizes in their first two years and there are an estimated 183m items of outgrown baby clothes in British homes, according to research by Mothercare and the environmental charity Hubbub. While a lot is handed down, a third of parents say they’ve thrown clothes in the bin because they didn’t know what to do with them. But with rising awareness of the environmental impact of the fashion industry, the popularity of secondhand shopping is booming. The apparel resale market is expected to grow 16 times faster than the traditional clothing sector by 2026.
Continue reading...It is essential for companies of all sizes to keep customers and employees happy by communicating effectively – so where should you start?
Whether it’s by email, face-to-face or via a technology platform such as Slack or Zoom, good communication skills eliminate silos, win deals, and help build trust and loyalty with employees, clients and customers. But with the shift to hybrid working post-pandemic, many organisations are having to rethink how they’ve always done things. We ask three experts where leaders should start when it comes to optimising business communication.
Remember your audience is busy
The average professional spends a significant part of their working day reading and answering emails. And, according to Kim Arnold, business communication expert and founder of the email-writing training course Email Engagement, there are some pointers that everyone should know when it comes to writing emails.
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| Image by vectorjuice on Freepik |
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.
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Affiliate marketing is generally associated with websites, but there are other ways to promote your affiliate links, including:
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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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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.
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A bomb explodes — medical devices set to action.
It is only in war that both sides of human ingenuity coexist so brutally. On the one side, it innovates to wound and kill, on the other it heals and saves lives. Side by side, but viscerally opposed.
Dr. Joe Fisher is devoted to the light side of human ingenuity, medicine. His research at Toronto’s University Health Network has made major breakthroughs in understanding the absorption and use of oxygen by the body. Then, based on the results, he developed new, highly efficient methods of delivering oxygen to patients.
In 2004, together with other physicians and engineers, he created a company to develop solutions based on his innovations. He named it after the Toronto neighborhood where he still lives — Thornhill Medical.
Meanwhile, the studies conducted by Dr. Fisher started drawing attention from the U.S. Marines. They had been looking for solutions to reduce the use of large, heavy, and potentially explosive oxygen tanks transported by their medical teams to military operation sites.
“At first, they asked us if we could prove that it was possible to ventilate patients using much less oxygen,” says Veso Tijanic, COO of Thornhill Medical. “We proved it. Then, they asked us whether we could develop a device for this. Finally, whether we could integrate other functionalities into this device.”
The device is currently saving lives in Ukraine, Thornhill Medical having donated a number of them as well as its mobile anesthesia delivery module MADM.
These back-and-forths lasted about five years, gradually combining science and technology. It resulted in a very first product, launched in 2011: MOVES, an innovative portable life support unit.
This cooperation has also deeply transformed Thornhill Medical.
“We used to see ourselves as an R&D laboratory, we have now also become a medical device manufacturer!” says Tijanic.
Whilst the U.S. Marines started using MOVES, Thornhill Medical continued to innovate. In 2017, it launched an enhanced version, MOVES SLC.
Today, the Canadian company employs a staff of about 70. It continues to do research and development with its own team and partners around the world, publishing regularly in scientific journals. It has sold MOVES SLC around the world and launched two other solutions, MADM and ClearMate.
MADM is a portable device (capable of functioning on extreme terrain) which connects to any ventilator to deliver gas anaesthesia. ClearMate is an instrument — also portable and without electricity — which allows to take quick action in case of carbon monoxide poisoning. This is the most common respiratory poisoning, where every second without treatment worsens consequences on the brain and other organs.
Just like these two products, the heart of MOVES SLC is a technology stemming directly from Dr. Fisher’s research in breathing sciences. It includes a ventilator operating in circle-circuit: It recovers the oxygen expired by the patient, carefully controls its concentration (high FiO2) and redistributes only the strict minimum to the patient.
MOVES SLC operates with significantly less oxygen than required by traditional open-circuit ventilators. This is so little that a small oxygen-concentrator — integrated into MOVES SLC, that extracts oxygen from ambient air — is sufficient. No need for supplies from large oxygen tanks.
