British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Sir David Attenborough speak with schoolchildren about climate change at the Science Museum in London in February. (Reuters)
LONDON — Britain will ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans from 2030, five years earlier than previously planned, as part of what Prime Minister Boris Johnson is casting as a “green revolution” to cut emissions to net zero by 2050.
Under the next step in the plan, the sale of new hybrid cars and vans will be banned in 2035.
Johnson, who is grappling with Europe’s most deadly COVID-19 crisis, Brexit trade negotiations and the departure of his most senior adviser, wants to underscore his green credentials as part of what he hopes will be a reset for his government.
“Now is the time to plan for a green recovery with high-skilled jobs that give people the satisfaction of knowing they are helping to make the country cleaner, greener and more beautiful,” Johnson said in a column published in the Financial Times on Tuesday.
Britain last year became the first G7 country to set in law an overall net zero emission target by 2050, which will require wholesale changes in the way Britons travel, use energy and eat.
In total the plan would mobilize 12 billion pounds ($16 billion) of government money, with as much as three times that amount coming from the private sector, and create and support 250,000 highly skilled green jobs by 2030, Johnson said.
The new date for a ban on new petrol and diesel cars is five years earlier than the 2035 pledge made by Johnson in February.
The plan offers 582 million pounds ($773 million) in grants for those buying zero or ultra-low emission vehicles to make them cheaper to buy, which was welcomed by auto industry group SMMT.
“Success will depend on reassuring consumers that they can afford these new technologies,” SMMT said in a statement, adding the new deadline posed an “immense challenge” to the sector.
Johnson’s plan was broadly welcomed by industry.
“It gives a springboard to the huge opportunities for UK-wide investment and green jobs that a true low-carbon economy can bring,” said Josh Hardie, acting director at the Confederation of British Industry.
An extra 200 million pounds ($265 million) would create industrial clusters mustering technology to capture, store and use carbon dioxide emissions by the mid-2020s. Another two hubs are projected by 2030, taking the total investment in the technology to 1 billion pounds ($1.33 billion).
This funding is likely to benefit sites in northern England, such as the Humber region and Teesside, and Port Talbot in south Wales, where industrial carbon capture projects are being developed at sites such as steel works.
Johnson, who has promised to increase Britain’s offshore wind power to 40 gigawatts by 2030 from around 10 GW now, pledged up to 500 million pounds for projects trailing the use of hydrogen including for home heating and cooking.
The government also pledged 525 million pounds ($697 million) to support development of large- and small-scale nuclear plants.
File this one to the “we’ll believe it when we see it” folder. Toyota is apparently now the owner of a patent for an autonomous tanker vehicle that refuels or recharges your car “on the fly.” While that conjures images of a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker extending a fuel boom to an F-16, it’s unclear from the filing whether the cars would be in motion or parked.
This seems to be a high-level patent, one where a company is simply staking a claim to an idea rather than having a fleshed-out product. Discovered by The Drive, it shows a nondescript boxy trailer that contains the various types of fuel. It’s attached to an autonomous car that can be summoned by a customer, who provides the make and model of their car and selects different octane grades of petrol, diesel, hydrogen, or recharging for EVs.
The refueling rig would then follow a GPS signal to the customer’s location, not unlike a Lyft or Uber. It can also make several stops before returning to its home base for the trailer to be refilled.
While the patent filing admits that gasoline stations are common, hydrogen and charging stations aren’t, and perhaps these mobile refueling rigs are one way to compensate for the scarcity. Or, they can be used to rescue drivers who have run out of gas.
Could one vision of our future see armies of these self-driving tankers patrolling the highways, waiting for calls? The utopian scenario is brought back to reality when the patent also calls out provisions for advertising, turning them into roving billboards.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of Toyota’s patent is the drawing depicting how the trailer attaches to the drone car, which appears to be none other than a Honda Civic. Specifically, it looks like sixth-generation Civic sedan, sold in the U.S. from 1997-2000. With numerous Corollas and Camrys to reference, it’s a peculiar choice. Or, maybe it’s a nod to Honda being the first to Level 3 autonomy.
