Honda wants your EV to give back. 

The Japanese automaker is seeking to patent a “renewable energy credit management system” for electric vehicles. Honda’s filing proposes a way to offer drivers credits and compensation for feeding electricity back to the grid with renewable resources. 

“Considered as a pooled resource, the growing number of electric vehicle batteries may provide a wide range of valuable grid services, from demand response and voltage regulation to distribution-level services, without compromising driving experience or capability,” Honda said in the filing.

Honda’s tech uses a “vehicle-to-grid” framework and bidirectional charging to use EVs as “distributed energy resources.” This system includes a server that monitors when a car gives back and if the energy they gave is renewable, keeping track of this using a car owner’s vehicle registration information. The “discharging information” of that vehicle is then sent to an energy regulatory authority (for example, the Air Resources Board or the Verified Carbon Standard, Honda noted), which calculates how much a car owner will be compensated from the energy they gave. 

When a car owner gives renewable charge back to the grid, they receive one “renewable energy credit” for every megawatt-hour of power given. The owner, in turn, can then sell those credits for cash, likely back to Honda, allowing them to “potentially lower the cost of electric vehicle ownership.” 

Renewable energy credits offer “certified proof” that the owner uses renewable energy from the grid and allows the owner to lower their carbon footprint, making them incredibly valuable to companies with big climate goals. 

Like most other vehicle manufacturers, Honda is racing toward electrifying its fleet. In January, the company unveiled plans to launch a series of new electric vehicles by 2026, with sales starting in North America. The company debuted two concept models that will be part of what it calls the “Honda 0 Series” at the Consumer Electronics Show.

The line-up is part of the company’s ambitious goals of selling 2 million EVs annually by 2030, and selling solely zero-emissions vehicles by 2040, including fuel cell vehicles such as hydrogen-powered cars. But the company has some work to do, having only just entered the US market this year with its first EV offering, the Honda Prologue SUV. 

As the company plays EV catch-up to other automakers, diversifying its offerings could give Honda a leg up in a crowded space, said Madeline Ruid, AVP and research analyst at Global V ETFs. “Traditional carmakers that are able to offer unique EV solutions could benefit as the race toward electrification gains pace and becomes more competitive,” Ruid noted. 

But the EV transition faces a major hurdle: the US power grid. Bringing more EVs into the fold adds pressure to a power grid that’s already stressed from things like extreme weather events. Plus, the grid being largely reliant on non-renewable sources such as fossil fuels creates another argument for EV naysayers, said Ruid. 

However, technologies like those in Honda’s patent “could help EVs transform from a potential stressor into a likely solution for increasingly complex power grids,” she said. 

As it stands, EV demand has slowed and sales have hit a rough patch, with the price tag being a major sticking point for consumers. Any tech that lowers the cost of these vehicles and that entices drivers to make the switch could prove beneficial, said Ruid. 

Plus, Honda also isn’t the only company that’s working on ways to share the power. Ford has filed applications for several bidirectional power patents, including one method that supports households during power outages and a technique that allows a fleet of EVs to charge one another during demand peaks. Given Ford’s commitment to electrification and vehicles already on the market in the US, Honda’s vehicle charge-back technology may have some competition.

Meta wants to make sure its headsets can’t be hacked. 

The company is seeking to patent a way to provide “user authentication for a near-eye display.” Meta’s patent lays out a system that may use a host of biological data to authenticate the users of its headsets, whether that be eye-scanning, gesture recognition or voice data. 

Meta notes that artificial reality headsets can be used to access a lot of personal data, including private content or communication sessions. “Without any security measures, any wearer of a near-eye display device may have access to content or communication session(s) available through that near-eye display device,” Meta said in its filing. 

When a user wants to access certain restricted data – such as calls, messages, access to social media accounts, or mobile payments – via a Meta headset, they would need to pass biometric authentication. 

Using both sensors in the headset and devices “communicatively coupled” with it, Meta’s system can choose from a long list of biological information to authenticate a user, including iris and retina scans, facial recognition, finger and palm scanning, heartbeat, or movements. 

Meta’s system dynamically chooses how to authenticate a user for access based on environmental conditions, such as noise or light level. For example, if the system requests a thumbprint authentication, but the user is wearing gloves, it would automatically make another kind of authentication available, such as facial or voice detection. Authentication techniques may also be based on the sensitivity of the data, Meta noted. 

If a user is continuously wearing their headset but was either inactive or switched between activities that require authentication, Meta’s system would renew the authentication without requiring the user to re-verify.

