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Data from GEOTAB and the North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE) shows the true capability of the Tesla Semi. From the information gathered, the Tesla Semi seems to be living up to the hype.

Data from the Run for Less event hints at the capabilities of the Tesla Semi. Tesla’s Class-8 truck was put through the ringer at the event, operating on its maximum payload capacity and traveling up to 500 miles round trip.

Dave Mullaney from Rocky Mountain Institute shared some information from Tesla Semi runs. During Run for Less, GEOTAB and the NACFE collected data from three PepsiCo Tesla Semi trucks. Mullaney shared the results of each Tesla Semi’s performance from the first day.

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We could soon see more lithium-ion batteries made with recycled materials thanks to a new partnership. BASF, a battery materials producer, has announced that it’s teaming up with Nanotech Energy, a maker of graphene-based energy products, to produce lithium-ion batteries with recycled materials for customers in North America.

While BASF will create the cathode active materials using recycled metals from a Battle Creek, Michigan facility, Nanotech will use those materials to create the lithium-ion battery cells. Making the batteries with recycled metals could decrease their CO2 footprint by around 25 percent, according to BASF.

Additionally, BASF and Nanotech Energy will also work with the American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) and the Canada-based TODA Advanced Materials Inc. ABTC will recycle the materials gathered by Nanotech, such as nickel, cobalt, manganese, and lithium. TODA will then use the materials to create battery precursors, which BASF will then convert into cathode active materials.

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Archaeological secrets from thousands of years ago in northeast Africa have been unearthed thanks to modern-day scientific innovations. A process known as chemical imaging recently revealed “hidden mysteries” about ancient Egyptian paintings located in tomb chapels close to the Nile River — and portable devices made it possible to analyze the 3,000-year-old art on-site in its original locations.

As announced in the peer-reviewed publication PLOS One on July 12, the portable devices enabled Philippe Martinez of France’s Sorbonne University, along with a team of international colleagues, to visit the tombs and analyze the paintings dating back to the Ramesside Period, which lasted from approximately 1,295 B.C. to 1,070 B.C. They were located in tomb chapels in the Theban Necropolis, located just west of the Nile, per a press release.

Thanks to the chemical imaging technology, the team gathered detailed information on the paintings, including paint composition and layering, and alterations that had been made to the pictures over time.

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My flash fiction literary sci-fi story Le bibloteca de las estrellas has been published by White Cat Publications! Link:

By Logan Thrasher Collins.

Six years after their wedding night, Erik’s wife Viviana died in the halls of La biblioteca de las estrellas. Viviana’s body laid on the floor of that great library, stacks of blue books scattered all around. The covers of the books were navy blue, the pages a pale cornflower blue, and the paragraphs written in brilliant sapphire ink. Erik stepped hesitantly towards his wife’s body, not wanting to comprehend the sight before him. Viviana wore a yellow sundress and her cooling skin seemed luminous beneath the azure light of the library’s electric chandeliers.

As Erik approached the body, he began to weep. His tears fell like rainwater onto the blue books, staining them with grief. Erik reminded himself that Viviana had died for a reason of her own choosing, that she had purposefully let El conocimiento de las estrellas into her brain. He knelt beside her, not wanting to move, not wanting to look away from her face. To Erik, Viviana was the most sparkly glittering girl in the universe. She had been enamored with small animals, she had danced in meadows of scarlet flowers, and she had spoken animatedly of constellations and galactic nuclei. But now her glamor had been stolen by the miniscule machines inhabiting these blue books.

Continue reading “La Biblioteca de las Estrellas” | >

Instead of designing their own qubits for study, the team used nature-made ones and focused on ways to control them.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada have developed a novel and robust way to control individual qubits. This ability is a crucial step as humanity attempts to scale up its computational capacities using quantum computing, a press release said.

Much like silicon-based computers use bits as the basic unit of storing information, quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits. A number of elemental particles, such as electrons and photons, have been used to serve this purpose, wherein the charge or polarization of the light is used to denote the 0 or 1 state of the qubit.

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For about a year and a half, Coca-Cola has experimented with limited-edition beverages that have mystery tastes — most of them with vague, futuristic concepts and undisclosed flavors.

The latest one, Coca-Cola Y3000, fits the bill. The one distinction: It’s supposed to taste like the future. Fittingly, the soft-drink giant used artificial intelligence to help determine the flavor and packaging.

It’s important for Coca-Cola to keep customers — particularly younger ones — excited about Coke, its more-than-a-century-old signature product. In recent years, health-conscious consumers have shied away from sugary beverages, making it trickier for soda sellers to market their legacy brands. Coca-Cola has used its Creations platform, responsible for limited-edition flavors like Y3000, to try to make the brand resonate with younger consumers.

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