Month: January 2022

Parallel Systems, a company founded by three former SpaceX engineers to build autonomous battery-electric rail vehicles, came out of stealth mode on Wednesday with a $49.55 million Series A raise. The company, which has raised $53.15 million to date, including a $3.6 million seed round, is working to create a more efficient, decarbonized freight network that flows on top of existing railway infrastructure.

The funds will be used to build Parallel System’s second-generation vehicle and launch an advanced testing program that will help the startup figure out how to integrate its vehicles into real-world operations, according to co-founder and CEO Matt Soule.

Parallel Systems also intends to use the new investment — which was led by Anthos Capital and includes investments from Congruent Ventures, Riot Ventures, Embark Ventures and others — to hire about 60 engineers, most of whom will deal with software, says Soule.

The startup’s rail vehicle architecture aims to solve a few problems: carbon emissions in freight, supply chain constraints of trucking and limits of railway freight. In the U.S., rail network accounts for 28% of all freight movement, but most of that is bulk movement activity — large trains that move primary resources like coal and lumber. A smaller portion of rail freight movement is referred to as intermodal activity, which essentially involves moving steel containers between a range of different modes of transportation, like boats and trucks.

“Rail has a lot of opportunity to grow when it comes to intermodal, and we focus on this because this is where we think there’s competition and appetite for innovation,” Soule told TechCrunch.

Parallel’s patent-pending vehicle architecture involves individually powered railcars that can load and transport standard shipping containers as a single or double-stacked load. They can join up to form “platoons” or split off to multiple destinations while en route, which means they don’t need to hold large volumes of freight to make the service economical, although Soule says they can actually carry much more weight than trucks, which handle most freight transportation in the U.S.

“For the unit economics of freight trains to get competitive with trucks, you need really long trains, and you’re amortizing the cost of that locomotive and crew over that one really long train,” said Soule. “When that becomes a problem is when you’re figuring out where to park that big train, and the answer is, not many places.”

Relying on long trains to transport goods means it’s harder to do high-volume turnovers that handle all our e-commerce wonders because those trains can’t always access urban communities or ports. They require specially built, large terminals to accommodate their physical size, said Soule.

“Our unit economics don’t depend on a very big train,” said Soule. “We can move in smaller platoons and rather than dwelling all day for the unloading and loading operation, we’re in and out within an hour or two, leaving room for other platoons to come in. It’s the more efficient footprint and it enables things like serving ports and creating inland port shuttle systems so you can move the containers from a seaport to an inland port, which is often a better place for trucks to go and are closer to warehousing activities.”

When it comes to autonomy, Parallel sees the railroad’s closed network as the ideal operational design domain for safe and early commercialization of autonomous technology due to limited track access and centralized traffic control. It’s important to note, however, that while Parallel’s long-term vision seems promising, the company has yet to test on national networks — it has been testing its prototype vehicle on a small rail in Los Angeles that’s insulated from national networks.

Rail in the U.S. is privately owned by owner-operators, which makes it difficult for Parallel to test its vehicles and the autonomous systems running the vehicles on a large scale. Parallel is targeting private rail companies as its customers, hoping to sell or lease its tools for them to operate the service on a day-to-day basis while offering a supporting role in terms of providing and integrating the technology. Until the startup gets a legacy railroad partner on board, it won’t be able to see if its tech can handle real-world operations.

The early-stage company is a few years off from developing tech that could go to market, says Soule, but it has an opportunity to own this sector of the market, particularly as shippers around the world not only want faster freight, but also cleaner freight.

The company’s platoon technology features self-propelled rail cars that push against each other to distribute the load, which, the company predicts, will lead to Parallel vehicles using just 25% of the energy compared to a semi-truck.

“The fundamental reason we’re doing this is to accelerate the decarbonization of freight, but the problem that we see is rail’s scale of operations is limited to a market it can serve,” said Soule. “So we’re trying to embrace this energy efficiency, but then break down its operational and economic barriers at the same time. And by the way, we’re making our powertrain electric, which further accelerates the decarbonization benefits because our grid itself is not clean. So when you look at a diesel truck, compared to what we’re building, and looking at the average, real-world CO₂content of the U.S. grid, we’re going to be 90% less CO₂ per mile to move a unit of freight with our technology versus a diesel truck today.”

Legislative efforts to rein in Big Tech’s alleged anti-competitive, self-preferential business practices took a big step forward on Thursday as a bipartisan group of lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted overwhelmingly (16-6) in favor of advancing new antitrust legislation. Now, the hotly contested American Innovation and Choice Online Act will head to the Senate floor, according to The Wall Street Journal.

If passed into law, the bill would make it illegal for tech’s largest internet companies to unfairly favor their own products and services on their platforms. In theory, this legislation could prevent Google and Apple from running their own apps in front of competitors in app stores, or make it more difficult for Amazon to sneak its AmazonBasics branded junk above other competitors on its marketplace. The bill would also require platforms to apply their terms and services rules equally to all users.

Senators made some last-minute additions to the legislation after hours of debate, such as a new provision that would include large foreign-owned platforms like ByteDance owned TikTok.

