With a pair of 200-kilowatt motors sending power to all four wheels, Sony’s first car can go from 0 to 62 mph in 4.8 seconds. It can hit a top speed of 149 mph, even though it weighs a hefty 5,180 pounds. The company hasn’t revealed how far the all-electric concept can go between charges, but that doesn’t much matter. Nor, really, do the rest of these specs, since Sony isn’t going to produce this car, which it revealed this week at CES. What’s important and interesting about the Vision-S is how it emphasizes the role Sony can play in an age where performance matters far less than how a vehicle treats its passengers.
The rapid shift of the auto industry toward self-driving and connected vehicles has pulled players like Google, Apple, and Amazon into the car business, mostly with regard to infotainment systems. General Motors plans to use Android software in its future vehicles; Amazon just landed Lamborghini as the latest user of its embedded Alexa system.
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Sony already has a place in the auto industry. It provides speaker systems to a variety of automakers. Toyota and its luxury arm, Lexus, use its CMOS image sensors in some models to underpin automatic emergency braking features. But now, the company is looking to ramp up its offerings. “We will accelerate our efforts to contribute to the future of mobility,” president and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida said at a press conference in Las Vegas. “This prototype embodies our contribution.” So it’s no surprise to see that the Vision-S plays up two Sony strengths: consumer entertainment and sensors.
Like most of today’s concept cars, this one comes packed with screens ready to stream Sony’s voluminous collection of music and movies.
Courtesy of Sony
The first is the easier to see here. The Vision-S features a bevy of screens, including one that stretches the length of the dashboard, like that in the upcoming Byton M-Byte SUV. These, of course, offer up access to the music, games, and movies in the company’s vast library. (The latter two are for when, as Sony says, you are “relieved from car operations.”) “We believe that the evolution of mobility will also redefine cars as a new entertainment space,” Yoshida said.
A 5G connection will ensure everything comes through with nary a moment of buffering. The two backseat passengers each get their own headrest-mounted screen. With speakers all around the car, including one in each seat, everyone can enjoy Sony’s immersive “360 Reality Audio” system, which debuted at CES 2019.
3D movies are a love-hate experience. You absolutely adore the feeling of something plummeting out of your screen so close you think you can nearly touch it, or the whole thing completely freaks you out. Either way—the only way it works is being able to use both of our eyes at the same time to capture the image and perceive its illusory depth.
But as a new study shows cuttlefish experience this phenomenon as well. When equipped with little 3D glasses and placed in front of a screen with a 3D movie of a shrimp passing by, they actually tried to grab it with their tentacles.
These new findings are laid out in a study in Scientific Advances, and it demonstrates more than just a cuttlefish’s ability to “hunt” virtual prey—it show’s that their vision systems are capable of stereopsis or “binocular vision”.
Binocular vision is the way that the brain uses images from both of our eyes to create a perception of depth. Humans have this ability—it’s how we know when something is about to smack us in the face, or if we need to reach out to grab something. For a while, it was thought that only primates and people could manage this because of our front-facing eyes. But it turns out that quite a few other creatures judge distance this way as well.
One other invertebrate, the praying mantis, evolved this way, as proven in their own tiny 3D glasses study from about a year ago. A cuttlefish is another complex invertebrate, so author Trevor Wardill, an ecology professor at the University of Minnesota had the idea of using them to further figure out stereopsis.
“To be fair when we proposed the project … they thought it was a little bit crazy,” Wardill says of first proposing the project to his partners at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts. “They did not really expect it to work, but we were pretty convinced that we should try.”
The initial act of getting cuttlefish to willingly wear the glasses without trying to take them off and actually watch the screen was tough enough, Wardill says. This process required gluing velcro to the top of its mucus-covered body, placing the glasses on their heads, and keeping the creatures happy and distracted enough to not mess with them (or ink all over the experiment).
But when the animals finally focused on the screen, creating an illusion of depth that can only be seen when using binocular vision, they accurately “hunted” the shrimp on screen.
“Putting little glasses on a slimy, tentacled invertebrate may sound both adorable and funny, but it’s actually an amazing accomplishment,” says Kate Thomas, a visual ecologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study.
