Lifeboat Foundation

GUN violence in America gets plenty of attention, but cars kill more. Around 40,000 people a year die on American roads, more than all fatalities caused by firearms (of which two-thirds are suicides, not homicides). The death rate in America, around 12 people per 100,000, is more than twice that of western Europe. The grim toll of motor-vehicle deaths is widely seen as unavoidable, given that the United States is a large, sprawling country primarily designed around the automobile. However, around a third of these deaths involved drunk drivers, suggesting that there is, in fact, substantial room for improvement. And fortunately, it appears that the advent of ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft has had a welcome impact on road safety.

According to a working paper by Jessica Lynn Peck of the Graduate Centre at the City University of New York, the arrival of Uber to New York City may have helped reduce alcohol-related traffic accidents by 25–35%. Uber was first introduced in the city in May 2011, but did not spread through the rest of the state. The study uses this as a natural experiment. To control for factors unrelated to Uber’s launch such as adverse weather conditions, Ms Peck compares accident rates in each of New York’s five boroughs to those in the counties where Uber was not present, picking those that had the most similar population density and pre-2011 drunk-driving rate.

London is testing out self-driving shuttles.

April 5 (UPI) — The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has completed a round of testing for its vertical takeoff and landing X-Plane program.

The agency began testing for the program in March 2016 using sub-scale aircraft developed and fabricated by Aurora Flight Sciences. The platform is comprised of 24 electric ducted fans, 18 of which are distributed within the main wings. The remaining six are placed in the canard surfaces.

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The year is 2030. Former president Donald Trump’s border wall, once considered a political inevitability, was never built. Instead, its billions of dollars of funding were poured into something the world had never seen: a strip of shared territory spanning the border between the United States and Mexico. Otra Nation, as the state is called, is a high-tech ecotopia, powered by vast solar farms and connected with a hyperloop transportation system. Biometric checks identify citizens and visitors, and relaxed trade rules have turned Otra Nation into a booming economic hub. Environmental conservation policies have maximized potable water and ameliorated a new Dust Bowl to the north. This is the future envisioned by the Made Collective, a group of architects, urban planners, and others who are proposing what they call a “shared co-nation” as a new kind of state.

Many people have imagined their own alternatives to Trump’s planned border wall, from the plausible — like a bi-national irrigation initiative — to the absurd — like an “inflatoborder” made of plastic bubbles. Made’s members insist that they’re serious about Otra Nation, though, and that they’ve got the skills to make it work. That’s almost certainly not true — but it’s also beside the point. At a time when policy proposals should be taken “seriously but not literally,” and facts are up for grabs, Otra Nation turns the slippery Trump playbook around to offer a counter-fantasy. In the words of collective member Marina Muñoz, “We can really make the complete American continent great again.”

RAND has opened an office in the San Francisco Bay Area to foster collaboration with the region’s leaders and researchers working to solve today’s complex problems—issues including technological change and innovation, social inequality, water resource management, and transportation.

“RAND’s research and analysis in technology, science, and economic policy intersect directly with the innovation emerging from the San Francisco Bay Area,” said Michael D. Rich, president and CEO of RAND. “RAND’s new office should help strengthen awareness within the Bay Area community of our long-standing commitment to using evidence and data to help policy and decisionmakers enhance well-being in the region and beyond.”

RAND brings a unique set of tools to address these policy concerns: big-data analytics, gaming, and methods to help people make difficult decisions in the face of uncertainty. Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist, is leading the new office and will be convening public- and private-sector stakeholders to discuss important issues. “We want to partner with the region’s technology and innovation communities, to link our research and their expertise to make better policies and improve people’s lives,” she said.

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Bosch and the car manufacturer behind Mercedes, Daimler, have announced they are joining forces “to advance the development of fully automated and driverless driving”.

The two companies are to enter into a development agreement that they say will bring fully automated driving to urban roads by “the beginning of the next decade”.

To do this the two companies will develop software and algorithms that lead to an autonomous driving system.

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Older automakers like Ford and General Motors driverless cars outscored Waymo and Uber in new survey, USA Today reports.

It takes millions of years for natural processes to convert plants into gasoline, but researchers at Ghent University have figured out how to do it much faster. By pre-treating grass to make it break down quicker, and then adding Clostridium bacteria similar to that found in your gut, they produced decane, one of the main ingredients of gasoline and jet fuel. While decane is a polluting fuel, commercial jets will need it for at least the next few decades, and the researchers believe their process is efficient enough to make it commercially feasible.

For their system to work, the scientists first treated the grass with a compound that broke it down and made it easier for bacteria to digest. They then treated it with an enriched Clostridium bacteria from the family that makes up the good bacteria in your gut, rather than the one that kills you. Fermentation much like that used for beer produced lactic acid and its derivatives, and further treatment yielded caproic acids. With further processing, that was converted into decane, a primary ingredient of gasoline and jet fuel.

As mentioned, decane and similar products aren’t very clean fuels (they produce CO₂ when burned), but they still have a much higher energy density than, say, lithium batteries. As such, be the main fuel used in aviation for the foreseeable future, as jet planes need to be relatively light to get aloft.

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Its six compact jet engines will send you hurtling through the sky at 100 mph.

The media is bursting at its seams with what seems to be the superhero revolution. Comic book publishers like Marvel and DC have spilled over onto the big screen, and now it may look as though they’re spilling over into our technology in the real world. While we have been making efforts at a superhero heads up display or an iron man workout suit, we are also inching our way up to a functional flight suit.

Gravity is a British technology start-up started by Richard Browning on March 31, 2017. The company has developed a human propulsion system to re-imagine manned flight. With miniaturized jet engines and a customized exoskeleton, the Daedalus is expected to push us into a new era of aviation. Browning and his team developed the suit over the course of 2016, with the team’s journey covered in this short documentary: