Lifeboat Foundation

The founder of a startup that helps cars drive themselves just became a billionaire — and he’s barely old enough to rent a car on his own.

Luminar Technologies CEO Austin Russell, 25, secured a hefty fortune after his company’s stock market debut this week. The Florida-based firm — which he founded when he was just 17 — makes so-called lidar scanners that use lasers to give autonomous cars a three-dimensional view of the road and what’s around them.

Luminar’s share price surged nearly 28 percent on its Thursday debut to close at $22.98, giving the company a market value of about $7.8 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Following its amazing electrified Ford Bronco, Zero Labs reveals a new modular electric platform for a wide range of classic cars and trucks.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company has released the first images teasing the first passenger station of the Las Vegas Loop ahead of its launch.

A Boring Company Loop system consists of tunnels in which Tesla autonomous electric vehicles travel at high speeds between stations to transport people within a city.

The first system is being deployed at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCVA), which is paying $50 million for the system, but we recently learned that the Boring Company plans to connect the convention center’s Loop to casinos on the strip in order to eventually create a city-wide Loop in Las Vegas.

This Week in Engineering is multi-segment show that explores the latest innovations and tech trends across many engineering disciplines from academic institutions, government agencies and industry.

EPISODE SEGMENTS:
0:14 GM Unveils Massive Investment in EV’s.
2:30 UK’s Kar-go Autonomous Delivery Vehicle.

Continue reading “All About Electric Transportation” »

RV life has never appealed a great deal to me. It has had a slight appeal, but it always looked a bit too compromising for my tastes. Until I discovered the Living Vehicle today.

Granted, there are still some benefits to a more fixed living situation, and an important thing to note is the Living Vehicle is certainly not cheap. It starts at $229,995 and various options will add thousands more (each). But the thing is wicked, offers the core luxuries of life that I feel I need, and allows you to travel all over the place and have different amazing views out your window and your front door as you wish — the kind of views, I presume, that can cost millions of dollars on their own.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mf3QSEFVSZE

The hungriest of black holes are thought to gobble up so much surrounding material they put an end to the life of their host galaxy. This feasting process is so intense that it creates a highly energetic object called a quasar – one of the brightest objects in the universe – as the spinning matter is sucked into the black hole ’s belly. Now, researchers have found a galaxy that is surviving the black hole’s ravenous forces by continuing to birth new stars – about 100 Sun-sized stars a year.

The discovery from NASA ’s telescope on an airplane, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, can help explain how massive galaxies came to be, even though the universe today is dominated by galaxies that no longer form stars. The results are published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Continue reading “Galaxy Survives Black Hole’s Feast – ‘Goes Against All the Current Scientific Predictions’” »

One Dutch-Irish company is leading the way towards greener roads, by selling cheap electric conversion kits for existing petrol or diesel cars.

Drivers will be able to cut their carbon footprints by trading in an old car running on fossil fuel and turning it into a functioning, battery-operated electric vehicle.

Based just south of Dublin, New Electric claims to be able to “future proof” cars for years to come, no matter the brand, the desired speed, or torque. Its mission is to take good quality cars that may have been sent to the scrap heap and revamp them by installing batteries.

Circa 1997

Berkeley — An ultrasensitive, superfluid gyroscope developed by physicists at UC Berkeley has the potential to surpass today’s most sensitive devices for measuring absolute rotation or spin.

In a paper in this week’s issue of Nature, physics professor Richard Packard and his colleagues, graduate students Keith Schwab and Niels Bruckner, report a proof-of-principle demonstration of the new device.

Continue reading “04.10.97 Develop Ultrasensitive Gyroscope Based on Superfluid Helium” »

EVs are selling themselves in Europe right now.