Meta’s system uses identity security in a way that may offer protection in the case of theft. For example, if someone steals your Meta Quest, while the thief would make off with an expensive gadget, they at least wouldn’t have access to any of your accounts or personal data. 

Though opportunities for someone to steal a mixed reality headset seem limited to breaking-and-entering, Meta’s goal has long been to make these devices more appropriate to wear outside of the house. The company already has a pair of smart glasses on the market in partnership with Ray-Ban, and a recent patent detailed its plans to make a lightweight reconfigurable headset that lasts 8 to 12 hours. 

Making these headsets lighter and more portable would make theft as easy as someone taking a pair of glasses out of another person’s purse on the subway. To that end, the kind of security that this patent suggests may become more important. 

Another reason that Meta may want to boost its identity protection is the emergence of Apple as a competitor, since one of the iPhone maker’s biggest selling points is privacy. Meta Implementing these safety features could be a way for the company to make its offering more appealing to the privacy-concerned buyer. 

That said, Meta has a shaky history with its handling of consumer data. Biometric data is particularly sensitive: Once it’s stolen, it can’t be easily replaced. But to the company’s credit, the patent does specifically cover this, noting that for “personal information protection and privacy purposes, a default setting may be not storing the information.”

Quantum computers have trouble focusing if the vibe is off. A Baidu patent could give “qubits” noise-canceling headphones. 

Though Baidu donated its quantum computing lab in January to the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences, an August patent application for a method to cancel “quantum noise” could help researchers overcome a major hindrance in scaling the tech. 

Noise in quantum computing doesn’t literally mean sound, but rather any unwanted or unpredictable disturbance that can knock a quantum computer “decoherence,” or a state in which the quantum bits (qubits) are entangled and knocked out of balance. This could be anything from heat to vibrations to human error by the engineers themselves.

Some examples of noise are heat dissipation from the qubits, which can cause temperature fluctuations in the surroundings of the computer and induce errors, physical vibrations in the environment, imperfections in the hardware or human error by the engineers themselves. 

“Quantum computer technology has developed rapidly in recent years, but in the foreseeable future, a noise problem of a quantum computer is inevitable … which leads to failure of a computation process,” The filing noted. 

Here’s how the system works: Once the quantum computer is set up with a certain number of primary qubits and “auxiliary” support qubits, an “encoding circuit” with an adjustable parameter that can interact with both is introduced as the main tool to counteract the noise. Then the system maps out a mathematical formula that adjusts the encoding circuit and the qubits in a way that brings the quantum computer as close as possible to its original state, thereby canceling out the effect of the noise. 

If this sounds a bit esoteric, imagine your quantum computer is a cake in which you accidentally crack too many eggs. Rather than chucking it and starting over, you adjust your recipe and compensate by adding in more of the other ingredients to balance it out. In this example, the extra eggs are the noise, and the recipe adjustment is the mapped formula, and the additional ingredients are the encoding circuit. 

This patent aims to offer an alternative to the two conventional ways of dealing with noise: quantum error correction and quantum error mitigation. 

Quantum error correction adds redundant qubits specifically dedicated to accounting for noise. But more qubits can create a higher propensity for error, as well as requiring more computing resources, making this method difficult to scale. Meanwhile, quantum error mitigation relies on predicting and controlling the sources of noise, such as the environment or temperature, which isn’t always effective or even possible. 

Overcoming noise will be a major win in being able to scale quantum computers to more than a few hundred qubits and put the tech to practical use. But noise isn’t the only issue that quantum computers face. Resources both for quantum hardware and software are limited, and talent is in short supply. And in order to even work properly, these machines need to be kept at extremely cold temperatures, which itself can be a huge drain on resources. 

However, moving past these obstacles could unlock precise and powerful computing that can do anything from accelerating AI to discovering new drugs to picking stocks. And while Baidu followed Alibaba’s lead in dropping out of the quantum computing race, many tech firms still see major promise. 

Google and IBM both operate their own quantum hardware. Microsoft and Amazon, meanwhile, offer quantum cloud computing, and Amazon recently sought to patent “quantum computing task translation” as a way to bolster its tech.

The financial sector sees its potential, too, with JPMorgan Chase seeking to patent “quantum computing-assisted portfolio selection” and HSBC is partnering with Quantinuum to find real-world use cases for the tech. According to Deloitte, the financial services industry alone is expected to spend $19 billion a year on quantum technology by 2032.