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Elon Musk's $100 million carbon capture XPrize competition starts today
After teasing it last month, Elon Musk has unveiled his $100 million XPrize competition with the lofty aim of removing carbon from the atmosphere to help stem climate change.
XPrize launches a $15 million contest to develop alternative meats
Just one week after Singapore became the first country in the world to approve the sale of lab-grown meat, XPrize has announced a new competition to foster the development of technologies that will transform the global food industry. In partnership with ASPIRE, an offshoot of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), the Feed the Next Billion contest gives entrants four years to develop meat alternatives. The XPrize says entrants will need to create consistent cuts of alternative meats that look, taste, smell, feel and cook like a regular fish fillet or chicken breast.
XPrize's latest challenge wants AI to better predict COVID-19 transmission rates
The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t only led to the loss of lives, but also to the loss of livelihoods worldwide as businesses close due to necessary lockdowns. In an effort to find ways on how to safely reopen societies in the midst of a pandemic, XPrize has teamed up with Cognizant on a new competition with a $500,000 prize purse. The XPrize Pandemic Response Challenge will have participants build data—driven AI models that can predict local coronavirus transmission rates.
XPrize launches $5 million competition to speed up COVID-19 testing
One of the biggest obstacles in our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is how terrible the state of testing is right now. Not only is there a shortage of testing supplies, there’s often a slow turnaround for results, which makes it that much harder to reopen schools and offices safely. In an effort to find a solution, XPrize has partnered with OpenCovidScreen, a non-profit focused on COVID-19 testing, to come up with a new $5 million Rapid Covid Testing competition that it is announcing today.
The latest Xprize winner harvests drinking water from the air
Judges have chosen the winner of the Water Abundance Xprize, and it might just be vital to solving some of the world's most difficult shortages. The Skysource/Skywater Alliance has earned $1.5 million for WEDEW (Wood to Energy Deployed Water), a system that converts air into drinking water using natural resources for power. The heart of the technology imitates clouds by cooling warm air and collecting the condensation in a tank. A biomass gassifier, meanwhile, vaporizes wood and other organic material to generate the necessary power for the system.
Elon Musk-funded XPRIZE expands education software testing
Back in 2014, XPRIZE announced a new "Global Learning" category that challenged teams to develop open source education software kids in developing countries can use to teach themselves reading, writing and math. The organization launched field tests of the five finalists' creations late last year, and now it's expanding the reach and scale of those pilot tests with help from new partners Queen Rania Foundation, Education Cannot Wait, Teach the World Foundation, Imagine Worldwide and Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation.
Xprize finalists to test CO2 recycling ideas in power plants
In September 2015, the NRG COSIA Carbon Xprize was born. Through a total of $20 million in reward money, the aim of this particular Xprize is to challenge participants to come up with a way to convert CO2 emissions into something actually useful. Almost two and half years later, and the Xprize crew have now whittled down the contestants from 27 semi-finalists to ten finalists.
The Lunar Xprize will continue, but without the $20 million reward
Earlier this year, the Lunar Xprize competition ended in an anticlimactic way, as Google opted not to extend the competition for a $20 million prize beyond the March 31st deadline. This meant that the contest ended without a winner. But now, Xprize has announced that the organization plans to continue the competition -- just without a cash reward. Xprize is hoping to find a new sponsor to reinstitute the monetary prize.
Google's $20 million Lunar Xprize will end without a winner
The Lunar Xprize is about to come to an anticlimactic end after more than a decade. Google has confirmed to CNBC that it doesn't plan to extend the $20 million competition past its March 31st deadline -- itself an extension well beyond the original 2014 end date. Given that all the finalists either don't have the funds to continue or don't expect to launch that quickly (the fastest, SpaceIL, might not launch before the end of 2018), the competition is effectively over with no winners. Not that Google minds, however.
XPRIZE’s five education software finalists help kids teach themselves
Millions of children around the world don't have access to basic education, such as reading, writing and arithmetic skills, and the problem is only getting worse. XPRIZE is looking to do something about it. Today, the organization announced the five finalists for the Global Learning XPRIZE; each will receive a $1 million.
Xprize enlists sci-fi authors and filmmakers to map our future
Science fiction has been instrumental in creating the future from the very beginning. Real-life manipulator hands, originally created for the nuclear industry, were named after Robert Heinlein's short story, "Waldo." It makes a lot of sense, then, that when the Xprize program partnered with All Nippon Airlines (ANA) to "imagine a bold vision of the future," it would look to celebrated science fiction novelists, writers, filmmakers, producers and screenwriters. The collaboration has produced the Science Fiction Council, a group comprised of high-octane sci-fi storytellers from nine countries, including luminaries like Margaret Atwood, Cory Doctorow, Andy Weir, Charles Stross, Ernest Cline and Nancy Kress.
