On Wednesday, Amyris announced another milestone#a memorandum of understanding with Brazil s largest low-cost airline, GOL Linhas Aereas, to begin using a jet fuel produced by yeast starting in 2014.
such as local buses and Amyris s experiment with GOL s planes. But dozens of other products are close to market,
Located in one of the grittiest areas of town, where train tracks, garbage, and broken down carsare far more prevalent than the hippies Berkeley is famous for,
and during WORLD WAR II, a million vehicles utilized the technology. But after the war, it more or less vanished from the planet, for reasons unknown.
That s why Google is doing self driving cars, and balloons floating in the air with Internet connections.
Google which boatloads of cash, and limitless ambition sees itself as the only company willing to take big risks like this.#
#Google s quest to popularize self-driving cars How a self-driving car sees the world.
At about 8am every morning, Anthony Levandowski gets into the driver s seat of his white Lexus for his daily commute to work.
He has a chauffeur and it s a robot. Levandowski backs out of his suburban driveway in the usual manner.
By the time he points his car down the street, it has used its GPS and other sensors to determine its location in the world.
But the moment Levandowski enters the freeway ramp near his house, a colorful graphic appears.
It s a schematic view of the road: two solid white vertical lines marking the boundaries of the highway
there are two on the far side of the freeway, shown in green on the schematic. Levandowski s car and those around him are represented by little white squares.
The graphics are reminiscent of Pong. But the game play? Pure Frogger. There are two buttons on Levandowski s steering wheel, off and on,
And with that, Levandowski has handed off control of his vehicle to software named Google Chauffeur. He takes his feet off the pedals and puts his hands in his lap.
The car s computer is now driving him to work. Self-driving cars have been around in one form or another since the 1970s
but three DARPA Grand Challenges, in 2004,2005, and 2007, jump-started the field. Grand Challenge alumni now populate self-driving laboratories worldwide.
but also most of the major car manufacturers: Audi, Volkswagen, Toyota, GM, Volvo, BMW, Nissan. Arguably the most important outcome of the DARPA field trials was the development of a robust and reliable laser range finder.
It s the all-seeing eye mounted on top of Levandowski s car, and it s used by virtually every other experimental self-driving system ever built.
This year will mark another key milestone in self-driving technology. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is expected widely to announce standards
and mandates for car-borne beacons that will broadcast location information to other vehicles on the road.
The beacons will warn drivers when a collision seems imminent#hen the car ahead breaks hard,
for example, or another vehicle swerves erratically into traffic. Automakers may then use this information to take the next step:
program automated responses. Levandoswki s commute is 45 miles long, and if Chauffeur were perfect,
he might use the time napping in the backseat. In reality, Levandowski has to stay awake and behind the wheel,
because when Chauffeur encounters a situation in which it s slightly unsure of itself, it asks him to retake control.
Following Google policy, Levandowski drives through residential roads and surface streets himself, while Chauffeur drives the freeways.
Still, it s a lot better than driving the whole way. Levandowski has his hands on the wheel for just 14 minutes of his hour-long commute:
at the very beginning, at the very end, and during the tricky freeway interchanges on the San mateo Bridge.
The rest of the time, he can relax.##oeautomatic driving is a fundamentally different experience than driving myself,
#he told automotive engineers attending the 2012 SAE International conference.##oewhen I arrive at work, I m ready.
He s the business lead of Google s self-driving-car project, an initiative that the company has been developing for the better part of a decade.
Google has a small fleet of driverless cars now plying public roads. They are test vehicles,
but they are also simply doing their job: ferrying Google employees back and forth from work. Commuters in Silicon valley report seeing one of the cars#asily identifiable by a spinning turret mounted on the roof#n average of once an hour.
Google itself reports that collectively the cars have driven more than 500,000 miles without crashing. At a ceremony at Google headquarters last year, where Governor Jerry brown signed California s self-driving-car bill into law, Google cofounder Sergey Brin said#oeyou
can count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this.##In other words, a self-driving car will be parked on a street near you by 2018.
Yet releasing a car will require more than a website and a#oeclick here to download#button.
For Chauffeur to make it to your driveway, it will have to run a gauntlet: Chauffeur must navigate a path through a skeptical Detroit, a litigious society,
and a host of technical catch-22 s. Right now, Chauffeur is undergoing what s known in Silicon valley as a closed beta test.
