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Category: transportation – Page 495

Car dealerships in Nordic countries actively discourage consumers from buying electric vehicles, researchers who conducted an undercover investigation said Monday.

Their findings, published in the peer-reviewed Nature Energy, reveal an overlooked barrier to the sale of electric vehicles, which are expected to play a key role in lowering CO2 emissions and curbing global warming.

Posing as prospective buyers, the researchers made 126 enquiries at 82 dealerships in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland.

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A chance to switch to renewable sources for heating, electricity and fuel, while also providing new opportunities for several industries to produce large numbers of renewable products. This is the verdict of researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, who now, after 10 years of energy research into gasification of biomass, see an array of new technological achievements.

“The potential is huge! Using only the already existing Swedish energy plants, we could produce renewable fuels equivalent to 10 percent of the world’s , if such a conversion were fully implemented,” says Henrik Thunman, Professor of Energy Technology at Chalmers.

How to implement a switch from fossil-fuels to renewables is a tricky issue for many industries. For heavy industries, such as oil refineries, or the paper and pulp industry, it is especially urgent to start moving, because investment cycles are so long. At the same time, it is important to get the investment right because you may be forced to replace boilers or facilities in advance, which means major financial costs. Thanks to long-term strategic efforts, researchers at Sweden´s Chalmers University of Technology have now paved the way for radical changes, which could be applied to new installations, as well as be implemented at thousands of existing plants around the globe.

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Red is the highest level of alert to aviation, meaning that either an eruption is forecast to be imminent with significant emission of ash into the atmosphere likely — as is the case currently in Hawaii — or an eruption is underway with significant emission of ash into the atmosphere. Either way, this could mean disruptions are possible in aviation around the big island of Hawaii for the foreseeable future, depending on what happens.

Ash clouds from volcanoes can clog the engines of airplanes and cause them to malfunction — or stop working altogether. According to this article from the World Organization of Volcano Observatories:

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The power of the cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning is making smart cities and data-based Location of Things navigation a reality. Join the Principal Product Manager for Microsoft Azure Maps and others and learn how advanced location technology will revolutionize everything from autonomous cars to connected cities. Don’t miss this VB Live event!

Register here for free.

Location data is the foundation of technology: It’s what binds a device and a user, a user and the environment they’re in. And as location data moves to the cloud and gets smarter, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the number of potential applications for smart location data is exploding, says Chris Pendleton, Principal PM for Azure Maps. We’re on the threshold of creating a smarter society, built on the hundreds of millions of connected devices that together create The Location of Things.

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Billionaire Elon Musk says he’s almost completed a tunnel under a Los Angeles suburb to test a novel transportation system that would scoot commuters underground on electric sleds called skates.

Musk tweeted Thursday that, pending regulatory approvals, free rides will be offered to the public in a few months. He also posted an Instagram video of the interior of the tunnel.

Last year, the Hawthorne City Council approved an approximately 2-mile (3.2-kilometer) test tunnel from Musk’s SpaceX rocket plant to a point east of Los Angeles International Airport.

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We’ve all dreamed of owning, or at the very least being a passenger of, a flying car. It’s the sci-fi dream that never transpired — until recently, that is. With a growing emphasis of developing flying taxis among several different companies, one wonders if the revolutionary Tesla Motors has plans to join in on this new venture.

Could Elon Musk’s random tweet from late last year be an indicator of Tesla’s interest in flying cars and their joining of this brand new “space race?”

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