Vantablack is a coating so black, anything covered in it appears to disappear, replaced by the blackest of black voids.
Now, the company behind the coating, Surrey NanoSystems, has teamed up with BMW to see what it looks like when you paint a vehicle with Vantablack — and it’s about as trippy as you’d expect.
A French startup is trying to streamline electric conversion with Tesla batteries in order to offer a relatively cheap way to convert older fossil fuel-powered cars.
Therefs nothing new about electric conversions, but they are often really complicated, which also makes them really expensive.
It most often cost tens of thousands of dollars, and thatfs why most electric conversions today are done on classic cars or to create drag-strip monsters.
Tesla is planning to ramp up installation of its new solar roof, but it needs to figure out a way to reduce installation time.
Now a new patent shows a possible solution by producing and installing solar roof tiles in jointed groups.
At Tesla’s 2019 shareholder’s meeting earlier this year, CEO Elon Musk said Tesla was still working on longevity testing for the new version of its solar roof tiles, Solar Roof V3, and that they are now installing the solar product in 8 states.
General Motors is the latest automaker reported to be working on solid-state lithium batteries, thanks to a $2 million grant from Uncle Sam.
The money is part of a larger grant to develop more fuel-efficient powertrains, CNET reported. The company is expected to use the rest of the money to develop a lighter-weight, more efficient engine for medium duty trucks, perhaps to replace the company’s 6.2-liter V-8.
Solid-state lithium batteries replace the flammable liquid organic solvents such as ethylene carbonate as an electrolyte in conventional lithium batteries with a solid, ceramic electrolyte that isn’t flammable. That allows engineers to cram more lithium atoms into the battery to give it more energy without increasing volatility, which could lead to lighter, batteries for electric cars with longer ranges.
LIVINGSTON, La. — About a mile and a half from a building so big you can see it from space, every car on the road slows to a crawl. Drivers know to take the 10 mph (16 km/h) speed limit very seriously: That’s because the building houses a massive detector that’s hunting for celestial vibrations at the smallest scale ever attempted. Not surprisingly, it’s sensitive to all earthly vibrations around it, from the rumblings of a passing car to natural disasters on the other side of the globe.
As a result, scientists who work at one of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detectors must go to extraordinary lengths to hunt down and remove all potential sources of noise — slowing down traffic around the detector, monitoring every tiny tremor in the ground, even suspending the equipment from a quadruple pendulum system that minimizes vibrations — all in the effort to create the most “silent” vibrational spot on Earth.
You know a new industry is born when investments pour in and results encourage more spending. Now, a new lab, the Collins Electric Aircraft Lab, wants to offer urban air mobility (UAM) and the general electric aviation world a 1MW electric airplane motor.
Who knew?
Not only are the batteries eco-friendly, but they are powerful as well. The researchers found a way to make them last longer and provide more electricity batteries by using silicon anodes — an electrode through which the current enters into an electrical device — instead of traditional graphite.
“Today graphite is used as the main commercial material for fabricating the anode electrodes,” Cengiz Ozkan, a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Riverside explained.
“We replaced graphite in the anodes with our new nanosilicon material derived from waste glass bottles,” he continued. “In the half-cell configuration, our batteries demonstrate performance about four times higher compared to graphite anode batteries.” Researchers at the University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering used a three-step process to use a discarded glass bottle into lithium-ion batteries.
Summary: The ability to train large scale CNNs directly on your cell phone without sending the data round trip to the cloud is the key to next gen AI applications like real time computer vision and safe self-driving cars. Problem is our current GPU AI chips won’t get us there. But neuromorphic chips look like they will.
A Californian-based start-up has unveiled what it says is the world’s largest computer chip.
The Wafer Scale Engine, designed by Cerebras Systems, is slightly bigger than a standard iPad.
The firm says a single chip can drive complex artificial intelligence (AI) systems in everything from driverless cars to surveillance software.
How far off are we from hopping on and off air taxis as a familiar local mode of transport? Eyes this week were fixed on one company aggressively keeping up its bit to open commercial routes and bring this type of mobility to life.
Volocopter on Wednesday presented its latest air taxi design, dubbed VoloCity. The machine can accommodate two people and hand luggage.
Ben Sampson, Aerospace Testing International, noted that this is actually the fourth electrical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) iteration but “the first that meets the new European Aviation Safety Agency standards.”
