TLDR 2021-12-30

Waymo's autonomous EV design 🚗, Rivian's pickup truck 🛻, 77 species found in Antarctica 🇦🇶

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Big Tech & Startups

Rivian’s R1T electric truck brings adventure to the EV crowd (1 minute read)

Rivian’s R1T electric truck is one of the first electric trucks to make it to the market. Starting at $67,500, the truck is built for adventure and has plenty of storage space for gear. The company also sells accessories, such as tents, that can be installed into the vehicle. With 835 horsepower and 908 pound-feet of torque, the R1T can go from 0 to 60 mph in 3 seconds. An in-depth video review of the R1T is available in the article.

Future autonomous Waymo EV will be custom built for ride-hailing with no steering wheel (2 minute read)

Waymo is collaborating with Geely, a Chinese automotive company, to create an EV for its US ride-hailing service. The future EV will have no steering wheel. Its design will focus on riders, with features like plenty of head room, leg room, and reclining seats, screens and chargers, and an easy to configure and comfortable cabin. Regulatory changes will likely be required before Waymo will be allowed to release a car without steering wheels and pedals in the US. Renders of the car design are available in the article.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

LG Unveils OLED EX, the Next Generation of Its OLED TV Tech (3 minute read)

LG's OLED EX is the company's next generation of its OLED display technology. It promises to boost maximum brightness, enhance picture quality, and allow for smaller display bezels. The new displays use a compound called deuterium combined with algorithmic image processing to increase brightness by up to 30% over conventional OLED displays. They will be used in every OLED TV manufactured at Samsung's Paju and Guangzhou locations in the second quarter of next year. While the global TV market declined by 12% this year, LG saw a 70% growth in OLED sales.

Scientists find unexpected trove of life forms beneath Antarctic ice shelf (3 minute read)

A team of researchers from Germany discovered 77 seafloor-dwelling species beneath an Antarctic ice shelf. Little is known about the environment under Antarctica's floating ice shelves, with previous studies only documenting a few dozen life forms. Some of the fragments of dead animals the researchers collected were up to 5,800 years old, showing how old the ecosystem could be. Many of the discovered animals feed on micro-algae, but plants or algae do not live in the environment, so the animals likely eat algae carried underneath the ice shelf by currents.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Leaf 3 (GitHub Repo)

Leaf 3 is a PHP framework for creating web apps and APIs with a clean, simple, and flexible structure. It is powered by an ecosystem of powerful modules with zero setup. A YouTube channel with video tutorials is available.

sish (GitHub Repo)

sish is an open source alternative to serveo/ngrok. It implements an SSH server that only handles forwarding. sish supports multiplexing connections over HTTP/HTTPS with WebSocket support, multiple types of forwarding, authentication, custom domains, and more.
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Miscellaneous

A Chinese Satellite Can Allegedly Take High-Res Images of US Cities In Seconds (2 minute read)

Beijing-3 is a small and relatively low-cost Chinese satellite that can allegedly take high-resolution images of cities in seconds. The commercial satellite can take images so detailed that they can be used to identify specific military vehicles and weapons. It was able to conduct an in-depth scan of San Francisco Bay within 42 seconds from an altitude of 310 miles at a resolution of 19.6 inches per pixel. The satellite has the potential to monitor up to 500 locations around the world at a rate of up to 100 trips per day using artificial intelligence.

Intel Core i7-12800H CPU outperforms Apple M1 Max in new benchmark (3 minute read)

Intel’s Alder Lake Intel Core i7-12800H features 14 cores and 20 threads. Recent benchmarks show that it outperforms Apple's M1 Max chip in single-core performance, with Apple's chip showing a slight edge in multi-core runs. While Intel's processor received noteworthy scores across the board, it has a distinct core and thread advantage over the M1 Max. Intel's Alder Lake-P chips will likely outperform previous generations by over 30%.
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