Lifeboat Foundation

#Electric and faster than a Tesla. The Rimac Nevera is now officially the fastest accelerating production vehicle in the world. While on its way to participate in Pebble Beach celebrations this weekend, the electric hypercar made a stop at Famoso Raceway in McFarland, California, where it managed to set a production car record quarter-mile time of 8.582 seconds at 167.51 mph, according to Rimac. That was fast enough to beat the company’s own unofficial record of 8.62 seconds, which it set in Croatia back in June. Unlike that previous attempt, Rimac utilized a drag-friendly, VHT-prepped surface this time around. https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a37304155/rimac-nevera-qua…ld-record/

Rimac enlisted Brooks Weisblat from DragTimes to be the wheelman for the record-setting attempt. Thankfully, that means we have some great video footage to go along with the new record. The Nevera is perfectly suited for this sort of endeavor, as the electric hypercar packs 1,914 horsepower and 1,741 lb-ft of torque. The car’s four electric motors also provide all-wheel drive, which utilizes Rimac’s All-Wheel Torque Vectoring 2 technology. Despite the help from the prepared surface and AWD, the Nevera wasn’t exactly testing in ideal conditions. The temperatures outside were as high as 98 degrees fahrenheit, with the track itself measuring in at 149 degrees fahrenheit. This required the company to make some setup adjustments as they went, making several passes in the process. The record-setting run itself was actually the eleventh pass the company made in quick succession.

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We’ve seen a lot of electric vehicle growth and success stories in the past several years, but one area that’s been a bit of a letdown has been the semi truck market. Unfortunately, we still don’t have the Tesla Semi, and it was recently delayed until 2,022 and a big side area of that market that “futurists” have long been excited about is potential self-driving trucks. Platoons of self-driving semi trucks are especially exciting since tight, train-like caravans of semi trucks would use far less energy than the current system, and those trucks could much more easily be cost-competitive electric trucks with zero tailpipe emissions. Anyway, though, we’re getting ahead of ourselves again.

Last month, Indiana’s Department of Transport (INDOT) announced a collaboration with Purdue University and German company Magment to test out whether cement with embedded magnetized particles could provide an affordable road-charging solution.

Most wireless vehicle charging technologies rely on a process known as inductive charging, where electricity pumped into a wire coil creates a magnetic field that can induce an electric current in any other nearby wire coil. The charging coils are installed at regular intervals under the road, and cars are fitted with a receiver coil that picks up the charge.

But installing thousands of miles of copper under the road is obviously fairly costly. Magment’s solution is to instead embed standard concrete with recycled ferrite particles, which are also able to generate a magnetic field but are considerably cheaper. The company claims its product can achieve transmission efficiency of up to 95 percent and can be built at “standard road-building installation costs.”

Heat flows naturally through the TEG because its cold side is kept at room temperature, while its hot side, which is in thermal contact with the cell, is at a high temperature. The Seebeck effect, which is the direct conversion of temperature differences between two semiconductor materials into electric voltage, generates this difference which then translates into additional electrical power.

The scientists decided not to use a spectrum splitting technology, which is generally utilized in these applications, to direct different parts of the solar spectrum towards either the PV or the TEG unit. “It is more convenient, in terms of final efficiency gains, to keep the solar cell at the same temperature of the TEG hot side, instead of keeping the cell cold but losing much of the recoverable heat,” the academics explained, noting that a wide-gap solar cell based on perovskite was chosen for the device, due to its lower sensitivity to high temperatures. “Temperature-sensitive materials, such as silicon, lose too much efficiency to make the hybridization convenient,” they further explained.

German researchers developed a lattice arrangement of three different layers of ferroelectric crystals that created a powerful photovoltaic effect.

Combining ultra-thin layers of different materials can raise the photovoltaic effect of solar cells by a factor of 1,000 according to researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in Germany.

Their findings, published in the journal “Science Advances,” described a lattice arrangement of three different layers of ferroelectric crystals (in this case, of barium titanate, strontium titanate, and calcium titanate) that created a powerful solar energy producing effect.

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IPCC’s new interactive atlas reveals how climate change will shape weather around the world.

Circa 2016

Scientists and engineers since the 1940s have been toying with the idea of building self-replicating machines, or von Neumann machines, named for John von Neumann. With recent advances in 3D printing (including in zero gravity) and machine learning AI, it seems like self-replicating machines are much more feasible today. In the 21st century, a tantalizing possibility for this technology has emerged: sending a space probe out to a different star system, having it mine resources to make a copy of itself, and then launching that one to yet another star system, and on and on and on.

As a wild new episode of PBS’s YouTube series Space Time suggests, if we could send a von Neumann probe to another star system—likely Alpha Centauri, the closest to us at about 4.4 light years away—then that autonomous spaceship could land on a rocky planet, asteroid, or moon and start building a factory. (Of course, it’d probably need a nuclear fusion drive, something we still need to develop.)

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Farmers reap double benefits with solar power in fields Solar panels generate electricity in the fields, helping both farmers and climate protection. DW visits a German solar farm — and looks at other places this combination is paying off. How widely can agrovoltaics spread? Fabian Karthaus grew u…

The model used to create the most optimistic scenario in the report, which limits warming to 1.5 ˚C, assumes the world will figure out ways to remove about 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by midcentury and 17 billion by 2100. (The scenario is known as SSP1-1.9, and those figures are based on an analysis of earlier data by Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and contributing author on the UN assessment.)

The UN’s long-awaited climate report, released on Monday, offered a stark reminder that removing massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be essential to prevent the gravest dangers of global warming. But it also underscored that the necessary technologies barely exist—and will be tremendously difficult to deploy.

Global temperatures will continue to rise through midcentury no matter what we do at this point, according to the first installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report. How much hotter it gets, however, will depend on how rapidly we cut emissions and how quickly we scale up ways of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air.

Continue reading “The UN climate report pins hopes on carbon removal technologies that barely exist” »