You know a new industry is born when investments pour in and results encourage more spending. Now, a new lab, the Collins Electric Aircraft Lab, wants to offer urban air mobility (UAM) and the general electric aviation world a 1MW electric airplane motor.
Who knew?
Not only are the batteries eco-friendly, but they are powerful as well. The researchers found a way to make them last longer and provide more electricity batteries by using silicon anodes — an electrode through which the current enters into an electrical device — instead of traditional graphite.
Continue reading “Researchers have found a way to make electric car batteries from glass bottles” »
Summary: The ability to train large scale CNNs directly on your cell phone without sending the data round trip to the cloud is the key to next gen AI applications like real time computer vision and safe self-driving cars. Problem is our current GPU AI chips won’t get us there. But neuromorphic chips look like they will.
A Californian-based start-up has unveiled what it says is the world’s largest computer chip.
The Wafer Scale Engine, designed by Cerebras Systems, is slightly bigger than a standard iPad.
The firm says a single chip can drive complex artificial intelligence (AI) systems in everything from driverless cars to surveillance software.
How far off are we from hopping on and off air taxis as a familiar local mode of transport? Eyes this week were fixed on one company aggressively keeping up its bit to open commercial routes and bring this type of mobility to life.
Volocopter on Wednesday presented its latest air taxi design, dubbed VoloCity. The machine can accommodate two people and hand luggage.
Ben Sampson, Aerospace Testing International, noted that this is actually the fourth electrical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) iteration but “the first that meets the new European Aviation Safety Agency standards.”
In this episode of our CleanTech Talk podcast interview series, Zach Shahan sits down with Tomek Gać, Co-Founder of Tesla Shuttle and founder and CEO of Quriers.pl and Energia Słonca, to discuss the successes, challenges, and future of electric delivery vehicles. You can listen to the full conversation in the embedded player below. Below that embedded SoundCloud player is a brief summary of the topics covered, but tune into the podcast to follow the full discussion.
It’s not like the one in your car, but a team of physicists at Trinity College Dublin have built what they claim is the world’s smallest engine. The engine is the size of a single calcium ion — about ten billion times smaller than an automobile engine.
Rather than powering your next road trip, the atomic engine could one day be used to lay the foundation for extraordinary, futuristic nanotechnologies.
Here’s how it works: the calcium ion holds an electrical charge, which makes it spin. This angular momentum is then used to convert heat from a laser beam into vibrations.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eRrQG-FLaZg
It’s a lunar lander named ‘Peregrine’, developed by the space robotics company to deliver payloads to the Moon for various companies, governments, universities, non-profits, and individuals for $1.2 million per kilogram. Astrobotic was selected by NASA in May 2019 for a $79.5 million contract to deliver up to 14 payloads to the Moon in 2021, under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
To date, Astrobotic has signed 16 customers for lunar delivery on that first mission, totaling 28 payloads from 8 nations and comprising resource development, scientific investigation, technology demonstration, exploration, marketing, arts, and entertainment. The vehicle has already passed an industry-standard Preliminary Design Review, and the program will build and test a Structural Test Model, followed by a Critical Design Review, later this year.
Hyundai is teasing a new 1970s-inspired electric car concept set to be unveiled at the IAA Frankfurt Motor Show next month.
Over the last few years, Hyundai has been going through a bit of a transition.
Continue reading “Hyundai teases a new 1970s-inspired electric car to be unveiled next month” »
Most of the spacecraft in science fiction are ridiculously spacious, but real life is much less luxurious. The International Space Station (ISS) has just 388 cubic meters of habitable space, and future deep-space assignments could have astronauts serving much longer tours of duty. NASA has partnered with Sierra Nevada Corporation to explore ways to make spacecraft a bit less cramped, and the company has now completed a prototype inflatable habitat module with almost as much living space as the entire ISS.
NASA originally funded the NextSTEP-2 program to develop technologies for long-term missions like the Lunar Gateway station and a journey to Mars. The current plan is to make the Lunar Gateway a smaller modular station that will initially have just a small life support area and docking for lunar landers. The inflatable habitat shown off at Johnson Space Center this week could eventually add a lot more living areas to the Gateway and other missions.
This isn’t NASA’s first look at inflatable habitats. The agency partnered with Bigelow Aerospace to deploy a small inflatable prototype module to the ISS called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM). The 16 cubic meter volume of BEAM is a far cry from the Sierra Nevada mockup, though.
