Recharge your electric vehicle in 20 minutes starting later this year

The takes-forever-to-recharge-an-EV reason not to buy an electric vehicle may not be a problem much longer. Engineers from BMW and General Motors say an electric vehicle can be 80% recharged in about 20 minutes using a new specification developed by the Society of Automotive Engineers. It calls for a single standardized connector that accepts DC fast charging, the one that will get you back on the road quickly, as well as less speedy AC and DC charging. BMW and GM got there first with Fast Charge testing signoff, but Audi, Chrysler, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), Porsche, and Volkswagen are onboard with the same SAE DC fast charge specs. At the same time, multiple suppliers of charging equipment are signed on: ABB, Aker Wade, Eaton, and IES.

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Steven Spielberg's Movie Industry Prediction: 'Implosion' Of Film Business Model Imminent

The Oscar-winning director told students at USC's School of Cinematic Arts that the movie business is teetering on the edge, and a few high-profile box-office failures in quick succession could catalyze dramatic changes in the way studios do business, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Spielberg lamented that it's becoming harder and harder for even brand-name filmmakers to get their projects into movie theaters. To wit: "Lincoln," which was a critical and commercial success for the director, nearly ended up on HBO, he told the audience. Unestablished talent, meanwhile, has run into trouble getting their projects greenlit at all, because their ideas are "too fringe-y" for studios.

Spielberg continued:

That's the big danger, and there's eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that's going to change the paradigm.

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The Big Bang Wasn’t the Beginning

What if the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning of the universe, but only one stage in an endlessly repeated cycle of universal expansion and contraction?

So suggests mathematical physicist and string theorist Neil Turok. He thinks there may be many universes, at once interpolated but separate, like a mixture of gases. These universes are attracted to each other; every few trillions of trillions of years, they collide, explode, expand and contract, then repeat the sequence all over again.

I recently spoke with Turok, winner of the first TED Prize of 2008, for an upcoming Wired News Q&A. Here are some outtakes from our conversation:

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Multiverse-Universe Debate: Cosmologists Weigh One Reality Vs. Many At World Science Festival

NEW YORK — Whether you believe our universe is unique or one of many coexisting realities, there's a scientific model that backs up your views. Cosmologists on both sides debated the issue June 1 here at the "Multiverse: One Universe or Many?" panel at the World Science Festival.

"Is the multiverse idea something that's implied by deficiencies in existing cosmological theories, or is it something some scientists need to help them explain certain unresolvable problems in existing theory?" journalist John Hockenberry asked, acting as moderator to scientists Andreas Albrecht, Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, and Neil Turok, who took the stage at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.

The possibility of a multiverse is raised by the theory of cosmic inflation. This idea posits that the universe grew exponentially in the first fraction of a second following the Big Bang, expanding even faster than the speed of light. Some versions of this theory suggest that certain areas of the universe expanded faster than others, creating separate bubbles of space-time that might have developed into their own universes. [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse]

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Google Buys Quantum Computer for Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA

To some of us, wicked fast quantum computers seem like the stuff of theory and some far off future. Not so if you work at Google or NASA. In a sign the technology is creeping closer to practical use, Google, NASA, and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association (USRA) recently announced formation of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab and seeded it with a brand new 512-qubit D-Wave Two quantum computer.

Quantum computers promise to be orders of magnitude faster than classical computers and far better at the “optimization problems” associated with machine learning—improving not only Google search but perhaps ushering in the kind of “creative problem solving” humans associate with intelligence.

Each D-Wave quantum computer is housed in a 10’ featureless black cabinet. Inside the box, an apparatus hangs from the ceiling like a high-tech stalactite. A niobium chip resides in the tip and is cooled to a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, at which point it becomes a superconductor. But apart from being colder than deep space, the way the computer itself functions differs from the classical model.

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