Connect with us

Uncategorized

In Washington, hydrogen-powered aviation and sustainable fuel startups announce plans for expansion.

Published

on

This week, the Paris Air Show began with announcements from two sustainable aviation ventures expanding their efforts in Washington state.

The hydrogen-powered aviation startup ZeroAvia has announced that it will expand its R&D capabilities at its Paine Field facility in Everett. ZeroAvia will receive a $350,000 grant from the state Department of Commerce to support the project, doubling the state’s previous investment. Last month, the organization praised an organization with Gold country Carriers to retrofit a resigned plane with its drive framework.

Twelve, a company developing sustainable aviation fuel, announced that it is constructing a commercial-scale production facility in Moses Lake, Eastern Washington. Twelve uses carbon dioxide and water to make a synthetic jet fuel, drawing comparisons to photosynthesis. When compared to conventional fossil fuels, it reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 90% and powers its process with renewable energy.

The air show in Le Bourget, France, lasts for a whole week, and a Washington delegation of nearly two dozen businesses and organizations is there to talk about the state’s role in sustainable aviation and get new businesses interested in flying into the Pacific Northwest.

Technology is in high demand everywhere. A global coalition of commercial airlines made a pledge two years ago to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Shipping companies and other businesses also want to cut emissions.

Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association, addressed a Boeing-led conference near Seattle this spring and stated, “We recognize that this is going to be extremely challenging, but it is achievable and we are absolutely determined to do everything we can to achieve that goal.” The conference was held near Seattle.

The petroleum fuels that power the majority of airplanes make it impossible to go green in aviation because there are no alternatives that come close to matching their affordability, availability, weight, or sheer amount of energy. Strategies for reducing carbon include:

Fuel for sustainable aviation (SAF): Feedstock materials include crops, sewage and dairy waste, waste vegetable oils, and agricultural and forestry debris.
Hydrogen: This fuel can be made from water and methane, among other things, and burnt directly or in fuel cells.
Batteries: Due to the batteries’ “energy density,” or weight in relation to the power generated, this option is currently restricted to smaller aircraft flying shorter distances.
Operations and materials modifications: NASA awarded Boeing a $425 million, seven-year grant to develop and test ultra-thin-winged fuel-efficient aircraft. Flight plans are being modified to reduce fuel consumption by airlines, cargo companies, and others.
Contrail studies: The ice cloud clouds produced by engine exhaust are unpredictable contrails. The Contrail Impact Task Force was established last year to investigate contrail impacts and opportunities for reduction.
It’s a lot to think about. The Cascade Climate Impact Model, a free tool released by Boeing last month, is intended to assist businesses in evaluating the cost-benefit trade-offs of various approaches to lowering carbon emissions, possibly with the intention of including Boeing aircraft in the solutions.

SAF is being favored by many established aerospace interests, particularly in the near future. It is possible to use the fuel in aircraft that already exist by mixing it with jet fuel. Boeing authorities refer to SAF as “the greatest switch” for cutting aeronautics carbon. However, the fuel is in short supply, accounting for well less than 1% of the total jet fuel that is currently available.

Senior emerging technology analyst Jonathan Geurkink of PitchBook seems to agree that SAF is the best option, at least for the time being. Today, “it’s a plug-and-play kind of solution for a lot of different reasons,” Guerkink stated. We don’t want to dump all of these planes at once.

Twelve signed a memorandum of understanding with Microsoft and Alaska Air last year to support the startup’s technology development in addition to the announced expansion in Moses Lake. Microsoft hopes to use Twelve’s fuel to offset employee travel costs, while Alaska intends to test it in one of its aircraft.

Locally, the sector is receiving additional support. In the spring of this year, lawmakers in Washington approved a bill that created a tax incentive for locally produced SAF and approved funding for a sustainable aviation fuel R&D center at Paine Field. In May, the Dutch company SkyNRG said it would build a biogas plant in Washington to make environmentally friendly aviation fuel.

“Assuming that motivating forces are adjusted suitably, there is feedstock, there’s innovation — everything that are set up to create practical flying fuel,” said John Dees, a senior decarbonization researcher with Carbon Direct. ” It concerns costs. It continues to cost more.

