In Jinan, China, there’s a section of highway over which some 45,000 vehicles drive every day. A company called Qilu Transportation Development Group is converted about two-thirds of a mile of that roadway to generate solar electricity — enough to power the highway lights and 800 homes. Qilu Transportation isn’t stopping there, though. Looking forward to a future of electric and autonomous driving, the goal is to make the road smart. Eventually, it will be able to provide more accurate traffic updates and mapping, and even wirelessly charge the batteries of
,” two lanes of the road are layered with transparent material and solar cells. There’s also room in the top layer to accommodate wires for inductive charging, as well as sensors that can monitor temperature, traffic and weight.
The time frame for fully productive smart roads is still unclear, though. “From the angle of the technology itself, charging is not a problem,” said Qilu Transportation General Manager Zhou Yong. “The vehicles that can be charged wirelessly aren’t used on roads yet.” The section of road will have to be made longer in order to actually be able to provide vehicles with any significant charge. Furthermore, the costs need to drop from about $1,112 per square meter to about $477 to make mass adoption viable. The company says it is working with domestic automakers on the technology, but didn’t name them.
The tests come as China is pushing to become a stronger leader in manufacturing, technology, and transportation. Jinan, where the smart road is being built, is home to China National Heavy Duty Truck Group (which is backed in part by
usage, electric trucks will continue to have access everywhere they need to go.
The FL’s electric motor can provide 248 peak horsepower or 175 continuous horsepower, while maximum torque is rated at 313 pound-feet of torque. The transmission is a two-speed affair, and there are different battery pack options available depending of the truck’s planned usage. The FL can accommodate between two and six lithium-ion batteries with 100-300 kWh, providing up to 186 miles of range with six batteries. The truck’s charging time is said to be 1-2 hours with fast DC charging, or up to ten hours on AC with the 300-kWh battery capacity.
Volvo’s experience with electric technology comes from its bus division, as it’s sold over 4,000 electrified buses since 2010.
So, no more idling garbage trucks under your window, if you ask Volvo. If only the garbage bins were handled silently, too.
Quantum Mechanics Creates a Totally Random Number Generator
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Peter Bierhorst’s machine is no pinnacle of design. Nestled in the Rocky Mountains inside a facility for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the photon-generating behemoth spans an entire building. Its lasers, mirrors, and lenses are split among three laboratories, two of them at opposite ends of the L-shaped building. The whole thing is strung together with almost 900 feet of optical fiber. “It’s a prototype system,” the mathematician explains. “Something might drift out of alignment, and the whole thing stops working. It might take a few days to figure out what went wrong.”
On a good day, the machine produces 1,024 bits of data every 10 minutes, equivalent to typing 13 letters per minute. But it promises what even monkeys on typewriters can’t: completely random text.
Which is much more important than you might think. Cryptography protocols, like the ones that secure your credit card info online and your encrypted e-mails, rely on long strings of random numbers. The less guessable the number, the higher the security.
But the numbers often aren’t as random as you’d hope. “There are a numberof papers that show weaknesses in cryptography because keys don’t have enough randomness,” says Grégoire Ribordy, the CEO of ID Quantique, a Swiss company that makes commercial random number generators. Some devices actually encrypt information using algorithm-generated numbers—which means that if you guess the algorithm, the numbers are entirely predictable. Other random number generators might convert electrical noise, like small fluctuations in voltage, into strings of numbers. But over time, these generators deteriorate and end up producing numbers that exhibit patterns. (Typing monkeys would exhibit patterns too, dictated by the relative lengths of their fingers and the layout of the QWERTY keyboard.) Any discernible pattern is a security risk.
Which is why, a couple years ago, Bierhorst’s team decided to develop a number generator that was perfectly, provably random. In the cryptography world, that means “numbers that cannot be predicted,” says Ribordy. And what’s random? Quantum mechanics.
It’s like this: Even if you repeat a quantum experiment by preparing a quantum particle in exactly the same initial state, subjecting it to the exact same conditions, measuring its orientation after the same amount of time, you can still end up with totally different results. This is unlike flipping a quarter, where its initial conditions—the force of your thumb, the direction of the winds—determine the outcome before it lands. The outcome of “flipping” a tiny quantum particle only exists as probabilities until the moment it “lands.” Electrons, photons, and atoms are really, actually random.