Yet, MOVES SLC is more than an innovative ultra-efficient ventilator, says Tijanic: “It is a complete life support device.” In addition to its integrated oxygen concentrator, it also includes suction and several sensors that monitor vital signs and brings it all together via a unique interface that can be operated on the device or by a mobile touch screen.
The user can intubate a patient and monitor its ventilation (FiO2, ETCO2, SpO2, ABP and other indicators) in addition to the patient’s temperature (two sensors), blood pressure (internal and external) and 12-lead ECG. The evolution of these measurements can be followed over the last 24 hours.
All of this, in a device measuring only 84 cm x 14 cm x 25 cm, weighing about 21 kilograms (including interchangeable batteries) which can be slung across the shoulder.
“MOVES must function in the middle of military operations, and be resistant to vibrations, crashes and shock, continue operating smoothly in sandstorms or in the rain.”
—Veso Tijanic, COO of Thornhill Medical
“MOVES SLC represents no more than 30 percent of the volume and weight of traditional equipment — ventilator, concentrator, suction, monitoring device,” adds the COO. Integrating various technologies in such a lightweight, compact package was, without surprise, a major challenge for the engineers. Still, not the most difficult one.
Making medical device components capable of withstanding extreme conditions will have been even more complex. “Traditional technologies were designed to function in hospitals,” explains Tijanic. “MOVES must function in the middle of military operations, and be resistant to vibrations, crashes and shock, continue operating smoothly in sandstorms or in the rain, in temperatures between -26°C and +54°C.”
Sometimes, the engineers could take existing components and develop protective features for them. Occasionally, they would recast them from different markets (oxygen sensors, for instance) to integrate them into their device. And in other cases, they had to start from scratch, creating their own robust components.
The challenge was successfully overcome: “MOVES is designed under the highest industry standards and has been tested and fully certified by various regulatory bodies.” It has been certified MIL-STD-810G, a ruggedness U.S. military standard, verified by over twenty different tests (acoustic vibration, explosive atmosphere, etc.).
The device is hence approved for use — not only transported, but actually used on a patient — in various helicopters, aircraft and land vehicles. And this makes a world of difference for Tijanic. “Critical care, such as we provide, normally requires specially equipped facilities or vehicles. With MOVES SLC, any place or vehicle — even civilian — of sufficient size, is an opportunity for treatment.”
Thornhill’s fully integrated mobile life support has been used by military medical teams for five years already. The device is currently saving lives in Ukraine, Thornhill Medical having donated a number of them as well as its mobile anesthesia delivery module MADM.
In July 2022, the U.S. Army published a report summarizing its medical modernization strategy. The 22-page report confirms the need for ever more lightweight, compact, and cost-effective technology. It also mentions the use of artificial intelligence for more autonomous monitoring of the patients’ medical condition. Thornhill is exploring the AI angle.
“There isn’t always a qualified expert available everywhere,” explains Tijanic. “AI could ensure the optimum settings of the device, and then modify these depending on how the patient’s condition evolves.”
Thornhill is also exploring another solution for cases where no experts are available on spot. Last April, a MOVES SLC was used in a demonstration of “remote control of ventilators and infusion pumps to support disaster care.” Operators based in Seattle successfully controlled remotely a device based in Toronto. Science-fiction thus becomes science, and turns into reality.
The Canadian company continues innovating to heal and save lives on rough chaotic terrain and in the most extreme and unpredictable circumstances. It is driven by medical and technological progress. It is also driven by a many-thousand-year-old trend: Humans will likely never stop waging war.
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.”
For a deep dive into the engineering behind the James Webb Space Telescope, see our collection of posts here.
When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals its first images on 12 July, they will be the by-product of carefully crafted mirrors and scientific instruments. But all of its data-collecting prowess would be moot without the spacecraft’s communications subsystem.
The Webb’s comms aren’t flashy. Rather, the data and communication systems are designed to be incredibly, unquestionably dependable and reliable. And while some aspects of them are relatively new—it’s the first mission to use Ka-band frequencies for such high data rates so far from Earth, for example—above all else, JWST’s comms provide the foundation upon which JWST’s scientific endeavors sit.
