A Norwegian distributor of CAT heavy machinery has converted a CAT excavator to electric power using 3.4 tons of batteries. This was 300 kWh of batteries. A Tesla 85 kWh battery pack weighs 1,200 lb (540 kg) and contains 7,104 lithium-ion battery cells in 16 modules wired in series. 340kWh of Tesla batteries would weigh …
Zunum Aero is a startup backed by Boeing and Jet Blue who is developing hybrid electric and all-electric aircraft of varying sizes. The planes would fly between the thousands of small airports around the USA. Southern California-based charter air services, JetSuite and JetSuite X, announced a deal where they would buy up to 100 of …
By 2020, almost 90 percent of the Ford Motor company portfolio in North America will be trucks, utilities and commercial vehicles. Given declining consumer demand and product profitability, the company will not invest in next generations of traditional Ford sedans for North America. Over the next few years, the Ford car portfolio in North America …
General Motors plans to introduce an autonomous ride-sharing service to several big cities in 2019. GM outlined its vision to reinvent itself. GM wants a future with zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion. GM sells 2.7 million cars a year and sodl 150,000 electric vehicles. GM has the Bolt electric car. GM bought self-driving …
Prof. Ulrich Wiesner, material science and engineering, created the first ever self-assembled, three-dimensional superconductor with a research group of graduate students and professors of different disciplines. This is the first time a superconductor has self-assembled into a porous, three-dimensional gyroidal structure. After years of collaboration with co-author Prof. Sol Gruner, physics, Wiesner developed the idea …
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has approved the expenditure of a further $200 million on the completion of Watts Bar 2, which would bring final spending on the project to a total of up to $4.7 billion. The scope of the project has increased by $125 million through regulatory orders and other items occurring since …
A team of Chinese researchers have made a breakthrough in stealth plane technology that could be so significant even local military sources say it should be kept out of the public realm. The team released the technical and design details of an “invisibility circuit” they claim has the potential to help aircraft trick the best …
NASA NIAC has a phase 2 funding for a transformer lunar exploration robots. Imagine an oasis of warm sunlight surrounded by a desert of freezing cold darkness. Robots inside the oasis perform scientific lab analyses and process icy regolith brought from excavations in the neighboring darkness. This oasis, about the size of a football field, …
The closest-ever pictures of Pluto and its moon Charon shows two separate hemispheres in color. There are unknown dark spots that look like pepperoni slices. New Horizons is now less than 9.5 million miles (15 million kilometers) from the Pluto system. The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally. On May 15, 2015, …
China National Nuclear Power’s IPO is over one hundred times over subscribed. China National Nuclear will sell 3.9 billion new shares at 3.39 yuan each. This will raise about US$2 billion. The share price will likely jump given how oversubscribed it is. The company plans to use the money to build 10 reactors and for …
A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has made the first steps towards development of bioartificial replacement limbs suitable for transplantation. In their report, which has been published online in the journal Biomaterials, the researchers describe using an experimental approach previously used to build bioartificial organs to engineer rat forelimbs with functioning vascular and …