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Could hydrogen keep the internal-combustion engine alive?

Toyota is now testing another, much older solution involving hydrogen: burning the stuff directly in an internal-combustion engine.

The automaker last week unveiled a race car whose inline-3 engine is designed to run on pure hydrogen. The race car is still being tested but will enter a round of the 2021 Super Taikyu Series race series in Japan this May.


Toyota plans to go racing with a car whose internal-combustion engine runs on pure hydrogen.

The Porsche- and Lamborghini-Carrying Cargo Ship Has Sunk in the Atlantic Ocean

Thousands of cars—including Porsches, Volkswagens, and Lamborghinis—have gone down with the giant cargo ship Felicity Ace, which had been on fire in the Atlantic Ocean for nearly two weeks. A salvage operation was underway to take the roll-on-roll-off car carrier to a safe area off the Azores when it sank on Tuesday morning. The fire was out by the time the ship went under the waves.

The weather had been rough at the time, a spokesperson for Felicity Ace’s Japanese operator, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines transportation company, told Bloomberg. The ship sank after listing to starboard around 220 nautical miles off the Portuguese Azores archipelago at around 9 a.m. local time on March 1. Salvage craft remain posted at the site of the sinking to monitor the situation, according to a press release from the Felicity Ace Incident Information Centre.

The first electric car with solid-state battery announced has pack with the energy density of a regular one

The Dongfeng E70 electric sedans were announced as the world’s first commercially available electric vehicles with a solid-state battery when they were delivered as part of a taxi fleet. Now the energy density of the E70’s battery pack and its range on a charge have been outed, and they are pretty run-of-the-mill.

Panasonic to begin mass producing new Tesla battery

TOKYO, Feb 28 (Reuters) — Panasonic Corp (6752.T) said on Monday it will begin mass production of a new lithium-ion battery for Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) before the end of March 2024 at a plant in Japan.

Unveiled by the Japanese company in October, the 4,680 format (46 millimetres wide and 80 millimetres tall) battery is around five times bigger than those currently supplied to Tesla, meaning the U.S. electric vehicle (EV) maker will be able to lower production costs.

The new powerpack is also expected to improve vehicle range, which could help Tesla lure more drivers to EVs.

Entirely New, Inexpensive Catalyst Speeds the Production of Oxygen From Water

The material could replace rare metals and lead to more economical production of carbon-neutral fuels.

An electrochemical reaction that splits apart water molecules to produce oxygen is at the heart of multiple approaches aiming to produce alternative fuels for transportation. But this reaction has to be facilitated by a catalyst material, and today’s versions require the use of rare and expensive elements such as iridium, limiting the potential of such fuel production.

Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed an entirely new type of catalyst material, called a metal hydroxide-organic framework (MHOF), which is made of inexpensive and abundant components. The family of materials allows engineers to precisely tune the catalyst’s structure and composition to the needs of a particular chemical process, and it can then match or exceed the performance of conventional, more expensive catalysts.

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