A new patent filing shows General Motors is developing a new design many of us have long pondered about: a car with transparent A-pillars that expand your field of view out of the windshield. GM's filing claims the design is intended mostly to improve driver awareness during left-handed turns, without jeopardizing the safety of the vehicle's crash structure.
Autonomous vehicle technologies need to be safer than humans by a considerable margin before they can be truly self-driving. But they can provide substantial benefits as assistive driving technology already today — provided their limitations are properly communicated.
Service robotics is a fast-developing sector, requiring embedded intelligence into robotic platforms to interact with the humans and the surrounding environment. One of the main challenges in the field is robust and versatile manipulation in everyday life activities. An appealing opportunity is to exploit compliant end-effectors to address the manipulation of deformable objects. However, the intrinsic compliance of such grippers results in increased difficulties in grasping control.
Graphene and two-dimensional materials (2DM) remain an active field of research in science and engineering over 15 years after the first reports of 2DM. The vast amount of available data and the high performance of device demonstrators leave little doubt about the potential of 2DM for applications in electronics, photonics and sensing. So where are the integrated chips and enabled products? We try to answer this by summarizing the main challenges and opportunities that have thus far prevented 2DM applications.
A closely watched auto-industry forecaster lopped more than 5 million cars off its projections for global production this year and next, largely due to fallout expected from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. S&P Global Mobility, formerly known as IHS Markit, lowered its 2022 and 2023 estimates each by 2.6 million vehicles. The forecaster now expects auto companies to make 81.6 million cars worldwide this year and 88.5 million next year.
El eventual impago de la deuda rusa está en una zona indefinida, en el día en el que vence el pago de intereses de dos emisiones de deuda denominada en dólares. Según ha informado la agencia rusa RIA Novosti, citando al ministro de Finanzas Anton Siluanov, Moscú ha ordenado el pago de la deuda en dólares, pero no puede garantizar el abono al inversor final a causa de las sanciones. En todo caso, Rusia tendría 30 días de periodo de gracia para ponerse al corriente de los pagos, por lo que la eventual declaración de default no sería inmediata.
Uno de los tres proyectos de prototipos de vacunas contra la COVID-19 en los que trabajaba el Consejo Superior de Investigación Científicas (CSIC) ha detenido el camino que estaba siguiendo hasta ahora. La institución confirma que ha decidido retirar la solicitud ante la Agencia Española del Medicamento para realizar el ensayo clínico con humanos y esgrime que hay dificultades para completarlo en España teniendo en cuenta la “poca gente que queda sin vacunar” y la “irrupción de la variante ómicron”.
El bloque Occidental, liderado por Estados Unidos y Europa, y el bloque del Este, capitaneado por Rusia, vuelven a estar en máxima tensión después de que el presidente ruso Vladímir Putin decidiera invadir Ucrania.
