Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk was challenged to fix South Australia’s energy problem in 2017, and just two years on he’s saved Australians millions.

A lithium-ion battery that is safe, has high power and can last for 1 million miles has been developed by a team in Penn State’s Battery and Energy Storage Technology (BEST) Center.

Electric vehicle batteries typically require a tradeoff between safety and energy density. If the battery has high energy and power density, which is required for uphill driving or merging on the freeway, then there is a chance the battery can catch fire or explode in the wrong conditions. But materials that have low energy/power density, and therefore high safety, tend to have poor performance. There is no material that satisfies both. For that reason, battery engineers opt for performance over safety.

“In this work we decided we were going to take a totally different approach,” said Chao-Yang Wang, professor of mechanical, chemical and materials science and engineering, and William E. Diefenderfer Chair in Mechanical Engineering, Penn State. “We divided our strategy into two steps. First we wanted to build a highly stable battery with highly stable materials.”

Going Green

Experts told Wired that the technique could eventually be used to extend a battery’s charge and discharge rate by forcing the millions of viruses to create a highly ordered electrode structure, with shortcuts for ions moving through electrodes.

“Something my lab is completely focused on now is trying to get the cleanest technology,” Belcher told the magazine.

Astronomers have spotted a cosmic blast that dwarfs all others.

A gargantuan explosion tore through the heart of a distant galaxy cluster, releasing about five times more energy than the previous record holder, a new study reports.

“In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain,” study lead author Simona Giacintucci, of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. “A key difference is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas.”

If planes were as reliable as in-flight Wi-Fi, we’d never get on a flight again. Fortunately, industry group Seamless Air Alliance is working to change that. The group operates under the mission of bringing “industries and technologies together to make the in-flight internet experience simple to access and delightful to use.” Its idea? To get rid of the toxic brew of current proprietary systems operated by each airline and instead establish a standard for in-flight Wi-Fi that can be flexibly swapped in and out to better allow airlines to respond as technology improves.

“The goal of the Alliance is to deliver high-speed, low-latency 5G quality access inside the plane,” the FAQ section of the group’s website states. “Access to the network will be seamless, meaning any enabled user device will work without any login, sign-on or other activities. The internet experience itself will be as good as, and in many cases better than, the home experience, including low latency, high speed, and a gate-to-gate continuity of service.”

An article for IEEE Spectrum notes that “a plane’s antennas are currently stored in a relatively small hump on the top of the craft, typically about 45 centimeters high. Even though it’s so small, that hump causes tremendous amounts of wasted jet fuel, [Seamless Air Alliance CEO Jack] Mandala says, causing an estimated minimum of an extra $75,000 per aircraft per year in fuel costs.”

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A communication satellite almost out of fuel has gotten a new life after the first space docking of its kind.

Research that investigates the mechanisms behind diamond formation, and uncovers new ways to produce synthetic forms of the unique stone, could mean big things, and not just for the coffers of jewelers around the world. A new type of artificial diamond developed by scientists at Stanford University sheds yet more light on this high-pressure production process, with a molecule found in crude oil and natural gas serving as their starting point.

Conventional diamonds take shape hundreds of miles beneath the Earth’s surface, under extreme heat and pressure that causes carbon to crystalize into the valuable stones. The ones we see above ground were shot upwards towards the surface through volcanic eruptions millions of years ago.

Scientists have spent decades tinkering with different ways to turn various materials into synthetic versions, with diamond giant De Beers even getting in on the act. These methods, however, have generally involved massive amounts of energy and require catalysts to trigger the transformation. The researchers at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences set out to find a simpler way of doing things.

Electric vehicle batteries have improved considerably in recent years, but their limited ability to store energy still keeps many people from giving up their gas-burning cars. That may be about to change, though, as a new anode material is said to offer a whopping four-fold increase in capacity.

Batteries incorporate two electrodes – an anode and a cathode – which ions travel between through an electrolyte. Among other things, the capacity of a battery is affected by the amount of electrons that are able to build up in the anode.

Typically, those anodes are made of graphite. According to scientists at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), silicon offers 10 times the energy storage capacity of graphite, but it has one major disadvantage as an anode material – it swells up during the charge/discharge cycle, causing its surface to crack and its capacity to thus drop drastically.

An experiment by EPFL researchers has confirmed a theory that has been used in mechanics for over half a century—despite never having been fully validated. The team could now use the theory in bolder and more innovative ways in their quest to develop ever better energy systems.

Some theories are widely used even though they have never been experimentally validated. One example is the so-called narrow groove theory, or NGT, which explains how air-lubricated bearings work in mechanical systems.

The theory was proposed in 1965 but, until recently, it had only been tested partially or indirectly. Researchers at EPFL’s Laboratory for Applied Mechanical Design (LAMD), based at Microcity in Neuch tel, have now closed a gap that has persisted in the scientific literature for over 50 years. The team has published its findings in the journal Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing.