Specialty subdivisions of BMW and Range Rover offer bulletproof variants of the luxury automakers’ current models, and other aftermarket companies like Brabus and AddArmor go a step further by making donor vehicles damn-near bombproof. But none of those examples look anywhere near as sturdy as the Armortruck SUV.
He continued, “This is a surprise: Overwhelmingly, the people were at home. We thought maybe they were taking public transportation, and we’ve taken special precautions on public transportation, but actually no, because these people were literally at home.”
“They’re not working. They’re not traveling,” Cuomo added, according to NBC News. “We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percent of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work — that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. That’s not the case. They were predominantly at home.”
New spacecraft experience setbacks all the time. SpaceX Starship prototype violently disassembled several times. Boeing launched the CST-100 but ended up in the wrong orbit. China isn’t a stranger to setbacks either.
China tested a prototype spacecraft on May 5th, 2020 in efforts to prove the technology was ready. It’s good it was a test and not an actual mission since the spacecraft did not perform as expected. The news agency Xinhua reported the spacecraft launched from Hainan China, operated abnormally during its return.
Spacecraft experience tremendous heat during the last minutes of their mission. The heat shield protects the spacecraft from that heat. NASA looked at lots of materials and tested many before using for heat shields.
Researchers in China have demonstrated a prototype device that uses microwave air plasmas for jet propulsion, an advance that could one day replace fossil fuel combustion engines.
The team from the Institute of Technological Sciences at Wuhan University describe the engine in AIP Advances.
Waiting in the wings: How plasma could help revolutionise aircraft design.
When we first covered the high-power Delfast TopCop electric bicycle, the company was still pitching its bikes to various police departments around the world. Now we’re hearing some of the first feedback from actual cops who have incorporated the e-bikes into their daily service.
Tesla has made even more battery improvements on its new ‘million-mile battery’ now with less cobalt, which could result in lower cost and even more energy density.
Last year, we were the first to report on Tesla’s battery research partner, Jeff Dahn and his team at Dalhousie University, unveiling the impressive results of tests on a new battery cell that could last over 1 million miles in an electric vehicle.
The new battery tested is a Li-ion battery cell with a next-generation “single crystal” NMC 532 cathode and a new advanced electrolyte, which they patented.
Scaling Up
There’s a long way to go between a proof-of-concept prototype and installing an engine in a real plane. But the prototype was able to launch a one-kilogram steel ball 24 millimeters into the air. That’s the same thrust, proportional to scale, as a conventional jet engine.
“Our results demonstrated that such a jet engine based on microwave air plasma can be a potentially viable alternative to the conventional fossil fuel jet engine,” lead researcher and Wuhan University engineer Jau Tang said in a press release.
Some big M&A is afoot in Israel in the world of smart transportation. According to multiple reports and sources that have contacted TechCrunch, chip giant Intel is in the final stages of a deal to acquire Moovit, a startup that applies AI and big data analytics to track traffic and provide transit recommendations to some 800 million people globally. The deal is expected to close in the coming days at a price believed to be in the region of $1 billion.
We have contacted Nir Erez, the founder and CEO of Moovit, as well as Intel spokespeople for a comment on the reports and will update this story as we learn more. For now, Moovit’s spokesperson has not denied the reports and what we have been told directly.
“At this time we have no comment, but if anything changes I’ll definitely let you know,” Moovit’s spokesperson.