For several years now, companies like Ribordy’s have sold quantum random number generators based on photons. The encoding scheme can get complicated, but more or less, photons oriented in one direction represent 1, while ones oriented in another direction represent 0. However, these products still have a potential vulnerability. Someone—or something, like environmental noise—could have infiltrated the machine and inserted bias into the photons’ states, a blemish on their perfect randomness. A user can’t prove that these generators are random, says Ribordy.
So Bierhorst’s team set out to design a machine that could prove its own randomness. This involved a lot of math. Using a quantum mechanics theorem known as Bell’s inequality, Bierhorst designed a test that could show whether anything could have tampered with the photons to introduce patterns or bias. You can apply this test every time you generate a number, and it spits out a number that tells you, for sure, whether anyone has messed with its representative photon.
They added an extra feature to ultra-certify the number generator’s randomness: In order to for someone to mess with output numbers, they’d also have to tamper with a detector in one lab while simultaneously signaling to someone else at another detector what they’d done.
That’s why they built the machine to be so huge. A hacker would have to send a message faster than the speed of light to signal opposite ends of the machine. Which is, according to the laws of physics, impossible. Their machine produces random signals encoded in photons, and nothing can alter the photons unless it can travel faster than light. QED.
It’s not clear whether this machine could eventually be marketable, says Ribordy. It’s too expensive right now, requiring a pricey cooling system—and it’s very large. For encryption, they’d also need to generate random numbers faster. Eventually, it would be great if they shrank the setup to fit on a chip, says Bierhorst: a random number generator in every laptop, so that nobody ever uses those algorithm-based numbers for encryption again.
But at NIST, he’s not worrying about commercializing the technology. Instead, they want to turn it into a public service: an online, government-run, reliably random number generator.
Beginning in 2013, they’ve actually offered a beta version of this service, called the NIST Randomness Beacon. It produces a 512-bit random number every minute and is currently based on commercial random number generators, but they want to incorporate Bierhorst’s machine into the system soon.
Since these numbers are public, they can’t be used for encryption. But Rene Peralta, a NIST computer scientist in charge of the service, says that governments are interested in using the random number generators to prevent corruption. For example, Peralta is working with the government of Chile to potentially use the Randomness Beacon for running government audits. They’d like to use random numbers to fairly choose which officials to audit, which will also help them avoid accusations of collusion. Brazil’s government, too, is interested in using random numbers to assign court cases to judges, in an effort to show the citizens that the judicial system is fair.
But for Bierhorst, the random number generator isn’t just a practical tool. His tests are further evidence that quantum mechanics particles really do exist in weird probabilities and can’t be predetermined. “It’s exciting to be able to say that randomness exists in the universe,” he says. And now, maybe—we can use that randomness to secure our digital destinies.
This Free And Easy App Can Prevent You From Getting Ripped Off At A Car Dealership
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There are all kinds of websites, platforms and startups that are supposed be “disrupting” the whole car buying process, yet every day people end up with bad deals. But the most powerful tool is something buyers have had for a while, and they don’t even have to download it.
It comes with pretty much every single smartphone, and has even existed in physical form for many, many years. It helps you do all sorts of calculations, from addition and subtraction to complex algebra.
It’s a calculator.
That’s right: the simple calculator is your first line of defense against a car deal that is either not competitive or will put you over your head when it comes to the payments.
Recently, our man Ryan Felton wrote up a fantastic investigative piece on an auto loan loophole in New York that legally allows dealers and lenders to charge astronomical interest rates to folks putting them in situations where the debt is absolutely crushing. It’s because it’s not a loan, but a “service contract”, even though they are effectively the same thing.
Here is an excerpt:
“Guerrero-Roa went to an auto dealer in Brooklyn to purchase a 2005 Lexus RX that was being advertised online for $6,900….What Guerrero-Roa didn’t realize was the transaction he’d signed off on actually required him to pay $18,998.40 for the car over 48 months.”
Don’t blame these folks, necessarily. The reason so many people get trapped by these outfits so often is because having a car is a crucial part of their financial survival, and if they lack the funds or the credit to get their car through a more legit means, they end up in places where the business model is built upon taking advantage of the desperate.
Obviously, these rules are intentionally predatory. But you can protect yourself.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, or even if you are buying a car from what seems like a legit establishment, the use of your calculator is key. Here is a quick way to find out if the deal is a bad one for you.
