Pictures: World’s largest solar yacht, the Tûranor PlanetSolar

By Amir Iliaifar Published August 17, 2011

Tûranor PlanetSolar, also known simply as PlanetSolar is a luxury yacht powered entirely through solar energy, interestingly, the name Tûranor derives from J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel the Lord of The Rings and translates to “Power of the Sun”. The boat launched on March 31, 2010, was designed by Knierim Yachbau in Kiel, Germany and designed by LOMOcean Design.

While already breaking a few world records, the Tûranor PlanetSolar will become the first boat to circumnavigate the world on solar power alone, the boat is covered in 500 square meters of solar panels which connect to one of two electric motors. The hull capacity sits at 200 persons and due to the aerodynamic design of the vessel, the yacht is capable of reaching speeds of up to 14 knots. The 31 meter long, $18 million to develop boat has ultimately been designed to be used as a luxury yacht once it completes is grand and record breaking journey across the globe.

Amir Iliaifar

Former Associate Automotive Editor

Associate Automotive Section Editor for Digital Trends, Amir Iliaifar covers the ever increasing cross-section between tech…

Topics

Computing

Meta goes toe-to-toe with the big boys as it launches Muse Wonder AI models

Illustration of Meta Muse Wonder AI model.

It's raining frontier AI models. Soon after Anthropic set alarm bells ringing with its Claude Fable model at the summit of AI peformance, OpenAI answered with GPT-6 Astra. Not one to be left behind, Google released Gemini 4 Argon. The race is now getting hotter as Meta enters the fray with two new AI models in the Muse series: Wonder and Wonder Full. Cheesy naming aside, these Meta AI models mean business, or at least that's what the benchmark figures suggest. More importantly, these AI models are already making their way to Muse users.

https://twitter.com/DigitalTrends/status/2109699549375988120

Emerging Tech

AI can’t tell if you’re gay or straight, but it thinks it knows what both look like

AI knows it shouldn't judge a face, but apparently, drawing one is a different story.

Emilia Clarke AI generated stock image. Gemini / Nano Banana is on the left

We've all been told not to judge a book by its cover, and you'd think AI would follow that rule, too. Ask an AI chatbot to guess someone's sexual orientation just by looking at their face, and it'll likely tell you that there's no reliable way to know. But what happens when you ask that same model to change someone's appearance to match a particular sexual orientation? Well, that's where things get uncomfortable.

A new study, accepted for presentation at the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, found that AI models from OpenAI and Google can be inconsistent when handling sensitive personal characteristics. They might refuse to make assumptions about someone based on their appearance, but when asked to generate those same assumptions visually, the results tell a very different story.

Computing

A clinical study with Google’s special chatbot shows a strong future for AI in healthcare

Google’s medical AI could give doctors a useful second set of eyes

Google Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer chatbot

AI is a useful tool for handling many tasks in private as well as professional settings, but medical advice, especially diagnosis, is one area where I generally draw the line. General-purpose chatbots tend to sound confident and convincing while giving medical advice, even when they are wrong, as studies have previously found.

That being said, Google's new research points to a much more convincing use for AI in healthcare. Its Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer chatbot, or AMIE for short, could help prepare both sides before the appointment even begins.