Lyft Inc. will sell its self-driving technology unit to Toyota Motor Corp. for $550 million, Reuters reported today. Lyft will receive $200 million cash upfront for Level 5, with the remaining $350 million paid over five years, the companies said. The deal marks Toyota's latest foray into ride hailing at a time of growing consolidation in the capital-intensive self-driving industry. Toyota said in February it would develop and build autonomous minivans for ride-hailing networks with Aurora and...
NASA helicopter Ingenuity completed its third flight on Mars today, moving farther and faster than before, with a peak speed of two metres per second, reports phys.org. The helicopter covered 50 metres. "Today's flight was what we planned for, and yet it was nothing short of amazing," said Dave Lavery, the Ingenuity project's program executive. Video clips will be sent to Earth in the coming days. Ingenuity's flights are challenging because of conditions vastly different...
Workplace figures from Statistics Canada show that between one and five years after robots are adopted in a workplace, firms that bring on the machines see about 20 per cent more employees than they had before adding the robots, CBC reports. More robots could increase productivity for Canadian companies, according to researcher Jay Dixon, whose research showed that while Canadian companies tended to hire more people after investing in robots, the distribution of jobs changed, with companies...
Research by a team at the University of Michigan could help harness the body's ability to block pain, Medical Xpress reports. All opioid drugs work on receptors that are naturally present in the brain and elsewhere in the body. "Normally, when you are in pain, you are releasing endogenous opioids, but they're just not strong enough or long lasting enough," says Dr. John Traynor. The team had long hypothesized that substances called positive allosteric modulators could be...
The International Space Station's population swelled to 11 today with the arrival of SpaceX's third crew capsule in less than a year, CBC reports All of the astronauts — representing the U.S., Russia, Japan and France — managed to squeeze into camera view for a congratulatory call from the leaders of their space agencies. A recycled SpaceX capsule carrying four astronauts arrived at the space station a day after launching from NASA's Kennedy Space Center....
A device on NASA’s Perseverance rover split carbon dioxide molecules into their component parts, creating about 10 minutes’ worth of breathable oxygen, ScienceNews reports. It was also enough oxygen to make tiny amounts of rocket fuel. The instrument, called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), is about the size of a toaster. Its job is to break oxygen atoms off carbon dioxide, the primary component of Mars’ atmosphere.
www.science-news.org/article/nasa-perseverance-rover-mars-oxygen-air
To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 31st birthday, NASA and the European Space Agency released an image today showing the ethereal AG Carinae, one of the brightest stars in our galaxy with a glowing gas-and-dust nebula that started forming around 10,000 years ago through an eruptive process, CNET reports.
https://www.cnet.com/news/hubble-snaps-stunning-image-of-monster-star-doing-something-weird/
Tesla chief Elon Musk has agreed with Twitter boss Jack Dorsey, who has said that bitcoin "incentivises" renewable energy, despite experts warning otherwise, the BBC reports. In a tweet on Wednesday, Dorsey said that "bitcoin incentivises renewable energy," to which Musk replied "True." The tweet comes after the release of a white paper from Dorsey's digital payment services firm Square and global asset management business ARK Invest entitled "Bitcoin as key to an abundant, clean energy future." Author and...
Researchers at Zhejiang University of Technology in China and Argonne National Laboratory in the U.S. have devised a strategy to restore inactive lithium in Li metal anodes, Tech Xplore reports. This strategy, outlined in a paper published in Nature Energy, is based on a chemical reaction known as iodine redox. "A fundamental solution for recovering dead lithium is urgently needed to stabilize lithium metal batteries," the researchers wrote. "We quantify the SEI (solid-electrolyte interphase) components and determine...
Adding polymer-munching enzymes could make biodegradable plastics compostable, reports Science News. “Biodegradability does not equal compostability,” says Ting Xu, a polymer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Most biodegradable plastics go to landfills, where the conditions are not right for them to break down. Ting's team added individual enzymes to two biodegradable plastics, including polylactic acid, commonly used in food packaging. They inserted the enzymes along with another ingredient, a degradable additive Xu developed,...
