Detroit is now home to the country’s first stretch of road that can wirelessly charge an electric vehicle (EV), whether it’s parked or moving.
Why it matters: Wireless charging on an electrified roadway could remove one of the biggest hassles of owning an EV: the need to stop and plug in regularly.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the government-funded science research facility nestled between Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains and Cumberland Plateau that is perhaps best known for its role in the Manhattan Project, two supercomputers are currently rattling away, speedily making calculations meant to help tackle some of the biggest problems facing humanity.
You wouldn’t be able to tell from looking at them. A supercomputer called Summit mostly comprises hundreds of black cabinets filled with cords, flashing lights and powerful graphics processing units, or GPUs. The sound of tens of thousands of spinning disks on the computer’s file systems, and air cooling technology for ancillary equipment, make the device sound somewhat like a wind turbine — and, at least to the naked eye, the contraption doesn’t look much different from any other corporate data center. Its next-door neighbor, Frontier, is set up in a similar manner across the hall, though it’s a little quieter and the cabinets have a different design.
Yet inside those arrays of cabinets are powerful specialty chips and components capable of, collectively, training some of the largest AI models known. Frontier is currently the world’s fastest supercomputer, and Summit is the world’s seventh-fastest supercomputer, according to rankings published earlier this month. Now, as the Biden administration boosts its focus on artificial intelligence and touts a new executive order for the technology, there’s growing interest in using these supercomputers to their full AI potential.
It really is impressive how many unknowns there are about the next decade in transportation. Sure, there have always been innovations and surprises, but to be unsure what most vehicles will even be powered by in 10 years, nor who — or what — will be in the driver’s seat, is astounding. Battery-electric vehicles are the leading contender to usurp internal combustion, eventually, though the road to that outcome is full of hurdles. Solid-state batteries (SSB) are seen as one of the key innovations to get there, various makers saying they’ll have at least one product with a solid-state battery on the market by the end of the decade. The overall numbers of SSB-powered vehicles might remain surprisingly low well into the 2030s, though. In Toyota’s internal news outlet, Toyota Times, the automaker wrote, “In the [SSB] mass production phase anticipated for 2030 and beyond, the companies are looking to boost capacity to several thousand tonnes (several tens of thousands of vehicles) in line with Toyota’s product plans.”
The “companies” referred to are Toyota and Japan’s petrochemical conglomerate Idemitsu Kosan, which formalized collaboration on SSBs this year. Right now, Toyota and Idemitsu are working on the development times for solid electrolyte and resulting quality and cost. When those are locked in, the firms will work on a pilot facility for commercialization. Initial commercial effort will take two years of testing and validation before wider production commences in 2030.
The “several tens of thousands of vehicles” appears to have gone through at least one revision after publication. In Jalopnik’s writeup, the capacity was quoted as “over ten thousand vehicles.” Even at the larger sum, that’s considerably less than onlookers expected, but that might be because onlookers expected too much, not because Toyota overpromised. The automaker’s talked big numbers for BEV sales, but has talked just as bigly about what kinds of electrified powertrains those sales will entail: At least four kinds of battery technologies, plus hydrogen, and hybrids. In 2021, Toyota said it expected to have an SSB ready by 2025. In 2022, a Toyota engineer said the first product to get an SSB would be a hybrid on go on sale in the first half of the decade.
Luxeed – a young, premium EV brand developed between Chery Automobile and Chinese tech giant Huawei, has shared new details of its flagship sedan, the S7. In a matter of months since first teasing the Tesla Model S competitor, followed by an influx of pre-orders, Chery and Huawei have now shared trim variants, pricing, and of course, range – which tops out at an impressive 855 km.
Luxeed is a new all-electric brand in China and when we say “new,” we mean we didn’t even know the official name of the joint effort between China’s Chery and Huawei until about four months ago.
In that time, we’ve seen Huawei tease its first model, learned its core specs from a regulatory filing in China, and saw the S7 sedan’s first unveiling three weeks ago, ahead of an official launch that took place today.
With dubstep as the soundtrack and neon lighting as the backdrop, Elon Musk handed the first Cybertrucks over to a select group of customers that included Reddit co-founder and VC fund Seven Seven Six founder Alexis Ohanian and Trousdale Ventures founder and CEO Phillip Sarofim.
The live streamed portion of the Tesla Cybertruck delivery event was a short affair — around 30 minutes. But the event still had all the traditional trappings one has come to expect from Tesla: the pomp and pumpy music, VIP guests and of course, Musk.
The Tesla Cybertruck deliveries come at least six years since Musk first tweeted about building a truck and four years since he debuted the futuristic-looking pickup.
Google DeepMind researchers have discovered 2.2mn crystal structures that open potential progress in fields from renewable energy to advanced computation, and show the power of artificial intelligence to discover novel materials.
The trove of theoretically stable but experimentally unrealised combinations identified using an AI tool known as GNoME is more than 45 times larger than the number of such substances unearthed in the history of science, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.
The researchers plan to make 381,000 of the most promising structures available to fellow scientists to make and test their viability in fields from solar cells to superconductors. The venture underscores how harnessing AI can shortcut years of experimental graft — and potentially deliver improved products and processes.
Newly discovered materials can be used to make better solar cells, batteries, computer chips, and more.
An #AI tool that has discovered 2.2 million new materials, and helps to predict material stability.
AI tool GNoME finds 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials that could power future technologies.
Modern technologies from computer chips and batteries to solar panels rely on inorganic crystals. To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable otherwise they can decompose, and behind each new, stable crystal can be months of painstaking experimentation.
Today, in a paper published in Nature, we share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals – equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials.
To commercialize the carbon-neutral bricks, Seratech is working together with a team of architects at London-based Carmody Groarke.
Saratech.
The brick is a product of 18 months of research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF).
Northwestern University researchers have raised the standards again for perovskite solar cells with a new development that helped the emerging technology hit new records for efficiency.
The findings, published today (Nov. 17) in the journal Science, describe a dual-molecule solution to overcoming losses in efficiency as sunlight is converted to energy. By incorporating first, a molecule to address something called surface recombination, in which electrons are lost when they are trapped by defects—missing atoms on the surface, and a second molecule to disrupt recombination at the interface between layers, the team achieved a National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) certified efficiency of 25.1% where earlier approaches reached efficiencies of just 24.09%.
“Perovskite solar technology is moving fast, and the emphasis of research and development is shifting from the bulk absorber to the interfaces,” said Northwestern professor Ted Sargent. “This is the critical point to further improve efficiency and stability and bring us closer to this promising route to ever-more-efficient solar harvesting.”