Work to drum up interest in pre-owned options are slowly starting to deliver an impact.
Category: sustainability – Page 331
Elon Musk is Time’s Person of the Year.
The magazine said that he had been chosen for his work in space as well as on electric cars, as well as his plans to take humanity to Mars and his interest in cryptocurrency. It also noted in its announcement that Mr Musk “also likes to live-tweet his poops”, thought to be a first for a Time “Person of the Year”.
“For creating solutions to an existential crisis, for embodying the possibilities and the perils of the age of tech titans, for driving society’s most daring and disruptive transformations, Elon Musk is TIME’s 2021 Person of the Year,” the magazine wrote in its announcement.
Rolls-Royce, the 115-year-old iconic British Engineering firm, has now achieved a new feat. After manufacturing world-class jet engines, it has left its mark in the electric aviation world.
Spirit of Innovation, a single-seat, electric-powered propeller plane built by Rolls-Royce, obliterated the zero-emission speed record, reaching over 556 kilometers per hour (345 mph) over a three-kilometer distance—and even maxing out at 623 kilometers per hour. This flight successfully smashed all previous records of electric planes which are environment friendly.
With a clarion call given by the COP26 on the need to cut emissions, Rolls-Royce has presented itself as a company that could earnestly provide that solution. With the aviation industry registering a record number of flights after a year of lockdowns, the emissions are set to grow further.
The same Saildrones captured the first-ever video from inside a major hurricane from sea level in September.
Six autonomous Saildrones are taking off on a six-month journey to tackle some of Earth’s most challenging ocean conditions, in order to improve climate change and weather forecast computer models, reported CNN.
They will travel to the Gulf Stream throughout the winter months where they will collect data about the process by which oceans absorb carbon (carbon uptake). So far, the numbers on this type of activity have only been estimates produced by statistical methods that cannot, therefore, be relied upon.
“This Saildrone mission will collect more carbon dioxide measurements in the Gulf Stream region in winter than has ever been collected in this location and time of year,” said Jaime Palter, a scientist at the University of Rhode Island who is co-leading the research.
“With this data, we will sharpen our quantification of ocean carbon uptake and the processes that enable that uptake in this dynamic region.”
Inside Clean Energy
Posted in energy, sustainability, transportation
The price of the batteries that power electric vehicles has fallen by about 90 percent since 2010, a continuing trend that will soon make EVs less expensive than gasoline vehicles.
This week, with battery pricing figures for 2021 now available, I wanted to get a better idea of what the near future will look like.
First, the numbers: The average price of lithium-ion battery packs fell to $132 per kilowatt-hour in 2021, down 6 percent from $140 per kilowatt-hour the previous year, according to the annual battery price survey from BloombergNEF. The new average is a step closer to the benchmark of $100 per kilowatt-hour, which researchers say is the approximate point where EVs will cost about the same as gasoline-powered vehicles.
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You are on the PRO Robots channel and in this form we present you with high-tech news. What can Google’s army of robots really do? Can time turn backwards? Catapult rockets and a jet engine powered by plastic waste. All this and much more in one edition of high-tech news! Watch the video until the end and write your impressions about the new army of robots from Google in the comments.
0:00 In this issue.
0:23 Everyday Robots Project.
1:20 California startup Machina Labs.
2:01 Aero cabs try to become part of transportation systems.
2:47 Renault decided to create its own flying car.
3:39 Startup Flytrex.
4:32 Startup SpinLaunch.
5:28 A rocket engine powered by plastic waste.
6:10 NASA launched the DART mission into space.
7:02 Parker Solar Probe.
7:48 Fitness Instructor Winning a Flight on Virgin Galactic’s Space Plane.
8:24 Quantum experiment by MIT physicists.
9:28 Quantum systems can evolve in two opposite directions.
10:19 Apple to launch its augmented reality headset project.
10:58 The world’s first eye prosthesis fully printed on a 3D printer.
11:38 South Korea announced the creation of a floating city of the future.
12:30 Moscow City Council approved the list of streets available for unmanned transport.
13:15 SH-350 drone of Russian Post from Aeromax company has successfully made its first test flight.
14:00 Concern “Kalashnikov” patented its own version of a miniature electric vehicle.
#prorobots #robots #robot #future technologies #robotics.
As the spread of electric vehicles continues to gain speed across the globe, the electric charging network needs to keep pace with the growing demand. Tesla, the global leader in electric vehicles, has spent millions to expand its supercharging network and the company currently has more than 25,000 supercharging stations across the planet. The EV manufacturer is looking to democratize its superchargers, and in certain regions, you can charge your Porsche Taycan right next to regular Tesla offerings such as the Model 3 and Model S, but some have been experiencing an unpleasant trend in recent times: internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles are blocking charging stations. This act is known as “ICEing”, and it has become such an issue in China that Tesla has banded with its customers to come up with an interesting solution.
We talk a lot about electric cars, and it’s evident that engineers are working toward fossil fuel alternatives for our land-based travel. But what about airplanes? In 2019, 18.27 billion gallons of fuel were used by planes. That’s far from carbon-neutral.
Soon though, we could feel less guilty about flying. A team of researchers has created a prototype jet engine that’s able to propel itself forward using only electricity. Their study was published in AIP Advances in May 2020.
Engineers have made bendable solar cells from ultra thin semiconductors—which for all their elasticity still boast a power-per-weight ratio on par with established thin-film solar cells.
What’s needed instead is something more like the engineering that goes into a race car, where the initial design is as perfect as the engineers know how to make it upfront, but every few laps during a race, they fine-tune it further for the specific conditions on the track that day, Venne said. His inspiration for a solution that is less labor-intensive than car racing also comes from the world of automobiles — specifically self-driving cars.
In addition to knowing the basic rules of the road, a self-driving car needs to be able to adapt to the unexpected, such as swerving to avoid hitting the squirrel crossing the road ahead, Venne said. “It occurred to me that if we’re doing this with cars, we should be able to do the same with the technology that drives the mechanical side of the building.”
BrainBox AI focuses primarily on controlling the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems within a building, which accounts for the majority of the energy consumption in most buildings, Venne said. A next-level goal is to get multiple neighboring buildings in a city working in tandem to produce better results, like helping utilities balance the consumption of electricity during periods of peak demand. A pilot project based on that concept won a Tech for Our Planet challenge at the recently concluded COP26 United Nations conference on controlling climate change.