With supply chains still in disarray and the war in Ukraine wreaking havoc on EV battery component commodity prices, many forward-thinking automakers are scrambling to secure not only stocks of the valuable metals like cobalt, lithium and nickel that go into EV batteries, but also the means of of building the batteries themselves. On Thursday, Volkswagen Group held a groundbreaking at the site of its forthcoming EV battery cell plant in Salzgitter Germany and announced the formation of a new company, PowerCo, which will be responsible for handling the VW Group's burgeoning battery business.
"Today is a good day for the automotive industry in Germany and Europe," German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said during the event. "Volkswagen is showing how the future of sustainable, climate-compatible mobility could look. Together, we are laying the foundation for shaping this future to a significant extent in Salzgitter."
PowerCo will handle the Group's global battery activities, from producing the batteries themselves to conducting R&D on new battery technologies to "products such as major storage systems for the energy grid," per the announcement. Once the Salzgitter plant is operational, PowerCo will begin work on a second factory in Valencia, Spain with an eye on three further cell factories in Europe and potentially North America as well. Each of the European factories will reportedly operate using 100 percent renewable energy. In all, PowerCo aims to open a total of six battery factories in Europe producing a total of 240 GWh capacity every year (~6 million electric vehicles worth).
Stefan Warter
Operations across the various production facilities will be highly standardized. Everything from "equipment, buildings and infrastructure" to "products, processes and IT" will conform so that the entire production process can be more readily adapted to future "product and production innovations," per the release.
(c) Sebastian Dorbrietz
The Salzgitter plant is expected to create 5,000 new jobs when it begins operations in 2025 with an annual capacity of 40 GWh (~500,000 electric vehicles worth). Some 20,000 positions are will need to be filled once the other European factories open, Daniela Cavallo, Chairwoman of the General and Group Works Council of Volkswagen AG, said.
Chinese electric vehicle maker Human Horizons unveiled its second EV model on Wednesday, dubbed the GT HiPhi Z. This four-door grand touring sedan comes packed with gadgets and intelligent systems including the world's only "vehicle-grade" high-speed robotic arm, which HH claims "can move back and forth in place in less than a second and features control accuracy of up to 0.001mm."
The HiPhi Z features a hybrid steel-aluminum construction as well as the "world's first wrap-around Star-Ring ISD light curtain," a series of over 4000 LEDs that "interact with passengers, drivers, and the world around it." What's more UWB sensors embedded in the doors will allow for "automatic detection of people, keys, and other vehicles, resulting in a smart adjusted door opening in terms of both speed and angle."
It comes equipped with a 120 kWh high-performance battery pack that the company claims hits 100 kmh from a standstill in 3.8 seconds while offering a range of over 700 km on a full charge. An all-aluminum double wishbone front suspension and a five-link rear suspension keep the ride smooth and responsive. The rear wheels can turn as well, like the Hummer EV, drastically shortening the vehicle's turning radius to nearly that of a much shorter Mini Cooper, per the company.
Human Horizons
The interior is akin to stepping into a Jetsons episode, if the company's PR is to be believed. Its "ultra-futuristic spaceship-like digital setup" centers around the HiPhi Bot, an on-board AI companion that can adjust virtually every aspect of the driving experience. You know, like HAL did. Still, you'll go out in style if HiPhi Bot ever does go rogue — the racing bucket seats are covered in vegan Ultrasuede, the Meridian sound system boasts 23 speakers, and the occupants can dictate their preferences for not just lighting, touch, and sound, but even the vehicle's fragrance too.
But for as fantastical as this vehicle's loadout appears, Human Horizons is very much intent of actually bringing them the to Chinese market. "The HiPhi Z is a testament to the company's dedication to technological advancement, sparing no expense in testing the boundaries of creation," Ding Lei, CEO and chairman of HiPhi, said in Wednesday's release. "Through rigorous testing and development, the HiPhi Z has retained more than 95 percent of its production intents revealed previously."
