NextBigFuture.com

The last mile of a package delivery is the most difficult due to dynamic, uncertain environments both inside and outside of the vehicle. A delivery truck can start completely organized and packed with boxes. As packages are individually delivered, however, the neat stacks can slide or fall over as the vehicle moves. Outside of the ... Read more

This is a review of a 2020 academic paper about using learning systems to train robotics arms and hands to grasp objects. Learning-based approaches to grasp planning are preferred over analytical methods due to their ability to better generalize to new, partially observed objects. However, data collection remains one of the biggest bottlenecks for grasp ... Read more

Researchers with DARPA’s Machine Common Sense (MCS) program demonstrated a series of improvements to robotic system performance over multiple experiments. Just as infants must learn from experience, MCS seeks to construct computational models that mimic the core domains of child cognition for objects (intuitive physics), agents (intentional actors), and places (spatial navigation). Using only simulated ... Read more

Five skeletons have now been found in the receding waters of Lake Mead near Las Vegas. The water level at Lake Mead is lower than any time since the 1930s. The first body was found in a barrel in the spring. The person inside was dead of a gunshot wound decades ago, according to authorities. ... Read more

Energy Parks on Twitter was trying to push unsubstantiated fears of battery fires in response to my coverage of my positive experience with Tesla solar power and Powerwall batteries. My positive experience is that I have ample solar power to run my air conditioning in recent hot weather 95-117F (35-47C). I sell power back to ... Read more

The Defense Department and other federal agencies have sought advanced sources that generate gamma rays, X-rays, neutrons, protons, and electrons to enable a variety of scientific, commercial, and defense applications – from medical diagnostics, to scans of cargo containers for dangerous materials, to non-destructive testing of aircraft and their parts to see internal defects. But ... Read more

DARPA has partnered with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to explore the potential for machine learning and artificial intelligence tools and techniques to accelerate critical mineral assessments. The goal is to significantly speed up the assessment of the nation’s critical mineral resources by automating key steps in the process. Assessments can quantify potential mineral sources ... Read more

DARPA is moving into Phase 2 of the No Manning Required Ship (NOMARS) program to develop a 210 ton robotic naval ship. In Phase 2, Serco will finalize ship design, build the ship, and work through a series of rigorous testing activities before taking it to sea for a three-month demonstration event. The first robotic ... Read more

Chuck Cook performs some of the most stringent testing of Tesla’s Full Self Driving software. He has performed many tests on unprotected left turns and roundabouts. Based upon his latest batch of tests for version FSD 10.69.1.1 he feels FSD feels ready for wide release. He says it is still early to jump up and ... Read more

In the MIT Technology Review Celine Halioua, CEO and founder of Loyal a company working on dog longevity said the antiagig field has “suffered from a branding issue” owing to outlandish claims made in the 1990s and 2000s. “Big names [Aubrey de Grey] in the field were yelling about 1,000-year life spans and immortality,” she ... Read more

NASA will roll the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket back to the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building) before the next launch attempt to reset the system’s batteries. The flight termination system is required on all rockets to protect public safety. Engineers could not overcome a hydrogen leak in a quick disconnect, an interface between the liquid ... Read more

A heat wave will last until the end of this week in the San Francisco Bay Area. Temperatures 100F (38C) or so all week. Today is the fourth day out of the last five days with a Virtual Power Plant event. Tesla has created the software so that the utility PGE (Pacific Gas Electric) can ... Read more

A Foreign Military Sales order from the U.S. Army worth up to $1.148 billion will deliver 250 M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams main battle tanks to Poland by 2025. Poland has ordered 980 South Korean K2 Black Panther tanks, 648 K-9 Krab self-propelled howitzers, and 48 FA-50 advanced trainer/light fighter aircraft. Poland will import the first batch ... Read more

BYD is aiming for 280,000 monthly deliveries of battery electric (BEV) and hybrid electric cars (PHEV) by the end of the year. BYD sold and delivered 174,915 hybrids and BEV in August. In August, BYD had 82,678 BEVs which was nearly triple the 30,382 units in the same month in 2021. Plug-in hybrid vehicles were ... Read more

If Ukraine can recapture Kherson city up to the Dnipro river then they will be able to shutoff water used for irrigation and for the population and Russian troops in Crimea. Ukraine was able to cut off the water to the North Crimean Canal from spring 2014 to the start of the 2022 Russian offensive. ... Read more

32 out of 56 French Nuclear Reactors have been shut down for months because of either stress corrosion or routine maintenance. The stress corrosion problem was because of sloppy maintenance. The French government will step in and absorb some of the sky high cost of electricity. This will partially shield consumers from the excess cost ... Read more

