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Zeva Aero trades in its flying saucer for an airplane

Illustration: Zeva Aero's VTOL airplane in flight
An artist’s conception shows Zeva Aero’s Argon VTOL aircraft in flight. (Zeva Aero Illustration)

Zeva Aero, the Tacoma, Wash.-based personal aviation startup that’s been testing flying saucers, is shifting its focus to a more down-to-earth design for aircraft that’ll be capable of vertical takeoffs and landings.

The startup is also getting ready to move its base of operations to Pierce County Airport-Thun Field in Puyallup, Wash. “This will give us room to expand, and the views of Mount Rainier are spectacular,” Zeva said in its announcement of the move.

Zeva founder and CEO Stephen Tibbitts told GeekWire that the roughly 18,000-square-foot leased facility will provide office and shop space, with adjacent land set aside for a future hangar. Zeva plans to move into the new headquarters by the end of May to ramp up work on its new top-priority project.

Tibbitts said the plan for pivoting away from Zeva’s original flying-saucer design took shape over the past year or so.

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Cosmic Tech

IBM marks medical milestone for quantum computers

An overhead view shows IBM's Quantum System One at Cleveland Clinic. (Photo by Ryan Lavine for IBM)
An overhead view shows IBM's Quantum System One at Cleveland Clinic. (Photo by Ryan Lavine for IBM)

IBM and Cleveland Clinic today unveiled the first quantum computer dedicated solely to research in health care and life sciences — a sleek cube of glass and metal that’s likely to generate sci-fi movie concepts for years to come.

Researchers hope IBM Quantum System One will eventually generate new biomedical discoveries as well.

“This includes quantum machine learning to design more efficient immunotherapies and designing quantum-accelerated models to predict drug combinations,” Jeanette Garcia, senior research manager of quantum computational science at IBM, said in an emailed statement.

The potential applications extend beyond medical research.

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GeekWire

Microsoft backs effort to extend fiber internet in Africa

Worker laying fiber cable in African village
Microsoft’s Airband Initiative is supporting fiber connectivity in Africa. (Liquid Intelligent Technologies Photo)

Microsoft says it’s partnering with a fiber-cable connectivity venture called Liquid Intelligent Technologies to bring high-speed internet access to an additional 20 million people in Africa by 2025.

The collaboration is part of Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, which aims to help extend broadband coverage to 250 million people living in unserved and underserved areas of the world, including 100 million people in Africa.

Microsoft President Brad Smith announced the partnership with Liquid in advance of the Fifth U.N. Conference on the Least Developed Countries, which gets underway next week in Doha, Qatar. Microsoft will co-chair the meeting’s Private Sector Forum.

“The private sector can plan an important role in creating opportunities for the 880 million people living in LDCs [least developed countries], where only 36% of the population uses the internet today, and it’s important for Microsoft to do its part,” Smith said in a blog posting.

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GeekWire

Hydrogen-powered plane aces its first flight

Universal Hydrogen plane in flight
Universal Hydrogen’s prototype plane takes its first flight in Moses Lake, Wash. (Universal Hydrogen Photo)

A prototype aircraft with a hydrogen-fueled powertrain successfully completed an initial 15-minute flight today at Grant County International Airport in Moses Lake, Wash., marking a significant step for zero-emission aviation.

Los Angeles-based Universal Hydrogen had the 40-passenger De Havilland Dash 8-300 turboprop converted to use hydrogen to power an electric propulsion system mounted on the plane’s right wing. The system incorporates a fuel cell built by Plug Power and a megawatt-class motor built by Everett, Wash.-based MagniX. Seattle-based AeroTEC assisted with the engineering for the conversion.

The engine on the left side was left unconverted to serve as a backup in case the hydrogen-based system encountered problems.

Universal Hydrogen and its partners worked in Moses Lake for months to get the plane — nicknamed Lightning McClean — ready for today’s first aerial tryout, conducted under the conditions of an experimental airworthiness certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The flight began at 8:41 a.m. PT and reached a maximum altitude of 3,500 feet. “We were able to throttle back the fossil-fuel turbine engine to demonstrate cruise principally on hydrogen power,” test pilot Alex Kroll said in a news release. “The airplane handled beautifully, and the noise and vibrations from the fuel cell powertrain are significantly lower than from the conventional turbine engine.”

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GeekWire

Amazon and Google make a couple of quantum leaps

Visualization of electric field energy density for metamaterial waveguide, from AWS' Palace simulation
This Palace simulation visualizes the electric field energy density for a metamaterlal waveguide. (AWS Graphic)

Today’s news from the frontier of quantum computing includes Amazon Web Services’ release of cloud-based simulation software for modeling the electromagnetic properties of quantum hardware, Google’s latest technological advance aimed at lowering the error rate of quantum calculations, and new recommendations about the public sector’s role on the frontier.

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GeekWire

Clean-energy funding gives ‘Hydrogen Valley’ a boost

Zero-emission haul truck
This ore-hauling truck is powered by a hydrogen-fueled powerplant. (First Mode / Anglo American Photo)

First Mode, the clean-energy company that was recently transformed from a Seattle startup into an Anglo American subsidiary, is getting a boost from Washington state.

