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(CNN) — Scientists believe a fossil found at a landfill in California belongs to an extinct species of whale that lived between 4 and 7 million years ago.

The seven-ton fossil was unearthed in June during a construction excavation at the Prima Deshecha landfill in San Juan Capistrano, Orange County Waste & Recycling announced in a statement.

A paleontologist with Paleo Solutions Lab, a company employed by the County of Orange —paleontologists must monitor construction excavations under California law — was working at the site when a large bone was spotted.

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Almost exactly a decade ago, I was cycling in a bike lane when a car hit me from behind. Luckily, I suffered only a couple bruised ribs and some road rash. But ever since, I have felt my pulse rise when I hear a car coming up behind my bike.

As self-driving cars roll out, they’re already being billed as making me – and millions of American cyclists, pedestrians and vehicle passengers – safer.

As a driver and a cyclist, I initially welcomed the idea of self-driving cars that could detect nearby people and be programmed not to hit them, making the streets safer for everyone. Autonomous vehicles also seemed to provide attractive ways to use roads more efficiently and reduce the need for parking in our communities. People are certainly talking about how self-driving cars could help build more sustainable, livable, walkable and bikable communities.

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A new nonprofit organization is partnering with Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, Airbus and other heavy-hitters to create a moon-centric prize program known as “The Moon Race.”

The contest’s goal is to boost technologies that could contribute to sustainable lunar exploration. A lot of the details, however, are still up in the air — including exactly what those technologies will be, and how much the prizes will amount to.

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Elon Musk unveiled prototypes of Tesla’s Solar Roof tiles In October 2016. They came in four styles that looked just like normal roofing material but were essentially miniaturized versions of traditional solar panels.

The announcement helped Tesla justify its $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity one month later and represented Musk’s vision for what the businesses could do together.

It’s been almost two years since then. So where are the tiles?

“We now have several hundred homes with the Solar Roof on them, and that’s going well. It takes a while to just confirm that the Solar Roof is going to last for 30 years and all the details work out,” Musk said on Tesla’s Q2 earnings call in August.» Subscribe to CNBC: http://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBC

Solar energy has long been considered the most sustainable option for replacing our dependence on fossil fuels, but technologies for converting solar energy into electricity must be both efficient and inexpensive.

Scientists from the Energy Materials and Surface Sciences Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) believe they’ve found a winning formula in a new method to fabricate low-cost high-efficiency solar . Prof. Yabing Qi and his team from OIST in collaboration with Prof. Shengzhong Liu from Shaanxi Normal University, China, developed the cells using the materials and compounds that mimic the crystalline structure of the naturally occurring mineral perovskite. They describe their technique in a study published in the journal Nature Communications.

In what Prof. Qi refers to as “the golden triangle,” solar cell technologies need to fulfill three conditions to be worth commercializing: their conversion rate of sunlight into electricity must be high, they must be inexpensive to produce, and they must have a long lifespan. Today, most commercial solar cells are made from crystalline silicon, which has a relatively high efficiency of around 22%. Though silicon, the raw material for these solar cells, is abundant, processing it tends to be complex and shoots up the manufacturing costs, making the finished product expensive.

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Can Tesla survive without Elon Musk? If he is banned from CEO or director positions or being a board member what will the impact to SpaceX be?


Tesla without Elon Musk at the wheel? To many of the electric car maker’s customers and investors that would be unthinkable. But that’s what government securities regulators now want to see.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has asked a federal court to oust Musk as Tesla’s chairman and CEO, alleging he committed securities fraud with false statements about plans to take the company private.

The agency says in a complaint filed Thursday that Musk falsely claimed in an Aug. 7 statement on Twitter that funding had been secured for Tesla Inc. to go private at $420 per share, a substantial premium over the stock price at the time.

New insight into how a certain class of photovoltaic materials allows efficient conversion of sunlight into electricity could set up these materials to replace traditional silicon solar cells. A study by researchers at Penn State reveals the unique properties of these inexpensive and quick-to-produce halide perovskites, information that will guide the development of next generation solar cells. The study appears September 27 in the journal Chem.

“Since the development of solar , which today can be found on rooftops and roadsides, researchers have sought new types of photovoltaic materials that are easier to process into solar cells,” said John Asbury, associate professor of chemistry at Penn State and senior author of the study. “This is because construction of silicon solar cells is complex and hard to scale-up to the level that would be needed for them to generate even 10 percent of our total demand for electricity.”

Because of these complications, researchers have been searching for less expensive alternatives to silicon solar cells that can be processed more quickly. They are particularly interested in materials that can be processed using a technique called roll-to-roll manufacturing, a technique similar to those used to print newspapers that enables low-cost, high-volume production. Such materials must be processed from solution, like ink printed on a page.

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