The senate decision comes despite vigorous pleas from two of tech’s biggest players: Google and Apple. In a blog post published earlier this week, President, Global Affairs & Chief Legal Officer at Google, Kent Walker, claimed the legislation under consideration could “break” some of Google’s most widely used services like Search and Google Maps, and potentially damage American competitiveness.

“Antitrust law is about ensuring that companies are competing hard to build their best products for consumers,” Walker said, “But the vague and sweeping provisions of these bills would break popular products that help consumers and small businesses, only to benefit a handful of companies who brought their pleas to Washington.”

Meanwhile, in a letter sent to lawmakers by Apple around the same time, the iPhone maker claimed the antitrust efforts could lead to an increased chance of security risks for iPhone users. Specifically, Apple expressed concerns the legislation could lead to the sideloading of apps, which would give Apple less control over what apps make it to consumers. A spokesperson for Senator Amy Klobuchar’s office refuted this argument in an interview with Bloomberg this week.

“The bill does not force Apple to allow unscreened apps onto Apple devices,” the spokesperson said. “All of Apple’s arguments about ‘sideloading’ really amount to a desperate attempt to preserve their app store monopoly, which they use to charge huge fees from businesses they are competing against.”

The two tech heavyweights were reportedly so concerned over the antitrust efforts that CEOs Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook both personally contacted multiple lawmakers urging them to oppose the legislation, according to multiple Senate aides cited in a Punchbowl News Report. Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz meanwhile reportedly spoke with Cook over the phone for 40 minutes on the eve of the vote, according to CNBC. Unsurprisingly, Cruz left the vote Thursday advocating for several new amendments, according to The Verge.

The bill was also scrutinized by a noteworthy collection of senators from across the aisle, including California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who took issue with what she saw as laws specifically targeting a handful of companies based in her state, according to the Journal. Others like Utah Senator Mike Lee worried the bill could cause “collateral damage,” and may have unintended consequences and entrenched the biggest tech giants by, “creating a strong incentive to simply cease doing any business with third parties.” Progressive groups like Free Press also expressed some concerns that certain provisions in the legislation as written would make it more difficult for platforms to combat disinformation.

Renewed antitrust fervor is simmering across multiple avenues of the U.S. government. Just two days prior to the Senate Judiciary Committee decision, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice announced a joint public inquiry intended to revise and strengthen the agency’s mergers and acquisition guidelines. Though it’s too early to say definitely what, if any, changes will come out of those revisions, both FTC chair Lina Khan and DOJ Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter have shown repeated interest in strengthening regulators’ abilities to target Big Tech’s business practice.

Among other things, the FTC and DOJ said they wanted to know if current guidelines adequately assess whether mergers are harming workers, a seeming nod to recent scrutiny of the consumer harm principle, which up until now has allowed for mergers so long as they do not result in increased prices—a principle that corporations have found is incredibly easy to game.

However, the senate’s new antitrust legislation marks a potentially much more direct threat to tech companies. Unlike FTC or DOJ rulings that can be litigated into obscurity by courts, the senate’s proposal would carry the more substantial weight of approved U.S. law. The Senate proposals would also more narrowly target the business practices used by tech’s biggest and most profitable giants.

All this renewed, bipartisan interest in reigning in Bug Tech mirrors similar sentiment among the general U.S. public. In a July 2021 poll conducted by Pew Research, 70% of U.S. adults identifying as liberal democrats and 59% identifying as conservative Republicans said they believed tech companies should be more than they are now. Both of those groups saw an increase in the percent of respondents who agreed with that sentiment compared to when asked a year prior.

A team of astrophysicists has calculated the number of stellar-mass black holes in the observable universe to be 40 quintillion, accounting for 1% of the total ordinary matter in the universe.

The researchers focus on stellar-mass black holes, the smallest-known variety, but note that their calculations could help address the longstanding mystery of how supermassive black holes proliferated. Their research is published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

For a long time, black holes were only theorized to exist and had never been observed—as their name suggests, they don’t let light escape their gravitational pull. But astronomers have figured out that black holes are at the center of large concentrations of light-emitting matter (our own Milky Way features a supermassive black hole at its center). More recently, black holes mergers have been detectable thanks to gravitational wave detectors like the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration.

But counting all the black holes in the observable universe, which stretches some 90 billion light-years across, is a daunting task. To get to the 40 quintillion sum (that’s 40 billion billions, or 40,000,000,000,000,000,000) the research team coupled a new star evolution code called SEVN and with data on the metallicity, star formation rates, and stellar sizes in known galaxies.

“The innovative character of this work is in the coupling of a detailed model of stellar and binary evolution with advanced recipes for star formation and metal enrichment in individual galaxies,” said Alex Sicilia, an astrophysicist at SISSA in Italy and the paper’s lead author, in an institute release. “This is one of the first, and one of the most robust, ab initio computation of the stellar black hole mass function across cosmic history.”