This illusion of depth is created by using two different colored images that are seen through the two different lenses, which the brain then calculates the distance between. Even though cuttlefish are colorblind, the colored filters in the glasses send the accurate color from the monitor to the right eye. They only see the image in each eye as a variety of greyscale intensities, Wardill adds.
Strangely enough, most animals with stereopsis have “yoked” eyes—meaning they look at the same thing at the same time. Cuttlefish’s eyes move separately, except for the moment they notice their prey.
The cuttlefishes weren’t great at “yoking” their eyes, Wardill says, but they still were able to hunt. It’ll take more investigation on what the cuttlefish’s eyes are actually doing to see how they use cues and spacial information to capture their meals.
Their lack of yoked eyes is not the only thing that’s different about a cuttlefish’s stereopsis. The study found that critters can also detect the distance from an “anticorrelated” stimulus, where the image seen in each eye was completely the opposite of the other (think black on white in one eye, white on black on the other).
This study demonstrates convergent evolution, Thomas says, as these creatures are so far off the evolutionary pathway from humans, but are in some ways similar to us. “I think it’s fascinating that an animal more closely related to a clam than to us has not only evolved eyes similar to ours, but also processes images from those eyes in a similar way to produce depth perception.”
Though they’re interesting results, they shouldn’t be super surprising—and they actually make a lot of sense in the context of the cuttlefish’s daily needs. Binocular vision makes predation easier, Wardill says, since you can see your prey in front of you without moving around or making a bunch of attempts to capture a meal. After all, a cuttlefish probably wouldn’t be catching very many shrimp if it was continually scaring them off.
If anything, Wardill says, it was more surprising that the animals kept their glasses on.
via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com
Worldwide, more than 130 million ebikes will be sold from 2020 to 2023, representing a value of $20 billion, according to a new report from the Technology, Media, and Telecommunications practice at Deloitte. The consulting and advisory firm also predicts that annual global ebike sales will reach 40 million units in 2023, far eclipsing the 12 million electric automobiles and trucks Deloitte is forecasting to be sold in 2025.
Deloitte attributed the aggressive ebike growth forecast to recent strides in lithium-ion battery (LIB) technology, pricing, and power in the ebike market.
“Although more than 80 percent of the ebikes sold each year were using heavy lead-acid batteries as recently as 2016, the falling price of much lighter LIBs has shifted the market. Over the entire four-year forecast period between 2020 and 2023, we expect about two-fifths of all ebikes sold globally to feature LIBs, with the proportion of LIB-powered ebikes starting out at about 25 percent in 2020, and rising to more than 60 percent in 2023,” study author Paul Lee wrote for Deloitte.
Advancements in lithium-ion batteries have helped spur ebike sales growth, Deloitte posits. (Jeff Allen/)
The report also states that ebikes have a much broader charging network than electric cars, speeding their uptake by users.
“Unlike electric cars, ebikes do not require a new network of fast chargers or the installation of specialized chargers in parking lots: Recharging an ebike merely requires plugging the battery into a standard power socket for a few hours. A modern house is likely to have more than 60 electricity sockets; a modern office building housing 1,000 workers may have more than 5,000. In contrast, only 150,000 public fast chargers for vehicles were available globally as of the end of 2018, of which 78 percent were in China,” Deloitte’s Lee wrote.
Citing ebike industry data drawn from a variety of media sources, the Deloitte report highlighted strong recent ebike sales momentum in a number of global markets:
In Germany, ebike sales jumped 36 percent to nearly 1 million units in 2018, and the nation reached that number of units in just the first half of 2019.
More than half of all adult bikes sold in the Netherlands in 2018 were electric.
In the US, ebike unit sales at specialty stores rose 73 percent last year to more than 400,000 ebikes.
Ebike unit sales in Spain rose 55 percent last year to more than 111,000 ebikes—selling for an average of 2,165 euros each.
More than 300 million ebikes, including electric share bikes, will be on the world’s streets by 2023, Deloitte forecasts. (Jordan Rosen Photography/Presidio Trust/)
With all those units being sold, the Deloitte report goes on to predict that about 300 million ebikes will be in circulation by 2023, up 50 percent from 200 million this year. Those figures include both privately owned ebikes and electric bikes deployed in bike share systems around the world.
