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Telecoms group teams up with government-backed fund to roll out on-street charging points
MAY 20, 2020 by Nic Fildes
What it is: Volvo CEO HÃ¥kan Samuelsson anticipates the demand for electric vehicles (EVs) will be stronger than ever post-pandemic. Speaking at a recent Financial Times global digital conference, Samuelsson emphasized that auto industry government subsidies should be channeled towards new technologies, particularly in the EV realm, instead of perpetuating fossil fuel dependency. Volvo plans to release a fully electric car each year until 2025 to meet its goal of having EVs represent 50% of global sales. In the midst of COVID-19 disruptions to showroom sales, we will experience a shift towards automotive e-commerce. Volvo is paving the road towards online vehicle orders with its XC40 Recharge, the auto manufacturer’s first mass-produced EV. With a $1,000 initial deposit, drivers can reserve the 402-horsepower EV, capable of traveling over 200 miles on a single charge.
Why it’s important: The automotive industry has been hit hard by COVID-19, with an estimated loss of $5.7 billion due to disruptions in the automotive supply chain. The pandemic has forced many manufacturing facilities — including those of Fiat Chrysler, Ford, and PSA Group — to shut down. Meanwhile, reduced foot traffic into showrooms, alongside a massive shift to remote work, has not helped the industry either. As car ownership declines, we may see a shift towards subscription services that allow for flexible semi-ownership at lower costs. In urban settings with limited vehicle storage space, this trend will only accelerate. For those who do purchase vehicles, dealership showrooms will be replaced by VR experiences and remote delivery. The auto industry is not turning back.
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| May 21, 2020 |
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The Senate voted along party lines to confirm President Donald Trump’s pick for national intelligence director on Thursday, making former Texas prosecutor John Ratcliffe easily the most controversial appointee to be confirmed to the post in its 15-year history.
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What it is: Sorrento Therapeutics has demonstrated complete inhibition of the virus causing COVID-19 after four days of incubation with antibody STI-1499. Standing out among billions of screened antibody candidates, STI-1499 binds to the spike proteins on the virus and prevents it from interacting with healthy human cell target receptors. In addition to developing this antibody into a treatment that can be tested in humans, the Sorrento team is also creating an antibody “cocktail” called COVID-SHIELD, consisting of multiple effective antibodies. More antibodies increase the likelihood that the virus can be defeated even as it mutates between transmissions.
Why it’s important: It remains unclear how quickly the SARS-CoV-2 virus can mutate. Many coronaviruses like the common cold can mutate rapidly, making it difficult to create sustained treatments. Sorrento’s approach of an antibody cocktail is therefore likely to be the most long-lasting treatment for this type of virus. While the treatment has yet to be tested in humans, Sorrento’s team is working to expedite development and ramp up production capacity in hopes of producing one million doses immediately following FDA approval.
What it is: Researchers from UC Davis, UC San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University have published a proposal of AI chatbots that can advise patients with coronavirus symptoms. Starting with Google’s Transformer architecture, OpenAI’s GPT language model, and another encoder-decoder architecture, the researchers were able to create AI bots that showed promising results for medical consultations. Models used to build prototype chatbots were trained with datasets containing English and Chinese patient-doctor conversations about the novel coronavirus.
Why it’s important: As patients and medical practitioners make the shift to telehealth consultations, many virtual providers have become overwhelmed by a rapid influx of patients (Frost and Sullivan research suggests that telehealth consultations grew by 50 percent in March). In order to alleviate the bottleneck, researchers indicate that AI chatbots can provide adequate consultations in the absence of human doctors or to supplement in-person consultation. The researchers write: “In this work, we make the first attempt to develop dialogue systems that can provide medical consultations about [the coronavirus]. Experimental results show that these trained models are promising in generating clinically meaningful and linguistically high-quality consultations.”
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| Important developments in the pandemic. |
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The latest
On Wednesday, Montgomery, Ala., Mayor Steven Reed announced his city was facing a crisis: the hospitals were out of ICU beds. “Right now, if you’re from Montgomery, and you need an ICU bed, you’re in trouble … our health-care system has been maxed out.” Reed said. The news came as a research team warned that a second wave of coronavirus infections was likely in the South — Dallas, Houston, southeast Florida, the entire state of Alabama — where reopening has happened rapidly, and other counties with cases on the rise.
Sweeping measures to prevent the spread were announced on March 15 — a federal warning against large gatherings, health screenings at airports, states of emergency declared by governors and mayors. But what if they had been announced just a week before? A new study from Columbia University has the possible answer: If social distancing had been in place seven days earlier, the United States could have prevented 36,000 deaths through early May.
As Trump has urged communities to reopen and cheered on order-defying protesters, places such as Ypsilanti are struggling to contain the virus. Nearly one in 100 residents has tested positive or is presumed positive, but the area didn't get a testing site until early May, after local leaders fought for one. The city's mayor was not invited to the president's event, but she had a message for him: “I would let him know that his dishonesty cost lives,” Lois E. Allen-Richardson said.
The pandemic is dramatically changing the way we will shop. Retailers that have spent years encouraging customers to linger. Not anymore. Gone are the days of trying on makeup or playing with toys in the aisles. The focus now is on making shopping faster, easier and safer. This is what you can expect when you head to a reopened store.
Other important news
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