The research is the first in a series of works that is attempting to model black hole masses, from star-sized ones up to supermassive black holes. Stellar-mass black holes are the smallest-known of the bunch, generally weighing in at few to a few hundred times the mass of the Sun. Intermediate black holes are notoriously absent from the observational record, but supermassive black holes reside at the center of most galaxies and accrete matter around them, pulling stars, planets, and gases close with their ridiculous gravitational might.

In the paper, the researchers also investigated how black holes of varying sizes might form. Stellar-mass black holes arise from the collapsed cores of dead stars, but the origins of supermassive black holes are more of a mystery. Lumen Boco, also an astrophysicist at SISSA and co-author of the paper, said in the same release that the team’s calculations “can constitute a starting point to investigate the origin of ‘heavy seeds’, that we will pursue in a forthcoming paper.”

The new study doesn’t address so-called primordial black holes, hypothetical objects left over from the beginning of the universe that could be much, much smaller than any known black holes. There’s no evidence that these actually exist, but some physicists have suggested them as a potential solution to the mystery of dark matter. One team actually proposed that a bowling ball-size black hole could be Planet Nine, a theoretical body in the outer solar system affecting the orbits of distant objects.

More: What’s The Purpose Of The Universe? Here’s One Possible Answer

In August, chipmaker Intel revealed new details about its plan to build a “mega-fab” on US soil, a $100 billion factory where 10,000 workers will make a new generation of powerful processors studded with billions of transistors. The same month, 22-year-old Sam Zeloof announced his own semiconductor milestone. It was achieved alone in his family’s New Jersey garage, about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947.

With a collection of salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors. He had sliced up wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs using ultraviolet light, and dunked them in acid by hand, documenting the process on YouTube and his blog. “Maybe it’s overconfidence, but I have a mentality that another human figured it out, so I can too, even if maybe it takes me longer,” he says.

Zeloof’s chip was his second. He made the first, much smaller one as a high school senior in 2018; he started making individual transistors a year before that. His chips lag Intel’s by technological eons, but Zeloof argues only half-jokingly that he’s making faster progress than the semiconductor industry did in its early days. His second chip has 200 times as many transistors as his first, a growth rate outpacing Moore’s law, the rule of thumb coined by an Intel cofounder that says the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years.

Zeloof now hopes to match the scale of Intel’s breakthrough 4004 chip from 1971, the first commercial microprocessor, which had 2,300 transistors and was used in calculators and other business machines. In December, he started work on an interim circuit design that can perform simple addition.

Outside Zeloof’s garage, the pandemic has triggered a global semiconductor shortage, hobbling supplies of products from cars to game consoles. That’s inspired new interest from policymakers in rebuilding the US capacity to produce its own computer chips, after decades of offshoring.

Polar Manufacturing has been making ​metal ​hinges, locks, and brackets ​in south Chicago for more than 100 years. Some of the company’s metal presses—hulking great machines that loom over a worker—date from the 1950s. Last year, to meet rising demand amid a shortage of workers, Polar hired its first robot employee.

The robot arm performs a simple, repetitive job: lifting a piece of metal into a press, which then bends the metal into a new shape. And like a person, the robot worker gets paid for the hours it works.

​Jose Figueroa​, who manages Polar’s production line, says the robot, which is leased from a company called Formic, costs the equivalent of $8 per hour, compared with a minimum wage of $15 per hour for a human employee. Deploying the robot allowed a human worker to do different work, increasing output, Figueroa says.

“Smaller companies sometimes suffer because they can’t spend the capital to invest in new technology,” Figueroa says. “We’re just struggling to get by with the minimum wage increase.”

The fact that Polar didn’t need to pay $100,000 upfront to buy the robot, and then spend more money to get it programmed, was crucial. Figueroa says that he’d like to see 25 robots on the line within five years. He doesn’t envisage replacing any of the company’s 70 employees, but says Polar may not need to hire new workers.

Formic buys standard robot arms, and leases them along with its own software. They’re among a small but growing number of robots finding their way into workplaces on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The pandemic has led to shortages of workers across numerous industries, but many smaller firms are reluctant to write big checks for automation.

“Anything that can help reduce labor count or the need for labor is obviously a plus at this particular time,” says Steve Chmura, chief operating officer at Georgia Nut, a confectionery company in Skokie, Illinois, that has been struggling to find employees and also rents robots from Formic.

The robot-as-employee approach could help automation spread into smaller businesses more rapidly by changing the economics. Companies such as Formic see an opportunity to build large businesses by serving many small firms. Many are mining the data they collect to help refine their products and improve customers’ operations.

Shahan Farshchi, an investor in Formic, likens the state of robotics today to computing before personal computers took off, when only rich companies could afford to invest in massive computer systems that required considerable expertise to program and maintain. Personal computing was enabled by companies including Intel and Microsoft that made the technology cheap and easy to use. “We’re entering that same time now with robots,” Farshchi says.

Robots have been taking on new jobs in recent years as the technology becomes more capable as well as easier and cheaper to deploy. Some hospitals use robots to deliver supplies and some offices employ robotic security guards. The companies behind these robots often provide them on a rental basis.

Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, an industry body, says rising demand for automation among smaller companies is driving interest in robotics as a service. The approach has seen particular traction among warehouse fulfillment firms, Burnstein says.