Holding a pristine piece of Mars in a lab on Earth is among the most ambitious dreams of planetary scientists, and NASA and its European counterpart want to make the dream a reality.
It’s worthwhile, but it isn’t going to be easy, an independent group of experts who spent two months poring over the existing plans say in a new report to NASA. That report offers 44 findings and 44 recommendations meant to identify and mitigate weaknesses in current plans and bureaucratic systems related to the mission, all while warning that the mission may still miss its current cost and schedule goals. You can read the report here (PDF).
“We unanimously believe that the Mars sample-return program should proceed; we think its scientific value will be extraordinarily high, with the potential for world-changing discoveries about Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor, and possibly about an independent origin of life on another world,” David Thompson, chair of the independent review board and former president of commercial space company Orbital ATK (now part of Northrop Grumman Space Systems), said during a news conference held Tuesday (Nov. 10). “However, as the first round-trip mission to another planet, Mars sample return is also an extremely ambitious, technically demanding and operationally complex program.”
Although the board found that crucial later spacecraft in the mission may be able to launch in 2026, as NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) currently hope, the next launch window, which is in 2028, may well be more likely. NASA plans to continue targeting the earlier launch date and delay down the line as necessary, agency leadership emphasized.
“Basically, the way we’re interpreting the collective set of recommendations is full steam ahead,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said during the news conference. “The last thing that we want to do is kind of turn a switch right now, without really investigating this and looking at all options.”
The board also suggested that given that potential delay and other factors, a safer bet would be to budget between $3.8 billion and $4.4 billion, perhaps 30% higher than the number NASA is currently using.
An ambitious project
NASA created the independent review board in August to evaluate early plans for the larger suite of Mars sample-return missions and identify potential problems as early as possible.
As envisioned, the Mars sample-return program is a vast endeavor shared by two large space agencies that will require several separate spacecraft operating over more than a decade, not to mention the first rocket launch from the Red Planet’s surface and a host of measures to prevent sample contamination.
The report focuses on the future spaceflight aspects of the mission — how Perseverance and its staff will interact with future missions, what those spacecraft will look like, and the complicated process of getting that precious cargo safely off the surface of Mars and into laboratories on Earth. (The mission will also require a new sample-curation facility, which the board did not evaluate.)
Mars exploration is never easy. The Red Planet is notorious for its tricky launch calendar, with favorable opportunities spaced 26 months apart, slow communications, and perilous landing conditions.
“Every mission to Mars has things that we’re worried about,” Jeffrey Gramling, NASA’s Mars Sample Return program director, said during the news conference.
NASA and ESA also hope to launch the mission while the Mars 2020 rover Perseverance, currently on its way to the Red Planet, is still operational. The rover will land on Mars on Feb. 18 and work on the Red Planet’s surface for at least one Martian year (687 Earth days), although many of NASA’s robotic explorers have remained active far longer than the duration of their primary mission.
And it’s not like NASA has a ton of free time on its hands: The agency’s two key spacecraft-manufacturing centers have their hands full with other ambitious projects like the James Webb and Roman space telescopes and the Europa Clipper mission. So the review board recommends a host of measures to ensure that NASA shares the work between its centers carefully and can build on previous experience.
“The only reason we did it is to enhance our opportunities to be successful by opening our eyes wide,” Zurbuchen said of the independent review process. “I want us to really challenge ourselves for missions, but we want to do so every time by keeping our eyes open and learning from every opportunity we have.”
An artist’s depiction of NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance, storing samples of Martian rocks in tubes for a later rover to fetch and carry to Earth. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Devil in the details
Many of the report’s recommendations are deeply bureaucratic, like considering how work is shared between different NASA centers, all of which are working on plenty of other projects, and arranging ways to house NASA and ESA staff at each other’s facilities.
The board also recommended management changes to the Mars 2020 mission. One would incorporate the rover’s oversight into a broader Mars sample-return program now rather than waiting until the future missions are underway; another would see activities related to sample return prioritized above Perseverance’s other possible work.