As previous articles in this series have noted, JWST is parked at Lagrange point L2. It’s a point of gravitational equilibrium located about 1.5 million kilometers beyond Earth on a straight line between the planet and the sun. It’s an ideal location for JWST to observe the universe without obstruction and with minimal orbital adjustments.
Being so far away from Earth, however, means that data has farther to travel to make it back in one piece. It also means the communications subsystem needs to be reliable, because the prospect of a repair mission being sent to address a problem is, for the near term at least, highly unlikely. Given the cost and time involved, says Michael Menzel, the mission systems engineer for JWST, “I would not encourage a rendezvous and servicing mission unless something went wildly wrong.”
According to Menzel, who has worked on JWST in some capacity for over 20 years, the plan has always been to use well-understood K a-band frequencies for the bulky transmissions of scientific data. Specifically, JWST is transmitting data back to Earth on a 25.9-gigahertz channel at up to 28 megabits per second. The Ka-band is a portion of the broader K-band (another portion, the Ku-band, was also considered).
The Lagrange points are equilibrium locations where competing gravitational tugs on an object net out to zero. JWST is one of three craft currently occupying L2 (Shown here at an exaggerated distance from Earth). IEEE Spectrum
Both the data-collection and transmission rates of JWST dwarf those of the older Hubble Space Telescope. Compared to Hubble, which is still active and generates 1 to 2 gigabytes of data daily, JWST can produce up to 57 GB each day (although that amount is dependent on what observations are scheduled).
Menzel says he first saw the frequency selection proposals for JWST around 2000, when he was working at Northrop Grumman. He became the mission systems engineer in 2004. “I knew where the risks were in this mission. And I wanted to make sure that we didn’t get any new risks,” he says.
IEEE Spectrum
Besides, K a-band frequencies can transmit more data than X-band (7 to 11.2 GHz) or S-band (2 to 4 GHz), common choices for craft in deep space. A high data rate is a necessity for the scientific work JWST will be undertaking. In addition, according to Carl Hansen, a flight systems engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (the science operations center for JWST), a comparable X-band antenna would be so large that the spacecraft would have trouble remaining steady for imaging.
Although the 25.9-GHz K a-band frequency is the telescope’s workhorse communication channel, it also employs two channels in the S-band. One is the 2.09-GHz uplink that ferries future transmission and scientific observation schedules to the telescope at 16 kilobits per second. The other is the 2.27-GHz, 40-kb/s downlink over which the telescope transmits engineering data—including its operational status, systems health, and other information concerning the telescope’s day-to-day activities.
Any scientific data the JWST collects during its lifetime will need to be stored on board, because the spacecraft doesn’t maintain round-the-clock contact with Earth. Data gathered from its scientific instruments, once collected, is stored within the spacecraft’s 68-GB solid-state drive (3 percent is reserved for engineering and telemetry data). Alex Hunter, also a flight systems engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, says that by the end of JWST’s 10-year mission life, they expect to be down to about 60 GB because of deep-space radiation and wear and tear.
The onboard storage is enough to collect data for about 24 hours before it runs out of room. Well before that becomes an issue, JWST will have scheduled opportunities to beam that invaluable data to Earth.
JWST will stay connected via the Deep Space Network (DSN)—a resource it shares with the Parker Solar Probe, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, the Voyager probes, and the entire ensemble of Mars rovers and orbiters, to name just a few of the other heavyweights. The DSN consists of three antenna complexes: Canberra, Australia; Madrid, Spain; and Barstow, Calif. JWST needs to share finite antenna time with plenty of other deep-space missions, each with unique communications needs and schedules.
IEEE Spectrum
Sandy Kwan, a DSN systems engineer, says that contact windows with spacecraft are scheduled 12 to 20 weeks in advance. JWST had a greater number of scheduled contact windows during its commissioning phase, as instruments were brought on line, checked, and calibrated. Most of that process required real-time communication with Earth.
All of the communications channels use the Reed-Solomon error-correction protocol—the same error-correction standard as used in DVDs and Blu-ray discs as well as QR codes. The lower data-rate S-band channels use binary phase-shift key modulation—involving phase shifting of a signal’s carrier wave. The K-band channel, however, uses a quadrature phase-shift key modulation. Quadrature phase-shift keying can double a channel’s data rate, at the cost of more complicated transmitters and receivers.
JWST’s communications with Earth incorporate an acknowledgement protocol—only after the JWST gets confirmation that a file has been successfully received will it go ahead and delete its copy of the data to clear up space.
The communications subsystem was assembled along with the rest of the spacecraft bus by Northrop Grumman, using off-the-shelf components sourced from multiple manufacturers.
JWST has had a long and often-delayed development, but its communications system has always been a bedrock for the rest of the project. Keeping at least one system dependable means it’s one less thing to worry about. Menzel can remember, for instance, ideas for laser-based optical systems that were invariably rejected. “I can count at least two times where I had been approached by people who wanted to experiment with optical communications,” says Menzel. “Each time they came to me, I sent them away with the old ‘Thank you, but I don’t need it. And I don’t want it.’”
For a deep dive into the engineering behind the James Webb Space Telescope, see our collection of posts here.
“Build something that will absolutely, positively work.” This was the mandate from NASA for designing and building the James Webb Space Telescope—at 6.5 meters wide the largest space telescope in history. Last December, JWST launched famously and successfully to its observing station out beyond the moon. And now according to NASA, as soon as next week, the JWST will at long last begin releasing scientific images and data.
Mark Kahan, on JWST’s product integrity team, recalls NASA’s engineering challenge as a call to arms for a worldwide team of thousands that set out to create one of the most ambitious scientific instruments in human history. Kahan—chief electro-optical systems engineer at Mountain View, Calif.–based Synopsys—and many others in JWST’s “pit crew” (as he calls the team) drew hard lessons from three decades ago, having helped repair another world-class space telescope with a debilitating case of flawed optics. Of course the Hubble Space Telescope is in low Earth orbit, and so a special space-shuttle mission to install corrective optics ( as happened in 1993) was entirely possible.
Not so with the JWST.
The meticulous care NASA demanded of JWST’s designers is all the more a necessity because Webb is well out of reach of repair crews. Its mission is to study the infrared universe, and that requires shielding the telescope and its sensors from both the heat of sunlight and the infrared glow of Earth. A good place to do that without getting too far from Earth is an empty patch of interplanetary space 1.5 million kilometers away (well beyond the moon’s orbit) near a spot physicists call the second Lagrange point, or L2.
The pit crew’s job was “down at the detail level, error checking every critical aspect of the optical design,” says Kahan. Having learned the hard way from Hubble, the crew insisted that every measurement on Webb’s optics be made in at least two different ways that could be checked and cross-checked. Diagnostics were built into the process, Kahan says, so that “you could look at them to see what to kick” to resolve any discrepancies. Their work had to be done on the ground, but their tests had to assess how the telescope would work in deep space at cryogenic temperatures.
Superficially, Webb follows the design of all large reflecting telescopes. A big mirror collects light from stars, galaxies, nebulae, planets, comets, and other astronomical objects—and then focuses those photons onto a smaller secondary mirror that sends it to a third mirror that then ultimately directs the light to instruments that record images and spectra.
Webb’s 6.5-meter primary mirror is the first segmented mirror to be launched into space. All the optics had to be made on the ground at room temperature but were deployed in space and operated at 30 to 55 degrees above absolute zero. “We had to develop three new technologies” to make it work, says Lee D. Feinberg of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the optical telescope element manager for Webb for the past 20 years.