The company expects the HiPhi Z to retail for $89,000 - $129,000 US. It will announce official rollout dates at the Chengdu Auto Show in August.
Dubbed, the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE), this spacecraft will continue to orbit the planet for nearly another week, building up enough momentum to sling it on a trans lunar injection (TLI) route over to the moon. Once the Capstone reaches the moon, it will match the planned path of the Lunar Gateway to verify its highly-eliptical orbit.
More than 7,000 languages are currently spoken on this planet and Meta seemingly wants to understand them all. Six months ago, the company launched its ambitious No Language Left Behind (NLLB) project, training AI to translate seamlessly between numerous languages without having to go through English first. On Wednesday, the company announced its first big success, dubbed NLLB-200. It's an AI model that can speak in 200 tongues, including a number of less-widely spoken languages from across Asia and Africa, like Lao and Kamba.
According to a Wednesday blog post from the company, NLLB-200 can translate 55 African languages with “high-quality results.” Meta boasts that the model’s performance on the FLORES-101 benchmark surpassed existing state-of-the-art models by 44 percent on average, and by as much as 70 percent for select African and Indian dialects.
Translating between any two given languages — especially if neither of them is English — has proven a significant challenge to AI language models because, in part, many of these translation systems rely on written data scraped from the internet to train on. Super easy to do if you speak what this sentence is in, much more difficult if you’re looking for quality content in Fan or Kikuyu.
Meta AI
Like most of its other publicly promoted AI programs, Meta has decided to open-source NLLB-200 as well as provide $200,000 in grants to nonprofits to develop real-world applications for the technology. Applications like Facebook News Feed or Instagram, for example. “Imagine visiting a favorite Facebook group, coming across a post in Igbo or Luganda, and being able to understand it in your own language with just a click of a button,” the Meta post hypothesized. You can get a sense of how the new model works on Meta’s demo site.
Additive manufacturing is one of the most important technological advances of the 21st century. It's revolutionized the way we build everything from airplanes and wind turbines to medical implants and nano-machinery — not to mention the tidal wave of creativity unleashed once the tech made its way into the maker community. In Cosplay: A History, veteran cosplayer and 501st Legion member, Andrew Liptak explores the theatrical origins of the craft and its evolution from costuming enthusiasm to full-fledged fandom. Liptak also looks at how advances in technology have impacted the cosplay community — whether that's the internet forums and social media platforms they use to connect, the phones and cameras they use to publicize their works, and, in the excerpt below, the 3D printers used to create costume components.
In the summer of 2017, I picked up a Nintendo Switch and began playing the latest installment of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda series, Breath of the Wild. My son, Bram, and I hacked and slashed our way through Hyrule. Featuring a massive open world, the game is full of fascinating costumes, objects, and weapons, and, without question, we settled on a Halloween costume for that year: one of the main character Link’s colorful outfits, to be accompanied by a handful of cool-looking items: a sword, shield, bow with quiver of arrows, and a magical tablet called a Sheikah Slate (a magical data pad).
My local library had just installed a 3D printer, and after a bit of poking around online, I found the files for the Sheikah Slate, then sent them a file to print. A day or so later, I had the white tablet in hand. After a little sanding, some paint, and a ribbon, I had a serviceable replica. When I came across another set of plans for a lightsaber-like Guardian Sword++ (1), I had a friend with a 3D printer of his own print me one. Before I knew it, I had two of my items for the character.
Courtesy of Andrew Liptak
The process of 3D printing also goes by “additive manufacturing,” “computer automated manufacturing,” “layered manufacturing,” or “rapid prototyping.”(2) The process starts with a designer-developed 3D object known as a Computer Aided Design (CAD), which the software converts to a file that can be read by a printer (usually a Standard Tessellation Language file, or STL). This STL file guides the computer to lay down plastic in a series of fine layers. As the machine lays down each successive layer, one can slowly build up a three-dimensional object like a part for a costume. While slow, the process allows makers to print extremely detailed objects that you might not be able to create with traditional manufacturing methods.
