Internal combustion engines have not seen any fundamental technology breakthroughs in over 100 years. Large, bulky and inefficient engines are common, and they tend to use a significant amount of fuel in their operation. Modern diesel engines in particular are cumbersome, fuel inefficient and, in many cases, excessively loud. LiquidPiston X-Engines deliver increased range and reduced greenhouse gas emissions compared to traditional gasoline and diesel-powered designs, while also providing a size and weight advantage over most of its competitors. Investing in this exciting technology can help move it toward its goal of transforming application markets that will require more efficient use of fossil fuels while transitioning to biofuels and increased electrification.
LiquidPiston has addressed these legacy internal combustion engine (ICE) limitations by inventing a new optimized thermodynamic cycle and a rotary engine platform. A thermodynamic cycle determines how much of the energy contained in the fuel can be converted into useful work output, with the balance being wasted as heat. LP’s proprietary thermodynamic cycle, dubbed the High Efficiency Hybrid Cycle (HEHC) has a maximum theoretical thermal efficiency that is approximately 30 percent greater than the maximum theoretical thermal efficiency of the Otto (gasoline) and diesel cycles, which have been in use since the late 1800s. With a much higher thermal efficiency limit to work with, LP has proven that its X-Engine can achieve higher fuel efficiencies than piston engines of the same displacement or horsepower rating.
There is a major global push toward vehicle electrification, especially in the automotive space. This brings performance and noise reduction benefits, but with the addition of large, heavy batteries that need to be carried and recharged. The energy density of fossil fuels is still 40 times that of today’s best batteries, so it makes economic and performance sense in many applications to get the benefits of electric propulsion, but with a much smaller battery that can be charged during vehicle operation by a small on-board range extender, which burns fuel to drive an electric generator.
In essence, the vehicle carries fuel that’s more energy dense than the battery to be converted into electric power. Plus, refueling is enabled by the current gasoline/diesel fuel distribution system, which is widely deployed today. LP has focused and continues to focus on advanced combustion, engine platform design, and engine operation innovations, with over 60 patents granted and pending. The innovations include an elegant compact design featuring only two major moving parts: the shaft and the rotor. The X-Engine rotary architectural simplicity reduces the parts count and amount of metal used, quieter operation due to the absence of pistons and valves, and much lower vibration compared to piston engines.
Investments in the LP engine development will contribute to its continued evolution and application design-ins. Currently, the company is focusing on military and aerospace environments, but they plan to enter industrial, commercial and automotive markets later. If you’re interested in engine technology and its varied application and progress, cheering them on and contributing to the growth of LiquidPiston could be satisfying to you.
You can support LiquidPiston engines and their work by becoming an investor. As LP pursues their current engagements with multiple agencies of the US Department of Defense, they also will be moving toward serving industrial and commercial power generation marine, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and automotive hybrid electric propulsion markets.
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In the tight streets of Japan, tiny cars make a lot of sense, particularly the government-restricted kei class of cars. They’re especially small with similarly small engines, and besides being easier to maneuver and park, they’re also cheaper to own and run. But surely camping in one would be a somewhat cramped, unpleasant experience, right? Think again.
YouTuber Tokyo Lens, someone who creates a variety of interesting videos about places, people and things in Japan, went on a camping trip with what seems to be a pop-top Suzuki Every kei van. He details his experience and highlights all the neat features crammed into the little space. It really is remarkable how much there is.
We were particularly taken by the nice looking cabinetry, the fact that a person can pretty much fully stretch out in the pop top and that there’s actually a microwave and a tiny sink with a water-tank-supplied faucet. Check out the whole video for a look at how much you can do with a small space, as well as some nice shots of the Japanese countryside.
Jeff Bezos has a hidden weapon: your data. While Amazon’s retail empire is built on a complex web of infrastructure and murky working practices, its selling success is based on an intricate knowledge of what millions of people buy and browse every day.
Amazon has been obsessed with your data since it was an online bookshop. Almost two decades ago the firm’s chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, said that the company tries to “collect as much information as possible” so it can provide people with recommendations. And, as Amazon has expanded, so has its data collection operation. “They happen to sell products, but they are a data company,” a former Amazon executive told the BBC in 2020.