The longest wavelengths that Hubble has to contend with were 2.5 micrometers, whereas Webb is built to observe infrared light that stretches to 28 μm in wavelength. Compared with Hubble, whose primary mirror is a circle of an area 4.5 square meters, “[Webb’s primary mirror] had to be 25 square meters,” says Feinberg. Webb also “needed segmented mirrors that were lightweight, and its mass was a huge consideration,” he adds. No single-component mirror that could provide the required resolution would have fit on the Ariane 5 rocket that launched JWST. That meant the mirror would have to be made in pieces, assembled, folded, secured to withstand the stress of launch, then unfolded and deployed in space to create a surface that was within tens of nanometers of the shape specified by the designers.
The James Webb Space Telescope [left] and the Hubble Space Telescope side by side—with Hubble’s 2.4-meter-diameter mirror versus Webb’s array of hexagonal mirrors making a 6.5-meter-diameter light-collecting area. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA and the U.S. Air Force, which has its own interests in large lightweight space mirrors for surveillance and focusing laser energy, teamed up to develop the technology. The two agencies narrowed eight submitted proposals down to two approaches for building JWST’s mirrors: one based on low-expansion glass made of a mixture of silicon and titanium dioxides similar to that used in Hubble and the other the light but highly toxic metal beryllium. The most crucial issue came down to how well the materials could withstand temperature changes from room temperature on the ground to around 50 K in space. Beryllium won because it could fully release stress after cooling without changing its shape, and it’s not vulnerable to the cracking that can occur in glass. The final beryllium mirror was a 6.5-meter array of 18 hexagonal beryllium mirrors, each weighing about 20 kilograms. The weight per unit area of JWST’s mirror was only 10 percent of that in Hubble. A 100-nanometer layer of pure gold makes the surface reflect 98 percent of incident light from JWST’s main observing band of 0.6 to 28.5 μm. “Pure silver has slightly higher reflectivity than pure gold, but gold is more robust,” says Feinberg. A thin layer of amorphous silica protects the metal film from surface damage.
In addition, a wavefront-sensing control system keeps mirror segment surfaces aligned to within tens of nanometers. Built on the ground, the system is expected to keep mirror alignment stabilized throughout the telescope’s operational life. A backplane kept at a temperature of 35 K holds all 2.4 tonnes of the telescope and instruments rock-steady to within 32 nm while maintaining them at cryogenic temperatures during observations.
The JWST backplane, the “spine” that supports the entire hexagonal mirror structure and carries more than 2,400 kg of hardware, is readied for assembly to the rest of the telescope. NASA/Chris Gunn
Hubble’s amazing, long-exposure images of distant galaxies are possible through the use of gyroscopes and reaction wheels. The gyroscopes are used to sense unwanted rotations, and reaction wheels are used to counteract them.
But the gyroscopes used on Hubble have had a bad track record and have had to be replaced repeatedly. Only three of Hubble’s six gyros remain operational today, and NASA has devised plans for operating with one or two gyros at reduced capability.
Hubble also includes reaction wheels and magnetic torquers, used to maintain its orientation when needed or to point at different parts of the sky.
Webb uses reaction wheels similarly to turn across the sky, but instead of using mechanical gyros to sense direction, it uses hemispherical resonator gyroscopes, which have no moving parts. Webb also has a small fine-steering mirror in the optical path, which can tilt over an angle of just 5 arc seconds. Those very fine adjustments of the light path into the instruments keep the telescope on target. “It’s a really wonderful way to go,” says Feinberg, adding that it compensates for small amounts of jitter without having to move the whole 6-tonne observatory.
Other optics distribute light from the fine-steering mirror among four instruments, two of which can observe simultaneously. Three instruments have sensors that observe wavelengths of 0.6 to 5 μm, which astronomers call the near-infrared. The fourth, called the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), observes what astronomers call the mid-infrared spectrum, from 5 to 28.5 μm. Different instruments are needed because sensors and optics have limited wavelength ranges. (Optical engineers may blanch slightly at astronomers’ definitions of what constitutes the near- and mid-infrared wavelength ranges. These two groups simply have differing conventions for labeling the various regimes of the infrared spectrum.)
