Tesla’s launch of a robo-taxi network marks the beginning of a significant transportation disruption that will transform mobility, economy, geopolitics, and urban landscapes with the widespread adoption of electric autonomous vehicles ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.
Transportation Revolution.
🚗 Q: How will Tesla’s Robotaxi network impact transportation? A: Tesla’s Robotaxi network in Austin, Texas marks the ignition point for transportation disruption, with multiple companies competing to provide taxi rides without human drivers, potentially capturing 80–90% market share in 10–15 years.
🛢️ Q: What industries will be disrupted by autonomous electric vehicles? A: Autonomous electric vehicles will disrupt the oil and agriculture industries, as vehicles are the number one users of crude oil, and corn is the top agricultural product in the US, used to produce ethanol for gasoline.
🌆 Q: How will urban planning change with the rise of autonomous vehicles? A: Cities will repurpose parking spaces for retail, living areas, and solar panels, transforming urban planning and enabling new forms of transportation, including drones and aircraft.
Environmental Impact.
Parasitic, egg-eating worms might sound like the stuff of nightmares, but they’re simply a fact of life for blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay.
Interestingly, a new study published in the journal PLOS One by researchers at William & Mary’s Batten School & VIMS suggests these worms could serve as a valuable biomarker for managing the fishery.
The most recent Winter Dredge Survey, conducted by the Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences & VIMS in collaboration with Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, recorded historically low numbers of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay. The findings have sparked concern among the fishery’s many stakeholders and highlight a need for new tools that can help balance economic and ecological priorities—this study may help with that.
The future of sustained space habitation depends on our ability to grow fresh food away from Earth. The revolutionary new collaborative Moon-Rice project is using cutting-edge experimental biology to create an ideal future food crop that can be grown in future deep-space outposts, as well as in extreme environments back on Earth.
Starting with the question “How does our brain distinguish glucose from the many nutrients absorbed in the gut?” a KAIST research team has demonstrated that the brain can selectively recognize specific nutrients—particularly glucose—beyond simply detecting total calorie content. Their study, published in Neuron, is expected to offer a new paradigm for appetite control and the treatment of metabolic diseases.
Professor Greg S.B. Suh’s team in the Department of Biological Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Young-Gyun Park’s team (BarNeuro), Professor Seung-Hee Lee’s team (Department of Biological Sciences), and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, have identified the existence of a gut– brain circuit that allows animals in a hungry state to selectively detect and prefer glucose in the gut.
Organisms derive energy from various nutrients, including sugars, proteins, and fats. Previous studies have shown that total caloric information in the gut suppresses hunger neurons in the hypothalamus to regulate appetite. However, the existence of a gut–brain circuit that specifically responds to glucose and corresponding brain cells had not been demonstrated until now.
In a hunt for more sustainable technologies, researchers are looking further into enabling two-dimensional materials in renewable energy that could lead to sustainable production of chemicals such as ammonia, which is used in fertilizer.
This next generation of low-dimensional materials, called MXenes, catalyzes the production of air into ammonia for foods and transportation for high-efficiency energy fertilizers.
MXenes has a wide range of possibilities that allow for highly flexible chemical compositions, offering significant control over their properties.
More than 2 billion people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, with global warming and competing demands from farms and industry expected to worsen shortages. But the skies may soon provide relief, not in the form of rain but humidity, sucked out of the air by “atmospheric water harvesters.” The devices have existed for decades but typically are too expensive, energy-hungry, or unproductive to be practical.
Now, however, two classes of materials called hydrogels and metal-organic frameworks have touched off what Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), calls “an explosion of efforts related to atmospheric water harvesting.”
So far, none of the devices can compete with established approaches to augment water supplies, such as desalinating seawater. But some applications—cooling data centers and slaking the thirst of soldiers on the move—could support higher costs until the technology scales up, says Samer Taha, CEO of Atoco, a California-based startup. “There are many applications where atmospheric water harvesting can help.”