Hypersonic air travel promises point-to-point passenger and freight interplanetary connectivity. The market is heating up.
Category: transportation – Page 216
After a wild display of lights, music and futuristic technology, Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk kicked off the grand opening of the company’s new Texas gigafactory on Thursday.
The Austin plant — Tesla’s fourth globally — will manufacture the Model Y SUV and, next year, the highly-anticipated Cybertruck.
Tesla bull Kevin Paffrath predicts this is only the beginning electric-vehicle maker.
TransPod has received funding for a high-speed link between Alberta’s two largest cities. Travel between destinations will take 20 minutes.
The bicycle, reinvented.
Designer Stephen Henrich is prototyping an all-wheel bicycle that looks like an infinity symbol.
Computers may be growing smaller and more powerful, but they require a great deal of energy to operate. The total amount of energy the U.S. dedicates to computing has risen dramatically over the last decade and is quickly approaching that of other major sectors, like transportation.
In a study published online this week the journal Nature, University of California, Berkeley, engineers describe a major breakthrough in the design of a component of transistors—the tiny electrical switches that form the building blocks of computers—that could significantly reduce their energy consumption without sacrificing speed, size or performance. The component, called the gate oxide, plays a key role in switching the transistor on and off.
“We have been able to show that our gate-oxide technology is better than commercially available transistors: What the trillion-dollar semiconductor industry can do today—we can essentially beat them,” said study senior author Sayeef Salahuddin, the TSMC Distinguished professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.
And they could enter service by 2030.The automotive world is transforming to meet the needs of the future.
Hyundai has already made it very clear that it’s making a serious play at next-gen electric aviation, establishing its own eVTOL subsidiary Supernal late last year and promising to flex its automotive-grade manufacturing muscle to get air taxis built in bulk. Now, the company has made a presentation at the Vertical Flight Society’s H2 Aero workshop to confirm that it’s also bringing its hydrogen expertise into the aviation world.
Hyundai/Kia and Toyota, of course, have been the two main hydrogen fuel cell stalwarts in the automotive industry. Batteries make more sense for most passenger car applications globally, but Japan and Korea are committed to building a “hydrogen economy” powering much more than personal transport, so these companies in particular have persisted with building and selling relatively small numbers of fuel cell-electric cars like the Nexo and Mirai.
That means they’ve got full hydrogen powertrains designed, manufactured in the tens of thousands of units, and fully crash tested to meet automotive safety certification standards in multiple countries – an excellent head start, you might say, if you’re interested in rolling that expertise out into the aviation market. And that’s definitely an avenue Hyundai is looking to work through Supernal.
Nearly two months after its debut at the Super Bowl, DeLorean Motor is inching closer to revealing itself to the public.
The Humble, Texas, electric-vehicle maker, which shares the name of the vehicle from the “Back to the Future” film franchise, started getting buzz after a 15-second spot during The Super Bowl this year.
Captured CO2 products include non-petroleum fuels, vodka, perfume, foam, insulation, mattresses, and carbon fibre for buildings and cars.
Standard image sensors, like the billion or so already installed in practically every smartphone in use today, capture light intensity and color. Relying on common, off-the-shelf sensor technology—known as CMOS—these cameras have grown smaller and more powerful by the year and now offer tens-of-megapixels resolution. But they’ve still seen in only two dimensions, capturing images that are flat, like a drawing—until now.
Researchers at Stanford University have created a new approach that allows standard image sensors to see light in three dimensions. That is, these common cameras could soon be used to measure the distance to objects.
The engineering possibilities are dramatic. Measuring distance between objects with light is currently possible only with specialized and expensive lidar —short for “light detection and ranging”—systems. If you’ve seen a self-driving car tooling around, you can spot it right off by the hunchback of technology mounted to the roof. Most of that gear is the car’s lidar crash-avoidance system, which uses lasers to determine distances between objects.
Tesla released production numbers for the first quarter after a record-setting close to 2021.