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Archive for the ‘innovation’ category: Page 2

Mar 8, 2024

Next-gen EVs will be cheaper to produce than gas cars by 2027

Posted by in categories: innovation, transportation

Gartner predicts, too, that by 2027 15% of EV companies founded since the last decade will be acquired or bankrupt. “This does not mean the EV sector is crumbling,” said Pedro Pacheco, vice president of research at Gartner. “It is simply entering a new phase where companies with the best products and services will win over the remaining.” Of course, at least 18 EV and battery startups that went public in recent years and attracted huge investments are now struggling for cash, with plenty going belly up, including Lordstown Motors and Proterra.

Still, new innovations will push BEV price down, Gartner states. “New OEM incumbents want to heavily redefine the status quo in automotive,” he added. “They brought new innovations that simplify production costs such as centralized vehicle architecture or the introduction of gigacastings that help reduce manufacturing cost and assembly time, which legacy automakers had no choice to adopt to survive.”

By 2027, next-gen BEVs will be cheaper to make than comparable ICE vehicles, with production costs dropping faster than battery costs. But there’s a rub: Repair costs will be more expensive, Gartner says. By 2027, it predicts that the average cost of an EV body and battery “serious accident repair” will increase by 30%.

Mar 5, 2024

The Public Is Rapidly Turning Against AI, Polling Shows

Posted by in categories: innovation, robotics/AI

AI isn’t nearly as popular with the global populace as its boosters would have you believe.

As Axios reports based on a new poll of 32,000 global respondents from the consultancy firm Edelman, public trust is already eroding less than 18 months into the so-called “AI revolution” that popped off with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in November 2022.

“Trust is the currency of the AI era, yet, as it stands, our innovation account is dangerously overdrawn,” Justin Westcott, the global technology chair for the firm, told Axios. “Companies must move beyond the mere mechanics of AI to address its true cost and value — the ‘why’ and ‘for whom.’”

Mar 3, 2024

Suddenly, It Looks Like We’re in a Golden Age for Medicine

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, innovation

We may be on the cusp of an era of astonishing innovation — the limits of which aren’t even clear yet.

Mar 2, 2024

Movies of ultrafast electronic circuitry in space and time

Posted by in categories: computing, innovation

The increasing demand for ever-faster information processing has ushered in a new era of research focused on high-speed electronics operating at frequencies nearing terahertz and petahertz regimes. While existing electronic devices predominantly function in the gigahertz range, the forefront of electronics is pushing towards millimeter waves, and the first prototypes of high-speed transistors, hybrid photonic platforms, and terahertz metadevices are starting to bridge the electronic and optical domains.

However, characterizing and diagnosing such devices pose a significant challenge due to the limitations of available diagnostic tools, particularly in terms of speed and spatial resolution. How shall one measure a breakthrough device if it’s the fastest and smallest of its kind?

In response to this challenge, a team of researchers from the University of Konstanz now proposes an innovative solution: They create femtosecond electron pulses in a transmission electron microscope, compress them with infrared laser light to merely 80 femtosecond duration, and synchronize them to the inner fields of a laser-triggered electronic transmission line with the help of a photoconductive switch. Then, using a pump-probe approach, the researchers directly sense the local electromagnetic fields in their electronic devices as a function of space and time.

Mar 2, 2024

Scientists Demonstrate Effective Fusion “Spark Plug” in Groundbreaking Experiments

Posted by in categories: energy, innovation

Researchers at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) have led experiments showcasing an efficient “spark plug” for direct-drive approaches to inertial confinement fusion (ICF). In a pair of studies featured in Nature Physics, the team shares their findings and details the potential for scaling up these methods, aiming for successful fusion in a future facility.

LLE is the largest university-based U.S. Department of Energy program and hosts the OMEGA laser system, which is the largest academic laser in the world but still almost one hundredth the energy of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. With OMEGA, Rochester scientists completed several successful attempts to fire 28 kilojoules of laser energy at small capsules filled with deuterium and tritium fuel, causing the capsules to implode and produce a plasma hot enough to initiate fusion reactions between the fuel nuclei. The experiments caused fusion reactions that produced more energy than the amount of energy in the central hot plasma.

The OMEGA experiments use direct laser illumination of the capsule and differ from the indirect drive approach used on the NIF. When using the indirect drive approach, the laser light is converted into X-rays that in turn drive the capsule implosion. The NIF used indirect drive to irradiate a capsule with X-rays using about 2,000 kilojoules of laser energy. This led to a 2022 breakthrough at NIF in achieving fusion ignition —a fusion reaction that creates a net gain of energy from the target.

Mar 2, 2024

A baby star’s planet-forming disk has 3 times more water than all of Earth’s oceans

Posted by in categories: innovation, space

The team behind the breakthrough used the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array (ALMA) to zoom in on water vapor locked up in gas and dust within a protoplanetary disk surrounding the sun-like star HL Tauri, located 450 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

“I had never imagined that we could capture an image of oceans of water vapor in the same region where a planet is likely forming,” Stefano Facchini research leader and an astronomer at the University of Milan, said in a statement. “Our results show how the presence of water may influence the development of a planetary system, just like it did some 4.5 billion years ago in our own solar system.”

Mar 2, 2024

Scientists May Have Tamed Fusion’s #1 Nemesis

Posted by in categories: energy, innovation

A breakthrough in plasma control brings us a step closer to safe, limitless power.

Mar 1, 2024

Discover the universe’s oldest black hole, defying the mysteries of space

Posted by in categories: cosmology, innovation

Embark on a cosmic journey as we explore the latest breakthrough in black hole research. Recently, scientists revealed the discovery of the oldest black hole ever observed.

Feb 29, 2024

Fire-resistant sodium battery balances safety, cost and performance

Posted by in categories: innovation, materials

A sodium battery developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin significantly reduces fire risks from the technology, while also relying on inexpensive, abundant materials to serve as its building blocks.

Though battery fires are rare, increased battery usage means these incidents are on the rise.

Continue reading “Fire-resistant sodium battery balances safety, cost and performance” »

Feb 28, 2024

Synthon-based ligand discovery in virtual libraries of over 11 billion compounds

Posted by in categories: chemistry, innovation

Wonderful work truly breakthrough for different types of compounds for chemistry. Year 2021.


V-SYNTHES, a scalable and computationally cost-effective synthon-based approach to compound screening, identified compounds with a high affinity for CB2 and CB1 in a hierarchical structure-based screen of more than 11 billion compounds.

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