Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists astounded by performance of sustainable batteries with far-reaching implications for e-vehicles and devices.

Researchers at Bristol have developed high-performance sodium and potassium ion batteries using sustainably sourced cellulose.

Scientists at the Bristol Composites Institute have developed a novel controllable unidirectional ice-templating strategy which can tailor the electrochemical performances of next-generation post-lithium-ion batteries with sustainability and large-scale availability. The paper is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The future of autonomous vehicle deployment requires a smart transportation infrastructure that uses AI-traffic cameras and LiDAR sensors.

Starbucks is aiming to capitalize on the rising demand for electric vehicle infrastructure by installing fast chargers at up to 15 coffeehouses this summer, along a 1,350-mile route from Colorado to Washington.

The project, a pilot program with Volvo Cars, aims to build one DC charging station on each 100-mile segment of the western route.

Why install chargers at Starbucks? The coffeehouse chain is betting that it can score business from electric vehicle owners while they wait for their cars to charge — a process that can take a while, depending on the battery and strength of the charger.

USPS has been criticized for not ordering more EVs.

The United States Postal Service announced its initial order of 50,000 next-generation delivery vehicles, 10,019 of which will be battery-electric vehicles. It’s a notable number considering the agency’s resistance to calls for increasing the number of EVs in its future delivery fleet.

Originally, the postal service said it would purchase 165,000 next-generation mail trucks, only 10 percent of which will be battery-electric vehicles. President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats urged the agency to increase the number of EVs, but USPS determined there was no legal reason to change its plans.

Continue reading “USPS is doubling its initial order of electric mail delivery trucks” »

Like electric vehicles – traditionally seen as expensive and niche – solar power is now becoming a realistic option for many households, as well as businesses wishing to decarbonise their operations. While the upfront costs of installing a photovoltaic (PV) rooftop system can be expensive, home solar will usually pay for itself within 5–10 years – and then provides the owner with an essentially free, limitless supply of clean energy, decentralised and unaffected by price volatility. Unlike the world’s increasingly scarce, finite supplies of coal, oil and gas, our Sun will continue to shine for another five billion years. Home solar can also be combined with batteries (which, like solar, are rapidly declining in cost) for energy storage at night.

At the utility scale, gigantic solar projects are now emerging in many countries. Recent years have seen the first gigawatt-scale (GW) facilities. The largest has a nameplate capacity of 2.3 GW. China is the world leader, accounting for 30% of all solar electric generation, followed by Europe (21%) and then the USA (16%). The vast majority is produced from PV modules, with a small fraction obtained by concentrated solar power (using mirrors or lenses to concentrate a large area of sunlight onto a receiver).

Continue reading “Solar power reaches 1 TW milestone” »

Ingenuity, the helicopter currently zipping its way around Mars, has been a hotly watched topic here at UT. After completing its 21st mission and being on the planet for a little over a year, Ingenuity’s handlers have officially extended its mission in the hopes that it will continue its stellar, groundbreaking performances.

Perseverance, Ingenuity’s rover companion, is transitioning into its second scientific campaign, where it plans to travel 130 meters up from the Jezero crater floor to a dried-up river delta. Here it will focus on one of its primary missions – searching for evidence of ancient life on Mars. And Ingenuity will help lead the way.

Even Ingenuity’s path to the river delta, which isn’t limited to staying on the ground, won’t be easy. It will likely take three separate flights to get to a new staging area in the delta, including one that goes around a hill that rises off the crater floor. During this time, it will help scout a pathway for Perseverance to take, including providing information to decide which of two river channels the rover should take to reach the delta itself.

In theory, competition among ride-hailing companies should be a good thing, providing more options for consumers. In practice, having too many ride-hailing vehicles adds to urban congestion. How can cities balance these factors?

A new study co-authored by MIT researchers, in collaboration with the Institute for Informatics and Telematics of the National Research Council of Italy, provides a model that shows the extent to which ride-sharing competition clogs the streets—allowing analysts and policymakers to estimate how many vehicles and firms might form an optimally-sized market in a given metro area.

“What this shows is that by not coordinating ride-hailing companies, we are creating a huge amount of additional traffic,” says Carlo Ratti, a professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “If cities were to use a platform to coordinate ride-hailing, we could reduce overall congestion and traffic in cities all over the world.”

Elon Musk signaled plans to scale Tesla to the “extreme” while teasing the release of Tesla’s “Master Plan Part 3” on Twitter one day before opening the automaker’s first European factory.

On Monday, Musk revealed on Twitter the themes that will dominate the next installment in Tesla’s long-term playbook: artificial intelligence and scaling the automaker’s operations.

“Main Tesla subjects will be scaling to extreme size, which is needed to shift humanity away from fossil fuels, and AI,” Musk tweeted. “But I will also include sections about SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company.”

The algorithm estimates how weights will need to be altered on the forward pass, and the estimates perform comparably to backpropagation.