In the language particular to Google, the researchers are#oedogfooding#the car#riving to work each morning in the same way that Levandowski does.
It s not so much a perk as it is a product test. Google needs to put the car in the hands of ordinary drivers in order to test the user experience.
The company also wants to prove#n a statistical actuarial sense#hat the auto-drive function is safe:
not perfect, not crash-proof, but safer than a competent human driver.##oewe have a saying here at Google,
#says Levandowski.##oein God we trust#ll others must bring data.##Currently, the data reveal that so-called release versions of Chauffeur will, on average,
travel 36,000 miles before making a mistake severe enough to require driver intervention. A mistake doesn t mean a crash#t just means that Chauffeur misinterprets what it sees.
For example, it might mistake a parked truck for a small building or a mailbox for a child standing by the side of the road.
It s scary, but it s not the same thing as an accident. The software also performs hundreds of diagnostic checks a second.
Glitches occur about every 300 miles. This spring Chris Urmson, the director of Google s self-driving-car project, told a government audience in Washington, D c,
. that the vast majority of those are nothing to worry about.##oewe ve set the bar incredibly low,
#he says. For the errors worrisome enough to require human hands back on the wheel,
Google s crew of young testers have been trained in extreme driving techniques#ncluding emergency braking, high-speed lane changes,
How many seconds of warning should Chauffeur provide before giving back the controls? The driver would need a bit of time to gather situational awareness,
#So far, Chauffeur has a clean driving record. There has been reported only one accident that can conceivably be blamed on Google.
A self-driving car near Google s headquarters rear-ended another Prius with enough force to push it forward
and impact another two cars, falling-dominoes style. The incident took place two years ago#he Stone age,
the car was not in self-driving mode at the time, so the accident wasn t Chauffeur s fault.
It was due to ordinary human error. Human drivers get into an accident of one sort or another an average of once every 500
the argument could be made that Google Chauffeur is already as safe as the average human driver.
#Google has been uncommonly secretive about its self-driving-car program. Though it began in 2009,
The attack came from Chrysler, the smallest of Detroit s Big Three automakers, in the form of a television commercial for the new Dodge Charger.
In the ad, the Charger is traveling through a long gloomy tunnel, the camera tracking with it.
#oehands-free driving, cars that park themselves, an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company.#
#The voice-over is monotone, lifeless, ominous.##oewe ve seen that movie, #the voice intones.#
A year after the Dodge commercial aired, Levandowski showed up in Detroit as the keynote speaker at the SAE s annual shindig.
Google wants to make#oeavailable to the rest of the auto industry all of the building blocks that we ourselves use,
#he said and then ticked off the goodies#oethe Android operating system, search, voice, social, maps, navigation, even Chauffeur.#
automakers should focus on making the user experience their own. No one talks about the actual terms of the deal#egotiations with individual car companies were held behind closed doors#ut it shouldn t surprise anyone
if Google is proposing to give away the software. For the car companies, the real cost of implementing the technology would be specialized in the peripheral that Chauffeur needs to run:
the lidar. The acronym stands for light detection and ranging, and it works on the same principle that radar and sonar do#ut today s most advanced lidar is much more accurate,
generating up to 1. 3 million voxels per second. A voxel is like a pixel but represents a point in space instead of on a two-dimensional screen.)
But at $75, 000 to $85, 000 each, Google s lidar costs more than every other component in the self-driving car combined, including the car itself.
#oefor the autonomous vehicle, I m kind of the only thing that works,#Hall says. Industry scuttlebutt has it that Ford is giving Google the most serious consideration.
Hall confirms that a major automaker recently summoned him to its headquarters to ask whether he could make a next-generation lidar#ruggedized, standardized automotive component.
The company wanted a design that it could hide (perhaps behind the windshield) that would wholesale for no more than $1, 000,
It would be many more years before a self-driving car is brought to market, prompting lidar orders in the hundreds of thousands.
the $100-million lidar order from a car company? Or the $100-million lidar factory by Velodyne or another supplier?
Self-driving cars should be achievable in five years. It takes more than five years to engineer a new car from the ground up.