Mid-infrared wavelengths are crucial for observing young stars and planetary systems and the earliest galaxies, but they also pose some of the biggest engineering challenges. Namely, everything on Earth and planets out to Jupiter glow in the mid-infrared. So for JWST to observe distant astronomical objects, it must avoid recording extraneous mid-infrared noise from all the various sources inside the solar system. “I have spent my whole career building instruments for wavelengths of 5 μm and longer,” says MIRI instrument scientist Alistair Glasse of the Royal Observatory, in Edinburgh. “We’re always struggling against thermal background.”
Mountaintop telescopes can see the near-infrared, but observing the mid-infrared sky requires telescopes in space. However, the thermal radiation from Earth and its atmosphere can cloud their view, and so can the telescopes themselves unless they are cooled far below room temperature. An ample supply of liquid helium and an orbit far from Earth allowed the Spitzer Space Telescope’s primary observing mission to last for five years, but once the last of the cryogenic fluid evaporated in 2009, its observations were limited to wavelengths shorter than 5 μm.
Webb has an elaborate solar shield to block sunlight, and an orbit 1.5 million km from Earth that can keep the telescope to below 55 K, but that’s not good enough for low-noise observations at wavelengths longer than 5 μm. The near-infrared instruments operate at 40 K to minimize thermal noise. But for observations out to 28.5 μm, MIRI uses a specially developed closed-cycle, helium cryocooler to keep MIRI cooled below 7 K. “We want to have sensitivity limited by the shot noise of astronomical sources,” says Glasse. (Shot noise occurs when optical or electrical signals are so feeble that each photon or electron constitutes a detectable peak.) That will make MIRI 1,000 times as sensitive in the mid-infrared as Spitzer.
Another challenge is the limited transparency of optical materials in the mid-infrared. “We use reflective optics wherever possible,” says Glasse, but they also pose problems, he adds. “Thermal contraction is a big deal,” he says, because the instrument was made at room temperature but is used at 7 K. To keep thermal changes uniform throughout MIRI, they made the whole structure of gold-coated aluminum lest other metals cause warping.
Detectors are another problem. Webb’s near-infrared sensors use mercury cadmium telluride photodetectors with a resolution of 2,048 x 2,048 pixels. This resolution is widely used at wavelengths below 5 μm, but sensing at MIRI’s longer wavelengths required exotic detectors that are limited to offering only 1,024 x 1,024 pixels.
Glasse says commissioning “has gone incredibly well.” Although some stray light has been detected, he says, “we are fully expecting to meet all our science goals.”
The near-infrared detectors and optical materials used for observing at wavelengths shorter than 5 μm are much more mature than those for the mid-infrared, so the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) does double duty by both recording images and aligning all the optics in the whole telescope. That alignment was the trickiest part of building the instrument, says NIRCam principal investigator Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona.
Alignment means getting all the light collected by the primary mirror to get to the right place in the final image. That’s crucial for Webb, because it has 18 separate segments that have to overlay their images perfectly in the final image, and because all those segments were built on the ground at room temperature but operate at cryogenic temperatures in space at zero gravity. When NASA recorded a test image of a single star after Webb first opened its primary mirror, it showed 18 separate bright spots, one from each segment. When alignment was completed on 11 March, the image from NIRcam showed a single star with six spikes caused by diffraction.
Even when performing instrumental calibration tasks, JWST couldn’t help but showcase its stunning sensitivity to the infrared sky. The central star is what telescope technicians used to align JWST’s mirrors. But notice the distant galaxies and stars that photobombed the image too!NASA/STScI
Building a separate alignment system would have added to both the weight and cost of Webb, Rieke realized, and in the original 1995 plan for the telescope she proposed designing NIRCam so it could align the telescope optics once it was up in space as well as record images. “The only real compromise was that it required NIRCam to have exquisite image quality,” says Rieke, wryly. From a scientific point, she adds, using the instrument to align the telescope optics “is great because you know you’re going to have good image quality and it’s going to be aligned with you.” Alignment might be just a tiny bit off for other instruments. In the end, it took a team at Lockheed Martin to develop the computational tools to account for all the elements of thermal expansion.
