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Category: transportation – Page 120

New technology allows hydrogen to be directly injected into the cylinders like an internal combustion engine.

As the world scrambles to transition to green fuels to achieve carbon neutrality, promoting power sources that use hydrogen as a clean fuel is one strategy to further the move. Now, researchers in South Korea have developed a new technology for a passenger car hydrogen engine that promises to make it more viable for mass production.

The powertrain developed by researchers at the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) and the Zero-Carbon Engine Research Lab of Hyundai-Kia Motor Company (HMC) is a 2-liter direct injection hydrogen engine that runs entirely on hydrogen fuel.

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Tesla is still fighting for its North American Charging Standard chargers to become dominant over the Combined Charging System chargers, which are used by most other electric vehicles in the United States. Now, the company is releasing a new product that could help its cause.

The product, called the Tesla Universal Wall Connector, is a new version of the EV company’s home charging Wall Connectors. But unlike the old Tesla Wall Connectors, which are only compatible with NACS (and therefore can only charge Teslas), the Tesla Universal Wall Connector will also be compatible with CCS plugs.

As Electrek pointed out, this is similar to what Tesla has done with its Magic Dock adapters installed at some Supercharger stations, which can charge both Teslas and non-Teslas alike.

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The long-promised more affordable Tesla electric car might debut alongside an automated robotaxi.

Tesla is reportedly preparing to build a $25,000 electric car built on the company’s next-generation engineering platform. Axios.

The $25,000 car reportedly has a futuristic design like the long-delayed Cybertruck — the angular pickup truck that Tesla first revealed in 2019. The Cybertruck will supposedly begin production this year, with production-at-scale beginning in 2024.

Who knows when we’ll actually see a $25,000 Tesla.

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Robotaxi company Cruise is “just days away” from getting regulatory approval that would pave the way for mass production of its purpose-built driverless vehicle, CEO Kyle Vogt said on Thursday in comments reported by the Detroit Free Press.

General Motors-backed Cruise unveiled the vehicle — called Origin — in early 2020, presenting the kind of driverless car that we all dreamed of when R&D in the sector kicked off years ago; a vehicle without a steering wheel and without pedals. A vehicle with passenger seats only.

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Removing membranes could shave off as much as 30 percent of battery costs since they are the most expensive components.

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati in the US have developed a new design that could make lithium-ion batteries much cheaper to produce. This can have a profound impact on the large-scale energy storage systems needed to store renewable energy, a press release said.

Lithium-ion batteries, extensively used for power electronic devices, have also found their way into electric vehicles (EVs) thanks to their superior energy density over conventional batteries. These can also be deployed to store renewable energy when production is high, but the demand is low.

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A new facility will be able to produce battery capacity to power 130,000 homes on a daily basis using renewable energy.

Zinc halide batteries touted as a low-cost alternative to battery energy storage system (BESS) have received a significant boost in the US after the Department of Energy (DOE) offered a $400 million loan to help scale production and reduce manufacturing costs, a press release said. The offer will cover setting up of four production lines at battery maker Eos’ facility in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania.

Lithium-ion batteries are a crucial component of our attempts to switch to a greener economy powered by renewable energy. Although the technology is ubiquitous these days and powers everyday devices like smartphones and even electric vehicles (EVs), it is still very expensive.

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(NewsNation) — A scientific expedition off the coast of Alaska sparked speculation among livestream viewers when cameras on a remote-controlled dive vehicle captured a mysterious object at the bottom of the ocean.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conducted the Aug. 30 expedition and described the object as a “golden orb” that “struck an imaginative chord.”

So, what was it?

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Google Deepmind will soon begin researching autonomous language agents such as Auto-GPT, potentially boosting the viable applications of LLMs such as Gemini.

Google DeepMind is looking for researchers and engineers to help build increasingly autonomous language agents, Edward Grefenstette, director of research at Google DeepMind, announced at X.

Such AI agents already exist in early stages, with Auto-GPT being one of the earliest examples. The basic idea is to create a system that autonomously achieves a given goal using a mix of prompt engineering, self-prompting, memory, and other system parts. While such agents are already showing promising results, they are still far from being able to achieve good results on their own and usually require human feedback and decision-making.

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Active particles can form two-dimensional solids that are different from those formed by nonmotile particles, showing long-range crystalline order accompanied by giant spontaneous deformations.

If you compress a liquid slowly enough at low temperatures, it will freeze into an ordered solid: a crystal. Or at least that’s what we’re used to seeing in three dimensions. If you instead consider particles confined to a two-dimensional (2D) plane, the outcome is quite different. For equilibrium systems, a 2D solid stabilizes into a structure that lacks long-range order—it becomes less ordered further away from a central lattice site. The behavior of systems far from equilibrium, such as self-propelled particles, remains, however, an open question. In a numerical study of bacteria-like particles, Xia-qing Shi of Soochow University in China and his colleagues now show that active crystals follow a slightly different set of rules than their nonmotile counterparts [1]. Like 2D equilibrium crystals, 2D active systems stabilize into an ordered solid-like phase but with extremely large particle fluctuations around the configuration of a perfect crystal lattice.

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