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Archive for the ‘transportation’ category: Page 340

Aug 23, 2019

Hyundai teases a new 1970s-inspired electric car to be unveiled next month

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

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.

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Aug 23, 2019

Aerospace Firm Shows Off Giant Inflatable Space Habitat

Posted by in categories: space, transportation

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.

Aug 23, 2019

The Bentley From The Year 2035!

Posted by in categories: media & arts, robotics/AI, transportation

I always wondered what the future of cars would look like, and now Bentley has given me a nice perspective.


This is the Bentley EXP100GT. It is one of the stand out cars from Pebble Beach this year! Come with me as I take you through the features and what their vision is for the next 100 years. This is also where you get to see the car drive autonomously!

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Aug 22, 2019

Quantum computers to become portable

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics, transportation

Together with the University of Innsbruck, the ETH Zurich and Interactive Fully Electrical Vehicles SRL, Infineon Austria is researching specific questions on the commercial use of quantum computers. With new innovations in design and manufacturing, the partners from universities and industry want to develop affordable components for quantum computers.

Aug 22, 2019

Sea Machines Robotics to demonstrate autonomous spill response

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

BOSTON — Sea Machines Robotics Inc. this week said it has entered into a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration to demonstrate the ability of its autonomous technology in increasing the safety, response time and productivity of marine oil-spill response operations.

Sea Machines was founded in 2015 and claimed to be “the leader in pioneering autonomous control and advanced perception systems for the marine industries.” The company builds software and systems to increase the safety, efficiency, and performance of ships, workboats, and commercial vessels worldwide.

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Aug 22, 2019

Volocopter reveals its first commercial aircraft, the VoloCity air taxi

Posted by in category: transportation

VoloCity takes off into nightIt’s a race to the skies in terms of which company actually deploys an on-demand air taxi service based around electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. For its part, German startup Volocopter is taking another key step with the revelation of its first aircraft designed for actual commercial use, the VoloCity.

The VoloCity is the fourth-generation eVTOL vehicle that Volocopter has created, but the first three were created for testing and demonstration purposes, and have flown more than 1,000 times in service of that goal. The VoloCity, an 18-rotor VTOL with a range of around 35 km (just under 22 miles) and a top speed of about 70 mph, is designed for transporting up to two people, including light luggage like backpacks, briefcases or purses.

VoloCity Top

Aug 21, 2019

Physicists create world’s smallest engine

Posted by in categories: energy, physics, transportation

Theoretical physicists at Trinity College Dublin are among an international collaboration that has built the world’s smallest engine—which, as a single calcium ion, is approximately ten billion times smaller than a car engine.

Work performed by Professor John Goold’s QuSys group in Trinity’s School of Physics describes the science behind this tiny motor. The research, published today in international journal Physical Review Letters, explains how random fluctuations affect the operation of microscopic machines. In the future, such devices could be incorporated into other technologies in order to recycle and thus improve .

The engine itself—a single calcium ion—is electrically charged, which makes it easy to trap using electric fields. The working substance of the engine is the ion’s “intrinsic spin” (its angular momentum). This spin is used to convert heat absorbed from laser beams into oscillations, or vibrations, of the trapped ion.

Aug 21, 2019

Scientists find a way to create long-life, fast-charging batteries

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, physics, transportation

A group of researchers led by Skoltech Professor Pavel Troshin studied coordination polymers, a class of compounds with scarcely explored applications in metal-ion batteries, and demonstrated their possible future use in energy storage devices with a high charging/discharging rate and stability. The results of their study were published in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

The charging/discharging rate is one of the key characteristics of lithium-ion batteries. Most modern commercial batteries need at least an hour to get fully charged, which certainly limits the scope of their application, in particular, for electric vehicles. The trouble with active materials, such as the most popular anode material, graphite, is that their capacity decays significantly, as their charging rate increases. To retain the battery capacity at high charging rates, the active electrode materials must have high electronic and ionic conductivity, which is the case with the newly-discovered coordination polymers that are derived from and salts of , such as nickel or copper. Although these compounds hold a great promise, their application in lithium-ion batteries remains virtually unexplored.

A recent study undertaken by a group of scientists from Skoltech and the Institute for Problems of Chemical Physics of RAS led by Professor P. Troshin in collaboration with the University of Cologne (Germany) and the Ural Federal University, focused on tetraaminobenzene-based linear polymers of nickel and copper. Although the linear polymers exhibited much lower initial electronic conductivity as compared to their two-dimensional counterparts, it transpired that they can be used as anode materials that get charged/discharged in less than a minute, because their conductivity increases dramatically after the first discharge due to lithium doping.

Aug 21, 2019

Mathematical framework turns any sheet of material into any shape using kirigami cuts

Posted by in categories: biological, information science, mathematics, physics, transportation

This could lead to self-healing cars.


Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a mathematical framework that can turn any sheet of material into any prescribed shape, inspired by the paper craft termed kirigami (from the Japanese, kiri, meaning to cut and kami, meaning paper).

Unlike its better-known cousin origami, which uses folds to shape , kirigami relies on a pattern of cuts in a flat paper sheet to change its flexibility and allow it to morph into 3D shapes. Artists have long used this artform to create everything from pop-up cards to castles and dragons.

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Aug 21, 2019

Zeus V8 electric motorcycle to be produced under 3D printing partnership

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, sustainability, transportation

Nearly one year ago to the day, we first revealed Curtiss Motorcycle’s upcoming Zeus V8 electric motorcycle. And now we’re learning that the innovative electric motorcycle has already begun production, thanks to a recently announced partnership.