Another issue that arose in the report were questions about whether NASA and ESA have fully explored all their options for the most successful design of specific pieces of the mission. The sample-fetching rover, for instance, builds on the European/Russian ExoMars rover scheduled to launch in 2022, but may benefit from additional mobility improvements, for example. Currently, all planned surface missions are designed to be solar-powered, but adding nuclear power may make the mission less vulnerable.
And the report notes that in addition to the staggering complexity of the Mars sample-return endeavor, it’s not open to much of what NASA jargon dubs “descoping” — essentially, corners that can be cut along the way should a mission be facing budget or schedule shortfalls.
One of the few measures the agencies could use if the endeavor finds itself backed into a corner would be to delay the launch of one or more of the later mission spacecraft, which NASA and ESA are tentatively targeting for 2026.
The next launch opportunity toward Mars comes in 2028, but any later and things get tricky. If surface missions slip into the 2030s, major components of the project will need to be overhauled, independent review board member Peter Theisinger of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said during the news conference. “The conditions when you arrive at Mars change dramatically over the Martian year,” Theisinger said. “Launch opportunities after 2028 don’t arrive at a very attractive season.”
But despite all the complications, bringing Martian rocks to Earth is worth it, the board is confident. “The science would be very exciting,” Maria Zuber, a member of the review board and a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said during the news conference.
“We’ve done a lot of analyses in situ with Mars rocks on the surface of Mars, and clearly those have been very valuable,” she said. “But what you can do with a rock bringing it back and working in a terrestrial lab … [the samples] will produce a timeline essentially of the history of what was going on in this crater.”
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
HighPoint Technologies has updated their NVMe RAID solutions with PCIe 4.0 support and adapter cards supporting up to eight NVMe drives. The new HighPoint SSD7500 series adapter cards are the PCIe 4.0 successors to the SSD7100 and SSD7200 series products. These cards are primarily aimed at the workstation market, as the server market has largely moved on from traditional RAID arrays, especially when using NVMe SSDs for which traditional hardware RAID controllers do not exist. HighPoint’s PCIe gen4 lineup currently consists of cards with four or eight M.2 slots, and one with eight SFF-8654 ports for connecting to U.2 SSDs. They also recently added an 8x M.2 card to their PCIe gen3 family, with the Mac Pro specifically in mind as a popular workstation platform that won’t be getting PCIe gen4 support particularly soon.
HighPoint’s NVMe RAID is implemented as software RAID bundled with adapter cards featuring Broadcom/PLX PCIe switches. HighPoint provides RAID drivers and management utilities for Windows, macOS and Linux. Competing software NVMe RAID solutions like Intel RST or VROC achieve boot support by bundling a UEFI driver in with the rest of the motherboard’s firmware. Highpoint’s recent 4-drive cards include their UEFI driver on an Option ROM to provide boot support for Windows and Linux systems, and all of their cards allow booting from an SSD that is not part of a RAID array. HighPoint’s NVMe RAID supports RAID 0/1/10 modes, but does not implement any parity RAID options.
Highpoint has also improved the cooling on their RAID cards. Putting several high-performance M.2 SSDs and a power-hungry PCIe switch on one card generally requires active cooling, and HighPoint’s early NVMe RAID cards could be pretty noisy. Their newer heatsink design lets the cards benefit from airflow provided by case fans instead of just the card’s own fan (two fans, for the 8x M.2 cards), and the fans they are now using are a bit larger and quieter.
In the PCIe 2.0 era, PLX PCIe switches were common on high-end consumer motherboards to provide multi-GPU connectivity. In the PCIe 3.0 era, the switches were priced for the server market and almost completely disappeared from consumer/enthusiast products. In the PCIe 4.0 era, it looks like prices have gone up again. Even though these cards are the best way to get lots of M.2 PCIe SSDs connected to mainstream consumer platforms that don’t support the PCIe port bifurcation required by passive quad M.2 riser boards, the pricing makes it very unlikely that they’ll ever see much use in systems less high-end than a Threadripper or Xeon workstation. However, Highpoint has actually tested on the AMD X570 platform and achieved 20GB/s throughput using Phison E16 SSDs, and almost 28GB/s on an AMD EPYC platform (out of a theoretical limit of 31.5 GB/s). These numbers should improve a bit as faster, lower-latency PCIe 4.0 SSDs become available.
