Month: April 2019

Enlarge / Will startup Rivian be the first company to bring a battery electric truck to market? Deliveries start next year. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

On Wednesday morning, Ford announced that it will invest $500 million in the electric vehicle startup Rivian. Assuming regulatory approval, the two will form a strategic partnership, with Ford taking a minority stake in Rivian. Joe Hinrich, Ford's president of automotive, will get a seat on Rivian's board, but more importantly Ford will use Rivian's battery EV platform to build a new Blue Oval-badged BEV.

"This strategic partnership marks another key milestone in our drive to accelerate the transition to sustainable mobility. Ford has a long-standing commitment to sustainability, with Bill Ford being one of the industry's earliest advocates, and we are excited to use our technology to get more electric vehicles on the road" said RJ Scaringe, Rivian founder and CEO.

"As we continue in our transformation of Ford with new forms of intelligent vehicles and propulsion, this partnership with Rivian brings a fresh approach to both," said Jim Hackett, Ford president and CEO. "At the same time, we believe Rivian can benefit from Ford’s industrial expertise and resources."

Enlarge / Mozambiqueans are seen at desolated buildings following the Cyclone Idai in Sofala region in Beira, Mozambique on March 31, 2019. (credit: Gokhan Balci/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

By some measures, it has been the busiest South Indian Ocean hurricane season on record. In terms of damage and major hurricanes, it appears to have been the worst in modern history.

Hurricane scientists define the South Indian Ocean basin as the part of the ocean south of the equator, and west of 135 degrees longitude—this encompasses an area from Africa to the western part of Australia. The "cyclone" season for the South Indian Ocean generally runs from about September through April, but for record-keeping purposes it runs from July 1 of a given year to June 30 the next.

The 2018-2019 season, which began on July 1, has recorded 17 storms, according to statistics maintained by University of Colorado hurricane scientist Phil Klotzbach, and based on data from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. While that by itself is not a record, as the basin has had as many as 22 storms dating back to 1980, the storms this season have been especially strong.

Enlarge (credit: Takashi Nakajima)

I suspect that if you asked an engineer at Intel about quantum computing, they probably wouldn’t want to know about it unless the chips could be fabricated using standard fabrication technology. Using standard processes means using electrons as the basis for quantum computing.

Electrons are lovely in many respects, but they are rather extroverted. It doesn’t matter what you do, they will run off and play with the neighbors. The constantly interacting electron does not look after its quantum state, so quantum information is rapidly lost, making processing really difficult. This makes the achievement of a quantum non-demolition measurement in an electron system rather remarkable.

Don’t demolish my quantum state

So, what is a quantum non-demolition measurement? Let’s start with the quantum state of an electron. Electrons have a property called spin. For any given orientation (let’s choose vertical), the electron’s spin can take on two values: up and down. I can measure and set these states: I set the state to up and measure the state to be up, for instance. But, this is a quantum property, so we can also set the state to be some mixture of the two, say 50 percent up and 50 percent down. This is called quantum superposition.