Today will be the fourth Tesla-PGE Virtual Power Plant (VPP) event in 17 days. VPP today. This will be for about 2 hours. A solar power blog reported that earlier Tesla-PFE were targeting or estimating 20-60 hours per year. The VPP only operates from May to October. 60 days at 10 hours every 20 days ... Read more

For the first time, astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable. The above NASA James Webb Space Telescope image shows the exoplanet HIP 65426 b ... Read more

NASA encountered a liquid hydrogen leak while loading the propellant into the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket. Multiple troubleshooting efforts to address the area of the leak by reseating a seal in the quick disconnect where liquid hydrogen is fed into the rocket did not fix the issue. Engineers are continuing to ... Read more

Many countries saw 18% excess deaths during the two years of the pandemic. There should have been a drop in excess deaths as we got COVID under control. More people who would have died this year from old age and natural causes died in the past 2 years from covid. Therefore, this year’s excess deaths ... Read more

This is the third PGE Virtual Power plant day in 15 days. I am in the VPP program in Northern California. This is the second day in a row with a VPP and the third since the first 15 days ago. Tesla set up the software to allow people with stationary storage power walls and ... Read more

NASA has awarded five additional missions to SpaceX for crew transportation services to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract. The CCtCap modification brings the total missions for SpaceX to 14 and allows NASA to maintain an uninterrupted U.S. capability for human access to the space station ... Read more

A research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging in Cologne, Germany, has now shown in laboratory animals that brief exposure to rapamycin has the same positive effects as lifelong treatment opening new doors for a potential application in humans. Rapamycin, known for its positive effects on life and health span in ... Read more

I am part of the Tesla VPP program in Northern California. There are now about 2800 households that are part of the VPP. PGE is having its second VPP event in about two weeks. Those with Tesla Solar Power and Tesla Powerwalls who have opted into Tesla’s Virtual Power Plant program get $2 per kwh ... Read more

Elon says SpaceX is aiming for 100 Falcon 9 flights in 2023. Elon also shared a photo of the Mechazilla lifting the Super Heavy booster. If SpaceX finishes the year with another 15 launches then they will have total 187 Falcon 9 launches at the end of 2022. One hundred launches in 2023 would put ... Read more

Starlink 3-4, SpaceX now has more than 2900 working Starlink satellites in orbit, representing about 66% of the full 4408-satellite constellation. Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell estimates that almost 2400 – more than half of the final constellation – have reached operational orbits and are serving customers back on Earth. SpaceX began operational Starlink launches less than ... Read more

Physicists from TU Delft, ETH Zürich and the University of Tübingen have built a quantum scale heat pump made from particles of light. This device brings scientists closer to the quantum limit of measuring radio frequency signals, useful in for example the hunt for dark matter. Above-An illustration of the device, which consists of two ... Read more

NASA will target Saturday, Sept. 3 at 2:17 p.m. EDT, the beginning of a two-hour window, for the launch of Artemis I, the first integrated test of NASA’s Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and the ground systems at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Mission managers met Tuesday to discuss data and ... Read more

Ray Kurzweil predicted Technological Singularity nearly 20 years ago. Elon Musk could enable a world of economic abundance with real-world AI. Robotaxi and Teslabot will transform the world more than car and the first industrial revolution. The Technological Singularity is a predicted point when technological growth becomes radically faster. Real World AI would be general ... Read more

Invest Alberta supports commercialization of Terrestrial Energy’s Integral Molten Salt Reactor with a focus on reducing emissions in the oil and gas, and petrochemical industries. Alberta, along with the provinces of Ontario, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, is working to advance small modular reactor (SMR) technologies through an interprovincial memorandum of understanding it joined in April ... Read more

Korea’s SK Group will invest USD250 million in TerraPower to develop small modular nuclear reactors. The round was co-led by SK Inc and SK Innovation and TerraPower’s founder Bill Gates. Additional funding will come from other investors. The US Department of Energy is giving TerraPower cost-shared funding through the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) to ... Read more

Abilene Christian University (ACU) has applied to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a construction licence for a molten salt research reactor (MSRR), to be built on its campus in Abilene, Texas, as part of the Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing (NEXT) laboratory. ​ACU plans for the MSRR to achieve criticality by December 2025. The ... Read more

NASA scrubbed the Monday Artemis launch because of fuel leaks. SLS has a stress crack. UPDATE:NASA says the problem was due to an “engine bleed” issue. One of the four main engines could not be properly chilled ahead of its ignition. If they do not have to send the SLS rocket back to the Vehicle ... Read more

