Month: August 2020

Enlarge (credit: Lucid)

Electric car startup Lucid doesn't like the phrase "Tesla killer," but the comparison is hard to avoid. The company raised $1 billion from Saudi Arabia two years ago and is working on the Lucid Air, a high-end battery electric sedan reminiscent of Tesla's Model S. Lucid is scheduled to officially unveil the car in September and begin selling it next year.

One area where Lucid is looking to differentiate itself from its more established electric rival is with its advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) called DreamDrive. Elon Musk has ambitious goals for Tesla's Autopilot technology, but the company has struggled to meet them. One possible factor: Musk has ruled out using lidar, a sensor that is widely used by companies attempting to develop fully driverless vehicles.

"Anyone relying on lidar is doomed," Musk said at an event last year to showcase Tesla's progress in self-driving technology. Musk believes that cameras and radar will be sufficient to achieve full autonomy and that lidar is a "crutch" that distracts companies from pursuing more fundamental breakthroughs.

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  Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is on its way. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

On Thursday morning, an Atlas V rocket launched NASA's latest rover, Perseverance, to Mars.

This marked the third of three launches to the red planet in 2020—following the UAE's Hope and China's Tianwen-1 missions—and it came near the closing of this year's month-long "window" to the red planet. During such a window, which comes around about every 26 months, spacecraft can follow an elliptical orbit such that they will arrive at the location in space where Mars will be seven months from now—making the shortest possible journey to the red planet.

Even the smallest missions to Mars need a powerful rocket to launch, and this is especially true for a rover that will be the largest object NASA has ever tried to land on the red planet's surface. Perseverance weighs a little more than a metric ton.

Enlarge / The town of Nain. (credit: Dennis Minty/Adventure Canada)

Moravian missionaries arrived in Canada in the 1700s, forever altering the future of the country's Inuit population. Beginning in the 19th century, Inuit children were taken away from their families and forced to attend residential schools (boarding schools), where they were not allowed to speak their own language. In the 1950s, thousands of Inuit in Nunatsiavut (the easternmost of Canada’s four Inuit regions) were forcibly removed from their land and stripped of their native language and customs. As a result, a generation of students that lost their culture gave birth to children who are now, themselves, searching for new ways to reclaim it.

Restoring that culture is a challenge, because many Inuit currently live in remote communities that lack roads and transportation infrastructure, leaving them isolated from each other. But technology has started helping them to connect with other Inuit across the country, to preserve traditional cultural practices, and to create a space for young people to learn about and participate in their heritage.

Of the 65,000 Inuit spread across Canada, about 7,200 are Labrador Inuit. About a third of these Labrador Inuit reside in Nunatsiavut, which has five major Inuit communities scattered along the coastline of Newfoundland Labrador province. None of the communities are connected to each other—or to anywhere else for that matter— by road, and they can only be reached by airplane or boat. Nain, with a population of approximately 1,200 people, is the largest and northernmost Inuit community.