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News
Autonomous robots now live on desert solar rows, wake up after dark, brush the glass dry with no water and park to recharge off their own panel — dirty glass costs 7 to 50 percent of a farm's output, and after a dust storm it can hit 80 percent
2+ day, 10+ hour ago (568+ words) Deserts are just about the perfect place to put solar panels. The sun barely takes a day off, land is cheap, and there’s not much standing around to cast a shadow. They’re also the single worst place on the planet…...
Japan hung 2 megawatts of solar panels 12.5 feet over a rice paddy and then spent the whole growing season turning them edge-on so they would stop shading the crop, and the back of the glass lives off the light bouncing up from the water
1+ week, 3+ day ago (977+ words) Solar panels have exactly one job. Catch as much light as they can, for as long as the sun is up, and turn it into electricity. The entire industry is arranged around that single idea. So it takes a moment…...
A 236-foot American solar drone with a wingspan longer than a 747's flew eight days over the Gulf with no fuel and nobody aboard, ran a Navy radar the whole time, and then went into the water on the way home because the batteries ran flat before sunrise
2+ week, 3+ day ago (1503+ words) Every airplane you have ever boarded has the same hard limit built into it, and it sits in the wings. Fuel decides range, endurance, loiter time, and how long anyone can stay over one patch of ocean before somebody has…...
A California data center has run for two years with no power line at all, making its own electricity from hydrogen and cooling its 1,800 GPUs with the water that drips out of the fuel cells, and it just ordered stacks for a bigger one
4+ week, 7+ hour ago (1218+ words) Hydrogen fuel cells were supposed to end up under the hood. Carmakers spent two decades and a great deal of money developing them, and in passenger cars the technology never got past a few niche models sold mostly in California....
A Danish startup just set out to catch undersea saboteurs by listening instead of chasing, scattering cheap silent microphones across the seabed that hear a diver or a stealth drone coming long before it reaches the cables carrying 99% of the world's data
1+ mon, 2+ day ago (1059+ words) For the past couple of years, the cheapest way to knock out a slice of Europe’s internet has been a rusty tanker and a dropped anchor. Drag it across the wrong stretch of seabed, snap a cable or two, and…...
A robot shaped like a metal giraffe swims into Japan's nuclear reactors, grabs the steel wall with vacuum-pad feet and reads the welds with an ultrasonic wand, soaking up a radiation dose that would kill the person who'd otherwise do it
1+ mon, 4+ day ago (911+ words) A nuclear reactor’s steel vessel is the one component nobody at the plant is allowed to be relaxed about. It’s the thick-walled can that holds the fuel and the superheated, pressurized water around it, and the job is to keep…...
Britain just sent a robot dog into the rooms where a human gets a sealed suit and a clock, on a 136 billion pound cleanup that runs to 2125 — the dog has no clock, drags a paper filter across the wall by copying a man's hand, and the first thing it carried out was blue chalk
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (1449+ words) You have almost certainly seen a Boston Dynamics Spot doing something clever in a video. Dancing in formation, opening a door for another robot, trotting up a flight of stairs while an engineer films it on a phone. Robot dogs…...
America now has a reactor test bed for hacking, AI and remote control, a 10-kilowatt machine under Purdue that traded its 1960s dials for ethernet — built to prove whether one control room can watch a fleet of reactors from thousands of miles away
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (1209+ words) Nuclear control rooms are one of the last corners of America where analog never died. Dials, knobs, chart recorders, switch panels that look lifted from a 1960s film set. And there’s a logic to it: you can’t reach a dial through…...
A Swiss reactor design promises to burn the nuclear waste that stays dangerous for 300,000 years down to material needing under 1,000 — but first somebody has to build a proton cyclotron nearly three times more powerful than the strongest one on Earth
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (1473+ words) Every nuclear plant on the grid can stop its own chain reaction in seconds. The control rods drop, the fission stops, the reactor is off. It works. It worked at Fukushima Daiichi, where the three reactors that were running scrammed…...
A U.S. state may effectively ban Tesla's Cybercab if recent legislation passes
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (435+ words) New Jersey may essentially ban Tesla’s Cybercab before the vehicle is even available. New Jersey has introduced legislation mandating three types of sensing technology in all robot taxis. Speaking to The Verge, the bill’s main sponsor Sen. Andrew Zwicker, said…...