Alfa Romeo's new Tonale SUV will include a blockchain which will store NFTs to prove ownership and official service history documents. The boot of the car can also be used as a remote Amazon delivery drop-box controlled by Alexa.
MIT student Mustafa Doga Dogan has developed a way to embed invisible labels in 3D printed objects. The labels, such as QR codes, can be viewed using Infrared to track objects but are invisible to the eye.
Luke Berndt created a system to automatically photograph planes that fly over his house in Washington D.C. The skybot system uses the transponder of the aircraft to info the camera where in the sky to point at to take the photo. The camera moves and photographs until the plane is out of range or a new plane is in range. A machine learning custom vision cloud function then confirms that a plane is present in each photo and posts the best one to the Skybot website along with its identification detail from the FAA database..
The Verge published a fascinating article about how hacker Joe Grand figured out how he hacked a Trezor cryptocurrency hardware wallet. He managed extract the PIN from the wallet (which was running older firmware) after the wallet's owners forgot the pin but wanted to cash out when alt coins they owner appreciated in value to over $2 million.
Check out this great story on Wired about 22 year old Sam Zeloof who is building silicon chips in his garage using designs and equipment from the 70s, 80s & 90s.
Dutch startup Ocean Grazer has designed an ocean battery that uses excess renewable energy to pump 20 million litres of low pressure water from a concrete reservoir on the sea bed into a flexible bladder. When energy is needed, the bladder releases the water back into the reservoir using the force the ocean above it, driving water turbines and generating up to 10MWh of electricity as it passes back into the reservoir, at an efficiency rate of between 70 and 80 percent.
Researchers in Japan have developed a squeezed light based quantum computing system that can scale the number of qubits in use without the need for elaborate cooling systems.
Researchers in Kyoto University in Japan have demonstrated how the magnetic field generated by the conductive waves of a tsunami arrives about a minute before the waves themselves, and can be used as an early warning sign and a means to predict the height of the wave.
Patrick Collison of Stripe maintains a list of big projects that have been executed fast, such as The Eiffel Tower, Amazon Prime, and most recently, The Covid-19 Vaccine. The list is a great reminder that big things can be done when needed.
