Lifeboat Foundation

Gas taxes are the largest source of funding for highway construction, maintenance.

The Japanese government expects flying cars to launch full-scale in urban areas by the 2030s and wants to use the 2025 World Exposition in Osaka to promote the cutting-edge technology, as well as smooth the way for their real-life adoption.

TOKYO — With flying cars inching closer to real-world use, Japan will start working on new legislation as early as next month to allow passengers on the soaring sedans at the World Exposition in Osaka in 2025.

The Japanese government expects flying cars to launch full-scale in urban areas by the 2030s. It wants to use the expo to promote the cutting-edge technology and smooth the way for their real-life adoption.

Continue reading “Flying cars at 2025 Expo: Japan crafts ‘rules of the sky’” »

Flying taxi designed for long commutes is science fiction made real.

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This killer whale-inspired watercraft is the aquatic equivalent of aerobatic airplanes.

Elon Musk has made the argument that Tesla is more of an AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics company. This is another argument in the series of Musk’s insistence that Tesla is not an automotive company. He has been saying for some time now that investors should view Tesla as a group of startups. He says that Tesla’s service centres are a startup, Tesla’s insurance company is a startup, Tesla’s automation group is a startup, etc.

Musk said that eventually, Tesla is going to be as synonymous with AI and robotics as with vehicles and energy. The CEO mentioned this during a conference call about Tesla’s Q1 financial results.

Right now people think of Tesla as a car company or as an energy company. I think long term, people will think of Tesla as much as an AI robotics company as we are a car company or an energy company. I think we are developing one of the strongest hardware and software AI teams in the world.

Israel’s Aquarius Engines this week gave the world a first look at the tiny hydrogen engine it hopes can supplant gas engine-generators and hydrogen fuel cells in future electrified vehicles. Weighing just 22 lb (10 kg), the simple engine uses a single moving piston to develop power. Beyond vehicles, Aquarius is developing the engine for use as an off-grid micro-generator.

First created in 2014, Aquarius’ efficient single-piston linear engine has a single central cylinder in which the piston moves between two engine heads. In previous iterations, Aquarius used more conventional fossil fuels to create combustion, but now it’s turning attention to emissions-slashing hydrogen. The company says Austrian engineering firm AVL-Schrick recently completed third-party testing, verifying that a modified version of the engine can operate purely on hydrogen.

“It was always our dream at Aquarius Engines to breathe oxygen into hydrogen technology as the fuel of the future,” explains Aquarius chairman Gal Fridman. “From initial tests, it appears that our hydrogen engine, that doesn’t require costly hydrogen fuel-cells, could be the affordable, green and sustainable answer to the challenges faced by global transport and remote energy production.”

Home batteries are becoming increasingly popular ways to store solar energy to power houses at night, but what if one could make the whole house a battery? Rechargeable cement batteries prove the idea is possible, even if it has a long way to go to be affordable.

Dr Emma Zhang of Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, mixed 0.9 percent carbon fibers into cement and poured it over a metal-coated carbon fiber mesh to make concrete blocks. In the journal Buildings, Zhang and colleagues report that with iron anodes and nickel cathodes these blocks become rechargeable batteries.

At 0.8 Watthours per liter, Zhang’s battery is hundreds of times less energy-dense than a lithium-ion battery, and completely useless for transportation purposes. However, it stores about ten times more energy than previous rechargeable concrete batteries. These, Zhang said in a statement; “Showed very low performance,” forcing her and colleagues to seek new ideas on how to produce the electrodes.

One of the more interesting areas of battery research centers on how these devices can not just store energy, but also double as structural components. We’ve seen some impressive examples of this that could be worked into electric vehicles, and now scientists in Sweden have applied this type of thinking to big buildings, demonstrating a novel type of cement-based battery that could see large structures constructed from functional concrete.

The research was carried out at Chalmers University of Technology, where scientists were working on developing more sustainable building materials, with a particular focus on concrete. As the world’s most widely-used material and one that is very energy intensive to produce, we’re seeing a lot of research into how the carbon footprint of concrete could be reduced, and the authors of this new study have come up with an interesting potential solution.

Like regular concrete, it starts with a cement-based mixture, but one spiked with small amounts of short carbon fibers to add conductivity and flexural strength. Also incorporated into the mix are a pair of carbon fiber meshes, one coated in iron to act as the battery’s anode and the other coated in nickel to act as the cathode. As the battery’s two electrodes, these ferry electrons back and forward as the device is charged and discharged.