Futurism has an update on Elon Musk's boring project - Elon Musk Has Finally Confirmed What the Boring Tunnels He’s Making Are For.

We now have an idea of just what Elon Musk's Boring Company is going to be for. Yes, it's to solve traffic, but it looks like it isn't meant just to be your usual tunnel for cars. In a new update today, the company asserts that it's actually building a tunnel that can also run the Hyperloop.

The Age reports that Australian government MP John Alexander is pushing for a high speed rail or hyperloop link between Sydney and Melbourne as a solution to unaffordable house prices - High-speed rail and a Hyperloop: John Alexander's radical housing affordability plan.

High-speed rail between Sydney and Melbourne would be used to decentralise Australia's urban population and open up cheaper housing under a radical plan now endorsed by a parliamentary committee. ... The report also urges the government to monitor and, in future, assess the feasibility of Hyperloop, a supersonic tube conceived by Tesla founder Elon Musk that would potentially see passengers traverse Sydney to Melbourne in less than one hour.

Linking regional centres by rail would enable people to live in Goulburn, for example, and work in Sydney, and ease pressure on crowded city markets. It would "provide an abundant supply of affordable housing for many generations to come", Mr Alexander said.

SpaceX's Hyperloop pod competition is on this weekend. BusinessInsider has a good summary of what is going on and who is competing - Elon Musk's Hyperloop contest is happening this weekend — here's a look at all the competing pods. Musk's recent tweet about this made me wonder if his boring hobby might be hyperloop related...

In June 2015, SpaceX announced an open competition for university students and engineering teams to design and actually build a Hyperloop pod that will travel through a vacuum tube. In 2013, Musk released a 57-page white paper detailing his plan for the Hyperloop, a futuristic transit system that could propel people in pods at speeds topping 700 mph. Musk isn't planning to pursue the Hyperloop commercially, but he is encouraging others to take up the challenge through the SpaceX competition.

The competition itself has actually been running for quite some time. After SpaceX announced the competition in June 2015, more than 1,200 teams applied for entry. However, SpaceX engineers, who are serving as judges for the contest, narrowed down the number of participating teams to 30 by February 2016.

The South China Morning Post has an article on a hyperloop style transport system being proposed in South Korea - South Korea plans 1,000km/h, near-supersonic, ‘hyper-tube train’ that would leave maglev in the dust.

South Korea is seeking to develop a train-like public transport concept that is almost as fast as the speed of sound reaching 1,000km/h, the Korea Railroad Research Institute (KRRI) said Tuesday. The state-run institute will join forces with other research groups and Hanyang University to build the near-supersonic “train”, which would be able to travel from Seoul to Busan in half an hour. “We hope to create an ultra-fast train, which will travel inside a state-of-the-art low-pressure tube at lightning speeds, in the not-too-distant future,” said a KRRI official.

Startup Hyperloop Technologies has started shooting magnetically levitated capsules along a track in Las Vegas to demonstrate their idea for the future of freight and mass transit.

Their first demonstration was performed a few weeks ago and met with limited enthusiasm. Tech Review declared it "The Hyperloop’s Underwhelming First Public Test". The Guardian asked "Hyperloop or over-hyped? Latest demo does little to ease doubts. TreeHugger got a little romantic, saying "The Hyperloop is transportation's mysterious new girlfriend".

Regardless of the limited excitement engendered by the first demo, interest in the idea is still growing with both Russia and Scandinavia exploring the idea.

BusinessWeek has an article on a proposal to make Elon Musk's hyperloop idea even cheaper - Autodesk's Idea to Knit the Hyperloop Out of Carbon Fiber.

The tube in Musk’s plan is made out of prefabricated steel sections that must be welded together. Critics have pointed out that could leave the Hyperloop prone to air leaks, which would undermine the internal low-pressure system it needs to run. Brandt, who studied building technology at Harvard University and holds the title of technology futurist at Autodesk, proposes making the tube out of one very long stretch of braided carbon fiber infused with an epoxy resin. The strong, lightweight material is used to make everything from jumbo jets to race cars.

There are machines that can churn out limited qualities of the braided carbon fiber. Brandt envisions building a supersize version and mounting it onto a rig loaded with reels of carbon fiber so it could roll along the Hyperloop’s route. Working at a rate of 1 meter per minute, this factory on wheels could weave a Hyperloop tube from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than two years, and, says Brandt, require fewer support pylons. “Elon’s estimate calls for about $2.6 billion for concrete, but we’d get that down to more like $1.5 billion,” he says.

TE has a post on Elon Musk's unveiling of the "hyperloop" concept - Elon Musk unveils his plans for the Hyperloop.

Just now ... Elon Musk unveiled more details of his much-discussed blue-sky idea: the Hyperloop, a system to carry passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco, 382 miles or 615 km, in about 35 minutes — less than half the time it takes to fly between the two cities. While early rumors suggested the Hyperloop might connect Los Angeles and New York, and even New York and China, the alpha plans of the highly speculative system are focused in California, as a provocative response to a $68.4 billion high-speed rail plan to connect the state’s two largest coastal cities. As specced, that high-speed rail system would be only slightly cheaper than flying — and would take about twice as long, at 2 hours, 40 minutes. (Of course, right now, the train between Oakland and Los Angeles takes a cool 12 hours, 10 minutes.)

Musk’s Hyperloop is an aboveground system — long tubes set atop pylons — that could run alongside highways. The system would run capsules that hold 28 passengers each through the tubes, departing every two minutes. These capsules contain compressor fans in their nose that form a cushion of air underneath them.

“Wheels don’t work very well at [700 mph], but a cushion of air does,” the plans read. “Air bearings, which use the same basic principle as an air hockey table, have been demonstrated to work at speeds of Mach 1.1 with very low friction.”

Building the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion — a fraction of the proposed high-speed rail system. A ticket on the Hyperloop would cost $20, far trumping both airfare and the price of gas for the same car trip.