Lifeboat Foundation

Public transportation just got way cooler. Premium Swedish electric boat maker Candela has just unveiled the new Candela P-12, an electric hydrofoil water taxi.

Designed to replace traditional diesel-powered ferries, the Candela P-12 uses an electric powertrain combined with a carbon fiber hull and hydrofoils to create a super-efficient drive system.

The 8.5 meter (28 foot) water taxi can fit up to 12 passengers in its panoramic-view cabin.

This axion insulating state was realized, Bansil says, by combining certain metals and observing their magnetoelectric response. In this case, researchers used a solid state chip composed of manganese bismuth telluride, which were adhered together in two-dimensional layers, to measure the resulting electric and magnetic properties.

Researchers note that such a finding has implications for a range of technologies, including sensors, switches, computers, and memory storage devices, among many others. The “storage, transportation, and manipulation of magnetic data could become much faster, more robust, and energy-efficient” if scientists can integrate these new topological materials into future devices, the researchers write.

“It’s like discovering a new element,” Bansil says. “And we know there’s going to be all sorts of interesting applications for this.”

CHINA’S NEW 600 KM PER HOUR LEVITATED TRAIN is the next step in its system of 38,000 km of high speed rail lines covering the nation. China’s land area is almost exactly the same as the USA’s, but, by contrast, the USA has ZERO km of high speed rail. China is financing this and other massive infrastructural networks in the same way that the US formerly financed all its major infrastructure— with governmental financing. Every highway, every railway system, every waterway, etc., etc., in the USA was built in the same way, but we stopped building such systems.

It’s fast, very fast.

In fact, it is the fastest train the world.

Continue reading “China unveils 600 km/h Transrapid train” »

Energy storage ideas.

Mateo Jaramillo sees the future of renewable energy in thousands of iron pellets rusting away in a laboratory in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Jaramillo is chief executive of Form Energy, a company that recently announced what it says is a breakthrough in a global race: how to store renewable energy for long periods of time.

The aircraft, evocatively called Skydweller and built by a U.S.-Spanish aerospace firm Skydweller Aero, could help the Navy keep a watchful eye on the surrounding seas while escorting ships months at a time or act as a communications relay platform. The company was awarded a $5 million contract by the U.S. Navy to develop the aircraft.

To stay airborne for so long, the pilotless craft would have 2900sq ft of solar cells on its wings.

Airports have vast swaths of empty land and rooftops. But it’s not so easy as just covering everything with solar panels.

The Air Force wants Hermeus Corporation to prove the concept for a high-speed transport, and maybe more.

Skydweller Aero’s latest flight test of a modified solar-powered aircraft will provide the real-world data necessary for the U.S.-Spanish startup’s engineers to start developing and testing their proprietary autonomous flight software.

Established in 2019 following the acquisition of Swiss nonprofit Solar Impulse’s Solar Impulse 2 aircraft—which circumnavigated the globe in 2016 — Skydweller is headquartered in Oklahoma, with offices in the Washington D.C. region and a flight test facility in Albacete, Spain, roughly two hours south of their engineering operations in Madrid. During the two-and-a-half-hour optionally-piloted flight demonstration in Albacete, Skydweller’s engineering team completed initial validation of their new flight hardware and autopilot’s ability to initiate and manage the aircraft control, actuation, and sensor technology systems.

A pilot was in the cockpit of the Solar Impulse 2, working in tandem with another operator who controlled the movements of the aircraft remotely from the ground.

This next jump in battery-tech could solve a lot of EV problems.

The world of the internal combustion engine will sadly, but very necessarily, come to a close at some point in many of our lifetimes. Hybrids and electric vehicles are becoming more affordable and more advanced at a rapid pace, which means batteries are taking the place of fossil fuels. This has led to an equally rapid progression in battery technology, with the main goals of improving capacity, charging times, and safety. One major advancement in this field is the advent of solid-state batteries, which promise to push the boundaries of the limitations that current lithium-ion batteries carry.

Continue reading “What You Need to Know About Solid-State Batteries” »