A chart created by longtime Apple pundit and Relay Ventures partner Horace Dediu shows just how much Apple's lineup of phones has widened over the years. This broadening of the product offering reveals Apple's casting a wider and wider net to convince more people to buy iPhones and then purchase the apps and services on them.
In September, Rolls-Royce announced it had completed a 15-minute flight of its first all-electric aircraft, as part of its Accelerating the Electrification of Flight program. This marked the beginning of the company’s extensive testing to better understand the performance potential of the new aircraft and part of its broader aim to support the net-zero carbon emissions national target.
The company announced that its Spirit of Innovation plane used a 400kw electric powertrain “with the most power-dense battery pack ever assembled for an aircraft.” The aim is to eventually achieve speeds of over 300 miles an hour. In addition, the aircraft’s three electric motors allow it to achieve a 90 percent energy-efficient flight.
To ease their concerns, she ordered a vending machine where shoppers can choose their steaks, sausages, or salami, pay with a card or cash, and retrieve their meat after it drops into the bin—without having to queue inside or interact with a salesperson.
Now, her coronavirus rescue is a growing part of her business. Most stores in Germany must close on Sundays and public holidays, but no such restrictions cover vending machines, leading to an upsurge of sales when the shop is shuttered. Thanks at least in part to a billboard Marx put on a nearby Autobahn, customers who haven’t sufficiently prepared for their Sunday at the grill come from as far as Hamburg to pick up bratwurst or barbecue. Once, when Marx’s husband saw a police car stopping by in the wee hours, he feared something was amiss, but the officers simply wanted breakfast supplies.
"Indiscriminate voiding of excreta by cattle contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and soil and water contamination. Emissions are higher in animal-friendly husbandry offering cattle more space — a trade-off we call the ‘climate killer conundrum’.
Using a backward chaining, reward-based training procedure, we here show that cattle can control their micturition reflex and use a latrine for urination."
Sea Machines Robotics, a Boston-based developer of autonomous vessel software and systems, announced on Tuesday that it is readying a tugboat for a 1,000-nautical-mile autonomous journey (that’s roughly 1,150 miles) around Denmark.
Crafted in the Netherlands, the tug will employ long-range computer vision and a “sensor-to-propeller” system called the SM300. Together, Sea Machines says these features allow for “path-planning, obstacle avoidance replanning, vectored nautical chart data, and dynamic domain perception.” In other words, it is designed to follow along a predetermined path safely, identifying and avoiding any obstacles that might appear along the way.
Scientists briefly estimated that Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein, as it's now known, was the largest such icy body identified to date, perhaps more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) across. Additional observations have cast that into doubt, but given the "megacomet" a new distinction: it sprouted a tail remarkably far from the sun, suggesting more revelations to come. All told, the object offers astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to watch the antics of a comet.
BFI4, located in exurban Kent, Wash., is Amazon’s flagship fulfillment center and regularly hosts senior company leaders—Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy dropped by recently—who want a better understanding of what happens after a shopper clicks “Buy Now.” It was the first facility of its kind capable of processing more than 1 million items a day, three times what was possible at the company’s state-of-the-art warehouses a decade ago. Improving technology means Amazon can stay several steps ahead of brick-and-mortar rivals Walmart Inc. and Target Corp., which are now adopting many of the practices Amazon has worked on for years.
More than the physical robots, the stars of Amazon’s facilities are the algorithms—sets of computer instructions designed to solve specific problems. Software determines how many items a facility can handle, where each product is supposed to go, how many people are required for the night shift during the holiday rush, and which truck is best positioned to get a stick of deodorant to a customer on time. “We rely on the software to help us make the right decisions,” says Shobe, BFI4’s general manager.
eBird, which allows birders to note which species they’ve spotted—and where—had a more than 40 percent increase in sightings in April 2020 over the previous year. That’s more than double the app’s normal annual growth, according to data provided by Farnsworth. This February, 140,000 users logged on, to date the greatest number of users in a single month and a 50 percent increase over last February. Now, there are over a billion entries.
Farnsworth says this citizen data is crucial. Scientists can monitor migration using weather surveillance radar, and they’re experimenting with acoustic sensing that uses microphones to record bird calls. (Machine learning can identify which species are migrating, based on the captured songs.) But there are still no devices that can replace in-person observation. “We actually really want humans involved,” he says. “Going out and using your ears and eyes, and your own sensory abilities—we want people doing that because it engenders a much, much closer relationship with what’s happening around you.”
But this flood of new data presents a conundrum: Scientists can’t always tell whether changes in the data are due to animal behavior or just an increase in the amount of information available. Take the data about how many birds are injured or die after flying into buildings. Twice a year, millions of songbirds, raptors, hummingbirds, and shorebirds travel through New York City along the Atlantic Flyway, from their summer homes in Canada and the northeast to their winter habitats in Florida and the Caribbean. They can get disoriented by bright lights or by window glass, which they often can’t perceive as a barrier. Last year, the count of dead and injured birds in New York rose precipitously during the fall—but so did the number of bird-watchers.
According to the U.S. National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division, which has sent researchers to measure the acoustics of more than 600 outdoor American sites for the past 15 years, noise pollution is growing faster than the U.S. population and is more than doubling every 30 years. One writer’s calculations even show that more than 145 million Americans—roughly 44 percent of the population—are exposed to noise exceeding the recommended limits. Anything over 85 decibels can harm a person’s ears, like lawn mowers (90 decibels), trains (90 to 115 decibels), the wail of a siren (120 to 140 decibels), and loud concerts, at around 110 to 120 decibels. All told, more than 97 percent of the U.S. population is constantly exposed to noise from planes and highways at around 50 decibels—comparable to the buzz of a humming refrigerator—but the loudest sounds appear most frequently in low-income neighborhoods.
Though noise really is all around us, from rustling leaves (20 to 30 decibels) to a thunderclap (120 decibels), it is this man-made noise that affects human health, leading to hypertension, stress, and heart disease. Alarmingly, according to Hempton, there are now fewer than 10 places in the U.S. where you can avoid noise pollution for longer than 15 minutes.
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