There are three main 3D printing methods makers can use. The most common is fused filament fabrication (FFF), in which a spool of thermoplastic (like ABS or PLA) is melted in a heated nozzle and extruded onto a build surface to form the object. The next method is stereolithography (SLA), in which a printer beams a laser into a vat of resin, bonding the material into a solid object, layer by layer, as it slowly works its way from bottom to top (or top to bottom). The third method is called selective laser sintering (SLS), in which a machine puts down a layer of powdered material like fine resin or metal. When the layer is in place, the machine uses a laser to trace the desired pattern, fusing the layer into the right shape. Once one layer is complete, the machine lays down another layer of powdered material, and the process repeats itself.
Each of these methods can be used in a variety of ways. Chemist David E. H. Jones had initially proposed the process in his New Scientist magazine column in 1974, observing that “many liquid monomers can be polymerised to solid by ultraviolet light, or even visible light. Accordingly, a laser-beam shone through a tank of monomer should leave an optically straight fibre in its path,” he wrote. “A laser beam aimed in the right direction zig-zags all around the tank to create an interlaced web of fibres. By proper settings of the mirrors anything from a Brillo-pad to a vest can be made: and with no moving parts at all (3)!”
Courtesy of Andrew Liptak
From here, engineers and scientists began to devise systems to realize his theory. In 1981, Japanese scientist Hideo Kodama wrote a paper for the Review of Scientific Instruments—“Automatic method for fabricating a three-dimensional plastic model with photo-hardening polymer”—in which he described the method for printing up an object (4), which several companies and entrepreneurs followed a couple of years later before registering a series of patents for specific systems. Thus, 3D printing was born.
The automated process initially found a home as a manufacturing technique. It allowed companies to construct new types of models, but also became an easy way to create a prototype of an object: one merely needed to develop a computer model and print it up, without having to manufacture a new set of molds or a machine part. But the process didn’t immediately become widespread, thanks in part to the patents that individuals and companies held on these techniques. That began to change in the mid-2010s as those patents expired, causing a boom in the availability of 3D printers. As Filemon Schöffer wrote in TechCrunch, “When the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) printing process patent expired in 2009, prices for FDM printers dropped from over $10,000 to less than $1,000, and a new crop of consumer-friendly 3D printer manufacturers, like MakerBot and Ultimaker, paved the way for accessible 3D printing (5).”
Prop-making studios in Hollywood have used the technology for years to create costumes, but the newfound availability of home devices has been a boon for cosplayers, allowing them to create individual props or entire costumes (6).
Before the widespread availability of 3D printers, sculptors had to rely on a variety of techniques to replicate costume parts: carving out EVA foam, making resin molds, machining metal parts, sculpting bucks for vacuum formers, and other techniques—a lot of effort if you’re looking to build only one item or a limited run of items. Now, a cosplayer can print up an entire preset suit of armor with a 3D printer.
Ahead of Dragon Con 2019, Jack Durnin of Charleston, South Carolina, decided to build a Martian marine from Syfy’s science-fiction series The Expanse. “I saw the promo for season two,” he told me at the convention, “and I saw the Martian marines in the teaser, and was like, ‘What is this show?’ ”and ended up binging the entire series.
Durnin was already an experienced hand when it came to costuming. In high school and college, he made short films, for which he built many of the sets, costumes, and props himself. As he got into cosplay, he built Commander Shepard’s N7 armor from Mass Effect. When he watched The Expanse, he realized that he could put together his own set of the Martian marine power armor.
While some of the show’s fans had tracked down the real-world helmets and components that the studio’s makers had used to create the onscreen costumes, the Martian marine costume was different. It was entirely original to the series, and if he wanted his own version, he’d have to make it himself, from the ground up. “I started with the helmet,” he explained, “because I knew that would be the hardest and would take the most time. I started with screenshots and then the initial shape, trading the three dimensions of the helmet, and then started sculpting it.” From there, he went to work on sculpting the forearms and armor, using the same EVA foam that he had used for his Mass Effect armor. Durnin and his then-girlfriend (now wife), Jenni Tyler, debuted their costumes at that year’s convention. Their work was rewarded by astonished onlookers and even garnered praise from the cast and crew of the show.