Amazon knows a lot about you. Everything you do in Amazon’s ecosystem: from the thousands of searches you make on its app or website to every individual click, scroll, and mouse movement you make. It’s a lot of data—and that’s just the beginning of it. People who have requested their data from Amazon have been sent hundreds of files, including a decade of their shopping history and thousands of voice clips recorded by Alexa devices.
“The reason online shopping through Amazon is so convenient is because the company has spent years consolidating its power and reach,” says Sara Nelson, director of the corporate data exploitation program at civil liberties group Privacy International. “The company is in a position to collect huge amounts of data—through its shopping platform, but also through its Ring cameras, Alexa voice assistants, web services, delivery services, streaming services, and its many other business streams”. And now Amazon is moving into healthcare—something that Nelson says is concerning.
Amazon’s data collection is also reportedly putting it on the wrong side of regulators. On June 10, the Wall Street Journal reported data protection regulators in Luxembourg, where Amazon’s European headquarters is based, are preparing a $425 million GDPR fine in response to the way it uses people’s personal data—although no specific details were provided and an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the potential fine. Anti-competition regulators are also looking at the company’s use of data. And governments are demanding more data from Amazon, including information from Ring and Alexa recordings.
What Amazon Knows About You
Let’s start with Amazon’s privacy notice. At more than 4,400 words it’s hardly surprising that most people don’t read it, but it does clearly lay out what Amazon does with your data. Broadly, the information that Amazon collects about you comes from three sources. These are: the data you give it when you use Amazon (and its other services, such as reading Kindle books), the data it can collect automatically (information about your phone and your location) and, finally, information it gets from third-parties (credit checks to find out if your account is fraudulent, for example).
The ultimate goal of all this data collection? To help sell you more things. Amazon will use your personal information—and everything it can learn about your likes and dislikes – to show you recommendations for stuff it thinks you might buy. More broadly it can also get a sense of its most popular sellers and people’s shopping behavior.
“Personal data about shopping is incredibly sensitive,” says Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics. “It can tell you about a person’s health status, their political tendencies, their sexual practices, and much more. People buy all kinds of things on Amazon, from books and movies to health-related items. Add to that personal data from Alexa, and it gets even more concerning.”
It also uses information, such as your location, to make sure the things you buy actually get delivered to you. “We process your personal information to operate, provide, and improve the Amazon Services that we offer our customers,” the company’s privacy notice says. It also broadly sets out the legal arguments for all the data it collects.
This trio wasn’t alone. Canada had its own network, Nabu, which promoted itself with the slogan “Switch on to smart TV!”Warner Cable and American Express launched a partnership to create a network based on QUBE, a two-way cable communications service that rolled out in some midwestern cities through the late 1970s. John Lockton, president of Warner Amex, told the Wall Street Journal in early 1983 that “We feel a video-game channel is a concept whose time is about to come.”
The Technology
The technology behind PlayCable is still used by millions of homes: cable television. Today, cable networks have consolidated into the backbone of Internet access in the United States. Early networks like PlayCable laid the foundations for that expansion.
PlayCable was a joint venture between General Instrument’s Jerrold Division, which designed cable TV converter boxes for growing cable networks, and Mattel Electronics. “General Instrument had actually been working on PlayCable prior to the launch of Mattel’s Intellivision,” said Moskovtiz in an interview over Zoom. “They were looking for other revenue streams, and here comes another company, Mattel Electronics, that seemed to offer a way to add another business element to their model.” Mattel’s Intellivision had what every cable provider craved: popular TV entertainment that over-the-air television couldn’t provide.
The PlayCable hardware slotted in the Intellivision console like any game but had a coaxial jack on the other end, which users connected to a cable box from their service provider. Once connected, it sent data over an FM radio band available on cable that typically went unused.
Gamers booting PlayCable were greeted by a starfield with the title “PlayCable presents Intellivision Intelligent Television” printed across it. Unlike modern Xbox and PlayStation consoles, PlayCable was fast and offered few options. The service launched directly into an alphabetical catalog of games while a familiar tune played in the background.
PlayCable also beat modern consoles in download times. Grabbing The Master Chief Collection from Xbox Game Pass can take hours, but even the largest games on PlayCable would load in less than thirty seconds. Thank the insanely small size of the era’s games. TheMaster Chief Collection takes up 800 million times more storage than the largest game ever brought to PlayCable.
