Toyota's Woven City: A Living Lab for Autonomous Mobility
Toyota is building a prototype city called Woven City at the base of Mount Fuji in Susono City, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. The effort occupies about 175 acres (70.8 hectares) on...
Innovation
Evolutionary AI tops backpropagation; Google X moonshot factory; AI's climate paradox; aluminium batteries; Branson's AC prize.
How Stadium Tech Actually Changes the Live Sports Experience
Professional sports venues spent the 2020s layering on digital tools that promised to make the live event better than watching from a couch. The results have been uneven. Tap-to-pay terminals...
Toyota awards $4M to 5 wheelchair innovations
In November 2020, Toyota Motor Corporation concluded a four-year global search for technologies that replace the conventional wheelchair. The Mobility Unlimited Challenge, run with the Nesta Challenges foundation, distributed $4...
How Companies Are Profiting from Climate Change
Climate change is creating new revenue streams for a growing number of businesses. These companies are not just managing risk. They are selling goods and services that depend on a...
Aluminium batteries: when abundance meets electrochemistry
Aluminium batteries are not a single technology. They are a family of chemistries, each trying to replace lithium-ion in a specific role. The common thread is the anode material itself....
AI's Climate Paradox: Emissions vs. Efficiency Gains
The same technology helping scientists predict weather patterns and detect methane leaks is also driving a surge in power demand that threatens to undercut those gains. Artificial intelligence systems, particularly...
The Hyperloop: A Decade of Hype, No Commercial System Built
In December 2023, Virgin Hyperloop permanently ceased operations. The firm, once called Hyperloop One, had raised more than $450 million in venture capital, built a 500-meter test track outside Las...
Siemens hit carbon neutral 2 years early
In September 2015, Siemens set a target to cut its global carbon output by 50 percent by 2020 and to become carbon neutral by 2030. The industrial group reached that...
Branson’s AC prize cuts climate impact 5x
In November 2018, Richard Branson launched a competition to reinvent residential air conditioning. The Global Cooling Prize, backed by a coalition that included the Indian government and research partners, offered...
What Is Google X, the Moonshot Factory?
Google X began in January 2010 as a secret lab where Sebastian Thrun and Astro Teller pursued ideas that could not survive anywhere inside the search giant. After Google restructured...
World Rugby smart ball tracks kicks, passes, tries
October 2023 brought the official launch of a smart rugby ball that tracks kick distance, hang time, velocity and exact position on the pitch. World Rugby developed it with Sportable,...
Evolutionary AI tops backpropagation in 2024 tests
Evolutionary artificial intelligence does not learn by adjusting weights through calculus. It breeds solutions. The approach selects, mutates, and recombines architectures the way nature selects organisms. Since the 1960s, when...
