Is supersonic travel coming back?
Almost 20 years after Concorde was retired, new supersonic passenger aircraft are finally emerging.
Category: transportation – Page 352
The Tesla Model 3 “refresh” has gone live on the electric car maker’s online configurator, and it comes with several compelling updates. As could be seen in the all-electric sedan’s order page, the Model 3 now comes with better range, better performance, new wheels, new features like a powered trunk, and more.
A look at the Model 3’s updated online configurator shows that the Standard Range variant, which used to have 250 miles of range, now has 263 miles of range per charge. The Model 3 Long Range Dual Motor AWD stands at the top range-wise with a whopping EPA rating of 353 miles per charge, far above the 322 miles that it previously offered. Even the Model 3 Performance, which is not optimized for maximum efficiency, now comes with 315 miles per charge, an improvement over its previous 299-mile EPA rating.
Except someone—or, rather, something— can hear: your car. Hearing your angry words, aggressive tone, and raised voice, and seeing your furrowed brow, the onboard computer goes into “soothe” mode, as it’s been programmed to do when it detects that you’re angry. It plays relaxing music at just the right volume, releases a puff of light lavender-scented essential oil, and maybe even says some meditative quotes to calm you down.
What do you think—creepy? Helpful? Awesome? Weird? Would you actually calm down, or get even more angry that a car is telling you what to do?
Scenarios like this (maybe without the lavender oil part) may not be imaginary for much longer, especially if companies working to integrate emotion-reading artificial intelligence into new cars have their way. And it wouldn’t just be a matter of your car soothing you when you’re upset—depending what sort of regulations are enacted, the car’s sensors, camera, and microphone could collect all kinds of data about you and sell it to third parties.
What the hell is happening in the skies above Los Angeles?
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: On Wednesday afternoon, crew members on an airliner flying near Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) once again spotted a person in a jetpack gliding at an altitude of 6,000 feet high, a few miles northwest of the flight hub.
✈ You like badass planes. So do we. Let’s nerd out over them together.
Are organic batteries coming?
Researchers at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University, have for the first time demonstrated an organic battery. It is of a type known as a ‘redox flow battery,” with a large capacity that can be used to store energy from wind turbines and solar cells, and as a power bank for cars.
Redox flow batteries are stationary batteries in which the energy is located in the electrolyte, outside of the cell itself, as in a fuel cell. They are often marketed with the prefix ‘eco,” since they open the possibility of storing excess energy from, for example, the sun and wind. Further, it appears to be possible to recharge them an unlimited number of times. However, redox flow batteries often contain vanadium, a scarce and expensive metal. The electrolyte in which energy is stored in a redox flow battery can be water-based, which makes the battery safe to use, but results in a lower energy density.
Mikhail Vagin, principal research engineer, and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Campus Norrköping, have now succeeded in producing not only a water-based electrolyte but also electrodes of organic material, which increases the energy density considerably. It is possible in this way to manufacture completely organic redox flow batteries for the storage of, for example, energy from the sun and wind, and to compensate for load variation in the electrical supply grid.
Is Tesla about to revolutionize the way we travel once more? Will it keep its promises? Or will regulators prove a massive oil slick to progress? A giant network of autonomous cars, that will drive at a very low cost and much safer than any human ever could. Everything we know about Tesla RoboTaxi Service.
0:00 Robotaxi information
3:09 preview of tesla ride sharing app functionality
4:49 Q2 2020 Earning Call — elon talks about driving the FSD tech himself
5:51 Elon Musk talks about Level 5 Autonomy and when Elon Musk hopes will reach full Level 5 Autonomy.
#fullselfdriving #elonmusk #robotaxi
Tesla has potentional to make uber obsolete. a full FSD upgrade will make Tesla Taxis will make billions. We cover everything we know about tesla ride sharing service so far and how tesla will command the robotaxi market. watch elon musk unveil plans for a ride-hailing service.
Collectively, we produce 2.1 billion tons of waste per year, or as a group of students from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) would explain it, we produce the same amount as “the PSV Eindhoven football stadium filled 7380 times to the roof.”
With hydrogen supplied by Orange County’s sewage treatment plant and paid for by the car manufacturer, a new fuel cell vehicle is actually hitting the market in Los Angeles.
Energy recycling heats up
Posted in energy, sustainability, transportation
Circa 2016
Scientists have developed a novel system that recovers energy normally lost in industrial processes.
Each year, energy that equates to billions of barrels of oil is wasted as heat lost from machines and industrial processes. Recovering this energy could reduce energy costs. Scientists from Australia and Malaysia have developed a novel system that is designed to maximize such recovery.
Heat can be converted to electricity by devices called thermoelectric power generators (TEGs), which are made of thermoelectric materials that generate electricity when heat passes through them. Previous studies have attempted to use TEGs to recover energy from the heat generated by, for example, car engines, woodstoves and refrigerators. However, TEGs can only convert a small amount of the heat supplied to them, and the rest is emitted as heat from their “cold” side. No previous studies have attempted to recover energy from the waste heat that has already passed through TEGs. Researchers from Malaysia’s Universiti Teknologi MARA and RMIT University in Australia set out to develop a system that can do this.