🔋 Form Energy to build the world's largest battery installation, LongWriter LLM produces 10,000 words, Snowball Earth period discovery, US Army's autonomous rescue vehicle

Form Energy is set to transform a former paper mill site in Maine into the world's largest battery installation. This exciting project will add an impressive 85 MW of power to the grid.

Form Energy's iron-air batteries utilize abundant materials like iron, water, and air, operating on the reversible principle of rusting. These batteries are significantly cheaper than lithium-ion alternatives, offer longer energy output, and pose no fire risk.

The Maine installation will address the region's energy scarcity challenges, which stem from limited fossil gas supplies and reliance on expensive liquefied natural gas. You can find more insightful stories like this in our Must-Read.

🔥Today’s job of the day as featured on jobs.interestingengineering.com:

> MIT Field Engineer
> Applied Cybersecurity Engineer, Principal

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MUST-READ

✍️ LongWriter: New AI large language model capable of producing 10,000-word texts

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized how businesses operate, but they face limitations in generating long-form text.

Addressing this, researchers at Tsinghua University developed LongWriter, an LLM capable of producing up to 10,000 words of output.

This breakthrough was achieved by training the model on a dataset of significantly longer documents. The team created a dataset called "LongWriter-6k," containing 6,000 written documents that range in length from 2,000 to 32,000 words.

🌎 Earliest record of ‘snowball Earth’ revealed by 720-million-year-old rocks

Between 635 and 720 million years ago, Earth was encased in a massive ice age, known as the "snowball Earth" period.

Recent research has uncovered the most complete geological record of this period in Scotland and Ireland's Port Askaig Formation. The rocks show evidence of a transition from a warm, tropical environment teeming with cyanobacterial life to a frozen world covered in ice.

The findings from this research shed light on the extreme environmental changes that occurred during the snowball Earth period.

🚙 Deep Orange 15: US Army unveils student-built autonomous rescue vehicle

The US Army's DEVCOM has unveiled Deep Orange 15, a semi-autonomous ground rescue vehicle designed by Clemson University students.

This futuristic vehicle is equipped with advanced technologies like a semi-active suspension system, an innovative litter-loading mechanism, and a hybrid powertrain. The vehicle can perform self-driving functions, allowing the human driver to focus on providing critical medical care to injured personnel.

The project highlights the growing interest in autonomous vehicles for military and civilian applications.

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The answer is: A

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