Now that consumer M.2 NVMe SSDs are available in 4TB and 8TB capacities, these RAID products can accommodate up to 64TB of storage at a much lower price per TB than using enterprise SSDs, and without requiring a system with U.2 drive bays. For tasks like audio and video editing workstations, that’s an impressive amount of local storage capacity and throughput. The lower write endurance of consumer SSDs (even QLC drives) is generally less of a concern for workstations than for servers that are busy around the clock, and for many use cases having a capacity of tens of TB means the array as a whole has plenty of write endurance even if the individual drives have low DWPD ratings. Using consumer SSDs also means that peak performance is higher than for many enterprise SSDs, and a large RAID-0 array of consumer SSDs will have a total SLC cache size in the TB range.
The SSD7140 (8x M.2, PCIe gen3) and the SSD7505 (4x M.2, PCIe gen4) have already hit the market and the SSD7540 (8x M.2, PCIe gen4) is shipping this month. The SSD7580 (8x U.2, PCIe gen4) is planned to be available next month.
Cultural purity, however, is not commercial purity. Anime as an artform has always been influenced by business interests. To make room for commercials, episodes last 20 minutes exactly and pace the plot around short breaks. Toy, merch, music, and DVD makers have traditionally been at the table deciding what manga gets the anime treatment to begin with. Ten years ago, anime that could be spun into a cute, popular pachinko machine was likelier to get greenlit. Japanese norms around workflow, too, impact the look and feel of anime: overworked and underpaid employees and freelancers churning out frame after hand-drawn frame under intense deadlines. And because Japanese studios are making more anime than ever, to ease the workload, many are beginning to rely on CGI in lieu of traditional art, giving action-figure texture to a fight scene or gravitas to a slow pan of some big sword.
With DVDs on their way out, streaming platforms are now the be-all, end-all of anime production. As such, anime is contorting again. “There’s two ways of making anime in Japan now,” Sudo, the anime industry journalist, tells me. “One is the traditional way, what we call ‘media mix’ in Japan, where we have anime, manga, and goods all being sold at the same time.” Sudo says that Crunchyroll and Funimation, which cater to Western otaku, fall into the “media mix” category. The other category—brand new—is the made-for-Netflix model.
As a company, Netflix wants to be something for everyone, everywhere. So part of its strategy has been to suck modern hits from across the ocean, like a data-driven Scylla— Naruto, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, One Piece, Haikyu!!. Nothing odd about that; it’s pure distribution.
But the other, more interesting part of the equation is the anime Netflix is exclusively streaming, producing, or making on its own. A Netflix spokesperson claims the company doesn’t keep an official tally on what’s licensed versus produced, but there seem to be roughly 40 series the platform markets as “original.” In 2014, before Sakurai was brought on, Netflix released its first original series, Knights of Sidonia, an entirely CG-animated space opera cell shaded to appear 2D. It’s mecha-monster mania, not beautiful, but not cynical either. It’s reminiscent of beloved anime like Gundam Wing, and well-paced, too. Aside from the 3D animation style, there is no question that it is an anime in the anime tradition.
Four years later came Devilman Crybaby, a phantasmagoric, mind-bending masterpiece. (Many might say Neo Yokio, Jaden Smith’s American-Japanese animated series, should be noted here as well; others will argue it does not belong in this essay at all.) Some were led to believe Netflix would continue releasing anime too edgy to fit neatly anywhere else. It wasn’t so. Although Devilman was a cannonball leap into the adult end of an acid-laced swimming pool—entirely too “mature” and “artsy” for, say, Crunchyroll’s roster—what followed trended in the opposite direction.
