CODEX

A $750 million solar facility in Buffalo will produce a gigawatt of high-efficiency solar panels per year and make the technology far more attractive to homeowners. In an industrial park near the shore of Lake Erie, hard by the Buffalo River, the future of the solar power industry is under construction. SolarCity’s sprawling Buffalo factory, built and paid for by the state of New York, is nearing completion and will soon begin producing some of the most efficient solar panels available commercially. Capable of making 10,000 solar panels a day, or one gigawatt of solar capacity a year, it will be the largest solar manufacturing plant in North America and one of the biggest in the world. When production begins, SolarCity, already the leading installer of residential solar panels in the United States, will become a vertically integrated manufacturer and provider—doing everything from making the solar cells to putting them on rooftops. At a time when conventional silicon-based...

The doctors looking at Layla Richards saw a little girl with leukemia bubbling in her veins. She’d had bags and bags of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. But the cancer still thrived. By last June, the 12-month-old was desperately ill. Her parents begged—wasn’t there anything? There was. In a freezer at her hospital—Great Ormond Street, in London—sat a vial of white blood cells. The cells had been genetically altered to hunt and destroy leukemia, but the hospital hadn’t yet sought permission to test them. They were the most extensively engineered cells ever proposed as a therapy, with a total of four genetic changes, two of them introduced by the new technique of genome editing. Soon a doctor from Great Ormond was on the phone to Cellectis, a biotechnology company with French roots that is now located on the East Side of Manhattan. The company owned the cancer treatment, which it had devised using a gene-editing method called TALENs, a way of making cuts and fixes...

At a private workshop held this week for AI researchers, Apple researchers gave a rare glimpse of some machine-learning technology they’re building for self-driving cars. Speaking to an exclusive audience of researchers in the field, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Apple’s director of AI, discussed several projects apparently related to automated driving. The technical talks were given Friday during the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, the largest AI-focused academic event of the year, which was held in Long Beach, California. The event attracted thousands of researchers, including many from rival tech companies. The talks were designed to showcase Apple’s technical prowess and to woo potential recruits. Salakhutdinov, who joined Apple in 2016 but still holds a post as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, showed off a project previously disclosed in a paper posted online by Apple last month. This project trained a system to recognize pedestrians and other vehicl...

The electric-car startup Faraday Future is reported to be in dire financial straits. Its FF91 car is billed to have a 378-mile range, 1,050 horsepower, and a 0-to-60 time of 2.39 seconds—but reports suggest that there may never be enough money to actually build it. Rumors of financial instability at Faraday Future have been swirling for over 12 months now. This time last year, we explained that the company was burning cash and running up debts. It didn’t help that the company was having employees work on a self-driving car project at sister firm LeEco, which was founded by Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting (usually known as YT). But a new investigation by the Verge is even more damning. It argues that grandiose future visions, with their resulting excessive hiring and lavish spending on facilities, are taking a big toll on the startup. From the report: Four high-level former employees with knowledge of the company’s finances told the Verge as recently as early December that, barring a...

The Kepler space telescope, which launched in 2009, has produced more than 30,000 signals measuring light from stars to search for possible planets in distant parts of the galaxy. Sifting through that and other telescope data, astronomers have found more than 3,500 planets, up from 329 known before the Kepler mission. Now artificial intelligence is helping to find even more. On Thursday, researchers from Google and University of Texas at Austin announced that a machine-learning algorithm had discovered two new planets, Kepler 80g and Kepler 90i. Kepler 90i is a particularly special discovery—it’s the eighth planet orbiting its star, marking the first system outside our own known to have eight planets. To find the planets, the researchers trained an algorithm on 15,000 labeled signals from Kepler data, provided by NASA, to recognize what is and isn’t a planet. In tests, the algorithm could correctly identify which signals reflected planets and which did not 96 percent of the time. A...

The Oreo beta for the Nokia 5 brought a new version of Nokia’s camera app – with surprising (and hidden) new features. The camera now supports dual cameras of both the telephoto and wide-angle kind. The app specifically shows 2x telephoto zoom, which is the standard for phones right now. The Nokia 5 can’t make use of it of course, even HMD’s only dual camera phone – the Nokia 8 – has a identical field of view on its two cameras. But this app shows what could come in the future. So far no phone on the market does both telephoto and wide-angle. We’ve already heard the first murmurs of phones with three cameras but chances are that HMD is just considering two separate models. All Nokia 9 rumors so far point to a two-camera solution. There’s another less exciting change to the camera app – you can now manually select Shutter speed and ISO on the Nokia 5. Values go between 1/500s and 1s for the shutter and 100 to 2,000 for ISO

There are a lot of people in the world who ride motorcycles, especially in more crowded areas where cars don't fit especially well. India is one of those places, and many users there are now noticing a 'motorcycle mode' showing up in their Maps alongside car, train, and walking options.   We've known something like this was coming for some time now thanks to our teardowns.  v9.61 ,  v9.62 , and  v9.66  all contained strings relating to some sort of two-wheeler or motorcycle mode, and this seems to be the final culmination of that. One reader let us know that this showed up for him in  v9.67.1, which is the most recent version out . As you can tell from the screenshots, motorcycle mode has the same goal as any other mode: to find the best, most efficient route possible given the type of transportation. Since motorcycles can fit in places that cars must go around, you'll note that estimated travel times are quicker, sometimes significantly so. ...