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Fast downloads were important, because the physical device had a limitation shared with most game consoles of the era: it lacked long-term storage. Games were loaded not to a hard drive but directly to RAM, so players had to redownload a game every time they launched it.
The Games Network offered its own spin on the idea. Its physical box didn’t slot into an existing console but was its own device called “The Window.” It had a keyboard built-in and could support peripherals like disc drives, joysticks, and a printer. These peripherals might have let The Games Network overcome RAM limitations, but I could find no evidence they ever reached customers.
GameLine used the Atari 2600’s game cartridge slot just as the PlayCable used the Intellivision’s, but it connected to a telephone provider through a modem instead of a cable box. GameLine might’ve expanded beyond games by connecting to other computer networks which, at the time, also used phone lines instead of cable–but none of these services would have much chance to grow.
The Legacy
PlayCable, GameLine, and The Games Network were shockingly modern, offering a bundle of games over a network more than a decade before the world wide web. Yet none survived beyond 1984. They were sunk by a perfect storm of technical, business, and cultural trends.
Today, anyone with Internet access can sign up for Xbox Game Pass and, once subscribed, download games directly from Microsoft’s servers. However, the Internet didn’t exist in 1980, so every service provider had to install its own head-end computer. Game Pass likely wouldn’t be viable if Microsoft had to install a data center in every city where it wants to offer the service, but that’s how PlayCable, and its competitors, worked.
LOS ANGELES — Archer Aviation unveiled its first electric flying taxi “Maker” in a Tesla-style debut on Thursday as an increasing number of investors and aviation companies pile into the hot but yet-to-be-approved urban air mobility space.
Interest in zero-emission aircraft that take off and land like helicopters but fly like planes is growing as aerospace companies look for new markets and face pressure to help decarbonize their industry though the battery-operated vehicles.
Maker’s debut, staged at a hangar using XR technology to simulate a ride, followed news on Thursday of two separate deals involving electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft companies based in Britain and Brazil.
Archer’s aircraft does not yet fly commercially, but it mounted an extravagant show under a new chief creative officer who has decades of experience in experiential design and television production, Kenny Taht, to attract attention.
Archer expects Maker’s commercial launch in 2024 in Los Angeles and Miami and is in the process of certifying the piloted four-passenger aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration, co-founder and co-CEO Brett Adcock told Reuters.
“Our real goal is to make a mass market transportation solution in and around cities,” Adcock said.
The taxis can fly at 150 miles per hour (240 km per hour) for distances up to 60 miles (100km) at an entry level price between $3 and $4 per passenger mile.
In New York City for example, the 17-mile trip from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Manhattan would cost $50 to $70 and take around five to seven minutes versus 60 to 90 minutes in a car.
While experts estimate the eVTOL market to be worth billions over the next decade, it is not expected to immediately make money, and the timing of regulatory approval remains uncertain.
Asked about the approval process, the FAA said: “The FAA can certify new technologies such as eVTOLs through its existing regulations. We may issue special conditions or additional requirements, depending on the type of project.”
As the market heats up, so has competition.
Archer is currently embroiled in a legal battle with Boeing-backed competitor Wisk Aero, which has accused it of stealing trade secrets and infringing on its patents.
Archer last week asked a California court to dismiss the lawsuit and courtersued Wisk for “false statements” regarding a separate criminal probe.
Archer plans to go public through a $3.8 billion merger with blank-check company Atlas Crest and has an investment and $1 billion order from United Airlines.
The Xbox Series S is a tiny console, and if you want to take advantage of its small size with some added portability, then the xScreen peripheral might be just what you need. Launching on Kickstarter soon, the device gives you a 1080p display and integrated stereo speakers to keep your games looking and sounding sharp while you’re on the go.
Launching at an MSRP of $250 (via VGC) but available for a lower price if you back the Kickstarter, the xScreen attaches directly to the sides of the Xbox Series S system and features passthrough ports for both the power and HDMI cables, as well as the storage expansion slot if you want to keep extra games installed. A control strip on the device includes levels for the volume and brightness, as well as other screen adjustments, and at 11.6 inches, the display should be big enough to let you play comfortably if you’re at a table or in a tent–though we do suggest enjoying nature if you are camping. Don’t be a dork.
