Lifeboat Foundation

In March, the departments of Energy, Interior and Commerce said they were aiming for U.S. offshore wind capacity to hit 30 gigawatts (GW) by 2,030 a hugely optimistic goal that would require thousands of new wind turbines to be installed off the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts.

With federal support locked in, now it’s up to developers and operators to figure out where it’s safe to install offshore wind farms and pursue permits.

Bedrock, a Richmond, California, start-up, wants to help them map the seafloor using electric autonomous underwater vehicles (e-AUV) that can launch right from the shore.

DP World has completed testing of the Boxbay fully automated container storage system at its Jebel Ali terminal in Dubai, accomplishing more than 63,000 container moves since the facility was commissioned earlier this year.

The facility, which can hold 792 containers at a time, exceeded expectations, delivering faster and more energy-efficient than anticipated, the Dubai-headquartered terminal operator said.

Continue reading “Fully automated container storage system makes first successful trial” »

Dozens of container ships are anchored off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. A crush of advance orders from U.S. manufacturers and retailers is contributing to the bottlenecks.

The 14,207-square-foot home in Henderson features views of the Las Vegas Strip, smart-home technology, solar power and a 12-car garage.

Battery-and carmakers are already spending billions of dollars on reducing the costs of manufacturing and recycling electric-vehicle (EV) batteries — spurred in part by government incentives and the expectation of forthcoming regulations. National research funders have also founded centres to study better ways to make and recycle batteries. Because it is still less expensive, in most instances, to mine metals than to recycle them, a key goal is to develop processes to recover valuable metals cheaply enough to compete with freshly mined ones. “The biggest talker is money,” says Jeffrey Spangenberger, a chemical engineer at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, who manages a US federally funded lithium-ion battery-recycling initiative, called ReCell.

Reducing the use of scarce metals — and recycling them — will be key to the world’s transition to electric vehicles.

Despite strong support from the FAA, the airline industry, and aerospace companies, the U.S. Senate ceased funding the development of a supersonic airliner in 1971. Two years later, the FAA banned supersonic flight over land, a prohibition that remains to this day.

The Concorde went on to serve various destinations, including some in the United States, flying at supersonic speeds only over water. That continued until 2,003 when British Airways and Air France retired their fleets, together amounting to just 12 aircraft. (Fourteen production aircraft were manufactured, but one was scrapped in 1,994 and another crashed in 2000.)

While the Concorde successfully overcame the technical hurdles standing in the way of supersonic passenger service, it succumbed to economics: The cost of fuel and maintenance was especially high for these planes. A new generation of aeronautical engineers and entrepreneurs are, however, keen to once again take on the technical, environmental, and economic challenges.

Elon Musk has mentioned that the Tesla Cybertruck’s production version would be extremely similar to the all-electric pickup truck’s controversial prototype from 2019. While this may largely be the case, Musk has hinted at some new features that would be included in the production Cybertruck. Apart from updated door handles and rear-wheel steering capabilities, for example, Musk also hinted at “other great things” coming for the vehicle.

A recently published patent application from Tesla has now hinted at a couple more updates that may be coming to the Cybertruck, at least on the design front. The patent, titled “Automotive Glass Structure Having Feature Lines and Related Method of Manufacture,” describes a way to form extremely durable glass structures with aggressive curves and folds. Using such a technique, Tesla stated that it could create components like windshields with very aggressive feature lines that would otherwise not be possible with conventional glass-forming methods.

The patent application’s illustrations showcased how the system would be used in a vehicle such as the Cybertruck. One of the images in the patent featured the far left and right side of the Cybertruck’s windshield having aggressive feature lines that make the all-electric pickup truck even more futuristic and CGI-esque. This is quite different from the windshield used on the prototype Cybertruck, which seemed completely flat.

Looks like the hoverboard is now a reality, similar to Back to the Future.

It still looks very dangerous. I’m not sure this will take off with the public.

UNILAD Tech

Continue reading “Next-Level Real-Life Hoverboard” »

The smarter cars are getting, the more exposed they are to the threats the technology world is struggling to deal with.