Toggle light / dark theme

View insights.


Since 2011, the UK government has been providing a tax-payer funded discount on the sale of battery electric vehicles. Known as the “plug-in car grant”, it was designed to help persuade motorists make the switch from diesel or petrol and commit to electric driving.

But last month the grant was scrapped with immediate effect. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, given that the amount buyers were able to claim back had gradually been whittled down from £5,000 to £1,500; or that it was recently available only for new vehicles costing less than £32,000 (the average cost of electric cars is around £43,000).

In fact, the government had been trying to scrap the grant completely for a while. Only a major backlash a couple of years ago forced the government to do a speedy handbrake turn and keep it going for a while longer.

Airline company Boom Supersonic has shown off brand new renders of its Overture aircraft, which it claims will become the “world’s fastest airliner.”

The company unveiled the “production design” of the sleek jet, which includes four engines, a new fuselage, and fewer passenger seats compared to previous iterations.

Needless to say, the aircraft is fast as hell, with a cruising at Mach 1.7 over water and just under Mach 1 over land, meaning it could fly from New York to London in just 3.5 hours.

GM unveiled Monday evening the Chevrolet Blazer EV, an all-electric SUV with up to 320 miles of range and a starting price of $48,000 that CEO and Chairman Mary Barra hopes will supercharge her bid to surpass Tesla in U.S. EV sales by 2025.

The Chevrolet Blazer EV, which will go on sale in 2023 as a 2024 model year, isn’t the only impending GM electric vehicle. A slew of Cadillac and Chevy EVs are also making their way to market. But the Blazer, at its more affordable price point and in the lucrative SUV segment, could kick-start GM’s sales goals.

Internally, the confidence is high. Blazer is going be a massive statement and illustrate how GM can hit big volume segments, according to Scott Bell, Global VP of Chevrolet.

We live in an increasingly connected world, a fact underscored by the swift spread of the coronavirus around the globe. Underlying this connectivity are complex networks—global air transportation, the internet, power grids, financial systems and ecological networks, to name just a few. The need to ensure the proper functioning of these systems also is increasing, but control is difficult.

Now a Northwestern University research team has discovered a ubiquitous property of a complex network and developed a novel computational method that is the first to systematically exploit that property to control the whole network using only . The method considers the computational time and information communication costs to produce the optimal choice.

The same connections that provide functionality in networks also can serve as conduits for the propagation of failures and instabilities. In such dynamic networks, gathering and processing all the information necessary to make a better decision can take too much time. The goal is to diagnose a problem and take action before it leads to a system-wide issue. This may mean having less information but being timely.

The 6 million-square-foot Samsung plant will be located south of Highway 79 and southwest of Downtown Taylor, near Taylor High School. It is expected to bring 1,800 jobs to Williamson County.

The plant is expected to start operations in 2024. The City of Taylor, Williamson County and Taylor ISD all already have economic agreements in place related to Samsung’s development.

To learn more, read Community Impact’s full report.