Lifeboat Foundation

BEIJING China’s production and sale of electric cars will more than double this year, the industry minister said on Sunday.

More than 300,000 electric cars were sold in China last year, Miao Wei, the head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told reporters on the sidelines of the annual meeting of parliament on Sunday.

The reliability, mileage and lifespan of electric batteries needs improvement and China needs to speed up the installation of electric car charging stations, Miao said.

Beginning in June, the Army will road-test communications technology that could lead the way to autonomous big-rig convoys.

Baidu Inc. will soon start testing autonomous cars in the U.S., part of the Chinese tech giant’s effort to introduce a commercially viable model by 2018.

The move, disclosed by Baidu’s chief scientist Andrew Ng in an interview late Tuesday, is a significant step for the company, which is trying to get ahead in the race to build autonomous cars and is now calling on the resources of its Silicon Valley tech center to advance the effort. At the same time, Baidu is advocating for better coordination with the U.S. government, which the company says is necessary to get self-driving cars on the road.

Central to the push is Mr. Ng, an artificial-intelligence scientist who conducted groundbreaking research at Stanford University and at Alphabet Inc.’s Google. He’s also a co-founder of online-learning company Coursera Inc.

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CNET On Cars — Road to the Future- Airless tires.

More Videos by Crazy Inventions.

IFlex — Airless Tire

Hankook’s Revolutionary Airless i-Flex Tire is Puncture-Proof and 95% Recyclable.

#Hankook #iFlex #Tire

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Airless tires.

#Airless_tires are the next generation of tires waiting to take over the world. Recently, #Hankook_iFlex_tire underwent a series of high speed tests and that has helped us take a step closer to a future where tires without air would become a reality. It was company’s fifth attempt at launching #airless_tires into the market. Why is the company trying to do so and that too this religiously? Because of the multiple benefits that this gadget brings in comparison to the traditional tires.

#Hankook’s tire is far more energy efficient and can be recycled as well. The material that has been used by Hankook allows the company to reduce the production steps into half as compared to a conventional tire.

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ARPA-E creating sustainable energy crops for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass.

In Washington, the DOE’s ARPA-E TERRA projects seek to accelerate the development of sustainable energy crops for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass. To accomplish this, the projects uniquely integrate agriculture, information technology, and engineering communities to design and apply new tools for the development of improved varieties of energy sorghum. The TERRA project teams will create novel platforms to enhance methods for crop phenotyping (identifying and measuring the physical characteristics of plants) which are currently time-intensive and imprecise.

The new approaches will include automated methods for observing and recording characteristics of plants and advanced algorithms for analyzing data and predicting plant growth potential. The projects will also produce a large public database of sorghum genotypes, enabling the greater community of plant physiologists,

Bioinformaticians and geneticists to generate breakthroughs beyond TERRA. These innovations will accelerate the annual yield gains of traditional plant breeding and support the discovery of new crop traits that improve water productivity and nutrient use efficiency needed to improve the sustainability of bioenergy crops.

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The legendary hacker George Hotz, known by his nom de guerre “geohot,” who first came to public attention by hacking Apple’s (AAPL) first iPhone, spoke this morning at the South by Southwest conference about taking on Tesla’s (TSLA) self-driving car initiatives with his own garage efforts, a talk titled “I built a better self-driving car than Tesla.”

By the end of the talk, it was clear he had numerous targets, including Alphabet’s (GOOGL) self-driving car efforts, despite mighty respect for the search giant.

Hotz’s achievement, rigging up home made parts to an Acura ILX to make it self-driving, first came to prominence with an article in mid-December by Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance.

Continue reading “We Are Coming for You, Tesla, And You, Too, Google, Says Hacker Hotz” »