If Detroit started designing self-driving cars now around components that actually exist, there s no way the technology could get to the showroom by 2017.
Google is not a car manufacturer. Nor does it intend to be one, Levandowski says. So what s the plan?#
#oei don t think we need to wait 10 years for the next model or body style to come out to build the technology,
#However, without reinventing Chauffeur and the super-high-resolution Google maps that go with it, Hall doesn t see the point.
It too is filled with catch-22 s. Hall described a Powerpoint presentation containing the automaker s analysis of self-driving-car technology.#
#Detroit doesn t want to start making self-driving cars without legal clarity. And legal clarity will not arrive until self-driving cars test the law.
Bryant Walker Smith, a civil engineer, lawyer, and Stanford Law school fellow, is the leading expert on how existing law would apply to self-driving cars.
His book-length legal analysis has more than 650 footnotes, but the title sums up the situation:#
#oeautomated Vehicles Are Probably Legal in the United states.##Probably. In Smith s analysis, the legal concept of#oedriver#goes back to an international agreement called the Geneva convention on Road Traffic,
ratified by Congress in 1950. In those days, many of the world s drivers still had reins and a whip instead of a wheel and pedals.
They drove teams of horses, herds of goats, drifts of sheep. Animals, Smith argues, are autonomous.
Thus, in the eyes of the law, an autonomous vehicle is arguably similar to a horse-drawn buggy.
And under the Geneva convention, a basic legal requirement for drivers#hether of animals or of cars#s the same.
The driver must have control. Who has control of a driverless car? For the autonomous vehicle that now drives Levandowski to work, the answer (according to Smith) is logical:
the person in the driver s seat. The Google car doesn t work without one,
as Chauffeur needs to be able to hand back the reins with 10,20, or maybe even 30 seconds notice.
In Smith s analysis, the person behind the wheel satisfies the legal requirement of control#ut this theory hasn t been tested in court.
And even if self-driving cars do not violate an international treaty, myriad state laws imply that the driver must be human.
New york s vehicle code, for example, directs that#oeno person shall operate a motor vehicle without having at least one hand or
in the case of a physically handicapped person, at least one prosthetic device or aid on the steering mechanism at all times when the motor vehicle is in motion.#
#Computers don t have hands. That is a problem. Some states, prodded by Google lobbyists and looking to get ahead of the curve,
have made the cars explicitly legal. The doctrine assigns driver-hood to the person either in the driver s seat or the one who activates the self-driving function.
Nevada was the first to adapt the principle into state law: Its DMV even designed special license plates for the vehicles (they have an infinity sign.
California, Florida, and, most recently, the District of columbia have followed suit.##oewhat s going to happen, no matter what the law says,
is people are going to get sued,#Urmson, the director of Google s self-driving-car project, allows.
But that doesn t mean the development of potentially lifesaving technology should be halted.##oethere wasn t legal protection for the Wright brothers
when they made that first plane, #he says.##oethey made them, they went out there,
and society eventually realized its value.##The oldest joke in the automotive world is the one about the loose nut between the gas pedal and the steering wheel.
There s one last hazard to engineer out of the modern car: human error, which according to NHTSA, is the#oecertain#cause of 81 percent of all car crashes.
Cars kill roughly 32,000 people a year in the U s, . and in 2010, Levandowski s life partner, Stefanie Olsen, was one of the 2. 2 million per year injured.
She was nine months pregnant at the time.##oemy son s name is Alex, and Alex almost was born never,
He credits the safety features engineered into the car#Prius#or saving Alex s life.
should prevent oblivious drivers from causing harm. Self-driving-car boosters talk about a virtuous circle that starts
when human hands leave the wheel. It s not just safety that improves. Computer control enables cars to drive behind one another,
so they travel as a virtual unit. Volvo has perfected a simple auto-drive system called platooning, in
which its cars autonomously follow a professional driver. It uses technology that s already built into every high-end Volvo sold today, plus a communications system.
The vehicle-to-vehicle communications standard soon to be announced by NHSTA would at least in theory, enable all makes
and models to platoon. And lidar could eliminate even the need for a lead driver.
A 2012 IEEE study estimates that widespread adoption of autonomous-driving technology could increase highway capacity fivefold, simply by packing traffic closer together.
