Consoles are obsolete the minute they are released. The onward march of silicon innovation ensures that consoles never are able to keep up with the times, but technical superiority rarely results in being remembered. That kind of legacy is defined by the experiences a device provides. A genre defining game, a revolutionary approach to media, or a beloved controller can be enough to sway popular opinion. But really…it all boils down to a box. All the spurious promises of world-class hardware specs, all the overly ambitious software ship dates, and even the questionable fast-food crossover promotions exist in service to the box. The boxes vying for attention in 2020 A.D. are the PlayStation 5 (PS5) and Xbox Series X/S/Seriessss (XSX or whatever the common nomenclature eventually shakes out to be). These boxes likely represent the minimum spec for the next decade in big-budget video games, however, it is the core identity of those consoles that will define the era.
Self-driving technology is a holy grail that promises to forever change the way we interact with cars. Thus far, there’s been plenty of hype and excitement, but full vehicles that remove the driver from the equation have remained far off. Tesla have long posited themselves as a market leader in this area, with their Autopilot technology allowing some limited autonomy on select highways. However, in a recent announcement, they have heralded the arrival of a new “Full Self Driving” ability for select beta testers in their early access program.
Taking Things Up A Notch
Telsa’s update notes highlight the new “Full Self-Driving” capabilities. Drivers are expected to pay continuous attention and be prepared to take over at any time, as the system “may do the wrong thing at the worst time.”
The new software update further extends the capabilities of Tesla vehicles to drive semi-autonomously. Despite the boastful “Full Self Driving” moniker, or FSD for short, it’s still classified as a Level 2 driving automation system, which relies on human intervention as a backup. This means that the driver must be paying attention and ready to take over in an instant, at all times. Users are instructed to keep their hands on the wheel at all times, but predictably, videos have already surfaced of users ignoring this measure.
The major difference between FSD and the previous Autopilot software is the ability to navigate city streets. Formerly, Tesla vehicles were only able to self-drive on highways, where the more regular flow of traffic is easier to handle. City streets introduce far greater complexity, with hazards like parked cars, pedestrians, bicycles, and complicated intersections. Unlike others in the field, who are investing heavily in LIDAR technology, Tesla’s system relies entirely on cameras and radar to navigate the world around it. Continue reading “Tesla Begins “Full Self Driving” Public Beta As Waymo And Cruise Go Unattended”→
The human mind is a path-planning wizard. Think back to pre-lockdown days when we all ran multiple errands back to back across town. There was always a mental dance in the back of your head to make sense of how you planned the day. It might go something like “first to the bank, then to drop off the dry-cleaning. Since the post office is on the way to the grocery store, I’ll pop by and send that box that’s been sitting in the trunk for a week.”
This sort of mental gymnastics doesn’t come naturally to machines — it’s actually a famous problem in computer science known as the traveling salesman problem. While it is classified in the industry as an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, a more succinct and understandable definition would be: given a list of destinations, what’s the best round-trip route that visits every location?
These days, we have LED light bulbs that will last a decade. But it wasn’t so long ago that incandescent lamps were all we had, and they burned out after several months. Thomas Edison’s early light bulbs used bamboo filaments that burned out very quickly. An inventor and draftsman named Lewis Latimer improved Edison’s filament by encasing it in cardboard, earning himself a patent the process.
Lewis had a hard early life, but he succeeded in spite of the odds and his lack of formal education. He was a respected draftsman who earned several patents and worked directly with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Although Lewis didn’t invent the light bulb, he definitely made it better and longer-lasting. Continue reading “Lewis Latimer Drafted The Future Of Electric Light”→
Electric cars, as a concept, were once not dissimilar from the flying car. Promised to be a big thing in the future, but hopelessly impractical in the here and now. However, in the last ten years, they’ve become a very real thing, with market share growing year on year as new models bring greater range and faster charging times.
