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Category: transportation – Page 335

Recyclable ‘veggie’ battery could power future devices more efficiently

A new type of 3D-printed battery which uses electrodes made from vegetable starch and carbon nanotubes could provide mobile devices with a more environmentally-friendly, higher-capacity source of power.

A team of engineers led from the University of Glasgow have developed the battery in a bid to make more sustainable batteries capable of storing and delivering power more efficiently. The battery’s design and fabrication is outlined in a paper published in the Journal of Power Sources.

Lithium-ion batteries provide a useful combination of lightweight, compact form factors and the ability to withstand many cycles of charging and discharging. That has made them ideally suited for use in a wide array of devices, including laptops, mobile phones, smart watches, and electric vehicles.

AI-equipped backpack allows the blind to walk in public without dogs or cane

A team of researchers at the University of Georgia has created a backpack equipped with AI gear aimed at replacing guide dogs and canes for the blind. Intel has published a News Byte describing the new technology on their Newsroom page.

Technology to help get around in public has been improving in recent years, thanks mostly to smartphone apps. But such apps, the team notes, are not sufficient given the technology available. To make a better assistance system, the group designed an AI system that could be placed in a backpack and worn by a to give them much better clues about their environment.

The backpack holds a smart AI system running on a laptop, and is fitted with OAK-D cameras (which, in addition to providing obstacle information, can also provide ) hidden in a vest and also in a waist pack. The cameras run Intel’s Movidius VPU and are programmed using the OpenVINO toolkit. The waist pack also holds batteries for the system. The AI system was trained to recognize objects a sighted pedestrian would see when walking around in a town or city, such as cars, bicycles, other pedestrians or even overhanging tree limbs.

Elon Musk tweets Tesla could become ‘the biggest company’ surpassing Apple ‘probably in a few months’ then deletes it

Musk’s tweet offering guidance on timing for an anticipated increase in Tesla’s market cap has since been deleted, but screenshots were widely shared on Twitter.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has clashed with Musk and Tesla over the CEO’s unfettered use of Twitter before.

In the third quarter of 2018, Musk faced securities fraud charges from the SEC after he tweeted to his tens of millions of followers then that he was planning to take Tesla private at $420 a share, and had secured funding to do so. Tesla’s stock price jumped more than 6 percent that day.

Tesla claims EPA range can be achieved on its electric cars

In response to an independent range test, Tesla has reportedly claimed that the EPA range on its vehicles can be achieved by draining the battery pack beyond the zero-mile displayed range.

Last month, we reported on Edmunds conducting independent range tests on a bunch of electric vehicles to compare them to their EPA estimates.

The results showed that Tesla is using the most optimistic versions of its EPA estimated range in its advertising compared to other automakers.

Lexus LF-1 Limitless Concept: Maximum Lexus

A proposed flagship in crossover form.

From the moment the Lexus brand made its debut at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit 29 years ago, the LS sedan has been the division’s flagship. But the luxury segment, just like the rest of the automobile market, increasingly is turning away from sedans and toward crossovers. So Lexus is testing the waters for what it dubs “a new flagship luxury crossover” with the debut of the LF-1 Limitless concept at this year’s Detroit auto show.

Suez Canal could be blocked for weeks

A huge container ship blocking the Suez Canal like a “beached whale” may take weeks to free, the salvage company said, as officials stopped all ships entering the channel on Thursday in a new setback for global trade. The 400 metre Ever Given, almost as long as the Empire State Building is high, is blocking transit in both directions through one of the world’s busiest shipping channels for oil and refined fuels, grain and other trade linking Asia and Europe. The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) said earlier that nine tugs were working to move the vessel, which got stuck diagonally across the single-lane southern stretch of the canal on Tuesday morning amid high winds and a dust storm.

The Battery That Will Finally Unlock Massless Energy Storage

It could revolutionize electric vehicles and aircraft.

In groundbreaking new research, scientists have made a structural battery 10 times better than in any previous experiment.

What’s a structural battery, and why is it such a big deal? The term refers to an energy storage device that can also bear weight as part of a structure—like if the studs in your home were all batteries, or if an electric fence also held up a wall.