In 2019, Elon Musk stood up at a Tesla day devoted to automated driving and said, “Essentially everyone’s training the network all the time, is what it amounts to. Whether Autopilot’s on or off, the network is being trained.” Tesla’s suite of assistive and semi-autonomous technologies, collectively known as Autopilot, is among the most widely […]
Early in July, Rhode Island’s governor signed legislation mandating that the state acquire 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2033. Among the state’s American peers, there’s no deadline more ambitious. “Anything more ambitious, and I would start being a little skeptical that it would be attainable,” says Seaver Wang, a climate and […]
Alexander “Sandy” Fraser Developer of the first virtual circuit network switch Fellow, 85; died 13 June Fraser developed the Datakit, the first virtual circuit network switch, while working at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J. The telecommunications technology is used by all major U.S. telephone companies. He invented other pioneering technologies as well, including the […]
TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Keras: Those three deep-learning frameworks have dominated AI for years even as newer entrants gain steam. But one framework you don’t hear much about in the West is China’s PaddlePaddle, the most popular Chinese framework in the world’s most populous country. It is an easy-to-use, efficient, flexible, and scalable deep-learning platform, originally […]
You won’t see a single Tesla cruising the glamorous beachfront in Beidaihe, China, this summer. Officials banned Elon Musk’s popular electric cars from the resort for two months while it hosts the Communist Party’s annual retreat, presumably fearing what their built-in cameras might capture and feed back to the United States. Back in Florida, Tesla […]
As climate change edges from crisis to emergency, the aviation sector looks set to miss its 2050 goal of net-zero emissions. In the five years preceding the pandemic, the top four U.S. airlines—American, Delta, Southwest, and United—saw a 15 percent increase in the use of jet fuel. Despite continual improvements in engine efficiencies, that number […]
Few fields of endeavor have advanced as swiftly as bioinformatics over the past couple of decades. Just 25 years ago, the human genome was still largely a mystery. Then, in 2003, the first sequence was announced, of about 92 percent of a human genome. That sequence cost some US $300 million dollars. Over the years, […]
Practical nuclear fusion is, famously, always 10 years in the future. Except that the Pentagon recently gave an award to a tiny startup to launch a fusion power system into space in just five. There is no shortage of organizations, from VC-backed startups to nation states, trying to realize the dream of cheap, clean, and […]
From PlayStations to Porsches, many consumer products have been hit by a chip shortage that began choking the global economy in 2020, and continues today. “We aren’t even close to being out of the woods,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo tweeted last month. “The semiconductor supply chain is very fragile, and it’s going to remain […]
FAA air traffic controllers supervising flights over Arizona, New Mexico and Texas were confused and frustrated by an increase in military tests that interfered with GPS signals for civilian aircraft, public records show. In March and April this year, flight controllers at the Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center filed reports on NASA’s Aviation Safety […]