Lifeboat Foundation

Google today is announcing a HD version of its vehicle mapping solution. Unlike Google Maps, Google’s HD map is not a consuming-facing application, but an additional layer of data that’s served to the vehicle’s L2+ or L3 assisted driving systems through Google Automotive Services.

The additional information sits on top of Google Maps’ data and delivers details such as precise lane makers and localization of objects (road signs) to help assisted driving vehicles orient themselves on the road. The driver will not be able to see or access the HD map or data directly. It’s not clear at this time if the driver will even know if the vehicle is using the HD mapping, though, presumably the vehicle’s assisted driving skills will be improved when it’s in use.

According to a Google spokesperson, the HD mapping is initially focused on high-traffic roads like freeways, but the spokesperson stopped short of saying exactly which cities or freeways. They said Google is working with automakers to determine where the HD map is most helpful.

As lidar company Luminar pushed ahead to meet its goals for 2022 — milestones that included locking in new commercial contracts with unnamed automakers and shipping production-ready sensors to SAIC — it also snapped up a small HD mapping startup called Civil Maps.

The acquisition, which was disclosed Wednesday during Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell’s presentation at CES 2023, is more than just a large publicly traded company taking advantage of a consolidating industry. Although the timing couldn’t have been better due to the current economic environment, according to Russell.

For Russell, the acquisition is part of Luminar’s longer term vision to be more than just a lidar supplier. Mapping, specifically the mapping tech that Civil Maps created, is foundational to that goal, Russell said.

These global heat maps, published by NASA, illustrate just how much hotter the world is today than it was in the previous decades.

Creating a map of the most complicated terrain in the universe requires a host of special technologies.

A team mapping radio waves in the universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before.

Scientists have labored for decades to understand how brain structure and functional connectivity drive intelligence. A new analysis offers the clearest picture yet of how various brain regions and neural networks contribute to a person’s problem-solving ability in a variety of contexts, a trait known as general intelligence, researchers report.

They detail their findings in the journal Human Brain Mapping.

The study used “connectome-based predictive modeling” to compare five theories about how the brain gives rise to intelligence, said Aron Barbey, a professor of psychology, bioengineering and neuroscience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the new work with first author Evan Anderson, now a researcher for Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. working at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

In spin-based quantum processors, each quantum dot of a qubit is populated by exactly one electron, which requires careful tuning of each gate voltage such that it lies inside the charge-stability region (the “Coulomb diamond’‘) associated with the dot array. However, mapping the boundary of a multidimensional Coulomb diamond by traditional dense raster scanning would take years, so the authors develop a sparse acquisition technique that autonomously learns Coulomb-diamond boundaries from a small number of measurements. Here we have hardware-triggered line searches in the gate-voltage space of a silicon quadruple dot, with smart search directions proposed by an active-learning algorithm.

Powered by Linux, this will be an open-source initiative.

PressureUA/iStock.

Other tech companies, such as Microsoft as well as Apple, have attempted to break this dominance but have fallen exceedingly short of user expectations. Even though Google Maps are not 100 percent accurate, it is the best available product out there, and now major technology companies want to take on the beast together.

While grand spaceflight plans of some nations have ended up many years behind schedule, China completed the assembly in orbit of its Tiangong space station in late October, only 22 months later than planned. And on Nov. 29, the Shenzhou 15 mission blasted off from China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center deep in the Gobi Desert and took three astronauts to the space station to begin permanent occupancy of the outpost.

These human spaceflight achievements, combined with recent space probes to the moon and Mars, add to the evidence that China is running a steady space marathon rather than competing in a head-to-head space race with the United States. That China’s space program is making good time toward its long-term goals was reinforced during a rare visit for foreign media to the country’s heavily guarded desert rocket base for the Nov. 29 launch — including lengthy interviews with senior Chinese space officials by in for The New York Times.