Creator Upsec Gaming recommends using two of the devices together to make for instant competitive multiplayer action if you’re playing with a friend outside your house, and with a DC-to-AC power inverter, you can also use it in a vehicle.
Angela Mitchell still remembers the night she nearly died.
It was almost one year ago in July. Mitchell—who turns 60 this June—tested positive for covid-19 at her job as a pharmacy technician at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago. She was sneezing, coughing, and feeling dizzy.
The hospital management offered her a choice. She could quarantine at a hotel, or she could recover and isolate at home, where her vital signs would be monitored around the clock through a sensor patch worn on her chest. Mitchell chose the patch and went home.
Two nights later, she woke up in a panic because she could not breathe. She was in the bedroom of her suburban Chicago house, and thought a shower might help.
“By the time I got from my bed to the washroom, I was saturated in sweat,” she says. “I had to sit down and catch my breath. I was dizzy. I could barely talk.”
That is when “the call” happened. Clinicians at the University of Illinois Hospital were using sensors like the one Mitchell was wearing to remotely monitor her and hundreds of other patients and employees who were recovering from covid-19 at home. They saw Mitchell’s situation worsen and called. “I was sitting in the bathroom literally holding on to the sink when my phone rang,” she says. The medics told her she needed to see a doctor right away.
“I was sitting in the bathroom literally holding on to the sink when my phone rang”
Angela Mitchell
Mitchell was not sure. She did not want to disturb her family sleeping downstairs, and calling an ambulance seemed too extreme. But in the morning, she got a second call from her doctors, who said: Get to a hospital now or we will call an ambulance for you.
Mitchell asked her husband—who’d had covid-19 several months earlier— to drive her to Northwestern Memorial in Chicago, where she was quickly admitted and told that her oxygen levels were dangerously low. She says her condition at home changed so quickly—from very mild symptoms to serious respiratory problems—that she didn’t even realize she was in crisis. But by the time of the second call, she says, “I recognized I [was] in trouble and needed help.” She remained in the hospital for almost a week.
The pilot program that helped Mitchell is a part of a study conducted by the University of Illinois Health system and digital-medicine startup PhysIQ and funded by the National Institutes of Health. It is one important test of a new way for covid-19 patients to receive care outside hospital settings. Monitoring the progress of people recovering from the disease remains a challenge because their symptoms can turn life-threatening so quickly. Some hospitals and health systems have dramatically scaled up the use of wearables and other mobile health technologies to remotely observe their vital signs around the clock.
The Illinois program gives people recovering from covid-19 a take-home kit that includes a pulse oximeter, a disposable Bluetooth-enabled sensor patch, and a paired smartphone. The software takes data from the wearable patch and uses machine learning to develop a profile of each person’s vital signs. The monitoring system alerts clinicians remotely when a patient’s vitals— such as heart rate—shift away from their usual levels.
Typically, patients recovering from covid might get sent home with a pulse oximeter. PhysIQ’s developers say their system is much more sensitive because it uses AI to understand each patient’s body, and its creators claim it is much more likely to anticipate important changes.
“It’s an enormous benefit,” says Terry Vanden Hoek, the chief medical officer and head of emergency medicine at University of Illinois Health, which is hosting the pilot. Working with covid cases is hard, he says: “When you work in the emergency department it’s sad to see patients who waited too long to come in for help. They would require intensive care on a ventilator. You couldn’t help but ask, ‘If we could have warned them four days before, could we have prevented all this?’”
Like Angela Mitchell, most of the study participants are African-American. Another large group are Latino. Many are also living with risk factors such as diabetes, obesity, hypertension, or lung conditions that can complicate covid-19 recovery. Mitchell, for example, has diabetes, hypertension, and asthma.
For example, there are 11 people in Mitchell’s house, including her husband, three daughters, and six grandchildren. “I do everything with my family. We even share covid-19 together!” she says with a laugh. Two of her daughters tested positive in March 2020, followed by her husband, before Mitchell herself.
Although African-Americans are only 30% of Chicago’s population, they made up about 70% of the city’s earliest covid-19 cases. That percentage has declined, but African-Americans recovering from covid-19 still die at rates two to three times those for whites, and vaccination drives have been less successful at reaching this community. The PhysIQ system could help improve survival rates, the study’s researchers say, by sending patients to the ER before it’s too late, just as they did with Mitchell.