Peter Stone, an artificial-intelligence expert at the University of Texas at Austin, thinks that intersecting streams of automated traffic will essentially flow through one another, controlled by a new piece of road infrastructure#he computerized intersection manager.
Average trip times across a typical city would be reduced dramatically.##oeand once you have these capabilities,
#says Stone, #oeall kinds of things become possible: dynamic lane reversals, micro-tolling to reduce congestion,
autonomous-software agents negotiating the travel route with other agents on a moment-to-moment basis
not only would traffic jams become a thing of the past, every stoplight would also be green.
In Volvo s real-world platooning tests, drafting resulted in average fuel savings of 10 to 15 percent#ut that,
Wayne Gerdes, the father of#oehypermiling,#can nearly double the rated efficiency of cars using fuel-sipping techniques that could be incorporated into auto-driving software.
Volvo s goal is to eliminate fatalities in models manufactured after 2020 and its newest cars already start driving themselves
if they sense imminent danger, either by steering back onto the roadway or braking in anticipation of a crash.
and automakers could eliminate roll cages, returning the consequent weight savings as even better mileage.
The EPA has a new mileage mandate for car manufacturers: They must achieve a fleet-wide average of 54.5 mpg by 2025;
NHTSA defines five levels of autonomous-car tech, with level zero being nothing. Level one cars include standard safety features such as ABS brakes, electronic stability control,
and adaptive cruise control (ACC). In level two, level-one features like lane centering and ACC tie together
and the car begins to drive itself. Level three has the Google-style autopilot. And level four is the holy grail#he car that can drive you home
when you re drunk and then go fetch another six-pack. Already NHTSA has mandated level-one technologies in every new car.
Several automakers have systems that approach level two on the test track, and Mercedes appears to be the first to market.
Mercedes offers Distronic Plus with Steering Assist as an option on the 2014 S-class luxury sedans.
GM anticipates its Super Cruise system will debut later this decade. Both use a combination of radar and computer vision to center the vehicle in the lane
and maintain a safe distance from the car in front of it. But the real engineering challenge is making sure the driver stays alert.#
#oeall kinds of problems crop up in real-world testing, #says auto-drive consultant Brad Templeton, who worked with Google on its self-driving-car project for two years.#
#oepeople start doing all kinds of things they shouldn t#igging around in the backseat, for example.
It freaks everybody out.##Level-two systems need constant human vigilance and oversight to guard against situations like a deer running into the road;
the car must be able to hand back control with no warning. But the temptation for drivers is to simply zone out.
So engineers have begun to design countermeasures. Mercedes, for example, requires two hands on the steering wheel at all times.#
#oeeveryone s looking for ways to keep the driver engaged, #says Dan Flores, a spokesman for GM.#
#oeas the car gets more and more capable, we want the driver to maintain driving expertise.##Advocates like to say that there is no technical reason the new Mercedes needs hands on the wheel to steer through a turn.
The problem is that even the best radar -and vision-based pedestrian-avoidance systems fail to see the proverbial child running into the road 1 or 2 percent of the time.#
#oeobviously, 99 percent just isn t good enough; we need 99.99999, #says Templeton.##oeand what people don t seem to realize is that the difference between those two numbers is huge.
It s not a one percent difference#t s an orders of magnitude difference.##Google is betting that established car manufacturers,
working with low-cost radar and camera components, will never adequately bridge that gap. It s chosen a different technical path,
one that uses lidar to leapfrog level two altogether. It believes its level-three system will make cars safe enough for people to daydream
while they re being driven to work. And it s not stopping there. NHTSA s former deputy director, Ron Medford, has signed just on as Google s director of safety for the self-driving-car project.#
#oegoogle s main focus and vision,#says Medford,#oeis for a level-four vehicle.##Via Pop Sci Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati
#NASA plans to grow vegetables in space NASA is organizing the Vegetable Production System (VEGGIE) program that will send packs of seed material to the ISS.
When humans begin colonizing space there is one challenge we ll be facing, how to get food to those colonies.
The idea of farming in space is hardly a new one. Astronaut Don Pettit successfully grew a zucchini, broccoli,
and sunflower on the ISS, but NASA is now researching how vegetables may be grown in space for consumption.
