Tag: race
Vaughan Gething: Trump and Brexit set Wales back on race
: ‘Stuck in an ever-so-draining rat race’: Burnout, apathy on the rise rise as China’s youth face bleak job market
Amazon joins buyout race for Signify Health – WSJ
The Frontrunners In the Trillion-Dollar Race for Limitless Fusion Power
The companies were profiled in a Fast Company article titled “The frontrunners in the trillion-dollar race for limitless fusion power.”
Last year, investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos injected a record $3.4 billion into firms working on the technology, according to Pitchbook. One fusion firm, Seattle-based Helion, raised a record $500 million from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. … The Fusion Industry Association says that at least 33 different companies were now pursuing nuclear fusion, and predicted that fusion would be connected to the energy grid sometime in the 2030s…. And you’d be forgiven for missing another milestone in July, when the Energy Dept. announced awards of between $50,000 and $500,000, to ten fusion companies working on projects with universities and national labs.
Here are a few of the awardees, who include some of the industry’s leading companies, and whose projects offer a sampling of the opportunities — and hard problems — in fusion….
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building their first machine, SPARC, with a goal of producing power by 2025. “You’ll push a button,” CEO and cofounder Bob Mumgaard told the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit this summer, “and for the first time on earth you will make more power out than in from a fusion plasma. That’s about 200 million degrees — you know, cooling towers will have a bunch of steam go out of them — and you let your finger off the button and it will stop, and you push the button again and it will go.” With an explosion in funding from investors including Khosla, Bill Gates, George Soros, Emerson Collective and Google to name a few — they raised $1.8 billion last year alone — CFS hopes to start operating a prototype in 2025….
One morning last December, the company fired up its newest supermagnet — a 10-ton, 8-foot-tall device made of hundreds of tightly-twisted coils — and quietly pushed its magnetic field beyond a whopping 20 tesla, a record for a magnet of its size. (Most MRIs operate at a strength of about 1 tesla.) Eventually, 18 of these magnets will surround the SPARC’s tokamak, which CFS says could produce as much as 11 times more energy than it consumes, and at prices cheaper than fossil fuels.
Other fusion-energy companies profiled in the article:
Southern California-based TAE Technologies, which uses a unique non-radioactive reaction between hydrogen and boron. (Since its founding in 1998 TAE has raised $1.2 billion, with $250 million in its latest round led by Google and Chevron’s venture capital arm). TAE “says it plans to start delivering power to grids by 2030, followed by ‘broader commercialization’ during the next decade.”
General Atomics, of San Diego, California, which built eight of the magnet modules for the ground-breaking IITER facility, “including its wild Central Solenoid — the world’s most powerful magnet.”
Canada-based General Fusion (backed by Jeff Bezos and building on technology originally developed by the U.S. Navy), which hopes to generate the data need to build a commercial pilot plant.
Princeton Fusion Systems of Plainsboro, New Jersey, uses radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to generate a plasma formation in a magnetic bottle — holding the record for the longest time such a reaction has been stably held.
UK-based Tokamak Energy has reached the 100 million Celsius threshold for commercially viable nuclear fusion, the first to do so with a spherical, privately-funded device.
Helicity Space, based in Pasadena, California, has 10 employees and over $4 million in funding to pursue its goal of “enabling humanity’s access to the solar system, with a Helicity Drive-powered flight to Mars expected to take two months, without planetary alignment.”
Magneto-Intertial Fusion Technologies, of Tustin, California.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Learn to race through books with this speed-reading training app
TL;DR: As of August 21, you can get the ZapReader Speed-Reading: Lifetime Subscription for just $39.99 instead of $499 — that’s a 91% discount.
If you’re returning to school or starting a new position that requires some training, you might notice just how long it can take to read something. The average adult reading speed is about 238 words per minute. If you’ve got a text of a few hundred pages to get through, that’s a pretty big time sink, but it may not have to be. Reading is a skill like any other, and you may be able to become a faster reader without losing comprehension.
ZapReader Speed-Reading is an app that could help you become a speed reader by giving you access to expert courses, and tools, and helping you track your progress. It’s available for only $39.99 during our Back to Education sale now through August 24.
Become a speed reader
By giving you access to a toolset and expert instruction, this app is designed to help you improve your reading speed faster than you would on your own.
In practice, what you get with ZapReader are six expert courses, training exercises, a cloud library to store your eBooks, and the speed e-reader. The e-reader itself is compatible with Windows 7 or later and macOS 10.6 or later, and it comes loaded with tools that could help you improve your reading skills and become a speed reader. Those tools include text flash, text highlighter, horizontal text, a scroller, an eye movement tracker, and a pace trainer, among others. As you train yourself, you can also track your progress with analytic tools that report on your reading speed, training focus, and training time. All of this may be made even easier because you should be able to use almost any e-Book for your speed reader training. The e-reader can read 46 different files and e-book formats, so grab a favorite and hit the books!
Learn more in less time
You might be shocked at how quickly you can get through a whole book after a little while using ZapReader. During our Back to Education sale, a lifetime subscription to ZapReader Speed-Reading is on sale for $39.99 (Reg. $499) with no coupon code needed. In the spirit of getting educated, for every unit sold, 50 cents will be donated to a school or charity for children in need.
Prices subject to change.
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ZapReader Speed-Reading: Lifetime Subscription
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