AI Xprize asks for bold solutions to humanity's greatest problems
The XPrize program is no stranger to moon shots. From capturing carbon to cleaning water -- even literal trips to the moon and Star Trek-style tricorders -- the contest seeks the boldest solutions to humanity's greatest challenges. That tradition continues in the company's latest competition, the IBM Watson AI XPrize, in which 147 teams from 22 countries will compete for a $5 million purse over the next four years.
XPrize winner says its Tricorder is better than 'Star Trek'
The technology of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek looked so far forward it could almost have been used as a visual aide to Arthur C. Clarke's third law: technology so advanced, it's indistinguishable from magic. Despite the fictional technological magic of transporters, replicators and warp drive, Qualcomm saw enough potential in the show's medical tricorder to challenge the world to build one. Now, the Tricorder XPrize finally has a winner in Final Frontier Medical Devices' DxtER. The result isn't so much an all-in-one scanner as collection of noninvasive medical-diagnosis gadgets. Even so, its creators claim the DxtER package is better than Star Trek's fictional tricorder.
Google announces the five Lunar Xprize finalists
Google's Lunar Xprize is finally on the home stretch almost a decade after it was first announced. The contest organizers have revealed the five teams that got into the final phase of the competition by securing launch contracts before 2016 ended. First is team SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit developing a dishwasher-sized spacecraft (see the image above) that can explore the moon by taking big hops instead of driving around like a rover. They've secured a space aboard one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket's future launches.
Latest XPRIZE contests focus on water production and women's safety
The XPRIZE nonprofit just announced its latest set of competitions aimed at "sparking breakthrough solutions to two urgent grand challenges." The first is the "water abundance XPRIZE," which focuses on harvesting clean water from the air using renewable resources. Specifically, the challenge asks participants to create a device that extracts a minimum of 2,000 liters of fresh water per day from the atmosphere, using 100 percent renewable energy. To make things even trickier, the cost can only be two cents per liter of water.
Carbon Xprize chooses the 27 best solutions for CO2 emissions
Twenty-eight teams made it through the $20 million NRG COSIA Carbon Xprize's first round. Now, they have to start proving that they can truly transform a meaningful amount of carbon dioxide emissions into useful products. The semi-finalists from various universities, startups, big companies and non-profits all over the globe will do a test run of their technology over a ten-month period. Judges will look at how much CO2 they can convert, as well as the value of their products.
XPRIZE is challenging A.I. to save the world
If the thought of artificial intelligence conjures up nightmares the likes of Terminator 2 and HAL 9000, XPRIZE's latest competition could disabuse you of that notion. Today at TED2016, XPRIZE is announcing a new contest that invites teams from around the world to come up with ways artificial intelligence can help solve some of the world's most challenging problems. The competition is done in collaboration with IBM and is thus called the IBM Watson A.I. XPRIZE: the Cognitive Computing Competition.
Xprize offers $7 million for exploring the ocean floor
After years of focusing on moonshots and other lofty goals, the Xprize Foundation now hopes to inspire innovation in the opposite direction... in a very literal sense. Its new Shell Ocean Discovery Xprize is offering a total of $7 million in awards to teams that can deliver robotic exploration of sea floors as deep as 4,000m (13,123ft). The $4 million grand prize and a $1 million runner-up prize will go to the groups that deliver the sharpest maps on top of meeting baseline requirements for autonomy, depth and speed. The top 10 teams will split a $1 million milestone prize, while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is chipping in another $1 million for teams that spot objects through biological and chemical clues.
The Google XPrize moonshot is a step closer to reality
An Israeli team competing in the Google Lunar XPrize has secured a launch contract to send its rover to the Moon. Xprize is offering $20 million to the first team to land a rover on the moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit HD video and images back to earth. SpaceIL, the Israeli team in question, has signed with Spaceflight Industries, a company which specializes in space "rideshares." The deal means that SpaceIL's rover will likely be hitching a lift aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket alongside commercial satellites -- and possibly even other XPrize contestants -- in 2017.
Lunar Xprize hopeful pins plans on experimental rocket
Going into space is risky enough, but two startup companies are taking it to a new level. Moon Express is trying to get to the moon and land a robotic rover that can travel at least 500 meters (0.3 miles) and send back HD video to earth. That's not going to be easy, but it also wants to launch by 2017 on a rocket that's never flown, the Electron from New Zealand's Rocket Lab. That's a lot of dice-rolling, but if it succeeds, Moon Express will be eligible for Google's $30 million Lunar Xprize.