NASA is organizing the Vegetable Production System (VEGGIE) program that will send packs of a pellet-like seed material wrapped in Kevlar to the ISS.
When planted under LED lights this material will turn into lettuce. Once grown, the lettuce will be sent back to Earth for analysis to determine
if it s safe to eat. We wouldn t want our astronauts coming down with space food poisoning,
would we? And then once the food is deemed safe for consumption, the astronauts will get treated with a fresh meal.
NASA chose lettuce for the experiment because it s generally ready to eat straight out of the soil.
Other vegetableish things like potatoes are only good when cooked, and crops like wheat and rice take a longer time to grow.
Lettuce is an ideal choice for this project to figure out what s possible with space farming,
but NASA hopes to eventually grow other vegetables like radishes, peas, and tomatoes. Growing plants in space also has other
less tasty benefits. Gardening has long been known to have positive psychological impact on those who indulge in it.
With astronauts being so far from home and confined to tight quarters, the plants they grow could provide therapeutic relief from the stresses they face.
The astronauts may also benefit from the splash of color that plants provide, especially in an environment that consists of mostly whites and grays.
but NASA hopes that this research could give new insight into how crops behave in space.
and you ll see cars sponsored by e-cigarettes.##Those efforts to#oere-glamorize#smoking,
water is heavy and difficult to transport. Plastic bottle made water far more transportable, but it created a whole new set of problems.
Every day, millions of plastic water bottles, cups and containers are transported around the world by exhaust-spewing steamships, trains,
and trucks, only to be discarded, thrown into landfills, and onto our streets. And most of our current bottles don t degrade.
#Top 10 cutting-edge technologies in development Tube transportation is the future of transportation. You shouldn t give up on flying cars or hoverboards just yet.
As technology continues to march on, everything will go into development sooner or later#s demonstrated by the existence of these things,
these cameras are to be mounted to the outside of the International Space station. But their purpose isn t to capture images of space#hey ll be pointed toward the Earth.
While currently focusing on people and cars, they d like to add animals and weather conditions soon. 3. Wireless Electricity The notion of wireless electric power has been around far longer than one might think:
it could bring about an end to batteries as we know them. 2. Ultra-High Speed Tube Trains Magnetic levitation,
or Maglev, trains have been in development for quite some time. In Japan, a recent successful test run means that plans are underway to connect the whole country by 2045 with trains capable of reaching over 480 kph (300 mph.
They accomplish this by removing the wheels#nd thereby, contact and friction#rom the equation.
Maglev trains levitate above the track, suspended by an electromagnetic field. And while the Japanese model is impressive,
called the Evacuated Tube Transport, is the future of transportation, and it very well may be. Its track is contained within a sealed,
pressurized vacuum tube, making the capsules conceivably capable of speeds up 6, 500 kph (4, 000 mph),
all while subjecting the passenger to G-forces comparable to that of a leisurely ride on the highway
and it is the second-largest cooperative international scientific endeavor (ranking behind only the Space station).
ET3 will be global space travel On earth Daryl Oster, CEO for Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies. Elon musk is a brilliant, big-thinking, subtly accented,
self-made billionaire who has led the design of revolutionary cars and rockets and he needs no introduction.
Musk unveiled his idea for a next-generation transportation system on August 12th, and it got the attention of about every news organization between Earth and Mars,
So he realized the vision of ultrahigh-speed land travel could well depend on someone marshaling a tiny fraction of Musk s net worth and name recognition,
Oster, 51, runs a consortium called ET3, for Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies, and his vision has the rare distinction of being even bolder than one emerging from the mind of Elon musk. Like Hyperloop,
he thinks the economics favor a supersonic plane), Oster promotes a planetary network capable of speeding a passenger from New york to Beijing in two hours.#
#oeit s global space travel On earth,#Oster said, which happens to be ET3 s trademarked catchphrase.
A Victorian pneumatic tube system zipped the note across the road to the office and brought back an invoice.#
so he worked for smaller firms#here an autonomous military land vehicle, there a mower for golf course greens.
In the late 1980s, there was a spontaneous move to Lincoln, Nebr. to work on filament-wound structures#mix shafts for the food industry and rocket-motor casings.
