Uber is proving that it’s more than just a modern chauffeur service. With its self-driving taxis and, more recently, driverless truck deliveries, it’s revealed itself to be a real tech company that’s revolutionizing transportation. And it’s about to go further. Last month at the Nantucket Conference, Uber products head Jeff Holden hinted at the company’s research on vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft. Uber then released a 98-paged white paper yesterday detailing ju

Royal BAM Group last week unveiled a new type of robot: a “building machine” that is able autonomously to move around a building site on its own and print stone or concrete buildings. A prototype of the “3D Builder” entered service on the FabCity project in Amsterdam, where it is constructing the “Landscape House”, a quarter-scale building designed by Rotterdam-based practice Universe Architecture. The printer in action (BAM) According to BAM, the machine is the first to link

Pavegen, a British clean-tech company, is taking an innovative approach to sustainability by generating energy from something that most people do every day: walk. The technology is basically a multifunctional, custom flooring system that is outfitted with a wireless transmitter, which allows the data from the tiles to be captured, and generators that harness kinetic energy as people walk. That sounds complicated, but the way that it works is simple: As people walk over the fl

Building on plans to use the futuristic Hyperloop tube-transport system at its operations in Dubai, ports giant DP World has invested millions in the start-up company Hyperloop One, and its chief executive has joined the Hyperloop One board. DP World’s cash injection – the exact amount was not disclosed – is part of $50m Hyperloop One raised last week in preparation for a full-scale test of the system in the first quarter of next year. “The world is changing quickly and we wa

Colorado is the nation’s first state to have a beer delivery made by a self-driving truck and a San Francisco tech startup made it all possible. Anheuser-Busch said a self-driving truck last week delivered a load of 50,000 cans of beer from its Fort Collins brewery through Denver and to its Colorado Springs destination. A human driver accompanied the beer delivery, but his driving services weren’t used, Anheuser-Busch said. The self-driving technology was created by San Franc

Replacing bridges on busy commuter rail lines is a challenging proposition. Not only do owners have the physical cost of bringing these aging assets into states of good repair, they also must consider the user costs—the economic burden of impaired mobility and service disruption—that did not exist decades ago when the bridges were built. Lengthy track outages and construction phases can be devastating to surrounding communities and commuters, not to mention fare boxes. New Je