Factory

An intriguing new study has zeroed in on a brain region that is central to the development of both alcohol abuse and anxiety in adults, and demonstrated how gene editing could be used to wipe clean a person's predisposition to both disorders. Likened to a "factory reset" for the brain, the technique is put forward as a potential way to treat conditions that can be traced back to adolescence, and offers new insights into the effects on brain health of binge drinking at a young age.The study was carried out by scientists at…

Will Jackson, CEO of robotics company Engineered Arts, says he isn’t sure what’s worse: the angry emails that accuse him of building machines that will one day overthrow humanity or the speculative ones enquiring if the sender can fuck the robots. “Everybody wants to see a humanoid robot,” Jackson says. “They love to imagine all these things that are going to happen. Part of what we do is fulfilling that desire.” (Though not, he is careful to stress, the sex-robot stuff.) Footage of Engineered Arts’ most recent…

Tesla says it will turn Shanghai into “the world’s largest vehicle export hub” with a new factory capable of producing 450,000 electric vehicles per year, next to the existing plant. Gigafactory Shanghai is a massive success for Tesla and enabled the automaker to grow at an impressive rate during the pandemic while the rest of the auto industry slowed down. Last year, CEO Elon Musk disclosed that Gigafactory Shanghai has now surpassed Fremont Factory in production capacity, and Tesla has made the Chinese factory…

Sila Nanotechnologies announced that they will invest a few hundreds of millions of dollars into a new battery material factory in Washington state to support the production of up to 500,000 electric vehicles. The company described the project in Moses Lake in a new press release today: In a commitment to ensure America retains global leadership in the world’s transition to the new energy storage era, Sila, a next-generation battery materials company, today announced the purchase of a facility with more than…

The state of Georgia offered Rivian $1.5 billion in tax incentives for the buzzy EV company to build a factory east of Atlanta, according to documents signed by the company and local officials in the state. The factory will cost $5 billion to construct, and eventually produce 400,000 electric vehicles a year. In order to receive the money, Rivian agrees to create 7,500 jobs, with an average wage of $56,000 a year, plus benefits, by the end of 2028. Georgia officials are portraying the agreement as the largest economic…

Spot, the most famous four-legged robot in the world, sometimes seems more like an animatronic entertainer than an industrial machine. But creators Boston Dynamic want to remind the world at large in a new video that this thing can do work, too. The new Spot spot, titled “No Time To Dance,” shows the quadrupedal bot carrying out a range of tasks in an industrial setting. Spot takes readings from gauges, uses an infrared camera to scan some equipment, and generates work orders for human employees. And, yes, then it does…

Rivian announced today that it secured the incentive packaged, expected to be worth up to $1.5 billion if fully realized, for its upcoming electric vehicle factory in Georgia. In December, not long after it started production of its first electric vehicles at its Illinois factory, Rivian announced a new $5 billion electric vehicle factory in Georgia. Rivian managed to negotiate an impressive incentive package with the state. It is valued at $1.5 billion if the investment from the company is fully completed within…

British automaker Bentley has shared new data outlining its progress toward becoming carbon neutral throughout its entire global supply chain. The automaker’s “Dream Factory” headquarters in Crewe, England is already carbon neutral, but Bentley’s latest numbers show how much of a decrease it has made in its overall environmental impact the past year alone. Bentley Motors Ltd. is a century-old automotive brand globally recognized for its expertise in quality and luxury. That being said, the automaker earned early…

Suppliers to Apple Inc. AAPL -3.66% are among the businesses taking precedence in local governments’ efforts to restart factories in the Shanghai region as the U.S. tech giant, facing supply constraints, warned that the pandemic’s resurgence in China could dent sales.Covid-19 outbreaks have hit Shanghai and the neighboring provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang over the last month—a region with one of the highest concentrations of Apple’s top suppliers, according to the…

Workers at Tesla’s Shanghai factory are sleeping inside the facility as the Chinese metropolis begins to ease strict lockdown measures geared toward curbing the spread of COVID-19, Bloomberg reported on Monday. Keen to fire up the production line after a highly restrictive three-week lockdown, Tesla is reported to be deploying a “closed-loop system” designed to stop workers from mixing with other people, thereby protecting them from possible infection. The closed-loop system, where workers live in a bubble to shield…