Month: May 2024

Enlarge / Aurora's sensors festoon this Volvo VNL class 8 truck. (credit: Volvo Trucks)

Recently, we took a look at Volvo's VNL new Class 8 heavy truck developed for the North American market. Last night at the ACT Expo trade show, the company debuted a new variant, called the VNL Autonomous. The name should give it away—this truck has been designed to drive itself using autonomous tech from the startup Aurora.

The VNL Autonomous has been designed for SAE level 4 autonomy and combines long-range lidar with radar, cameras, and other sensors. Input from these sensors is processed by a redundant pair of computers running Aurora's AI software. Aurora has been a partner with Volvo Autonomous Solutions for some years now, working on hub-to-hub driverless freight systems for the North American market.

"Our platform engineering approach prioritizes safety by incorporating high-assurance redundancy systems designed to mitigate potential emergency situations," said Volvo Autonomous Solutions' chief product officer Shahkh Kazmi. "We built the Volvo VNL Autonomous from the ground up, integrating these redundancy systems to ensure that every safety-critical component is intentionally duplicated, thereby significantly enhancing both safety and reliability."

Enlarge / Aftermath of a nova at the star GK Persei. (credit: NASA/CXC/RIKEN/STScI/NRAO/VLA)

When you look at the northern sky, you can follow the arm of the Big Dipper as it arcs around toward the bright star called Arcturus. Roughly in the middle of that arc, you'll find the Northern Crown constellation, which looks a bit like a smiley face. Sometime between now and September, if you look to the left-hand side of the Northern Crown, what will look like a new star will shine for five days or so.

This star system is called T. Coronae Borealis, also known as the Blaze Star, and most of the time, it is way too dim to be visible to the naked eye. But once roughly every 80 years, a violent thermonuclear explosion makes it over 10,000 times brighter. The last time it happened was in 1946, so now it’s our turn to see it.

Neighborhood litterbug

“The T. Coronae Borealis is a binary system. It is actually two stars,” said Gerard Van Belle, the director of science at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. One of these stars is a white dwarf, an old star that has already been through its fusion-powered lifecycle. “It’s gone from being a main sequence star to being a giant star. And in the case of giant stars, what happens is their outer parts eventually get kind of pushed into outer space. What’s left behind is a leftover core of the star—that’s called a white dwarf,” Van Belle explained.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Cities and towns that build their own broadband networks often say they only considered the do-it-yourself option because private Internet service providers didn't meet their communities' needs. When a cable or phone company's Internet service is too slow, too expensive, not deployed widely enough, or all of the above, local government officials sometimes decide to take matters into their own hands.

Hundreds of municipal broadband networks have been built around the US as a result, including dozens that have started operating since 2021. The rise of public broadband hasn't happened without a fight, though. Private ISPs that would rather face no government-funded competition have tried to convince voters that public networks are doomed to become boondoggles.

Opponents of public broadband don't always attach their names to these campaigns, but it often seems likely that private ISPs are behind the anti-municipal broadband lobbying. Public broadband advocates say that over the past few years, they've seen a noticeable increase in "dark money" groups attacking public network projects.

Enlarge (credit: Financial Times)

Leading artificial intelligence companies have signed up to a new round of voluntary commitments on AI safety, the UK and South Korean governments have announced.

The companies, which include tech giants Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft as well as Sam Altman-led OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI and Chinese developer Zhipu AI, will publish frameworks outlining how they will measure the risks of their “frontier” AI models.

The groups committed “not to develop or deploy a model at all” if severe risks could not be mitigated, the two governments said ahead of the opening of a global AI summit in Seoul on Tuesday.