Access to a printer has another effect on the costuming community: it democratizes the field in a completely unprecedented way. In earlier days, a skilled modeler could produce a detailed model to sell to or share with the community at large. But this method inherently came with a bottleneck: said maker could produce their products only one by one. By creating a file and sharing it with others, ten or more makers could put together the piece at the same time. Hundreds of identical costumes could materialize worldwide almost simultaneously.
In the lead-up to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, interested cosplayers started a number of groups to create costumes for one of the film’s new trooper classes: the shoretrooper. While some makers decided to go the traditional route of sculpting and vacuum forming their own versions, one maker decided to model up his own printable version.
Courtesy of Andrew Liptak
In 2016, Sean Fields launched a website featuring a Dropbox link that contained all of the files required to put together the costume. Best of all, he released the files at no cost for anyone to download on their own. As a result, hundreds across the world built their costumes from his design. Fans from the US, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere constructed the costume, turning out at events clad in it. Others followed: a maker named Paul Prentice developed his own set of highly accurate shoretrooper armor, which he gave to interested makers in exchange for a charitable donation.
This technology had another, unexpected side effect: it helped to shorten the amount of time it would take someone to develop and build a costume. “When I was first becoming a prop maker,” Brian Anderson explained to me at FAN EXPO Boston in 2019, “there was an enormous investment in being able to produce something.”
When Lucasfilm released the television series The Clone Wars in 2008, Anderson, a longtime member of the 501st Legion, wanted to build a set of clone trooper armor from the series. “It took me over a year to sculpt and produce the molds for that suit, and an investment of several thousand dollars and materials just to get to that very first set.” Making armor in that fashion, he explained, wasn’t something one could do on impulse: it required a lot of planning and investment to complete. But once that money was spent, “subsequent suits were easy to make, because I could then vacuum form the armor [onto the existing molds].”
But with those molds already formed, he couldn’t easily improve them, especially as new details came to light. “Now, with 3D printing, the risk is so much lower.” At the time we spoke in August 2019, the final Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker, had yet to hit theaters, but he had already printed up a helmet that would appear in the film. “They were just shown in publicity photos for the first time a couple of weeks ago,” he said, but if there was a significant change, the original developer could simply take the model, tweak it, and rerelease it online for builders to print out again. “That happened to me with the helmet from The Mandalorian; I’ve already made that helmet from the file that Sean Fields produced. He said from the beginning, ‘This file probably isn’t accurate, and as I find new details, I’m going to iterate on the model, and anyone who buys the file now will get every free iteration through completion.’ When I first started working on that, a bunch of people asked why I was wasting my time on it if I knew it wasn’t going to be accurate. It’s twelve dollars’ worth of filament to print one. If I have to print a new one, it’s no big deal. And so, it lets people jump on trends very early and not have to worry so much about getting it right on the first try.”
Courtesy of Andrew Liptak
But while 3D printing has proved to be useful to cosplayers, it’s not the be-all and end-all technique that will replace the methods that preceded it. Processes like traditional sculpting, molding, and others remain in use throughout the world, and printing an object doesn’t mean that one can simply pull it off a printing bed and step into a convention with it in hand. These objects often require postproduction work, usually sanding down the lines left by the printer to a smooth surface (itself a labor-intensive process), filling in cracks and seams made when joining two parts together, and priming and painting the object.
Even once complete, a prop might not be very durable. A maker might opt to print out a hollow version of their desired prop, with a honeycomb-like interior structure, to save printing time and weight. A couple of years ago, I bought a replica run from Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 film Elysium. The parts were beautifully designed and printed and were extremely light. I built the prop, but when it fell (twice!), it broke along a couple of weak points, requiring fixes. When a friend printed up Link’s Guardian Sword for me, I had him do it as a solid part, realizing that it would be much sturdier.
