Cosmic Log
Lockheed Martin and Microsoft say they’re deepening their strategic relationship to help power the next generation of computing and communications technology for the Department of Defense.
Cloud-based services play a key role in that relationship. Under the terms of an agreement announced this week, Lockheed Martin will become the first non-governmental entity to operate independently inside the Microsoft Azure Government Secret cloud.
What’ll it take to solve the quantum computing challenges of the future? Microsoft has an app for that — and now developers around the world can have it, too.
The app is called the Azure Quantum Resource Estimator. It’s a software tool that was originally developed for Microsoft’s internal use. The tool is already guiding the company’s effort to develop full-stack quantum computers, and now it can also help outside developers figure out how much computing power they’ll need to execute a given quantum algorithm in a reasonable amount of time.
That’s a key question, because the guidelines used for classical computing don’t necessarily apply to the quantum frontier. Unlike classical computers, quantum computers take advantage of an environment where a quantum bit — better known as a qubit — can represent a one and a zero at the same time.
Quantum approaches can be far more efficient than the standard binary computing approach for solving particular kinds of problems: optimizing a network, for example, or figuring out how to design a synthetic molecule to perform a specific chemical task.
“We’ll be able to study, for example, how to help remove harmful gases from the atmosphere,” Krysta Svore, distinguished engineer and vice president of quantum software at Microsoft, told me.
“Ten years ago, we thought it would take a billion years’ run time on a quantum computer,” Svore said. “That’s a really long time to wait. But over the last decade, we’ve been able to bring that down to a month’s run time on a quantum computer … using exactly the resource estimator, this tool, to understand the cost of the algorithm. And we’ve been able to redesign our hardware accordingly as well.”
It’s only fitting that 20 of Eviation’s all-electric Alice commuter airplanes are destined to be based in Alice Springs.
That’s the upshot of the Arlington, Wash.-based company’s deal with Northern Territory Air Services, a scheduled airline and charter aircraft operator that’s headquartered in the town known as the capital of the Australian Outback.
“Australia is recognized around the world for its breathtaking scenery, and adopting carbon-free technologies is fundamental to preserving the environment for future generations,” Ian Scheyer, the CEO of NTAS, said today in a news release announcing a letter of intent to acquire the planes. “Eviation’s all-electric Alice aircraft provides us with the opportunity to chart a sustainable path forward in connecting communities across the country.”
Alice is designed to take on flights ranging from 150 to 250 miles — which fits the parameters for many of NTAS’ flights. Scheyer said electric aviation will make it possible for his company to provide “cost-effective and convenient passenger and cargo flights across the Outback.”
Robotic life imitated art this weekend at a telepresence contest in California, and Germany’s Team NimbRo is $5 million richer as a result. The payoff came at the end of the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition in Long Beach, sponsored by Japan’s All Nippon Airways and organized by the XPRIZE foundation.
The contest incentivized technologies that allow operators to perform real-time robotic operations remotely — a la the fictional blue-skinned androids who are linked to humans in the “Avatar” movie series (with “Avatar: The Way of Water” premiering next month). The concept is also center stage in “The Peripheral,” a sci-fi novel by William Gibson that’s been adapted for the screen on Amazon Prime Video.
Ninety-nine teams signed up for the Avatar XPRIZE in 2018, kicking off rounds of competition that led to the Nov. 5 finals at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center. The robots had to weigh less than 160 kilograms (350 pounds) and be controlled wirelessly.
This weekend, 17 finalist teams from 10 countries brought in their robotic telepresence systems to perform a series of remote tasks such as traversing an 80-foot-long obstacle course strewn with boulders, flipping switches, using a power drill to unscrew a bolt, and selecting the roughest rock in a collection based strictly by feel.
For the finals, the avatars were controlled by outside judges from a separate room, rather than by team members. Points were awarded based on how quickly and how well the tasks were performed. NimbRo’s robot did all 10 tasks in five minutes and 50 seconds.
A robot built by a French team called Pollen Robotics accomplished all the tasks in 10 minutes and 50 seconds, earning the $2 million second prize. Boston-based Team Northeastern came away with the $1 million third prize. The other $2 million of the prize purse was awarded last year to the teams advancing to the finals.
First Mode is establishing a proving grounds between Seattle and Portland to test and optimize giant zero-emission hauling trucks and the hydrogen-based infrastructure they’ll depend on.
The Seattle-based engineering venture says its leased facility at the TransAlta Centralia Mine, 85 miles south of Seattle, will include 7,500 square feet of office space and 20,000 square feet of outdoor yard space. “We plan to expand our footprint and activities in the future,” First Mode said in an emailed statement.
First Mode’s first job in Centralia will be to bring in a fleet of Komatsu 930E-4 ultra-class haul trucks and retrofit them with hybrid battery and hydrogen fuel cell power plants. Such conversions follow the model set in May, when the Anglo American mining company successfully deployed a proof-of-concept hybrid haul truck at its Mogalakwena mine in South Africa. First Mode developed the hybrid power plant for that truck, the world’s largest zero-emission vehicle.