Numerous businesses are looking into alternative fuel options, despite the fact that SAF has an advantage in cleaner aviation. This includes: in the Pacific Northwest:

ZeroAvia, with offices in California and the UK and research and development facilities in Everett.
In order to develop its aircraft, Universal Hydrogen, a California company, collaborates with AeroTEC, based in Seattle, and MagniX, based in Everett. Universal Hydrogen tested its hydrogen-powered electric propulsion system on a plane called Lightning McClean in March at Moses Lake.
Eviation, a company with headquarters in Arlington, Wash., completed a successful test flight of its all-electric Alice aircraft in Moses Lake in September 2022.
Personal aviation startup Zeva Aero is based in Tacoma, Wash., and its planned products include battery-powered aircraft.
However, clean hydrogen fuel is also in short supply, just like SAF. Additionally, because hydrogen is expensive and difficult to transport, some people consider producing it close to where it is used. In order for battery-powered flight to succeed, weight reduction efforts must continue.

There are a lot of good reasons to believe that hydrogen and batteries won’t be really viable for a while. Dees stated, “It’s not just a question of whether it works in the plane; the airports would need to adopt a lot of infrastructure.”

However, despite the obstacles, hydrogen and batteries are “where things will go,” he added.

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Uncategorized

A Chinese Laboratory has unveiled a “Reasoning” AI model to compete with OpenAI’s o1

Published

on

What looks to be one of the first “reasoning” AI models to compete with OpenAI’s o1 has been shown by a Chinese lab.

A preview of DeepSeek-R1, an AI research startup backed by quantitative traders, was made public on Wednesday. According to the company, DeepSeek-R1 is a reasoning model that can compete with o1.

Reasoning models, in contrast to most models, take more time to think through a question or query in order to adequately fact-check themselves. By doing this, they are able to steer clear of some of the common mistakes that models make.

As with o1, DeepSeek-R1 comes up with an answer by reasoning through tasks, planning ahead, and carrying out a sequence of actions. It may take some time. Similar to o1, DeepSeek-R1 may “think” for tens of seconds before responding, depending on how complicated the question is.

According to DeepSeek, on two well-known AI benchmarks, AIME and MATH, DeepSeek-R1 (or, more specifically, DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview) performs similarly to OpenAI’s o1-preview model. MATH is a set of word problems, whereas AIME assesses a model’s performance using other AI models. However, the model isn’t flawless. According to certain X critics, DeepSeek-R1 (as well as o1) has trouble with tic tac toe and other logic difficulties.

Additionally, DeepSeek is easily jailbroken, meaning that it can be encouraged to disregard security measures. The model provided a comprehensive meth recipe to one X user.

The Chinese government’s pressure on regional AI programs is probably the cause of the conduct. China’s internet regulator must benchmark models to make sure their answers “embody core socialist values.” Many Chinese AI systems refuse to reply to subjects that could enrage regulators since the government has reportedly gone so far as to suggest a blacklist of sources that cannot be utilized to train models.

The increased focus on reasoning models coincides with a reexamination of the validity of “scaling laws,” which are long-held beliefs that a model’s capabilities would continuously rise if it were given additional data and processing power. Numerous news stories indicate that models from prominent AI laboratories, such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, aren’t making as much progress as they used to.

New AI concepts, systems, and development processes are in high demand as a result. The first is test-time compute, which supports DeepSeek-R1 and o1 models. In essence, test-time compute, sometimes referred to as inference compute, allows models additional processing time to do jobs.

During a keynote address at Microsoft’s Ignite conference this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made reference to test-time compute and stated, “We are seeing the emergence of a new scaling law.”

An odd move is DeepSeek’s announcement that it intends to expose an API and open source DeepSeek-R1. High-Flyer Capital Management, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund that bases its trading decisions on artificial intelligence, is supporting it.

The general-purpose text-and image-analyzing DeepSeek-V2 model, one of DeepSeek’s original models, compelled rivals like ByteDance, Baidu, and Alibaba to lower the usage fees for some of their models and make others entirely free.

For model training, High-Flyer constructs its own server clusters; the latest one apparently costs 1 billion yen (~$138 million) and contains 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs. High-Flyer was founded by computer science graduate Liang Wenfeng with the goal of creating “superintelligent” AI through its DeepSeek organization.

Continue Reading

Uncategorized

Indian EV startup funded by SoftBank Ola Electric Jumps 20% on its Initial Public Offering, Putting the Company at $4.8 Billion

Published

on

In its first trading session on Friday, shares of Ola Electric shot up 20%, valuing the Indian electric car startup at almost $4.8 billion.

Ola Electric raised almost $730 million through its initial public offering in Mumbai by pricing its shares at 76 rupees, or 91 cents. Reuters claims that it is the largest listing in India for this year.