Courtesy of Andrew Liptak
Given that 3D printing often relies on melting plastic to extrude, props can also be extremely susceptible to heat: more than one cosplayer has noted that they’ve had a prop or costume part that’s melted on them in extreme heat, like in a hot car in the sun or if left next to a heater. This isn’t to say that other manufacturing methods are inherently better: objects cast in resin can melt, deform, or shatter; fiberglass and plastic can crack with age or strain; and fabrics can tear.
But despite those drawbacks, 3D printing is a game-changing technology, allowing cosplayers to work up entire outfits and costume components quickly and cheaply, opening the field to new costumers who might not have been able to take part previously.
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(1) “Un Bal Costumé Chez Jules Verne” [A Costume Ball at the Home of Jules Verne], Le Monde illustré, 21st year, no. 1044, April 14, 1877, https://laporteouverte.me/2016/11/13/un-bal-costume-chez-jules-verne.
(2) Herbert R. Lottman, Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 204.
(3) Lydia Smith, “5–10 March 1891: Bovril and the First Ever Sci-Fi Convention, at the Royal Albert Hall,” Royal Albert Hall (website), March 2, 2016, https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/news/2016/march/5-10-march-1891-bovril-and-the-first-ever-sci-fi-convention-at-the-royal-albert-hall.
(4) “ ‘The Coming Race’ and ‘Vril-Ya’ Bazaar and Fete, in Joint Aid of the West End Hospital, and the School of Massage and Electricity,’ ”Royal Albert Hall (website), https://memories.royalalberthall.com/content/coming-race-and-vril-ya-bazaar-and-fete-joint-aid-west-end-hospital-and-school-massage-and-1.
(5) Alex Palmer, “The Strange Story of the Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fete, the ‘World’s First Sci-Fi Convention,’ ”Mental Floss, May 31, 2021, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/646499/first-sci-fi-convention-vril-ya-bazaar.
(6) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, A D Condo (entry), updated May 24, 2017, http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/condo_a_d.
SpaceX's satellite internet service is officially going mobile after the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday authorized the company to provide its Starlink WiFi service to vehicles. SpaceX already offers Starlink home internet, which left beta last October.
"We agree with SpaceX... that the public interest would benefit by granting with conditions their applications," The FCC wrote in its authorization letter. "Authorizing a new class of terminals for SpaceX’s satellite system will expand the range of broadband capabilities to meet the growing user demands that now require connectivity while on the move, whether driving an RV across the country, moving a freighter from Europe to a U.S. port, or while on a domestic or international flight."
The US government has no higher award with which to honor a civilian's achievements than the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Handed out at the discretion of the Commander in Chief, the MoF celebrates "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors." President Biden announced the first slate of MoF recipients of his administration on Friday, a list that includes former Apple CEO, Steve Jobs.
President Biden's nominees for this award class number 17. They include luminaries like Olympic-winning gymnast Simone Biles, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, Gold Star Father Khizr Khan, former US Senator John McCain (posthumous), former president of the AFL-CIO Richard Trumka (posthumous), and the most clearly worthy recipient of the group, Denzel Washington.
The walk from the Las Vegas Convention Center to Tacos El Gordo may only be seven-tenths of a mile but under the blazing sun of a Nevada winter, the trip can seem an eternity. Lucky for us Al Pastor enthusiasts, this traditional CES taco trek is now far more convenient as the Boring Company and Resorts World Las Vegas announced the official opening of the latest Loop station at Las Vegas Convention Center.
This spur off of the Boring Company's existing Loop network (which runs underneath the North and South halls of the LVCC) connects the convention center directly to a sister station underneath the World Resorts property on the other side of South Las Vegas Blvd. Boring expects the trip between the two to take just a few minutes — assuming nothing goes wrong — and plans to eventually expand the underground vehicle network to more than 55 stops along the Strip.
“Today marks a monumental moment not only for our resort, but for Las Vegas,” Scott Sibella, president of Resorts World Las Vegas, said in a Thursday press relea. “Our passenger station will make a visit to our resort from the Las Vegas Convention Center easier than ever, and eventually connect us to key destinations throughout the city.”
