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Why the grid is ready for fleets of electric trucks

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Why the grid is ready for fleets of electric trucks


However, the researchers weren’t sure if the grid could handle many electric trucks simultaneously charging in one place. Unlike electric cars, which have relatively low power requirements and would be distributed through neighborhoods, fleets of electric trucks might strain electricity distribution systems.

Electricity distribution relies on substations that serve small areas, usually around a few square miles (although this varies widely depending on population density). If one area suddenly outstrips a substation’s capacity, it could cause an outage. Accommodating more electric trucks without triggering that problem might require major upgrades, which could be costly and take months or even years to carry out.

Borlaug and his colleagues modeled substation requirements using data from real-world diesel delivery fleets. The team took into account how far the trucks drove and how long they spent at their home base to estimate the charging needs of an electric fleet.

“About 80 to 90% of the substations that we studied were capable of accommodating fleets of up to 100 trucks without requiring significant upgrades,” Borlaug says. And if fleets managed their charging by choosing slower speeds to avoid stressing the grid, even fewer substations would need upgrades, he adds.

However, the trucking industry has historically been slow to adopt new technology, says Ben Sharpe, an analyst with the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit research group that studies the transport sector. Some states are considering incentives or even requirements to nudge fleets to electrify.

California passed regulations in June 2020 requiring a majority of heavy-duty trucks sold by 2035 to be zero-emission. The state also has an extensive voucher system to subsidize the cost of purchasing new electric vehicles. You “can’t overstate the importance” of California’s trucking regulations, Sharpe says. Largely as a result of these programs, about half of all electric trucks currently on the roads in the US and Canada are in California, he adds.

Other US states are following California’s lead: in July 2020, 15 states signed a new rule that requires all new medium- and heavy-duty vehicles to be zero-emission by 2050, with other targets leading up to the deadline.

While short-range electric trucks seem relatively close to commercial reality, some researchers have cautioned that stretching the range of electric trucks might not be technologically or economically feasible in the short term.

“For sure you would do short haul, there’s no question about it, because the economics are in favor, everything is in favor,” says Venkat Viswanathan, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University. And with batteries getting cheaper and lighter, trucks that can travel up to around 500 miles between charges are looking more realistic, Viswanathan says.

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These robots know when to ask for help

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These robots know when to ask for help


A new training model, dubbed “KnowNo,” aims to address this problem by teaching robots to ask for our help when orders are unclear. At the same time, it ensures they seek clarification only when necessary, minimizing needless back-and-forth. The result is a smart assistant that tries to make sure it understands what you want without bothering you too much.

Andy Zeng, a research scientist at Google DeepMind who helped develop the new technique, says that while robots can be powerful in many specific scenarios, they are often bad at generalized tasks that require common sense.

For example, when asked to bring you a Coke, the robot needs to first understand that it needs to go into the kitchen, look for the refrigerator, and open the fridge door. Conventionally, these smaller substeps had to be manually programmed, because otherwise the robot would not know that people usually keep their drinks in the kitchen.

That’s something large language models (LLMs) could help to fix, because they have a lot of common-sense knowledge baked in, says Zeng. 

Now when the robot is asked to bring a Coke, an LLM, which has a generalized understanding of the world, can generate a step-by-step guide for the robot to follow.

The problem with LLMs, though, is that there’s no way to guarantee that their instructions are possible for the robot to execute. Maybe the person doesn’t have a refrigerator in the kitchen, or the fridge door handle is broken. In these situations, robots need to ask humans for help.

KnowNo makes that possible by combining large language models with statistical tools that quantify confidence levels. 

When given an ambiguous instruction like “Put the bowl in the microwave,” KnowNo first generates multiple possible next actions using the language model. Then it creates a confidence score predicting the likelihood that each potential choice is the best one.

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The Download: inside the first CRISPR treatment, and smarter robots

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The Download: inside the first CRISPR treatment, and smarter robots


The news: A new robot training model, dubbed “KnowNo,” aims to teach robots to ask for our help when orders are unclear. At the same time, it ensures they seek clarification only when necessary, minimizing needless back-and-forth. The result is a smart assistant that tries to make sure it understands what you want without bothering you too much.

Why it matters: While robots can be powerful in many specific scenarios, they are often bad at generalized tasks that require common sense. That’s something large language models could help to fix, because they have a lot of common-sense knowledge baked in. Read the full story.

—June Kim

Medical microrobots that travel inside the body are (still) on their way

The human body is a labyrinth of vessels and tubing, full of barriers that are difficult to break through. That poses a serious hurdle for doctors. Illness is often caused by problems that are hard to visualize and difficult to access. But imagine if we could deploy armies of tiny robots into the body to do the job for us. They could break up hard-to-reach clots, deliver drugs to even the most inaccessible tumors, and even help guide embryos toward implantation.

We’ve been hearing about the use of tiny robots in medicine for years, maybe even decades. And they’re still not here. But experts are adamant that medical microbots are finally coming, and that they could be a game changer for a number of serious diseases. Read the full story.

—Cassandra Willyard

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5 things we didn’t put on our 2024 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies

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5 things we didn’t put on our 2024 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies


We haven’t always been right (RIP, Baxter), but we’ve often been early to spot important areas of progress (we put natural-language processing on our very first list in 2001; today this technology underpins large language models and generative AI tools like ChatGPT).  

Every year, our reporters and editors nominate technologies that they think deserve a spot, and we spend weeks debating which ones should make the cut. Here are some of the technologies we didn’t pick this time—and why we’ve left them off, for now. 

New drugs for Alzheimer’s disease

Alzmeiher’s patients have long lacked treatment options. Several new drugs have now been proved to slow cognitive decline, albeit modestly, by clearing out harmful plaques in the brain. In July, the FDA approved Leqembi by Eisai and Biogen, and Eli Lilly’s donanemab could soon be next. But the drugs come with serious side effects, including brain swelling and bleeding, which can be fatal in some cases. Plus, they’re hard to administer—patients receive doses via an IV and must receive regular MRIs to check for brain swelling. These drawbacks gave us pause. 

Sustainable aviation fuel 

Alternative jet fuels made from cooking oil, leftover animal fats, or agricultural waste could reduce emissions from flying. They have been in development for years, and scientists are making steady progress, with several recent demonstration flights. But production and use will need to ramp up significantly for these fuels to make a meaningful climate impact. While they do look promising, there wasn’t a key moment or “breakthrough” that merited a spot for sustainable aviation fuels on this year’s list.  

Solar geoengineering

One way to counteract global warming could be to release particles into the stratosphere that reflect the sun’s energy and cool the planet. That idea is highly controversial within the scientific community, but a few researchers and companies have begun exploring whether it’s possible by launching a series of small-scale high-flying tests. One such launch prompted Mexico to ban solar geoengineering experiments earlier this year. It’s not really clear where geoengineering will go from here or whether these early efforts will stall out. Amid that uncertainty, we decided to hold off for now. 

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