Honda may have dragged its feet for years when it came to electric two-wheelers, but the company has now released a number of new and interesting designs. The latest is the ultra-affordable Honda U-GO electric scooter.
Honda launched the U-GO through its Chinese arm Wuyang-Honda as a follow-up to its other low-cost Chinese electric scooters designed purely for urban riding.
The company announced two versions of the U-GO with different speeds and power levels.
In a major breakthrough, scientists have created time crystals which continuously and repeatedly change their state over time, without either absorbing or dissipating any energy, thus becoming true perpetual motion machines.
Circa 2019 pour salt water in the tank one day that converts to hydrogen then back to water.
A Stanford-led team has now developed a way to harness seawater – Earth’s most abundant source – for chemical energy.
Shells of tamarind, a tropical fruit consumed worldwide, are discarded during food production. As they are bulky, tamarind shells take up a considerable amount of space in landfills where they are disposed as agricultural waste.
However, a team of international scientists led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has found a way to deal with the problem. By processing the tamarind shells which are rich in carbon, the scientists converted the waste material into carbon nanosheets, which are a key component of supercapacitors — energy storage devices that are used in automobiles, buses, electric vehicles, trains, and elevators.
The study reflects NTU’s commitment to address humanity’s grand challenges on sustainability as part of its 2025 strategic plan, which seeks to accelerate the translation of research discoveries into innovations that mitigate our impact on the environment.
The Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base has released a new analysis of the Department of Defense’s investments into directed energy technologies, or DE. The report, titled “Directed Energy Futures 2060,” makes predictions about what the state of DE weapons and applications will be 40 years from now and offers a range of scenarios in which the United States might find itself either leading the field in DE or lagging behind peer-state adversaries. In examining the current state of the art of this relatively new class of weapons, the authors claim that the world has reached a “tipping point” in which directed energy is now critical to successful military operations.
One of the document’s most eyebrow-raising predictions is that a “force field” could be created by “a sufficiently large fleet or constellation of high-altitude DEW systems” that could provide a “missile defense umbrella, as part of a layered defense system, if such concepts prove affordable and necessary.” The report cites several existing examples of what it calls “force fields,” including the Active Denial System, or “pain ray,” as well as non-kinetic counter-drone systems, and potentially counter-missile systems, that use high-power microwaves to disable or destroy their targets. Most intriguingly, the press release claims that “the concept of a DE weapon creating a localized force field may be just on the horizon.”
UK-based architecture firm AL_A has collaborated with Canadian energy firm General Fusion to develop the world’s first magnetized target fusion facility on the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) campus in Culham, United Kingdom. The energy firm wanted to “transform how the world is energized by replicating the process that powers the sun and stars”. AL_A’s design proposes a first-of-its-kind facility with open spaces and see-through partitions that provides innovative carbon-free energy solutions.
The Fusion Demonstration Plant (FDP) will be a highly-efficient building that captures the technological advantage of fusion to solve global energy problems. The reactor will take on a symbolic form, sitting in the middle of a circular viewing platform. In addition to state-of-the-art facilities, the building will include gathering and exhibition areas for visitors of all ages.
The known total of global coronavirus infections surpassed 200 million on Wednesday, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, a daunting figure that also fails to capture howdeeply the virus has embedded itself within humanity.
The official tally stands at more than 614000 deaths in the United States. More than 550000 in Brazil. More than 425000 in India. Mexico has recorded more than 240000 fatalities, and Peru nearly 200000. Britain, Colombia, France, Italy, and Russia have all recorded well north of 100000 deaths. The global toll as of Wednesday was 4.2 million, itself a rough estimate given the discrepancies in the way nations record Covid-19 deaths.
As the coronavirus continues to find new hosts across the planet, the emergence of the Delta variant — thought to be twice as infectious as the initial form of the virus — is adding fuel to a fire that has never stopped raging. Fully vaccinated people are protected against the worst outcomes of Covid-19 caused by the Delta variant.
The vision of a concrete building that can store energy like a giant battery could someday be a reality.
Engineers usually regard heat as “waste energy” since it is hard to efficiently turn into anything useful. However, a new class of thermoelectric materials could change that after researchers opted to try the exact opposite of the usual approach. A paper in Science Advances explains why, speeding the search for even better versions.
As the name suggests, thermoelectric materials turn heat into electricity, skipping the boiling water stage used in most bulk electricity production. However, cost and inefficiency have kept thermoelectric generators restricted to niche applications, such as powering spacecraft like the Mars Perseverance rover where lightweight, reliable energy production matters more than price.
Thermoelectric materials are too expensive and polluting for more widespread use, but new versions that replace heavier elements with magnesium could change that, opening the door to even better options that could find widespread uses.
The future of energy storage is getting better. Welcome salt batteries! cheaper & more abundant than lithium!
It is claimed to have an energy density of up to 160 Wh/kg, which is a far cry from the density offered by lithium batteries of up to 285 Wh/kg, but is nothing to sneeze at in the world of sodium batteries. It can also be charged to 80 percent capacity in 15 minutes at room temperature, and maintain 90 percent of its capacity in temperatures of-20 °C (−4 °F).
A cheap and abundant material like salt might have plenty to offer the world of science, and one field where it could have game-changing effects is battery chemistry. Leveraging salt could help us avoid much of the cost and difficulty in sourcing scarcer lithium, and Chinese giant CATL is looking to lead the charge by launching its first commercial sodium-ion battery.
Like lithium batteries that power smartphones, laptops and much of the modern world, sodium batteries also shuttle ions between two electrodes as the device is charged and discharged. But sodium ions present a few problems that lithium ions don’t. The ions are larger in size and are prone to creating impurities that can cut the battery life short. In addition, they don’t offer anywhere near the energy density of tried and trusted lithium.
Researchers have put forward some promising solutions to these problems of late. Some have leant on extra salt to make the batteries go the distance, some have incorporated thin layers of copper to boost their performance, and others have managed to pack high energy densities into the industry standard 18650 format.
