Technology

Tesla has secured the rights to about 210 acres of land in Lingang, Shanghai, the site of the electric automakerplanned factory and its first outside of the U.S.

Tesla executives and leaders of the Shanghai Economics and Information Committee, Shanghai Lingang Area Development Administration and Shanghai Lingang Group witnessed the agreement-signing ceremony in China on Wednesday.

&Teslamission is to accelerate the worldtransition to sustainable energy not only through all-electric vehicles, but also scalable clean energy generation and storage products,& Robin Ren, Teslavice president of Worldwide Sales said in a statement. &Securing this site in Shanghai, Teslafirst Gigafactory outside of the United States, is an important milestone for what will be our next advanced, sustainably developed manufacturing site.&

The land transfer marks an important step for Tesla, which recently said rising costs had prompted the companyto accelerate construction of its so-called Gigafactory 3.Tesla warned in its production and delivery report in early October thattariffs, combined with the cost of shipping its vehicles via ocean carrier and the lack of access to cash incentives available to locally produced electric vehicles, has put the company at a disadvantage in China.

Tesla reasserted those statements Wednesday, noting that it expects the project to be a &capital efficient and rapid buildout, using many lessons learned from the Model 3 ramp in North America.&

Teslareached a dealin July with the Shanghai government to build a factory that it says will be capable of producing 500,000 electric vehicles a year. Once construction begins, it will take about two years until Tesla can produce vehicles. It will be another &two to three years before the factory is fully ramped upto produce around 500,000 vehicles per year for Chinese customers,& a Tesla spokesman said at the time.

The Shanghai factory deal marks a shift within the Chinese government to allow foreign companies to build and operate wholly owned facilities there. Foreign companies have historically had to form a 50-50 joint venture with a local partner to build a factory in China.

Chinese PresidentXi Jinpinghas said the country will phase out joint-venture rules for foreign automakers by 2022. Tesla is one of the first beneficiaries of this rule change.

The agreement allows Tesla to construct and operate a wholly owned factory in Lingang. The new factory will carry out research and development, manufacturing and sales operations.

The Chinese government will still be involved, however. Under a cooperation agreement, the Shanghai government and Tesla will jointly promote electric vehicle technology andindustry development.The city of Shanghai said it will provide support for Gigafactory 3, although details are thin as to what that might mean.

Prosthetic limbs have come a long way from the heavy, solid hands and legs of yesteryear, but itstill difficult to pack a range of motion into them without complex or bulky machinery. But new research out of Cornell uses a cleverly designed 3D-printed mechanism to achieve speed and strength with simple construction — and it costs a lot less, too.

&Developing prosthetic limbs requires designers to make difficult trade-offs among size, weight, force, speed, and cost of the actuation system,& the researchers say in their paper. For example, they point out, state of the art mechanical prosthetic hands can cost well over $10,000, with the high-end motors inside alone costing hundreds each. Cheaper hands use cheaper components, of course, which might mean that the hand can grip hard but not quickly, or vice versa.

This is partly because a mechanical hand needs to be able to adjust the force itapplying very quickly on the fly, and this usually involves some kind of variable transmission or dynamic gear ratio. But Kevin O&Brien and his colleagues developed a new way to have the motor adjust its speed and force without using hundreds of finely machined components. In fact, it and the hand it actuates can be almost entirely 3D-printed.

It works like this: The fingers of the hand are controlled, like many other such hands and indeed our own, by flexible cords that run along their lengths. These cords can be tightened or slackened to make the fingers take different positions, and thatoften done by having a spool take up the slack or deal it out. Itthis spool that must move precisely and is the end point of the complex gearing mentioned above in other hands.

But in the ADEPT hand (adaptively driven via elastomeric passive transmissions — we&ll stick with the acronym) these spools have in their centers a flexible cylindrical core, the shape of which can be modified by tightening a separate &tendon& around it. When the tendon is loose, the core is wider and spins quickly, producing fast, responsive movement. When the tendon is tightened, the core is reduced in radius and correspondingly increases in torque while decreasing in speed.

Thereno switching of gears, no meshing of teeth — if the hand determines that it needs just a little bit more torque to hold something, it can get it by tightening the tendon just that little bit. And as soon as it needs to quickly release or catch something, the tendon can loosen up and the fingers move quickly and lightly.

This simplicity and the ease of manufacturing make this much cheaper than other options, while it still provides a great deal of versatility and responsiveness.

&The benefits of elastomeric transmission systems are that they can be 3D printed quickly (50 per hour), cheaply (<$1 per part), and in many compact form factors,& the researchers wrote. A whole hand could be built for less than $500, they estimate.

Unfortunately the materials aren&t quite up to the task just yet — the part thatconstantly having its shape adjusted tends to degrade, though they managed to get it to the point where it could be adjusted about 25,000 times before failing (not catastrophically, just not doing its job well enough any more). That may sound like a lot, but your fingers move a lot. So therestill work to do before this is a realistic replacement for other mechanical parts.

Still, ita promising approach and general enough that it also could be used in artificial legs, arms and exo-suits. You can read more at Science Robotics.

Los Angeles-based Next 10 Ventures, a $50 million fund focused on the creator economy, is launching an incubator program to support YouTubers.

The EduCreatorIncubator will seed 25 to 40 &emerging video creators& with $25,000 to $75,000 in seed funding, depending on their location, and will enroll them in a 12-month mentorship program. The only requirement is that they focus on educational video content targeting children and young adults.

&The amazing thing about being able to provide more educational content to YouTube is that children, who may be first generation from an emerging or developing country, they now have a mobile phone and they have the ability to watch content,& said Cynthia So Schroeder, Next 10recently hired vice president of marketing, wholeading the incubation efforts. &Through this content, they may discover a field or a topic they haven&t had access to. Maybe they&ll discover oceanography or physics and that glimpse will … inspire them to be a future astronaut or engineer.&

So Schroeder, eBayformer head of global community development and engagement, joins the firmfounders:Benjamin Grubbs, YouTubeformer global director of top creator partnerships, and Paul Condolora, the former co-head of the Harry Potter franchise at Warner Bros.

EduCreator will provide participants with a network of other like-minded creators, programming focused on content development and format and mentorship from digital storyteller Jay Shetty,WeCreateEdu founder Jacklyn Duffand others. The goal is to help the YouTubers build sustainable and scalable online businesses.

Whatin it for Next 10 The firmhypothesis is that digitally savvy, mobile-first content creators are big money makers, or will be 10 years down the line — hence the fundname.Nearly 60 percent of GenZers, after all, cite YouTube as their preferred learning method, and the quantity of streaming video has more than doubled in the past year.

&At YouTube, I saw over 5x growth in watch time, commercialization and really, globalization of the platform,& Grubbs told TechCrunch. &I have three kids ages 9, 7 and 4 and I&ve seen it there too in how they are consuming media.Looking ahead over the next 10 years, this is going to be the way consumers are [being entertained], accessing insights and knowledge, and connecting.&

Applications to the incubator opened today and close November 17, 2018.