It began to dawn on me when I was watching The Great Pretender, a Netflix original from earlier this year that is eerily, heinously likable, to a degree that almost feels engineered, that Netflix was attempting to broaden anime’s scope. Its protagonist, Makoto Edamura, is a Japanese con-man who graduates from small-time crime to the drug-fueled endorphin circus that is Los Angeles, where he and some charismatic pros pull off big swindles. There’s hijinks in Singapore and fraud in London. It’s very international, very “something for everyone.” Review headlines write themselves: “thrilling,” “fast-paced,” “kickass.” It’s good. It’s gorgeous, actually. It’s also a little canned.
NASA has officially approved the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket for regular astronaut flights to and from the International Space Station. The agency has signed the Human Rating Certification Plan for SpaceX’s crew transportation system, making it the first spacecraft NASA has certified for manned missions since the space shuttle nearly 40 years ago.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said:
“This certification milestone is an incredible achievement from NASA and SpaceX that highlights the progress we can make working together with commercial industry.”
SpaceX had to prove that its system works by conducting numerous tests on the ground and completing demo flights over the past few years. The Elon Musk-led company successfully flew astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS back in May for the Demo-2 flight. A couple of months later, Crew Dragon splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean with the same astronauts onboard, bringing the historic mission — it was the first crewed flight that launched from US soil since the final space shuttle mission in 2011 — to a close.
In addition to the Demo-2 flight, SpaceX had to complete a plethora of other tests, including ones to make sure that Crew Dragon’s parachute system works. The company also had to put the capsule’s abort engines and launch escape system through their paces to make sure they can provide astronauts an escape from the rocket in case of an emergency during ascent.
Now that the Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 system has been certified, NASA and SpaceX can start focusing on future flights that’ll carry more astronauts to orbit. Kathy Lueders, associate administrator for NASA’s Human Exploration and Operation Mission Directorate, said:
“Certification moves us from the design and test phase into the crew rotation phase of our work, but we will not stop making sure every flight, including NASA’s Space Crew-1 mission, will be approached with the same rigor we have put into making this the best system it can be for our astronauts.”
The first Crew Dragon operational flight will ferry NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, as well as JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi, to the ISS for a six—month mission. NASA and SpaceX originally aimed for a Halloween launch, but their new target launch date is November 14th from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
BMW found a creative way to showcase its expertise in electrification. Its i division teamed up with its Designworks studio and intrepid stuntman Peter Salzmann to develop, build and test an electric wingsuit.
Designing the device, which the German carmaker calls simply Electrified Wingsuit, took about three years. It consists of two main parts: a suit with wing-like pieces of fabric reminiscent of a flying squirrel’s fur-covered skin membranes, and a compact electric drive unit that houses a pair of carbon propellers capable of spinning at 25,000 rpm. They deliver a total output of 15 kilowatts (roughly 20 horsepower) for as long as five minutes.
BMW notes the drive unit was extensively tested in the same wind tunnel it uses to shape its cars in Munich, Germany. It tips the scale at approximately 26 pounds thanks to the use of carbon fiber and aluminum.
Wingsuit flying has been around for decades. Thirty-three-year-old Franz Reichelt notably died in 1912 while trying to test an early prototype by jumping off the Eiffel Tower, but adding electrification to the equation lets users reach action movie speeds of up to 186 mph. It also allows for more constant gliding over much longer distances. It gives the power of flight to whoever is brave enough to strap in; it’s like a jet pack without the jet fuel.
Salzmann tested the Electrified Wingsuit by jumping out of a helicopter hovering about 9,900 feet over the Austrian Alps, and BMW caught his descent on camera. He lived to tell the tale, he landed safely by deploying his parachute at the end of a long, roller coaster-like glide, and he’s looking forward to further developing this technology.
Don’t expect to see one displayed next to a 3 Series at a BMW dealer, however. Autoblog learned from a company spokesperson that there are no plans to bring the Electrified Wingsuit to the public.
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