MS Tûranor PlanetSolar, also known as PlanetSolar and founded by Swiss explorer Raphael Domjan, is the world’s largest solar-powered boat, which was launched on March 31, 2010. Between 2010 and 2012, it became the first solar electric car to round the globe, taking 584 days.
Solar panels covering 537 m2 of the 31-meter boat, rated at 93 kW, connect to two electric motors, one in each hull. The ship’s two hulls contain 8.5 tons of lithium-ion batteries. Because of its shape, the boat can go at speeds of up to 10 knots (19 km/h). To establish its hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, the hull was model tested in wind tunnels and tank tested. After the record attempt, the boat was planned to be utilized as a luxury yacht.
By Subscription? – In California, You Can and it’s a Tesla Model 3 EV.
A Santa Monica, California-based company can put you into a Tesla Model 3 using its cellphone app which is now available for both Android and iPhones. The company offering the Car-as-a-service (CaaS) model is Autonomy. Although currently available only in California, the future plans include rolling it out to other U.S. states.
Until the outset of the global pandemic, owning a car was on a dramatic decline. Ride-sharing was exploding, and because cars were becoming pricier, young people entering the workforce were less inclined to join their parents’ generation of car owners.
Isolation and lockdowns temporarily took drivers off the road, as did sticker shock. The latter has been particularly true for electric vehicles (EV) which without government rebates and incentives can cost tens of thousands of dollars more than cars running on gasoline and diesel.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab have created a novel fabrication process to produce smart textiles that comfortabl | Technology.
Using 3DKnITS, the research team created a “smart” shoe and mat, followed by building a hardware and software system capable of measuring and interpreting real-time data from the pressure sensors. An individual then performed yoga poses on the smart textile mat while the machine-learning system was able to accurately predict the individual’s motions and poses 99 percent of the time.
“Some of the early pioneering work on smart fabrics happened at the Media Lab in the late ’90s. The materials, embeddable electronics, and fabrication machines have advanced enormously since then,” said co-author Jospeh A. Paradiso, an Alexander W. Dreyfoos Professor and Director of the Responsive Environments group within the Media Lab. “It’s a great time to see our research returning to this area, for example through projects like Irmandy’s — they point at an exciting future where sensing and functions diffuse more fluidly into materials and open up enormous possibilities.”
Wicaksono now plans to refine the circuit and machine learning model since the fabrication technique has been deemed a success. This refinement involves the removing a time-consuming calibration step which currently needs to be done to each individual before the system can classify actions. Once this is done, 3DKnITS will be easier to use. Along with that, the researchers also hope to conduct tests on smart shoes outside of the lab to test how the accuracy of the sensors are affected by environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity.
Hibernation Biology & Applications In Human Health & Resilience — Dr. Dana K. Merriman, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor Emerita of Biology; Director of the Squirrel Colony, UW-Oshkosh.
Dr. Dana K. Merriman Ph.D. (www.uwosh.edu/facstaff/merriman/VaughanHome), is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Biology, and Director of the Squirrel Colony, at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and Adjunct Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences, Medical College of Wisconsin.
With her BA in Biological Science and her PhD in Physiology and Cell Biology, both from University of California-Santa Barbara, as well as having spent time as a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Utah Health Sciences Center, a core focus of Dr. Merriman’s laboratory research over the years has been the development of a captive breeding colony of the 13-lined ground squirrels.
This unique, one-of-a-kind captive breeding program, due to this species very unique cone-dominant, diurnal visual system, as well as their impressive physiological ability to survive in hibernation for over six months without food or water, has served investigators with animals and custom-dissected tissues from the US, Asia, and Europe for decades, as well as been core to Dr Merriman’s own work on vision, including cone cell biology and retinal function during the metabolic state transitions associated with hibernation.
Over the years, Dr. Merriman expanded her research horizon well outside of vision, into neuroscience, and in recent years she has collaborated on studies of muscle physiology, viral genomics, molecular biology of transposable elements, and comparative genetics of the control of coat patterning.
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Intel ((INTC) — Get Intel Corporation Report ) is the bearer of additional bad news.
The chip giant will give an extra blow to consumers and businesses concerned about the health of the economy. For several weeks in fact, consumers have seen their bills for groceries and other products increase. The price of gasoline at the pump has jumped when they go to fill up their car.
And the situation is not getting any better since inflation remains at its highest for forty years, which should push the Federal Reserve to be even more aggressive in raising rates. However, economists have already warned that this monetary policy would plunge the economy into recession.
A new study has identified neuroplastic changes in brain structure that accompany attention bias modification training in highly anxious individuals. The findings, which appear in the journal Biological Psychology, shed light on the mechanisms underlying the efficacy of the treatment.
Research has demonstrated that the brain prioritizes threating information over non-threatening information. But in highly anxious individuals, this attentional bias can become exaggerated and detrimental. The authors of the new study sought to better understand the changes in brain structure that result from attention bias modification, an intervention that seeks to systematically train attention away from threatening stimuli and toward neutral stimuli.
“Our lab has had a longstanding interest in understanding the behavioral and neural mechanisms of affective attention and attentional bias to affective information,” said study authors Josh Carlson and Lin Fang of the Cognitive x Affective Behavior & Integrated Neuroscience (CABIN) Lab at Northern Michigan University.