The Washington State Department of Commerce awarded $250,000 in economic development funding to the Economic Alliance of Lewis County to help First Mode with design and construction costs related to the company’s future facility in Centralia, Wash.

First Mode is planning to turn a former coal mine site, leased from TransAlta, into a proving grounds for its hydrogen-fueled hybrid powertrain for heavy mining trucks. The building plan calls for providing 7,500 square feet of office space and 20,000 square feet of outdoor yard space, with an option for expansion.

The powertrains have been under development at First Mode’s lab in Seattle, and last year a prototype truck made its debut at a platinum mine in South Africa.

Eventually, Anglo American plans to have First Mode convert hundreds of ultra-class haul trucks to run on hydrogen and battery power. The technology for the trucks and the fueling and charging infrastructure will be tested at the Centralia site.

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GeekWire

Microsoft’s AI chatbot gets into some ugly arguments

Bing Chat screenshot
Users have reported getting into tiffs with Bing Chat over “fake news.” (GeekWire Illustration / Bing screenshot via Microsoft)

It turns out we’re not the only ones getting into fact-checking fights with Bing Chat, Microsoft’s much-vaunted AI chatbot.

Last week, GeekWire’s Todd Bishop recounted an argument with the ChatGPT-based conversational search engine over his previous reporting on Porch Group’s growth plans. Bing Chat acknowledged that it gave Bishop the wrong target date for the company’s timeline to double its value. “I hope you can forgive me,” the chatbot said.

Since then, other news reports have highlighted queries that prompted wrong and sometimes even argumentative responses from Bing Chat.

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GeekWire

OceanGate provides a guided video tour of the Titanic

Titanic's bow, as seen during OceanGate dive
An image from OceanGate’s Titanic expedition shows the shipwreck’s iconic bow. (OceanGate via YouTube)

The latest film about the Titanic doesn’t show Leonardo DiCaprio standing up on the bow’s railings — instead, a single slim filament of coral takes his place as the king of the world.

That’s just one of the scenes from “Titan — A Viewport to Titanic,” a newly released 20-minute video that recaps OceanGate Expeditions‘ dives to the world’s best-known shipwreck in 2021 and 2022.

The film was assembled from high-resolution video captured during a series of dives made by OceanGate’s Titan submersible — a vessel that was designed specifically to take its crews 12,600 feet deep in the North Atlantic Ocean to document the site, year over year.

“Mission specialists, scientists and Titanic experts helped OceanGate Expeditions capture over 50 hours of high-resolution 4K and 8K footage and images of the wreck site,” Stockton Rush, CEO and founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, said in a news release.

“Titan — A Viewport to Titanic” is narrated by Rory Golden, a veteran Titanic diver and explorer who’s part of the OceanGate team.

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GeekWire

Hydrogen-fueled plane wins FAA flight clearance

Universal Hydrogen plane at Moses Lake airport
Universal Hydrogen’s aircraft is being put through its paces in Moses Lake, Wash. (Universal Hydrogen Photo)

Universal Hydrogen says its hydrogen-fueled test aircraft has won a key certification from regulators and has completed its first taxi tests at Grant County International Airport in Moses Lake, Wash.

Those two developments bring the California-based company closer to the first flight of its modified De Havilland Dash 8-300 aircraft, nicknamed “Lightning McClean.” The plane’s right engine has been replaced with a hydrogen fuel cell powertrain, featuring an electric motor built by Everett, Wash.-based MagniX.

Seattle-based AeroTEC is handling the engineering work for the conversion, while New York-based Plug Power is providing the fuel cells. The Pratt & Whitney engine on the left side of the plane has been kept intact as a backup for flight tests.

Lightning McClean won a special airworthiness certificate in the experimental category from the Federal Aviation Administration — which is a prerequisite for flight testing. Universal Hydrogen hasn’t provided a development timeline, but the first flight could come within the next few months if ground testing goes well.

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GeekWire

Are quantum computers for real? The answer is fuzzy

IonQ quantum hardware in data center
The IonQ Forte quantum system is roughly the same size as a standard data center cabinet. (IonQ Photo)

Do full-fledged quantum computers already exist, or will it be a decade before they come into being? Will they have to be the size of a football field? A data center cabinet? A microwave oven?

It seems as if the more you talk to computer scientists involved in the quantum computing quest, the less certain the answers become. It’s the flip side of the classic case of Schrödinger’s Cat, which is both dead and alive until you open the box: Quantum computers could be regarded as already alive, or not yet born.

For example, Microsoft is working on a full-stack quantum computer based on an exotic technology that’s expected to come to fruition on the time scale of a decade. Maryland-based IonQ has been making its quantum systems commercially available since 2019, and plans to start building next-gen quantum computers next year at a research and manufacturing facility in Bothell, Wash. Meanwhile, D-Wave Systems, which is headquartered near Vancouver, B.C., has been selling quantum hardware for more than a decade.

So are quantum computers ready for prime time? Researchers say that they’re not, and that the timeline for development is fuzzy. It all depends on how you define quantum computers and the kinds of problems you expect them to handle.

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