Commuters in downtown Barcelona have been able to ride the bus for free this week. There’s just one catch: this mini-bus has no one at the wheel.
The bus pulls away from the stop with its passengers on its own, brakes before changing lanes and eases down one of Barcelona’s most fashionable boulevards.
Renault is testing a new driverless mini-bus in Barcelona this week. The autonomous vehicle is running on a 2.2-km (1.3-mile) circular route with four stops in the center of the Spanish city. Adventurous commuters can jump on free of charge.
Unlike conventional silicon-based solar cells, perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are not only thin and lightweight, but can also be seamlessly applied to curved surfaces, like building facades and vehicle roofs. What’s more, they can be easily manufactured at room temperature using a solution process, leading to significantly reduced production costs.
However, for PSCs to achieve commercialization, it is crucial to develop technologies that maintain high efficiency over extended periods. A research team affiliated with UNIST has successfully made strides in this area. Their work is published in the journal Joule.
Professor Sang Il Seok of the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST, along with researchers Jongbeom Kim and Jaewang Park, has developed an interlayer that leverages the specificity of organic cations on the surface of PSCs, simultaneously achieving high-efficiency and durability.
A phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform named ‘Lucid’ has been targeting 169 entities in 88 countries using well-crafted messages sent on iMessage (iOS) and RCS (Android).
Lucid, which has been operated by Chinese cybercriminals known as the ‘XinXin group’ since mid-2023, is sold to other threat actors via a subscription-based model that gives them access to over 1,000 phishing domains, tailored auto-generated phishing sites, and pro-grade spamming tools.
Prodaft researchers note that XinXin has also been using the Darcula v3 platform for its operations, which indicates a potential connection between the two PhaaS platforms.
A research team has identified a previously unknown degradation mechanism that occurs during the use of lithium-ion batteries. Their findings are published in Advanced Energy Materials.
The team includes researcher Seungyun Jeon and Dr. Gukhyun Lim, led by Professor Jihyun Hong from the Department of Battery Engineering at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology), in collaboration with Professor Jongsoon Kim’s group at Sungkyunkwan University.
Lithium-ion batteries, which are essential for electric vehicles, typically use nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) ternary cathodes. To reduce costs, recent industry trends have favored increasing the nickel content while minimizing the use of expensive cobalt. However, higher nickel content tends to shorten the overall cycle life of the battery.
Lithium-ion batteries are part of everyday life. They power small rechargeable devices such as mobile phones and laptops. They enable electric vehicles. And larger versions store excess renewable energy for later use, supporting the clean energy transition.
Australia produces more than 3,000 metric tons of lithium-ion battery waste a year. Managing this waste is a technical, economic and social challenge. Opportunities exist for recycling and creating a circular economy for batteries. But they come with risk.
That’s because lithium-ion batteries contain manufactured chemicals such as PFAS, or per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances. The chemicals carry the lithium—along with electricity—through the battery. If released into the environment, they can linger for decades and likely longer. This is why they’ve been dubbed “forever chemicals”
What is Control? here is a nice definition according to Wikipedia — Control engineering or control systems engineering is an engineering discipline that deals with control systems, applying control theory to design equipment and systems with desired behaviors in control environments. The discipline of controls overlaps and is usually taught along with electrical engineering and mechanical engineering at many institutions around the world. The practice uses sensors and detectors to measure the output performance of the process being controlled; these measurements are used to provide corrective feedback helping to achieve the desired performance. Systems designed to perform without requiring human input are called automatic control systems (such as cruise control for regulating the speed of a car).
A team of management researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has found that minority Lyft drivers in Florida are more likely to be stopped and ticketed for speeding and to be more highly fined than white drivers.
In their study published in the journal Science, the group analyzed data for more than 200,000 Lyft drivers working in Florida over the years 2017 to 2020.
Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Management and Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, respectively, have published a Perspective piece in the same journal, outlining the difficulty in finding suitable environments for conducting profiling studies in public settings and the results of the new effort.
Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have unlocked new insights into the turbulent behavior of hypersonic flows by using advanced 3D simulations.
Leveraging supercomputing power and custom-built software, they discovered unexpected instabilities and flow breaks around cone-shaped models at Mach 16, disturbances never seen before in previous 2D or experimental studies. These findings could significantly impact the design of future hypersonic vehicles by helping engineers understand how extreme speeds interact with surface geometries in new ways.
How gravity causes a perfectly spherical ball to roll down an inclined plane is part of the elementary school physics canon. But the world is messier than a textbook.
Scientists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have sought to quantitatively describe the much more complex rolling physics of real-world objects. Led by L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Physics, and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in SEAS and FAS, they combined theory, simulations, and experiments to understand what happens when an imperfect, spherical object is placed on an inclined plane.
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research, which was inspired by nothing more than curiosity about the everyday world, could provide fundamental insights into anything that involves irregular objects that roll, from nanoscale cellular transport to robotics.
Tesla is preparing to launch its robo taxi in June, leveraging its unique autonomy and data advantages to navigate challenges such as new tariffs and production shifts, while positioning itself for significant growth amid declining competitor viability ## Questions to inspire discussion ## Tesla’s Robo Taxi Service.
🚕 Q: When and where is Tesla launching its robo taxi service? A: Tesla’s robo taxi service is set to launch in Austin, Texas in June 2025, with plans for a nationwide rollout in the US later that year.
🏎️ Q: What vehicles will be eligible for Tesla’s robo taxi service? A: The service will be available on all vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving (FSD) capability, including existing Model 3 and Model Y, not just the upcoming Cybertruck.
💰 Q: How will Tesla’s robo taxi network economics work? A: The economics will be based on cost per mile, factoring in low capital costs of Tesla EVs and low power consumption of their onboard autonomy systems.
📊 Q: What competitive advantage does Tesla have in the robo taxi market? A: Tesla’s existing fleet of billions of miles of deployed vehicles and hundreds of thousands of users provide a massive data advantage for improving and assessing the service. ## Tariffs and Supply Chain.
🏭 Q: What is Tesla’s supply chain strategy? A: Tesla aims to build cars where sold for environmental reasons, which is considered best practice in network design but extremely difficult to implement.
