Month: September 2021

Self-sustaining solar house on wheels wants to soak up the Sun

Students from the Netherlands will take their new solar ride 3,000 km to Spain.

The Stella Vita hits the road.

Enlarge / The Stella Vita hits the road. (credit: Solar Team Eindhoven)

The creators of a new “self-sustaining house on wheels” are hoping their strange-looking project will help spark interest in solar vehicles. The vehicle, called the Stella Vita, was made by Eindhoven University of Technology students.

Solar Team Eindhoven's 22 members previously created a smaller solar-powered family car called the Stella Lux. According to Tijn Ter Horst, a member of the team and a mechanical engineering student at the university, the Stella Lux was energy-positive. “She could power other electric vehicles because she had so much energy left,” Ter Horst told Ars.

After producing the Stella Lux, the team began brainstorming future projects and came up with the idea of a home-like vehicle powered entirely by the Sun. In March, the students started constructing a tear-shaped solar mobile home, and they recently completed the project.

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Daily Deals (9-16-2021)

Apple’s 9th-gen iPad doesn’t ship until next week, but it went up for pre-order a few days ago and now Walmart already has it on sale for $30 off the list price. That means for $299 you can pick up a 10.2 inch tablet with an Apple A13 Bionic processor and 64GB of storage. Looking […]

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Apple’s 9th-gen iPad doesn’t ship until next week, but it went up for pre-order a few days ago and now Walmart already has it on sale for $30 off the list price. That means for $299 you can pick up a 10.2 inch tablet with an Apple A13 Bionic processor and 64GB of storage.

Looking for something cheaper? Amazon is selling refurbished Fire HD 8 tablets for $50. Or if you and a friend are both in the market for cheap tablets, you can save $75 when you buy two Fire HD 10 tablets, bringing the starting price down to $225 for a 2-pack.

Apple iPad (2021)

Here are some of the day’s best deals.

Tablets

Laptops

Mini PCs

Downloads & Streaming

Other

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Plugin-Hybride: Autoindustrie wehrt sich gegen höhere Förderauflagen

Die Regierung will die Förderung von Plugin-Hybriden nur noch von der Reichweite abhängig machen. Zudem werden künftig Kleinstautos gefördert. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (Plugin-Hybrid, Technologie)

Die Regierung will die Förderung von Plugin-Hybriden nur noch von der Reichweite abhängig machen. Zudem werden künftig Kleinstautos gefördert. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (Plugin-Hybrid, Technologie)

Cherry-picking data was routine practice at Theranos, former lab worker says

Theranos’ Edison device failed at least 25 percent of the time, court hears.

Elizabeth Holmes, founder and former CEO of blood-testing and life sciences company Theranos, leaves the courthouse with her husband Billy Evans after the first day of her fraud trial in San Jose, California, on September 8, 2021.

Enlarge / Elizabeth Holmes, founder and former CEO of blood-testing and life sciences company Theranos, leaves the courthouse with her husband Billy Evans after the first day of her fraud trial in San Jose, California, on September 8, 2021. (credit: Nick Otto / AFP)

At Theranos, lab techs would regularly omit two “outlier” data points from analysis in order to get the company's machines to pass quality checks, whistleblower Erika Cheung told jurors yesterday at the trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. 

The process of removing outliers from an analysis isn’t necessarily unusual. But Theranos’ own lab manual did not say how outliers should be identified, so to get the company’s proprietary blood-testing devices to pass quality checks, employees could decide which results to keep, essentially “cherry-picking” data, Cheung said. 

“It was very concerning in a research context because once that translates to a patient setting, it’s giving you a good indication that the system isn’t working reliably enough to feel confident and comfortable in running patient samples,” she said.

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Alphabet’s Project Taara delivers 20 Gbps internet connectivity via lasers

Earlier this year Google’s parent company Alphabet introduced Project Taara, a wireless optical communication technology that beams high-speed data using lasers instead of optical fiber. Now Alphabet has revealed that Project Taara technology is helping provide internet access in sub-Saharan Africa. The company says Taara links are able to beam data over a distance of […]

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Earlier this year Google’s parent company Alphabet introduced Project Taara, a wireless optical communication technology that beams high-speed data using lasers instead of optical fiber. Now Alphabet has revealed that Project Taara technology is helping provide internet access in sub-Saharan Africa.

The company says Taara links are able to beam data over a distance of about 5 kilometers at 20 Gbps speeds. During a 20-day period, over 700 terabytes of data were transmitted, with 99.99% availability.

Alphabet worked with Liquid Intelligent Technologies on the system which uses Project Taara technology to provide a digital connection between Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While the cities are only 4.8 kilometers apart, they’re separated by the Congo River and Alphabet notes that you’d need to lay about 400 kilometers of fiber cable to connect the cities.

Beaming data via lasers avoids that problem, bringing down costs substantially. But the wireless optical communication introduces its own challenges: you need an unobstructed line of sight.

That means that certain weather conditions can affect connectivity, which is why Alphabet is starting its Project Taara testing in sub-Saharan Africa rather than, say, San Francisco where fog would regularly get in the way. The company says this means there are certain areas where Project Taara technology will probably never be viable, but Alphabet estimates that it can offer more than 97 percent reliability in much of the world.

Another issue is temporary obstructions like birds flying in front of the signal or animals shaking the towers where the hardware is located. So Alphabet has fined tuned its hardware and software to make automatic adjustments on the fly to deal with thing like light rain or animals.

The result is a system that can shine a beam of light that Alphabet describes as “the width of a chopstick” accurately enough to hit a target the size of a US quarter as far as 10 kilometers away.

via The Verge

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NASA awards five contracts for lunar landers to follow SpaceX demonstration

The announcement comes as one of the winners, Blue Origin, is suing NASA.

A Lockheed Martin concept for a lunar lander.

Enlarge / A Lockheed Martin concept for a lunar lander. (credit: Lockheed Martin)

NASA is moving ahead with plans to bring competition into the development of landers for its Artemis Moon program. This week, the space agency said it had selected five US companies to conduct additional work toward refining lunar lander concepts to take astronauts down to the Moon's surface later this decade.

The combined value of the fixed-price awards is $146 million, and the work is to be completed during the next 15 months. The winning companies are:

  • Blue Origin Federation of Kent, Washington, $25.6 million
  • Dynetics of Huntsville, Alabama, $40.8 million
  • Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado, $35.2 million
  • Northrop Grumman of Dulles, Virginia, $34.8 million
  • SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, $9.4 million

According to NASA, each of these companies will further develop lander design concepts and evaluate the landers' performance, design, mission assurance requirements, and more. The companies will also mitigate lunar lander risks by conducting critical component tests and advancing the maturity of key technologies.

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