In the US, where bike share usage has lagged that of many other countries, ebikes could give a significant boost to share systems in the coming years, Deloitte predicts. “Of the 192 cities in the United States with bike sharing schemes, more than 40 already include ebikes in their fleet. Madison, Wisconsin, for example, converted all of the bikes in its bike share program to electric in June 2019. In trials, the Madison ebikes had generated up to five times as many trips as standard bikes … Conversely, in cities where ebikes have been withdrawn, bike sharing usage has declined."
via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com
Spacecraft could fly to distant stars using sails with surfaces similar to those of CDs and DVDs to help them stay centered on laser beams, a new study finds.
Conventional rockets driven by chemical reactions are currently the dominant form of space propulsion. However, they are nowhere near efficient enough to reach another star within a human lifetime. For example, although Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to Earth, it still lies about 4.37 light-years away, equal to more than 25.6 trillion miles (41.2 trillion kilometers), or more than 276,000 times the distance from Earth to the sun. It would take NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, which launched in 1977 and reached interstellar space in 2012, about 75,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri if the probe were headed in the right direction (which it’s not).
The problem with all thrusters that current spacecraft use for propulsion is that the propellant they carry with them has mass. Long trips require a lot of propellant, which makes spacecraft heavy, which, in turn, requires more propellant, making them heavier, and so on. That problem gets exponentially worse the bigger a spacecraft gets.
Previous research has suggested that “light sailing” might be one of the only technically feasible ways to get a probe to another star within a human lifetime. Although light does not exert much pressure, scientists have long suggested that what little it does apply could have a major effect. Indeed, numerous experiments have shown that “solar sails” can rely on sunlight for propulsion, given a large enough mirror and a lightweight-enough spacecraft.
The $100 million Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which was announced in 2016, plans to launch swarms of microchip-size spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, each of them sporting extraordinarily thin, incredibly reflective sails propelled by the most powerful lasers ever built. The plan has them flying at up to 20% the speed of light, reaching Alpha Centauri in about 20 years.
One concern with using laser sails is that if they drift out of alignment with the propelling laser beams — which will be based here on Earth, at least initially, in Breakthrough Starshot’s plan — they may veer wildly off course from their targets. Now scientists have designed and tested a new sail that could in principle automatically keep itself centered on a laser beam for the required few minutes, allowing a spacecraft to stay on course for interplanetary or even interstellar journeys.
The new sail relies on structures known as diffraction gratings, the most familiar versions of which are seen in CDs and DVDs. A diffraction grating is a surface covered with a series of regularly spaced microscopic ridges or slits that can scatter or diffract light, making different wavelengths or colors of light travel in different directions.
A recording on a CD or DVD is encoded in the form of microscopic pits of different lengths that are placed in rows of the same width and equal distances, and laser beams can scan these disks to read their data. These rows form a diffraction grating on the mirror surfaces of CDs and DVDs that can split white light into the many colors that make it up, resulting in the rainbow patterns that one can see on these disks.
“If you’ve ever examined the beautiful play of light from a compact disk, you will have seen the effects of diffraction,” study senior author Grover Swartzlander, an optical physicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, told Space.com.
The researchers built a sail consisting of two diffractive gratings placed side by side. Each grating was made of aligned liquid crystals that were contained in a plastic sheet. Similar liquid crystals are often used in the electronic displays of video screens and digital watches.
Previous light sail designs act like mirrors that reflect beams of light back at their sources. In the new design, the liquid crystals in each diffraction grating deflect the light rays at an angle, generating forces that send the sail both backward and sideways.
The grating on the left side of the new sail deflects light to the right of the laser beam, whereas the grating on the right side deflects light to the left. If the sail drifts so the laser beam fall on either side of the sail, that pushes the sail back into position with the light falling on the center of the sail.
In tests of their experimental sail, the scientists had to detect the microscopic forces the sail generated in response to a laser while distinguishing those forces from disturbances such as building vibrations or air currents.
