The US passed the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, a $250 billion bill promoting US semiconductors, AI, robotics and technology. It authorizes $81 billion for NSF, including $29 billion over five years for the new directorate. It directs the Department of Commerce to designate regional technology hubs across the country, and authorizes $10 billion over …
David Sinclair is a geneticist at Harvard and author of Lifespan. Nature – Reversal of biological clock restores vision in old mice Sinclair and his team restored vision in old mice and in mice with damaged retinal nerves by resetting some of the thousands of chemical marks that accumulate on DNA as cells age. They …
Ray Kurzweil wrote the Singularity is Near in 2005 and he described the near inevitability of the creation of super intelligence and a Technological Singularity. Kurzweil built upon the Singularity ideas of Vernor Vinge. In nearly two decades, computers have continued to improve, algorithms have improved and AI has improved. The Deep Learning and Reinforcement …
Powerful reinforcement learning agents could constitute a solution to artificial general intelligence. They hypothesise that intelligence, and its associated abilities, can be understood as subserving the maximisation of reward. Accordingly, reward is enough to drive behavior that exhibits abilities studied in natural and artificial intelligence, including knowledge, learning, perception, social intelligence, language, generalisation and imitation. …
Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark will join the auction winner on New Shepard’s first human flight on July 20th, 2021. Ever since Jeff Bezos was five years old, he has dreamed of traveling to space. On July 20th, he will take that journey with his brother. The greatest adventure, with his best friend. It …
Jordan Giesige has researched all aspects of the Tesla Battery Day announcements. Jordan’s analysis is that the Kato Road 4680 battery plant should be achieving a 5 GWh per year production level. This means about 0.4 GWh per month of 4680 batteries. This would be enough for 4000 cars with 100 kWh packs. This would …
The US Air Force is funding $48 million to study using the SpaceX Starship to move military cargo anywhere in the world in one hour. There will need to be more spent to actually use SpaceX Starships for rapid deployments. SpaceX seems to be well on the way to making Starship a technical and economic …
The SpaceX Super Heavy booster that will fly to orbit should be completed within weeks. This first booster will have 29 Raptor engines and each engine will have 225 tons of thrust. The regular Super Heavy boosters will have 32 Raptor engines for 7200 tons of thrust. The Saturn V that flew men to the …
There are many companies working to develop commercial supersonic planes. There is Boom Technology which has raised $241 million and has may pre-orders from potential customers. United Airlines agreed to purchase 15 Boom Overture aircraft with an option to buy 35 more. They are currently scheduled to begin servicing passengers in 2029. Nextbigfuture has been …
The largest battery maker in the world, CATL, is planning an 80 GWH/year plant near Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory. The new plant would be able to make 80 gigawatt-hours of battery cells a year. CATL currently makes 69.1GWh and already has 77.5GWh under construction. CATL said that it is in talks with Tesla about more collaboration …
SpaceX is scheduled to fly a cargo Dragon 2 to the space station starting June 3. Crew Dragon’s system of SuperDraco abort thrusters and other gear were removed from the human flight Dragon 2 to enable more cargo. Falcon 9 booster B1067 will take more than 3300 kg of cargo. They will bring new roll …