#oei just decided I wanted to ride motorcycles with my dad for a few years while he still could,
a Rand Corporation study on Very High Speed Transport had been gathering dust for more than a decade.
no rolling resistance-that could hit 14,000 mph taking passengers from New york to Los angeles in 21 minutes.
4 3#high and 16 2#long, not far off the dimensions of a midsize car.
life-support and sanity-preserving systems (such as big video screens to distract its passengers from the fact that they re hurtling through the choking darkness),
and lower costs throughout the system#one-tenth that of high speed rail or a quarter of the cost of a freeway,
Linear motors launch the capsules to jet-aircraft speeds and beyond; occasional linear motors en route maintain gaps between cars
and subtly adjust speed, and linear motors at the destination do the braking, winning back much of the acceleration energy through an analog of a hybrid car s regenerative braking system.
Most of the trip, you re floating in the man-made great beyond, with a four-inch gap between the capsule s exterior and the nanoengineered concrete walls of the tube.
Of course, none of this exists, any more than Musk s Hyperloop does. Hyperloop, while similar in the broad sense, is a different animal.
The cars are bigger roughly six feet high by 4. 5-feet wide, and long enough for 28 passengers.
Musk also elevates his tubes, which have an internal diameter of 7 4, #on pillars (note that Musk proposes a second, larger system,
one that could carry three cars). The tubes would host the vacuum-pressure equivalent of an altitude of 150,000 feet.
This is rarefied air, but still 1, 000 times more dense than ET3 s proposed vacuum,
what amounts to an airbag would slow the vehicle from its 760-mph tear. Some of that air is channeled to 28 air bearings
Rather than using maglev technology, Hyperloop cars float on a cushion of air. As with ET3, Hyperloop s minimizing air resistance
Oster says ET3 is 50 times more efficient than the best electric cars or trains; a 57-megawatt solar array atop the Hyperloop route would produce more than twice the average power needed to run the system, Musk estimates.
Of course, asking a transportation expert about ET3 vs. Hyperloop is like asking an NFL scout to rank Quidditch prospects.
Experts in traditional transportation tend to be flummoxed by these systems, with their strange technologies and disregard for the traditional boundaries of road, rail and air, transit and cargo.
With respect to ET3, Texas A&m Transportation Institute spokesman Rick Davenport said in an email, #oethis is the first
While providing all but resistance-free travel, vacuums kill. As pressure drops, so does the boiling point,
A 1973 NASA document summarizing the biological effects of vacuums on mammals gives you 10 seconds of consciousness
Jean Ratner, a therapist who directs the Center for Travel Anxiety in Maryland, says that simulating windows with high-def screens would#oehelp a lot,
#but claustrophobia will be a real problem for some passengers. Even in the closed tube of an airplane, they can get up and go to the bathroom,
at least-neither Hyperloop nor ET3 appear to have included built-in bathrooms.##oeno bathroom#that would be a disaster,
adding that even the notion of bathrooms assuages passengers who need a sense of possible escape.
and said the devil will ultimately be in the details of evacuated tube transport. Those details range from minimizing g-forces around curves (Hyperloop anticipates 0. 5gs of lateral force;
the limit for conventional trains is 0. 1g, and a maglev study found passengers get sick at 0. 2gs#not good,
especially without a bathroom) to keeping terrorists and saboteurs from soft targets that, when breached, create onrushing air tantamount to an onrushing train.
In the case of Hyperloop, the proposed gap between the capsule s air bearings and the steel wall is as little as 0. 5 millimeters.
and 3d printers cranking out spacecraft parts. Then he went toe-to-toe with Musk in a discussion of evacuated-tube transport.
Oster s command was typically encyclopedic. They came to understand that their ideas, both unique, amounted to a sort of convergent evolution.
Musk went back to work on his spacecraft and electric cars; Oster is forging ahead on ET3. In his Rand report of 41 years ago,
U s. airline passenger miles have leapt by a factor of 20; we drive, collectively, 250%more miles in more than twice as many vehicles;
and our atmosphere is laden with 21%more carbon dioxide. These sorts of ambitious transportation projects may be just what the country
and the environment needs, said Powell, the maglev pioneer.##oewe had the Apollo project and people got really excited about that.
The interstate highway system. The Internet. But right now we don t have any of that excitement going on,
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