Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Shell Will Start Installing Electric Vehicle Chargers at Its Gas Stations This Year
February 1st, 2017Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand. — Via: Electrek: In a future where the world’s car fleet is rapidly transitioning to electric vehicles, gas stations will be forcefully downgraded to simple convenience stores and consequently, they will lose a significant revenue stream brought in by people stopping for gas but buying something […]
New Wheeled Robot from Boston Dynamics
February 1st, 2017Via: The Verge: Boston Dynamics is best known for its bipedal and quadrupedal robots, but it turns out the company has also been experimenting with some radical new tech: the wheel. The company’s new wheeled, upright robot is named Handle (“because it’s supposed to handle objects”) and looks like a cross between a Segway and […]
California Adding Massive Battery Systems to Grid
January 31st, 2017Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand. — Via: Bloomberg: Tesla Motors Inc. is making a huge bet that millions of small batteries can be strung together to help kick fossil fuels off the grid. The idea is a powerful one—one that’s been used to help justify the company’s $5 billion factory near […]
AI Beats Professional Poker Players
January 31st, 2017Via: BBC: A poker-playing AI has beaten four human players in a marathon match lasting 20 days. Libratus, an artificial intelligence program developed at Carnegie Mellon University, was trained to play a variant of the game known as no-limit heads-up Texas hold ’em. In a similar tournament in 2015, the humans won. The victory has […]
LibreTaxi: Free and Open Source Alternative to Uber/Lyft
January 31st, 2017Via: LibreTaxi: LibreTaxi makes taxi affordable by getting rid of the third party between passengers and drivers. Negotiate the price before the ride is confirmed, pay cash upon arrival. 1-minute hiring for all drivers.
Cafe X, Bringing Robots to the Coffee Shop
January 30th, 2017Via: TechCrunch: The world’s first coffee shop opened in Constantinople in 1555. Four hundred and some years later, Cafe X is putting a twist on that old barista model. Opening in San Francisco today, the startup is opting instead to have a large robotic arm craft your caffeinated potions.
Bag of Chips Can Sense If You’ve Been Drinking and Call You an Uber
January 30th, 2017Via: Mashable: Tostitos’ new bag wants to chaperone your Super Bowl party. In honor of the big game, the chip maker is launching a special-edition version of its packaging with a built-in sensor that can detect trace levels of alcohol in your breath. If it decides you’ve been drinking — regardless of how much — […]
DragonflEye Project Wants to Turn Insects Into Cyborg Drones
January 26th, 2017Via: IEEE: As hard as we’re trying, it’s going to be a very long time before we’re able to build a robotic insect that’s anywhere near as capable or versatile as a real one. So for now, we rely on a cybernetics approach to get real insects to do our bidding instead. Over the past […]
Robotic Fabricator Could Change the Way Buildings Are Constructed
January 25th, 2017Via: MIT Technology Review: So what is the state-of-the-art for construction robots? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Markus Giftthaler at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland and a few pals who have developed a new class of robot capable of creating novel structures on a construction site. They call their new […]
Musk Apparently Not Joking About Tunnel Boring Venture
January 25th, 2017Is this real? Via: Electrek: If you weren’t convinced that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was serious about launching a new company to start digging tunnels, maybe you will be now that he is putting a timeline on the project. He announced early this morning that they have made “exciting progress” and that he expects to […]