Escalating costs and delays had troubled Webb for years. But for Feinberg, “commissioning has been a magical five months.” It began with the sight of sunlight hitting the mirrors. The segmented mirror deployed smoothly, and after the near-infrared cameras cooled, the mirrors focused one star into 18 spots, then aligned them to put the spots on top of each other. “Everything had to work to get it to [focus] that well,” he says. It’s been an intense time, but for Feinberg, a veteran of the Hubble repair mission, commissioning Webb was “a piece of cake.”
NASA announced that between May 23rd and 25th, one segment of the primary mirror had been dinged by a micrometeorite bigger than the agency had expected when it analyzed the potential results of such impacts. “Things do degrade over time,” Feinberg said. But he added that Webb had been engineered to minimize damage, and NASA said the event had not affected Webb’s operation schedule.
Corrections 26-28 July 2022: The story was updated a) to reflect the fact that the Lagrange point L2 where Webb now orbits is not that of the “Earth-moon system” (as the story had originally reported) but rather the Earth-sun system
and b) to correct misstatements in the original posting about Webb’s hardware for controlling its orientation.
Corrections 12 Aug. 2022: Alistair Glasse’s name was incorrectly spelled in a previous version of this story, as was NIRCam (which we’d spelled as NIRcam); Webb’s tertiary mirror (we’d originally reported only its primary and secondary mirrors) was also called out in this version.
This article appears in the September 2022 print issue as “Inside the Universe Machine.”
Quantum computing is a devilishly complex technology, with many technical hurdles impacting its development. Of these challenges two critical issues stand out: miniaturization and qubit quality.
IBM has adopted the superconducting qubit road map of reaching a 1,121-qubit processor by 2023, leading to the expectation that 1,000 qubits with today’s qubit form factor is feasible. However, current approaches will require very large chips (50 millimeters on a side, or larger) at the scale of small wafers, or the use of chiplets on multichip modules. While this approach will work, the aim is to attain a better path toward scalability.
Now researchers at MIT have been able to both reduce the size of the qubits and done so in a way that reduces the interference that occurs between neighboring qubits. The MIT researchers have increased the number of superconducting qubits that can be added onto a device by a factor of 100.
“We are addressing both qubit miniaturization and quality,” said William Oliver, the director for the Center for Quantum Engineering at MIT. “Unlike conventional transistor scaling, where only the number really matters, for qubits, large numbers are not sufficient, they must also be high-performance. Sacrificing performance for qubit number is not a useful trade in quantum computing. They must go hand in hand.”
The key to this big increase in qubit density and reduction of interference comes down to the use of two-dimensional materials, in particular the 2D insulator hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). The MIT researchers demonstrated that a few atomic monolayers of hBN can be stacked to form the insulator in the capacitors of a superconducting qubit.
Just like other capacitors, the capacitors in these superconducting circuits take the form of a sandwich in which an insulator material is sandwiched between two metal plates. The big difference for these capacitors is that the superconducting circuits can operate only at extremely low temperatures—less than 0.02 degrees above absolute zero (-273.15 °C).
Superconducting qubits are measured at temperatures as low as 20 millikelvin in a dilution refrigerator.Nathan Fiske/MIT
In that environment, insulating materials that are available for the job, such as PE-CVD silicon oxide or silicon nitride, have quite a few defects that are too lossy for quantum computing applications. To get around these material shortcomings, most superconducting circuits use what are called coplanar capacitors. In these capacitors, the plates are positioned laterally to one another, rather than on top of one another.
As a result, the intrinsic silicon substrate below the plates and to a smaller degree the vacuum above the plates serve as the capacitor dielectric. Intrinsic silicon is chemically pure and therefore has few defects, and the large size dilutes the electric field at the plate interfaces, all of which leads to a low-loss capacitor. The lateral size of each plate in this open-face design ends up being quite large (typically 100 by 100 micrometers) in order to achieve the required capacitance.
