hubie writes:The most complicated and expensive part of the supply chain is the last-mile delivery, where the costs can account for up to 28% of the total transportation cost and is projected to increase. The two main issues driving these costs will be the continual rise of e-commerce as well as rapid global urbanization, so there is a need for ways to optimize the delivery process to reduce costs. Urbanization leads to continued growth of traffic, which leads to transportation delays, higher fuel costs, and larger environmental impacts. These factors have led companies to consider deliveries by drone, but drones have limited battery capacities. Instead of looking at company delivery trucks as mobile charging stations from which to launch drones, a group of researchers considered utilizing public transportation vehicles to serve that purpose.The idea of letting drones recharge or hitch rides on buses and trams to conserve energy was first introduced by Stanford researchers. The researchers in this work extended that idea to using multiple drones and multiple warehouses operating around the actual transportation nodes of a city (Bremen, Germany) and found that this is an attractive and viable approach that can be implemented in the real world.Journal Reference:
DannyB writes:Shameful: Insteon looks dead—just like its users' smart homesThe app and servers are dead. The CEO scrubbed his LinkedIn page. No one is responding.
hubie writes:The Central Valley of California makes up only 1% of U.S. farmland, but produces 40% of the nation's produce despite only receiving 5 to 10 inches (12 to 25 centimeters) of rainfall a year. That kind of productivity is due to massive pumping of groundwater for irrigation. After decades of pumping, parts of California are literally sinking and water is getting harder to get at (wells in the Tulare Basin have to be drilled a kilometer deep).Groundwater in this region comes from two sources that are separated by a dense layer of clay. The water on top of the clay resides in loose soil and this water gets replenished with rainfall and snowmelt runoff. The water below the clay is the aquifer and this is not replenished. A major problem is that nobody knows where the pumped water is being pulled from, nor how much of it remains.A research team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory came up with a new method to monitor changes between the two water sources.
upstart writes:NASA Mars Perseverance Rover: Digging Into Drill Data:You probably think that the drill being employed on Perseverance Rover is bound to be special, but do you know just how clever it is? The problem that the drill has to balance is getting maximum life from the drill bit itself while achieving the job of collecting samples of rock and sediment.
zafiro17 writes:https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/04/16/apple_m2_chips/Apple is seemingly testing four next-generation M2 processors on software developed by third-party app makers in at least nine Mac models that are likely to be upcoming laptops and desktops.Two years ago, the iGiant debuted its homegrown Arm-compatible M1 processor to power computers and iPads; the shift marked a departure from using x86 Intel silicon for its PCs. Instead of purchasing off-the-shelf processors, Apple – which was already designing its own mobile system-on-chips – wanted a custom design for its macOS products.Now it appears the M1's successor, the M2, is edging closer to launch, judging from developer logs leaked to Bloomberg that signal there is "widespread internal testing" of the chip family at Apple.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
zafiro17 writes:It's 2022 and most of us are glued to one internet device or another for 23 hours of the day. So where does your attention go? Software, for this discussion, can mean: apps installed on your laptop/desktop, operating systems, desktop environments/windowing applications, web software/software as a service, apps on a smartphone, etc. - broadly defined.Use this as an opportunity to spread some love for software that you find helpful, useful, efficient, or rewarding.Keep the conversation going.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
ElizabethGreene writes:From Becky Ferreira at Vice:Scientists believe they have identified the oldest fossils on Earth, dating back at least 3.75 billion years and possibly even 4.2 billion years, in rocks found at a remote location in northern Québec, Canada, according to a new study.If the structures in these rocks are biological in origin, it would push the timeline of life on our planet back by 300 million years at a minimum, and could potentially show that the earliest known organisms are barely younger than Earth itself.These presumed microbial fossils were originally collected by Dominic Papineau, an associate professor in geochemistry and astrobiology at University College London, during a 2008 expedition to Québec's Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt, a formation that contains some of the oldest rocks on Earth. Papineau and his colleagues reported their discovery in a 2017 paper published in Nature, which sparked a debate over whether the tubes and filaments preserved in the rocks were a result of biological or geological processes.[...] In the wake of skepticism about the claims of their 2017 study, Papineau and his colleagues employed a host of new techniques to clarify the nature of the mysterious structures in the Canadian rock.[...] "We don't have any DNA, of course, that survived these geological timescales, with the heat and pressure that the rock has suffered," Papineau said. "But what we can say, on the basis of morphology, is that these microfossils resemble those that are made by the modern microbacterium called Mariprofundus ferrooxydans."Journal Reference: