Lifeboat Foundation

These quick EVs also happen to be among the fastest battery-electric cars out there.

The Telangana state government in South India, in collaboration with various agricultural aid organizations and technology companies, launched a groundbreaking project known as “Saagu Baagu.” This initiative focused on assisting 7,000 chilli farmers with AI-powered tools, marking a significant step…

Saagu Baagu shows AI’s growing role in agriculture, helping developing-world farmers achieve sustainable and profitable practices.

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The biggest news stories this morning: Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay package has been tossed out by the court, How to watch Super Bowl 2024, Microsoft’s gaming revenue was up 49 percent in Q2.

Oxford PV, a spin-off from the University of Oxford, says it’s achieved the world record for the most efficient solar panel.

In collaboration with Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, the company says its solar panel achieved 25% conversion efficiency – the percentage of solar energy shining on a panel converted into electricity. That’s a big deal compared to the more typical 16–24% in commercial solar panels.

Oxford PV’s secret sauce is perovskite-on-silicon tandem solar cells, which could theoretically hit over 43% efficiency, leaving traditional silicon solar cells with a theoretical limit of less than 30% in the dust. Its record-setting panel cranked out 421 watts over an area of 1.68 square meters. The researchers used standard mass production gear and optimized it for the tandem technology.

All thanks to perovskite solar panel technology.

Finding and describing new species can be a tricky endeavor. Scientists typically look for distinctive characters that can differentiate one species from another. However, variation is a continuum that is not always easy to quantify. At one extreme, multiple species can look alike even though they are different species—these are known as cryptic species. At the other extreme, a single species can be highly variable, creating an illusion of being different species. But what happens when you encounter both extremes simultaneously?

Herpetologist Dr Chan Kin Onn (previously at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, Singapore, now with the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, USA) led a study describing a new species of pit viper from Myanmar that is both similar and different from its sister species. The discovery is published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

Porsche isn’t directly targeting the Tesla Model Y with the new Macan EV, but the two vehicles have many surprising similarities.

Engineers and material scientists have been trying to develop increasingly advanced devices, to meet the growing needs of the electronics industry. These devices include electrostatic capacitors, devices that can store electrical energy in a dielectric between a pair of electrodes through the accumulation of electric charge on the dielectric surfaces.

These capacitors are crucial components of various technologies, including electric vehicles and photovoltaics (PVs). They are often fabricated using polymers as dielectric materials, synthetic substances made up of large organic molecules with good intrinsic flexibility and insulating properties.

Researchers at Tsinghua University and other institutes in China recently introduced a new strategy to fabricate polymer composites filled with subnanosheets exhibiting highly advantageous properties. Their proposed method, outlined in a Nature Energy paper, allowed them to fabricate a 100-meter-long roll of a polymer-based subnanocomposite film.

For the first time, researchers have used bacteria to “upcycle” waste polyethylene.

Move over Spider-Man: Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a strain of bacteria that can turn plastic waste into a biodegradable spider silk with multiple uses.

Transforming Plastic Into Protein