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takyon writes:

This is the first weekend for teams to compete at SpaceX's Hyperloop Pod Competition:

Hyperloop, a concept for a high-speed ground transport system, was introduced in 2013 by Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. SpaceX, which designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft, announced the contest in June 2015, inviting university students and independent engineering teams to build functional, scale-model Hyperloop pods. Through the competition, SpaceX hopes to speed up the development of a prototype for a safer, faster, less expensive and more sustainable mode of transportation, according to the company's website.

Most of the teams are comprised of university students, with two notable exceptions:

All but two of the participating teams are affiliated with universities, including USC, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara. Other teams hail from such places as Maryland, New York, Colorado, Oklahoma, Virginia, Japan, Spain, Canada, India, and the Netherlands. The nonuniversity teams are a group from a Texas high school and a team of individuals organized from around the world through Reddit.com. Finalists were chosen based on their design concepts from a field of 1,200 initial applicants.

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