By 3:52 p.m. local time, the value of the shares was approximately 91.20 rupees.

The company’s first-day increase is the result of investors’ bets that it will emerge as a major player in India’s electric vehicle market at a time when the government is taking steps to support the sector.

Just two and a half years ago, Ola Electric, a manufacturer of electric scooters, shipped its first unit.

In India, two-wheelers are the most widely used form of transportation. According to research from McKinsey & Co., electric two-wheelers in particular are predicted to make up 60% to 70% of all new scooter sales in India by 2030.

As it gets ready to release its first electric motorcycle product in the second half of 2025, Ola Electric is attempting to capitalize on this trend.

Like Tesla, the venture was started by well-known businessman Bhavish Aggarwal and bills itself as a corporation that can handle everything from design to manufacture and batteries.

However, as of right now, it doesn’t seem like the corporation has any intentions to enter the auto industry.

Temasek, an investment group based in Singapore, and SoftBank are two well-known investors in Ola Electric.

The business stated that it intends to utilize the profits from the initial public offering (IPO) to finance the growth of its gigafactory battery production, pay down debt, and increase research and development.

In the year that concluded on March 31, the company’s sales increased by 90% on an annual basis, but its losses increased. The business hasn’t made any money yet.

Aggarwal is also a co-founder of Ola Cabs, an Indian ride-hailing service.

Continue Reading

Uncategorized

Debris Hits International Space Station Following Mysterious Satellite Destroy

Published

on

The prospect of debris from another spacecraft colliding with the International Space Station posed a terrifying situation. This was the outcome of a Russian satellite that had been deactivated that had fragmented into at least 100 pieces in orbit. The station’s crew sought refuge as best they could, anticipating an impact from the dangerous circumstances.

“USSPACECOM has observed no immediate threats and is continuing to conduct routine conjunction assessments to support the safety and sustainability of the space domain. As such, USSPACECOM has notified commercial, governmental, Allied and partner organizations via Space-Track.org, to include Russia as the satellite owner.” the U.S. Space Command said in a statement regarding the situation and the possible threat to the International Space Station that was posted on X. In order to include Russia as the satellite owner, USSPACECOM has informed commercial, governmental, Allied, and partner groups via Space-Track.org.

Thankfully, it seems that the International Space Station is safe at this time and that any possible crisis has been avoided. “Mission Control continued to monitor the path of the debris, and after about an hour, the crew was cleared to exit their spacecraft and the station resumed normal operations,” U.S. Space Command said in confirmation of this.

On June 26, the Russian spacecraft known as RESURS-P1 broke apart, throwing more than 100 bits of debris into Earth’s low orbit. The satellite weighed 13,200 pounds and was traveling 220 miles above Earth when it broke apart. It is enough to suggest that the possible consequences of such an object colliding with the International Space Station may have been disastrous.

That was obviously a frightening time to be on the International Space Station, and sadly, it’s not something they’re not used to either. There have been previous instances where a Russian satellite has put other people in danger. In order to test an anti-satellite missile system, Russia purposefully destroyed one of its own Soviet-era satellites back in 2021. The crew of the space station was also forced to seek cover as a result of this disaster, as the aftermath sent thousands of debris pieces hurtling across space.

Some are wondering if the RESURS-P1 breaking apart was part of another Russian missile test given that historical history. Back in 2021, NASA sent a reprimand to Russia for this behavior, highlighting how dangerous it was for the safety of astronauts in space at the time. It’s unclear what kind of punitive measures Russia would face if it becomes out that its direct activities put the International Space Station in peril once more.

Experts have conceded, nevertheless, that the RESURS-P1 might have simply disintegrated as a result of a space collision or a satellite battery explosion. Without a doubt, more investigation into the incident will be done to ascertain its cause. Everyone seems to be concentrating on how relieved they are that there is no threat to the security of people who are on board the International Space Station right now.

The United Nations passed a resolution banning the testing of anti-satellite missile systems following the 2021 incident. Even after learning about the danger it posed at the time, Russia was among the countries that voted against that move, indicating that they do not support it.

But whether they would genuinely want to break such an arrangement is debatable. NASA would undoubtedly be upset even if the International Space Station sustained damage because of its significant scientific significance. This is true even if no one on board is hurt. What what caused the most recent Russian satellite to be destroyed is still unknown.

Continue Reading

Trending

error: Content is protected !!