Lessons from jet engines
PhysIQ founder Gary Conkright has previous experience with remote monitoring, but not in people. In the mid-1990s, he developed an early artificial-intelligence startup called Smart Signal with the University of Chicago. The company used machine learning to remotely monitor the performance of equipment in jet engines and nuclear power plants.
“Our technology is very good at detecting subtle changes that are the earliest predictors of a problem,” says Conkright. “We detected problems in jet engines before GE, Pratt & Whitney, and Rolls-Royce because we developed a personalized model for each engine.”
Smart Signal was acquired by General Electric, but Conkright retained the right to apply the algorithm to the human body. At that time, his mother was experiencing COPD and was rushed to intensive care several times, he said. The entrepreneur wondered if he could remotely monitor her recovery by adapting his existing AI system. The result: PhysIQ and the algorithms now used to monitor people with heart disease, COPD, and covid-19.
Its power, Conkright says, lies in its ability to create a unique “baseline” for each patient—a snapshot of that person’s norm—and then detect exceedingly small changes that might cause concern.
The algorithms need only about 36 hours to create a profile for each person.
The system gets to know “how you are looking in your everyday life,” says Vanden Hoek. “You may be breathing faster, your activity level is falling, or your heart rate is different than the baseline. The advanced practice provider can look at those alerts and decide to call that person to check in. If there are concerns”—such as potential heart or respiratory failure, he says—“they can be referred to a physician or even urgent care or the emergency department.”
In the pilot, clinicians monitor the data streams around the clock. The system alerts medical staff when the participants’ condition changes even slightly—for example, if their heart rate is different from what it normally is at that time of day.
The machine-learning model was trained with data from people enrolled in the study’s first phase. About 500 discharged patients and staff members were monitored at home last year. The researchers expected about 5% of that group to develop episodes that would require treatment. The number was actually about 10%.
The new system predicted these episodes in less time than traditional pulse oximetry, says Vanden Hoek, and fewer patients required hospitalization. Administrators say the program has saved them “substantial” amounts of money.
So far, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved five of the company’s algorithms, including a heart failure prediction model developed for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The promise and peril of wearables
The Chicago-based partnership is one in a growing number of attempts to train AI embedded in wearable devices to diagnose and monitor covid cases. Fitbit, for example, has made progress with an early detection tool: its algorithm detected about 50% of cases at least one day before visible symptoms developed. The US Army is also conducting a nationwide pilot program through its Virtual Medical Center. Its system, much like the Illinois trial, involves continuously monitoring patients’ vital signs through a wearable patch.
The Chicago-based program will continue throughout the year, and participants are now being recruited from several local hospitals in addition to UI Health, bringing the total to about 1,700.
Although it’s an important measure for Black and Latino communities in the city, some experts warn that it’s important to remain cautious when it comes to wearables—particularly because AI has been used to perpetuate discrimination. Black and Latino communities haven’t always benefited from technological advances, and they’ve experienced racial bias in AI medicine, whether from hospital screening systems that are less likely to identify the severity of their health needs or early decisions to locate covid-19 testing centers outside Black neighborhoods.
“There isn’t enough mobile health research being done exclusively with African-Americans,” says Delores C.S. James, an associate professor of health at the University of Florida, whose research focuses on digital health disparities. (She is not involved in the Chicago study.) “There is a unique opportunity given the high ownership of smartphones and social media engagement,” she says. “And let us keep in mind the high rate of health disparities and poor health outcomes. We must be included.”
Mitchell says she is pleased that marginalized communities are targeted to benefit from the AI tool. “This device is being utilized in communities that are deprived of these opportunities,” she says. “This can help everyone.”
Today, she remains optimistic, even though she is still struggling with the impact of covid on her health as one of the estimated 3 million Americans who are considered “long tail” survivors. She didn’t return to work for almost five months, and currently she’s in cardiac rehab to help improve her breathing and talking. A recent study shows that long-term survivors are at higher risk of death, have more complications throughout the body, and will become a “massive health burden” as their symptoms continue.
Still, Mitchell says, the sensor made the difference between long-term problems and paying a much higher price.
“I owe my life to this monitoring system,” she says.
