The idea of a car that turns into a plane in three minutes sounds like a dream. Imagine you’re driving along during peak hour. You get an alert of incoming traffic and shapeshift into an aircraft that takes to the skies, overtaking commuter delays, toll bridges, and construction delays — suck it, gridlock! But the reality of the flying car (aka air car) is a lot less spontaneous and a lot less flexible. And I’m here to burst your bubble following the news of Samson Sky’s successful FAA inspection. This week, after 14 years of design, R&D, and fundraising, Samson Sky, creators of the Switchblade flying car, announced that after an inspection by an FAA agent, the vehicle successfully completed high-speed taxi testing and is ready to take flight.
Say you had millions of dollars to spend. If you’re an automotive enthusiast, perhaps you’d buy the latest Ferrari or a 1956 Aston Martin. But would you spend an exorbitant amount for a car you can’t physically drive? It may sound illogical, but research by Vanarama shows people are digging deep into their pockets to buy car-related NFTs. This means that they own the cars’ digital rendering (although anyone can view and download it), but they’ll never get to lay a single hand on the vehicle. In fact, as per the study, buyers are willing to pay even more for the NFT version than the actual car.
The future of last-mile package delivery is fast and contactless, with delivery providers focused on eliminating traffic and parking challenges. An increasingly prominent option is the use of uncrewed aerial vehicles or drones. This week research comparing the environmental impact of different forms of last-mile delivery was published in the scientific journal Patterns. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University compared the energy consumption of quadcopter drones against diesel and electric medium-duty trucks, small vans, and electric cargo bicycles on a per-package basis. Hi there, EV nerd! Subscribe now for a weekly recap of our favorite mobility stories
It’s strike season on the London Underground, and that means one thing for the UK’s interminable Tory governments: time to rev-up the driverless hype train. Conservative politicians have long called for a fully-autonomous metro. In 2012, then-London Mayor Boris Johnson said Britain’s capital would have driverless trains within 10 years. A decade later, he claimed the switch would free people from being “prisoners of the unions.” Greetings, humanoids Subscribe to our newsletter now for a weekly recap of our favorite AI stories in your inbox. The government reiterated the case during recent funding talks with Transport for London (TfL), which operates the local underground network.
The USA’s “love affair with the automobile” hasn’t been kind to pedestrians. In 2020, more than 6,500 people were struck and killed while walking in the country. A new report by Smart Growth America lays most of the blame on roadways. Greetings, humanoids Subscribe to our newsletter now for a weekly recap of our favorite AI stories in your inbox. “Our nation’s streets are dangerous by design, designed primarily to move cars quickly at the expense of keeping everyone safe,” the study authors wrote. The campaigners want streets to be redesigned for pedestrian safety.
Today, social media users want serendipitous shopping experiences — where new brands and ideas pop up on their feeds like wizened wizards in an RPG. In this world, your social media profile is your shop window. How you dress it up, counts. If you’re a solopreneur or an influencer, social media will likely be one of the first touchpoints your audience will have with your brand and it will be the key to expanding your reach to new audiences in the future. Of course, when you’re running a company of one, time is in short supply.
What if wearable electronics could monitor your health and detect diseases even before symptoms appear? That’s exactly the vision of Sihong Wang and his research team at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME). “With this work we’ve bridged wearable technology with artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a powerful device which can analyze health data right on our own bodies,” Wang says. Greetings, humanoids Subscribe to our newsletter now for a weekly recap of our favorite AI stories in your inbox. The assistant professor and his team envision a future where wearable biosensors can track indicators of health, including sugar, oxygen, and metabolites in people’s blood.
Experts believe some 80-percent of the universe could be made up of a mysterious substance called “dark matter.” Some even think there’s an entire group of particles forming a “dark sector” that could be as complex as the matter and antimatter families. Unfortunately, the quest to finally observe dark matter is hitting a wall. Simply put we need more particle colliders. And whether they get built is, seemingly, completely up to the powers-that-be in the European and US political arenas. Cash rules everything The development of particle colliders has been one of humankind’s most expensive scientific endeavors.
Two Stanford heavyweights have weighed in on the fiery AI sentience debate — and the duo is firmly in the “BS” corner. The wrangle recently rose to a crescendo over arguments about Google’s LaMDA system. DeveloperBlake Lemoine sparked the controversy. Lemoine, who worked for Google’s Responsible AI team, had been testing whether the large-language model (LLM) used harmful speech. Greetings, humanoids Subscribe to our newsletter now for a weekly recap of our favorite AI stories in your inbox. The 41-year-old told The Washington Post that his conversations with the AI convinced him that it had a sentient mind.