“The First Mode Proving Grounds in Centralia is a critical next step in our mission to help heavy industry eliminate diesel and transition to clean energy,” First Mode CEO Chris Voorhees said today in a news release. “The site will support both the optimization of ultra-class haul trucks and the full infrastructure associated with diesel-free mobility and the production and distribution of clean energy.”
MagniX has been working on electric propulsion systems for years, but now the Everett, Wash.-based venture is adding hydrogen fuel cells to its power repertoire for carbon-free flight.
The expansion plan follows up on MagniX’s partnership with Universal Hydrogen, announced two years ago, and on last month’s initial flight test of an all-electric Eviation airplane equipped with MagniX’s 650-kilowatt motors.
Last year, MagniX and Universal Hydrogen said they’d work with Plug Power and AeroTEC to create a Hydrogen Aviation Test and Service Center at Grant County International Airport in Moses Lake, Wash., where the Eviation flight test took place.
Today MagniX said it would start developing hydrogen fuel cells to complement its battery electric and hybrid electric propulsion systems.
The future may not be evenly distributed, but there’s a dystopia-inducing concentration of it in “The Peripheral,” a science-fiction novel by cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson.
Now the novel has been turned into a streaming-video series distributed on Amazon Prime Video, and it turns out that Gibson’s future is more like the present than it was when the book was published in 2014.
“We initiated our writers’ room three weeks before the pandemic hit and the country shut down,” series producer/writer Scott B. Smith recalls. “There’s something called ‘the Jackpot’ in the story, which involves a kind of multi-vector apocalypse. And we felt like we were watching that happening in real time.”
Smith discusses how his team created the screen version of “The Peripheral” — and how Gibson’s world of the future squares with the challenges of the present — in the latest episode of Fiction Science, a podcast that focuses on the intersection of science and technology with fiction and popular culture.
Arlington, Wash.-based Eviation Aircraft says Evia Aero, a nascent European regional airline that’s based in Germany, has signed a letter of intent to purchase 25 of Eviation’s all-electric commuter Alice aircraft.
The airline hasn’t yet gone into service, but it eventually intends to use the nine-passenger Alice planes as its primary aircraft for point-to-point regional travel within Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands.
“Together with Eviation, a pioneer of electric flight, we will introduce a fleet of zero-emission aircraft that will transform the way we experience regional travel in Europe,” Florian Kruse, founder and CEO of Evia Aero, said today in a news release. “We are deeply committed to holistically transforming the aviation industry by implementing a complete cycle of local energy generation, storage, and flight operations.”
Gregory Davis, Eviation’s president and CEO, hailed Evia Aero’s commitment to electric air travel. “The creation of an all-electric European commuter fleet of Alice aircraft will advance an economically, environmentally and socially sustainable future of flight,” Davis said.
Microsoft and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, have their own visions for a virtual world called the metaverse — but an alternate, open-source vision from Seattle science-fiction author Neal Stephenson is gathering steam.
And while Stephenson may not have billions of dollars at his command, he has a selling point that the tech heavyweights can’t match: He’s the guy who came up with the concept of the metaverse for a 1992 sci-fi novel titled “Snow Crash.”
The venture co-founded by Stephenson and digital currency pioneer Peter Vessenes, known as Lamina1, aims to take advantage of blockchain, a technology that’s just as buzzy as the multiverse. The plan is to develop a Layer 1 (in Latin, “Lamina 1”) blockchain platform that content creators can take advantage of as they build out their corner of the metaverse.
Last November, Stephenson told me that the metaverse as envisioned by Meta and Facebook didn’t exactly match his vision for a virtual world of planetary proportions. “They’re generally not talking about those kinds of planetary-scale things,” Stephenson said at the time.
In the months that followed, he decided to get into the game himself.
Now that the metaverse is finally getting real, Magic Leap isn’t playing games.
When the mysterious augmented-reality venture was founded back in 2010, the idea was to transform the consumer market with a goggle-eyed headset that would let users play with robotic digital gremlins and a virtual solar system. Over the course of a decade, the Florida-based company raised $2.6 billion in funding — and opened a Seattle engineering office led by science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson.
That was then. This is now: The Seattle office was closed amid controversy in 2020, and Magic Leap is now taking aim at the enterprise market for augmented reality, or AR, rather than the consumer market.
At this week’s GeekWire Summit, Magic Leap’s chief technology officer Julie Larson-Green acknowledged that times have changed.
“There was a lot of money spent going after the consumer AR market,” she said. “It was definitely early, and a lot of money was spent on R&D, and it’s a completely different company now.”
Just last week, Magic Leap put its second-generation AR device on the market, with three models at price points between $3,299 and $4,999.