In an effort to move away from the large lateral configuration, the MIT researchers embarked on a search for an insulator that has very few defects and is compatible with superconducting capacitor plates.
“We chose to study hBN because it is the most widely used insulator in 2D material research due to its cleanliness and chemical inertness,” said colead author Joel Wang, a research scientist in the Engineering Quantum Systems group of the MIT Research Laboratory for Electronics.
On either side of the hBN, the MIT researchers used the 2D superconducting material, niobium diselenide. One of the trickiest aspects of fabricating the capacitors was working with the niobium diselenide, which oxidizes in seconds when exposed to air, according to Wang. This necessitates that the assembly of the capacitor occur in a glove box filled with argon gas.
While this would seemingly complicate the scaling up of the production of these capacitors, Wang doesn’t regard this as a limiting factor.
“What determines the quality factor of the capacitor are the two interfaces between the two materials,” said Wang. “Once the sandwich is made, the two interfaces are “sealed” and we don’t see any noticeable degradation over time when exposed to the atmosphere.”
This lack of degradation is because around 90 percent of the electric field is contained within the sandwich structure, so the oxidation of the outer surface of the niobium diselenide does not play a significant role anymore. This ultimately makes the capacitor footprint much smaller, and it accounts for the reduction in cross talk between the neighboring qubits.
“The main challenge for scaling up the fabrication will be the wafer-scale growth of hBN and 2D superconductors like [niobium diselenide], and how one can do wafer-scale stacking of these films,” added Wang.
Wang believes that this research has shown 2D hBN to be a good insulator candidate for superconducting qubits. He says that the groundwork the MIT team has done will serve as a road map for using other hybrid 2D materials to build superconducting circuits.
Just another obscure warrantless surveillance program.
US law enforcement can access details of money transfers without a warrant through an obscure surveillance program the Arizona attorney general’s office created in 2014. A database stored at a nonprofit, the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC), provides full names and amounts for larger transfers (above $500) sent between the US, Mexico and 22 other regions through services like Western Union, MoneyGram and Viamericas. The program covers data for numerous Caribbean and Latin American countries in addition to Canada, China, France, Malaysia, Spain, Thailand, Ukraine and the US Virgin Islands. Some domestic transfers also enter the data set...
With people spending no more than eight seconds reading an average email, how can companies use them to boost their customer base? The founder of a science subscription box for kids reveals how she grew her digital community
With model comets that whizz and fizz, potions that change colour, and sparkly dough sculptures that conduct electricity – science can be fun. But all too often, a child’s experience of Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects at school can be boring and uninspired.
“Hardly any primary school teachers have done any science beyond GCSE,” entrepreneur Renee Watson, who is a scientist by trade, says. “I had been doing a lot of work with schools and saw there was no time or money to make science fun and interesting in the classroom. So I thought: ‘Well, I can put fun stuff in boxes and send them to families to do at home.’”
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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.
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, possibly later this month, 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.”
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.
“We can’t afford to strike, but we can’t afford not to strike,” firefighter Kasey from Leicestershire has told the Guardian.
The wave of strikes sweeping the UK are reaching their peak this week, threatening to bring much of the country to a standstill as workers across the transport network, NHS, Royal Mail and civil service take industrial action in ongoing rows over pay and conditions.
In the new year, strike ballots for firefighters and teachers will close, while junior doctors are scheduled to vote next month. Nurses across the country will begin their first strike on Thursday.
We asked four people across England – a paramedic, a teacher, a firefighter, and a train driver – about why they are striking, the realities of being a public sector worker during a cost of living crisis and whether they are hopeful that this action could lead to change in their industry
For any service business, being able to promote commercial insight is vital. Here, the consultancy Intralink explains how it uses content marketing to bring its expertise to wider attention
From China to South Korea, some US and European businesses are looking to make significant investments and seek out commercial partnerships in Asia.
But with huge risks and rewards at stake, many are drawing on the knowledge and advice of business consultancies such as Intralink, which employs an army of experts on sectors from medical devices and semiconductors to renewable energy and agricultural technology.
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.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.
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.”
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