With their lower emissions output and ever-improving performance, one could be forgiven for thinking that traditional combustion engines are all but dead. Mazda would beg to differ – investing heavily in new technology to take the gasoline engine into the next decade and beyond. Continue reading “Mazda Investing Big In Advanced Gasoline Tech With Skyactiv-X”→
September 30th, 1980 is the day when Ethernet was first commercially introduced, making it exactly forty years ago this year. It was first defined in a patent filed by Xerox as a 10 Mb/s networking protocol in 1975, introduced to the market in 1980 and subsequently standardized in 1983 by the IEEE as IEEE 802.3. Over the next thirty-seven years, this standard would see numerous updates and revisions.
Included in the present Ethernet standard are not just the different speed grades from the original 10 Mbit/s to today’s maximum 400 Gb/s speeds, but also the countless changes to the core protocol to enable these ever higher data rates, not to mention new applications of Ethernet such as power delivery and backplane routing. The reliability and cost-effectiveness of Ethernet would result in the 1990 10BASE-T Ethernet standard (802.3i-1990) that gradually found itself implemented on desktop PCs.
In America, corn syrup is king, and real sugar hovers somewhere around prince status. We’re addicted to corn, and corn, in turn, is addicted to nitrogen. A long time ago, people figured out that by rotating crops, the soil will stay nutrient-rich, which helps to an extent by retaining nitrogen. Then we figured out how to make nitrogen fertilizer, and through its use we essentially doubled the average crop yield over the last hundred years or so.
The aerial roots of the Sierra Mixe corn stalk help the plant produce its own nitrogen. Image via Wikimedia Commons
Not all plants need extra nitrogen. Legumes like beans and soybeans are able to make their own. But corn definitely needs nitrogen. In the 1980s, the now-chief of agriculture for Mars, Inc. Howard-Yana Shapiro went to Mexico, corn capital of the world, looking for new kinds of corn. He found one in southern Mexico, in the Mixes District of Oaxaca. Not only was this corn taller than American corn by several feet, it somehow grew to these dizzying heights in terrible soil.
So if we already have nitrogen fertilizer, why even look for plants that do it themselves? The Haber-Bosch fertilizer-making process, which is an artificial form of nitrogen fixation, does make barren soil less of a factor. But that extra nitrogen in ammonia-based fertilizer tends to run off into nearby streams and lakes, making its use an environmental hazard. And the process of creating ammonia for fertilizer involves fossil fuels, uses a lot of energy, and produces greenhouse gases to boot. All in all, it’s a horrible thing to do to the environment for the sake of agriculture. But with so many people to feed, what else is there to do?
Over the last decade, the UC Davis researchers use DNA sequencing to determine that the mucus on the Sierra Mixe variety of the plant provides microbes to the corn, which give it both sugars to eat and a layer of protection from oxygen. They believe that the plants get 30-80% of their nitrogen this way. The researchers also proved that the microbes do in fact belong to nitrogen-fixing families and are similar to those found in legumes. Most impressively, they were able to transplant Sierra Mixe corn to both Davis, California and Madison, Wisconsin, and have it grow successfully, proving that the nitrogen-fixing trick isn’t limited to the corn’s home turf. Now they are working to identify the genes that produce the aerial roots.
One Step in a Longer Journey of Progress
We probably won’t be switching over to Sierra Mixe corn anytime soon, however. It takes eight months to mature, which is much too slow for American appetites used to a three-month maturation period. If we can figure out how to make other plants do their own nitrogen fixation, who knows how far we could go? It seems likely that more people would accept a superpower grafted from a corn cousin instead of trying to use CRISPR to grant self-nitrogen fixation, as studies have shown a distrust of genetically modified foods.
The issue of intellectual property rights could be a problem, but the researchers started on the right foot with the Mexican government by putting legal agreements in place that ensure the Sierra Mixe community benefits from research and possible commercialization. We can’t wait to see what they’re able to do. If they’re unable to transplant the power of self-fixation to other plants, then perhaps there’s hope for improving the Haber-Bosch process.