The US is using had a helicopters on the Iraq embassy but did not evactuate. Hundreds of Al-Sadr protestors did storme the presidential palace in Baghdad. Reports indicate twelve people were killed in Iraq Green zone violence and protests. The US still has about 12 military bases in Iraq. War is Boring reports – Violence ... Read more

Recommender AI systems are an important component of Internet services today: billion dollar revenue businesses like Amazon and Netflix are directly driven by recommendation services. AI recommenders get better as they get bigger. Several models have been previously released with billion parameters up to even trillion very recently. Every jump in the model capacity has ... Read more

It is commonly known that the recent Inflation Reduction Act bill” will provide $7500 tax credits for buyer of EVs in the United States. This will enable EV makers who mostly make their EVs in the US to get billions in increased profits if they were to make and sell a lot of EVs. Tesla ... Read more

BIG Technology is emerging now and ramping this decade. Early innovators and adopters will win. Those who invest in the winners will also win. Late adopters will lose badly. Just as those who were earliest on the internet and electric cars were winners. Early adopting countries won past technological shifts. The ranking of countries is ... Read more

SpaceX and T-Mobile will put cellphone antenna emulators into the Starlink Gen 2 satellites. T-Mobile will give SpaceX Starlink part of their cellphone spectrum. On Thursday, August 25 at Starbase, SpaceX Chief Engineer Elon and T-Mobile CEO and President Mike Sievert said T-Mobile and SpaceX will work together to increase connectivity. Starlink will amplify and ... Read more

Tesla Dojo team presented at the Hot Chip 34 conference. Tesla has made sure that the IO (input output), memory, software, power, cooling and all other aspects of the system are perfectly scalable. This will enable them to just build and add tiles to scale to the Exaflop level and beyond. About 120 compute tiles ... Read more

South Korea has about 2% of the developed world population but individual retail investors have 6 times the global developed world average invested in Tesla. Non-Korean private retail investors own about 12.6% of all Tesla shares and the Koreans have 1.6%.

I found some comments from Brett in the Trash. I have restored and approved them. I do not know what caused those to be trashed immediately. Let mw know if you have comments that you believed were blocked by the system. I will go through the trash to find them. NOTE: the trash was cleared ... Read more

Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP) has been given approval by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment to commission an experimental thorium-powered molten-salt reactor. This is the first molten salt nuclear reactor since the US shutdown a test reactor in 1969. The TMSR-LF1 will use fuel enriched to under 20% U-235, have a thorium inventory ... Read more

Japan will restart nuclear reactors and develop new plants using next-generation nuclear technologies. Japan wants to restart seven more nuclear reactors from next summer onward, Japan PM Kishida said at a government meeting on “green transformation.” That would bring the number of reactors brought back online after the 2011 Fukushima catastrophe to 17 out of ... Read more

A cover letter from lawyers representing Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, disclosed evidence of alleged legal violations and fraud made by the company in recent years. Twitter’s former head of cybersecurity accused the social media company of committing fraud and numerous “egregious” security violations in an explosive whistleblower complaint revealed Tuesday, shaking ... Read more

D-Wave Systems was trying to raise about $300 million from a SPAC. D-Wave was hoping the completion of the merger with DPCM Capital would grant it access to a trust account worth $300 million, assuming that there were no redemptions by shareholders, but the company disclosed in a recent filing with US regulators that the ... Read more

In 2006, I publicly predicted that solar energy would be the cheapest form of energy by 2020. Among 150 predictions I made in 2006 on the site nanotech-now were Solar power becomes cheapest form of enery by 2015-2020 Massive solar energy deployments, over one third of the new energy generators by 2015-2025 IRENA’s report, Renewable ... Read more

In 2006, I made a list of 152 public future predictions. I made a prediction that there would be 20 million millionaires by 2018-2020. This was triple the number of millionaires in the world in 2004. The 2004 numbers were and what were available and known in 2006. A new study from Capgemini published in ... Read more

Talk given at the Workshop on Autonomous Driving at CVPR 2022. It discussed Occupancy Networks and other technical aspects of Tesla Autopilot and Full Self Driving. Eshok provided info of accidents prevented and lives saved by Autopilot. I had a video that covers Tesla leading in safety based upon third party and regulator statistics.

There is an income limit on the new US Inflation Reduction Act EV $7500 tax credit for new Electric cars in the USA. There is a congressional report that details all of the items in the bill. On page 14, the credit would be disallowed for certain higher-income taxpayers. Specifically, no credit would be allowed ... Read more

Munro Associates analyzes Tesla 4680 battery pack. The Tesla 4680 battery pack uses only 16 threaded fasteners in the entire pack that were not penthouse area (the front part of the pack). Threaded fasteners is something that wears out increases costs. Tesla has designed with snap fit that last forever. It takes more time and ... Read more