“We were frustrated to find that our measurements were not reliable if the floor sagged from the weight of a small person,” Swartzlander said. “Eventually, we found adequate locations and methods of avoiding disturbances.”
The researchers successfully detected the sail generating re-centering forces that pushed it back into alignment with a laser beam.
“It was very satisfying to find that the experimental results agreed with our theoretical predictions,” Swartzlander said. “This agreement suggests that we can confidently design more complex diffractive structures for light sails driven by either sunlight or a laser beam.”
The researchers are now experimenting with sails capable of centering themselves if they drift in any direction, not just left or right. “Interestingly, these may have optical properties very similar to the diffractive nature of compact disks,” Swartzlander said.
In the future, the researchers suggested, their sails could be tested on the International Space Station or on a small satellite around Earth. They detailed their findings online Dec. 13 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
As more e-scooters cruise through city streets, a growing number of their riders are ending their trip in the hospital.
From 2017 to 2018, the number of emergency room injuries due to e-scooters rose from about 8,000 to 14,600, according to a new research report published in the journal JAMA Surgery. A third of the injuries in 2018 involved the head. For comparison, only about a sixth of hospitalized cyclists have head injuries.
E-Scooter Woes
It was a little surprising to see such a high proportion of e-scooter accident-related head injuries, say the authors, and it’s concerning. Head injuries are “the most important injury you want to prevent aside from death,” says Ben Breyer, a report co-author and urologist with the University of California, San Francisco. The results show how important it is for e-scooter riders to wear helmets — something not all local laws or e-scooter companies require.
The number of rides on this two-wheeled mode of transport more than doubled between 2017 and 2018 to about 84 million trips. Their popularity makes sense: The devices zip people around town and, for the many riders relying on a device offered by a short-term rental company, can be parked wherever is convenient.
More motorized scooters on the streets has meant more injuries, however. In a study released late last year of 36 e-scooter riders that got into accidents, x-rays revealed broken bones and other trauma in 19 of them. Over the course of a year-long study ending in 2018, two southern California hospitals saw almost 250 e-scooter injuries, with 40 percent involving the head. Since much of this research involved cases near and around specific hospitals, Breyer — who also studies bike-related accidents — wanted a better sense of what national trends were.
Watch Your Head
The new study, based on nationwide records of emergency room injury reports from 2014 to 2018, showed the number of e-scooter injuries increased year to year, with the largest jump from 2017 to 2018. Also in 2018, the most-injured age group shifted from those under 18 to riders between 18 and 34 years old. Across all four years of data, head injuries were the most common. Regardless of what part of the body took a hit, fractures were the most common type of injury, followed by contusions (bruising) and abrasions. Men accounted for about two-thirds of all cases, and the vast majority of recorded injuries came from urban hospitals.
Breyer suspects that scooter riders might be more prone to head injury compared with cyclists partly due to posture: Standing upright on a scooter makes it harder to protect your head if you fall, compared to cyclists that are already in crouched positions. But more importantly, scooter riders don’t appear to be wearing helmets. Other e-scooter accidentreports found only 2 to 4.4 percent of patients bothered with head gear.
The way hospitals log their injury data prevented Breyer and his team from studyingwhat kinds of head injuries physicians saw, or their severity. “While it could be minor and have no long term issues, sometimes they can be incredibly devastating and lead to long term disability,” Breyer says.
E-scooter providers often suggest that riders wear a helmet and occasionally hand out protective gear, but company enforcement is spotty. Some rental services even show advertisements of riders without any protective gear on. Legal requirements are also inconsistent. For example, California e-scooterers over 18 are no longer required to wear helmets, and, while Atlanta has banned nighttime e-scooter use, the city still only suggests that riders use headgear.
At least one scooter company has offered discounts for riders who submit selfies showing them wearing a helmet, and Breyer thinks it would be great if scooter companies could offer rentable helmets as well. Though there might be some logistical issues to work out, “It would be an important safety step, and I would commend companies if they were working on it.”
Paying minimum wage workers $1 more per hour might save lives, according to new research. The increases appear to have the largest effect when unemployment is high.