The Boring Company began work on the initial $47 million tunnels running under the LVCC back in 2019, completed excavation the following May, and opened for service — because of course it did — on April 20th, 2022. In October, 2021 Las Vegas approved the Boring Company's plans to expand its Loop network to encompass more than 29 miles of tunnel. That figure grew to 34 miles in June, 2022 to include stations at Harry Reid International Airport and Allegiant Stadium following approval from the Clark County Commissioners. However, despite Boring CEO Elon Musk's claims of superior passenger capacity — up to 4,400 people every hour! — the system so far has only managed to move around 575 people in that time.
Air travel remains one of the largest contributors to global warming in the transportation sector, producing 915 million tonnes of CO2 worldwide in 2019, per ATAG. In an effort to usher in a more sustainable era of flight, NASA announced Thursday that it is seeking partners "to develop technologies needed to shape a new generation of lower-emission, single-aisle airliners that passengers could see in airports in the 2030s."
NASA is looking to fund the design, building, testing and flying of large-scale demonstrators as part of its new Announcement for Partnership Proposals program. Specifically, the agency seeks to "reduce carbon emissions from aviation and ensure US competitiveness in a high-demand area of aircraft design — single-aisle commercial airliners."
“In the coming years, global air mobility will continue to grow at a steady pace, and single aisle aircraft will continue to carry the majority of that passenger traffic,” Bob Pearce, NASA associate administrator for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, said in Thursday's media release. “Working with industry, NASA intends to seize this opportunity to meet our aggressive environmental goals while fostering continued global leadership of the U.S. aviation industry.”
This effort comes as part of the White House's US Aviation Climate Action Plan, which itself aims to make make aviation emissions carbon-neutral by 2050. To help reach that deadline, NASA is planning to have these demonstrators ready by the end of the decade so that the lessons learned can be applied to the next generation of single-aisle aircraft coming in the 2030s. NASA plans to select at least one industry partner early next year, granting them funding and access to NASA facilities at Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.
Back in 2017, the European Union took the shockingly rational step of largely eliminating roaming charges for its citizens travelling among member nations, dubbing it the "Roam-like-at-home" system. Operating across the 27 countries that make up the European Economic Area as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway — but not the UK because Brexit — Roam-like-at-home was set to expire at the end of June. On Thursday, however, the European Commission announced that it will be extending the system for another decade, through 2032.
The EC cites benefits to both consumers and telecom providers as part of its decision, with consumers enjoying "a better roaming experience, with the same quality of mobile service abroad as they have at home," as well as improved access to emergency services and increased transparency in charging rates so travellers in the EU won't find a massive bill waiting for them when they get home.
“Remember when we had to switch off mobile data when travelling in Europe — to avoid ending up with a massive roaming bill?" Thierry Breton, Commissioner for the Internal Market, said in Thursday's press statement. "Well this is history. And we intend to keep it this way for at least the next 10 years. Better speed, more transparency: we keep improving EU citizens' lives."
The extended rules strongly suggests that carriers "ensure that consumers have access to use 4G, or the more advanced 5G, networks, if these are available at the destination" and "automatically interrupt mobile services if the mobile services over non-terrestrial networks reach charges of €50 or another predefined limit." What's more, they require 112 to dial emergency services be made available across the entire economic area and, by June 2023, for carriers to notify travellers of that ability either by text or popup when they enter the EU.
Most importantly, the new rules will put a couple Euros back in consumers' pockets because the EU is run by rational adults who can negotiate with telecom carriers for better wholesale data and voice pricing without the entire process devolving into a constitutional crisis. Users can expect to pay 2 €/GB this year with that rate steadily dropping to 1 €/GB from 2027 on, 0.022 €/min for voice until 2025 when it will drop to 0.019 €/min, and each SMS from here on out will cost 0.004 € until 2025 when it nudges down to 0.003 €.
