With only a few Tesla Cybertruck prototypes out there, it has rarely been spotted next to another electric pickup truck for a nice size comparison.
But now we get to see it next to a Rivian R1T.
We are likely weeks away from the first Cybertruck deliveries, yet we don’t have the finalized specs and dimensions of the electric pickup truck.
In a pivotal moment for the autonomous transportation industry, California chose to expand one of the biggest test cases for the technology.
A New Zealand supermarket experimenting with using AI to generate meal plans has seen its app produce some unusual dishes – recommending customers recipes for deadly chlorine gas, “poison bread sandwiches” and mosquito-repellent roast potatoes.
The app, created by supermarket chain Pak ‘n’ Save, was advertised as a way for customers to creatively use up leftovers during the cost of living crisis. It asks users to enter in various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a meal plan or recipe, along with cheery commentary. It initially drew attention on social media for some unappealing recipes, including an “oreo vegetable stir-fry”.
Pak ‘n’ Save’s Savey Meal-bot cheerfully created unappealing recipes when customers experimented with non-grocery household items.
Zach Kirkhorn’s replacement, Delhi-trained accountant Vaibhav Taneja, has kept a low profile since joining Tesla in 2016—a very low profile.
On any given day, Dallas motorists traveling along I-20 or I-45 are likely to be sharing the road with a self-driving truck that has the equivalent of a learner’s permit.
Why it matters: Dallas is the hub of autonomous truck testing and development, thanks to its vital freight corridors, business-friendly policies and generally favorable weather.
Fuel cells are compact energy conversion units that utilize clean energy sources like hydrogen and convert them into electricity through a series of oxidation–reduction reactions. Specifically, proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), an integral part of electric vehicles, utilize proton-conductive membranes for operation. Unfortunately, these membranes suffer from a trade-off between high durability and high ion conductivity, affecting the lifetime and performance of PEMFCs.
To overcome this issue, scientists have synthesized chemically and physically modified perfluorosulfonic acid polymer membranes, such as Nafion HP, Nafion XL, and Gore-Select, which have proven to be much more durable than unmodified membranes conventionally employed in fuel-cell operations.
Unfortunately, none of the existing proton-conductive membranes have fulfilled the highly challenging technical target—passing an accelerated durability test or a combined chemical and mechanical test—set by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to facilitate their use in automobile fuel cells by 2025.
The two materials, the researchers found, can be combined with water to make a supercapacitor — an alternative to batteries — that could provide storage of electrical energy. As an example, the MIT researchers who developed the system say that their supercapacitor could eventually be incorporated into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day’s worth of energy while adding little (or no) to the cost of the foundation and still providing the needed structural strength. The researchers also envision a concrete roadway that could provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel over that road.
The simple but innovative technology is described this week in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT professors Franz-Josef Ulm, Admir Masic, and Yang-Shao Horn, and four others at MIT and at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
MIT engineers created a carbon-cement supercapacitor that can store large amounts of energy. Made of just cement, water, and carbon black, the device could form the basis for inexpensive systems that store intermittently renewable energy, such as solar or wind energy.