Take the monthly payment quoted to you and multiply it by the term of the loan. In the case of the gentleman above, he was purchasing a $6,900 used Lexus with payments that would have amounted to about $395 per month on a 48-month loan.
By multiplying $395 by 48 we get a total of $18,998. That is over twice the amount of the car!
Now that case was an extreme one, but even folks with good credit can get hooked into a raw deal if they don’t run the numbers. Not long ago I wrote a piece about dealers advertising prices without disclosing additional fees. Some friends of mine were shopping for a minivan and it had an advertised price of $14,995. But when the dealers pushed the papers on them they saw a payment of $283 per month on a 72-month loan that assumed a $3,000 down payment.
So they did what any smart buyer would do and got out their calculator and multiplied $283 by 72 to get a total of $20,376. Then they added that $3,000 downpayment in with a grand total of $23,376. If they had taken that deal they would have spent more than $23,000 on a car that supposedly retailed for under $15,000.
Of course, the reason for this vast difference was a bevy of unnecessary and overpriced extra dealer fees and an interest rate that they could have easily beaten through their credit union. Needless to say, they ended up buying elsewhere
A general rule of thumb is that if the total loan amount is vastly greater than the sale price of the vehicle you are buying, do not sign the contract. Walk away.
Now the advanced lifehack to this whole calculator trick is to run the numbers before you go car shopping, and this will require several calculations. The first is taking an honest, hard look at your monthly income and deciding how much of that money can you safely allocate for a car payment and also know how much you have for a down payment. If you ignore this step, the chances of you taking a loan that is beyond your means have increased dramatically.
The next step is knowing what your credit score is. There are several free resources that can give you a ballpark of your credit score. While your actual score may be different when it comes to getting a car loan, these numbers will give you a general idea on where you stand. If the FICO reads above 700, chances are you will get the best rates; if it’s in the 600s you will likely get approved but the rates can vary. Below 600 means that you are going to have a hard time getting a loan from a major lender, though it may not be impossible.
Once you know your credit, you should either download or find an auto loan calculator. This will allow you to plug in the three components of a loan: the principal, the term and the rate to get payment calculation. It can be tricky because it will require some trial and error to find the vehicle price range that will line up with your payment. For the sake of running some example calculations, let’s say you have a target payment of $400 per month, and available $2,500 down. A credit score in the high 600 range and you were looking to spend around $25,000 on a new or used car.
You would take $25,000 and subtract your $2,500 down for a remainder of $22,500. In the section for “loan amount,” you plug in $22,500. In the section for “loan term,” you have to decide how long you want your loan to be.
The longer the loan the higher the risk of being underwater, so no more than a five year loan (60 months) is usually recommended. On a new car with a solid resale value maybe you can stretch it to a six year (72 month) loan.
And finally, you need to plug in your interest rate, or APR. This takes a bit of guesswork, but someone within the 600 FICO range is probably going to be somewhere in the ballpark of eight percent. It could be lower or it could be higher; it’s best to use conservative numbers for this exercise.
Screenshot: AutoLoanCalculator.com
After all the values are put in, we get a payment of $456. That is $56 more than your target. Now you have two choices—put more money down, or get a cheaper car. If more money down is not an option, you need to reduce the cost of the vehicle. If you drop the loan amount down to $19,500 you hit a payment of $395.39 per month.
Screenshot: AutoLoanCalculator.com
That is pretty close, and remember you still have your $2,500 down payment, which means you now have a total spending budget of $22,000 inclusive of whatever taxes and fees are applicable in your area. So you should be looking at cars in the $20,000 or under range to keep a buffer for those extras.
I want to make clear that my tips on finance are in no way making excuses for dealerships and lenders that participate in predatory practices. I firmly believe that there should be an increase in regulations and enforcement to prevent those situations.
But until that happens every buyer should be using the trusty calculator before they sign a sales contract.
You Can Now Bundle Your Spotify and Hulu Together for $12.99/Month
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If you’re already a Spotify Premium customer, have we’ve got a deal for you: now you can get both Spotify and a Hulu limited commercials plan bundled together for $12.99 per month.
The bargain is the result of an extended partnership between the two companies. For the time being, the deal is only available for current Spotify Premium customers, but it should be available for everyone by the summer, The Verge reports.
If you’re already a Spotify customer, you can add Hulu to your Spotify Premium plan for 3 months for $.99. Afterwards, if you want to keep it, you’ll pay $12.99 per month for both.
If all that sounds familiar, it’s because Spotify offered a similar deal in September, except it was for students only. Students can score the same package for just $4.99 per month.
Existing Hulu customers can take advantage of the deal as long as they switch their billing to Spotify and they don’t have premium add-ons to their account like HBO or Spotify. Spotify Premium currently runs $9.99 and Hulu $7.99, so the bundle equates to $5 a month in savings.
If you’re already a Spotify subscriber and you like TV, then it’s kind of a no-brainer. And if you’re just a Hulu subscriber, then you might want to consider adding a half-priced Spotify subscription to your shopping list come summertime.
These Are the Five States Where Adulthood Has Gotten Deadlier
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In many ways, the US has become a safer place to live, but not everyone’s reaping the benefits.Image: Skitterphoto (Pixabay)
A comprehensive report published this week in JAMA finds that the US has overall become a safer place to live over the past 25 years. But the report also reveals that in several states and among certain age groups, it’s only become deadlier.
Researchers used data from the Global Burden of Disease Study, an annual research program that tracks how many people are killed and disabled by various ailments across 127 countries. They specifically looked, on a state by state level, at the mortality rate of Americans from 1990 all the way up to 2016.
Between that time period, deaths dropped significantly. In 1990, the overall annual death rate was estimated to be 745.2 deaths per every 100,000 people; by 2016, the rate had dropped by 578 deaths per every 100,000 people. The average life expectancy increased as well, from 71.9 years in 1990 to 76.5 in 2016. Death and injury rates of major chronic disorders, such as cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer, declined as well.
Behind the general rosy picture, though, they also found profound differences—and worse outcomes—depending on where people lived. While someone born in Hawaii in 2016 could be expected to live 81.3 years, for instance, someone else born that same year in Mississippi had a life expectancy of 74.7 years. And though people between the ages of 50 to 99 as well as people under the age of 20 were less likely to die in 2016 in every state than they were in 1990, the same wasn’t entirely true for adults between the ages of 20 to 55.
The probability of someone dying between those ages declined in 31 states and Washington DC. But in five states—Kentucky, Oklahoma, New Mexico, West Virginia, and Wyoming—the probability of death had increased by 10 percent or more from 1990 to 2016.
“The US has witnessed some improvements among youth under 20 and seniors over 55, but overall the nation and some of our states are falling behind other, less developed countries,” said co-author Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in a statement.“The strain on America’s health resources is getting worse, and the need for prevention services and greater access to and quality of medical care is increasing.”
As for what’s killing these adults, Mokdad and his team point to factors like the ongoing opioid crisis and mental health disorders. In 1990, they noted, opioid use disorder was the 11th leading cause of accumulated “Disability-Adjusted Life Years,” or DALYs, a measure that’s used to calculate the loss of one healthy year to disability. By 2016, it became the 7th leading cause. States such as West Virginia have tellingly reported some of the highest rates of opioid overdose deaths in recent years.
DALYs attributed to major depression and anxiety disorders also increased by 17.32 percent and 16.7 percent, respectively.
“These findings point to an urgent need to address mental health and drug use disorders in the United States,” the authors wrote. “There is a need for improved access to quality mental health care and screening to improve outcomes, as well as programs to prevent mental disorders and promote mental health.”
These programs, as well as those that address other chronic risk factors like a poor diet or sedentary behavior, should ideally be focused at reaching out to the public though their local doctors, the authors advocate.
“Primary care is our health system’s front line of defense, detection, and treatment,” Mokdad said. “Local, state, and federal dollars need to be targeted more effectively for primary care, especially for those millions of Americans not on Medicare.”
Now that the Android-first Google Lens feature has finally rolled out to the Photos app on iOS devices, nearly all mobile users can appreciate a recently-added feature: Identifying pet breeds. Also, a new wrinkle added this week will have Google Photos automatically create a book starring your pet. Yes, the might of artificial intelligence has been mustered to determine what kind of dog or cat is in the photo you just took. The only thing left for humans to decide is if they prefer a hardcover or softcover edition.
Last year Google announced that Photos search can comb through your library by particular breed, species (including animals that aren’t cats or dogs) or emoji. Which could be helpful if you want to find the latest pic of your sibling’s pet but don’t want to sift through your entire camera roll. The announcement came with a few reminders of what Google Lens could already do, like videos of your favorite weird animals.
