Tech News

[Bevo]

New Lithium-Sulphur battery development

They don’t use toxic materials such as cobalt, nickel and manganese
All the materials are available in Oz

Electric vehicles (EVs), mobile phones and other consumer electronics mostly use lithium-ion batteries that were commercialised in the 1990s.

They’re made using toxic and exotic materials such as cobalt, nickel and manganese that are in increasingly short supply around the world.

Fortunately, there is an alternative; lithium-sulfur batteries use cheaper, more abundant materials and are able to store two to five times more energy per kilogram than lithium-ion ones.

But there’s a hitch — they degrade rapidly through the process of being recharged.

Now a team from Monash University say they’ve found a way of making lithium-sulfur batteries that are robust enough to be recharged 1,000 times.

Battery discovery could propel EVs from Sydney to Melbourne on one charge

[Snookoda]

Nice, 3x the capacity for much cheaper would be great since the cost of EV batteries at the moment wipe out savings on fuel with battery rental/replacement cost. A new EV needs to run for something like 7 years on the same battery pack to break even with a new conventional car on the carbon footprint side of things too.

[Bevo]

Jetson One - Official Launch

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Jetson - Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

Jetson is a Swedish company with a mission to change the way we travel. We aim to make the skies available for everyone with our safe personal electric aerial vehicle.

Our prototype “proof of concept” was finished in the spring of 2018, and until now we have been very busy working on a consumer friendly version.

That project resulted in Jetson ONE, a commercially available personal electric aerial vehicle that you can own and fly.

Jetson was founded by Peter Ternström and Tomasz Patan in 2017. We intend to make everyone a pilot.

[Snookoda]

I suppose this counts, Microsoft advertising the vaccine rollout in Windows search box:

[Bevo]

Researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) experiment in the United Kingdom managed to produce a record amount of heat energy over a five-second period, the UK Atomic Energy Authority said.

The 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy produced were more than double the previous record of 21.7mj achieved there in 1997.

The agency said the result was “the clearest demonstration worldwide of the potential for fusion energy to deliver safe and sustainable low-carbon energy”.

“If we can maintain fusion for five seconds, we can do it for five minutes and then five hours as we scale up our operations in future machines,” said Tony Donne, program manager for EUROfusion.

“This is a big moment for every one of us and the entire fusion community.”

The results were a “huge step closer to conquering one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of them all”, said Ian Chapman, chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

The JET facility is home to the world’s largest and most powerful operational tokamak — a donut-shaped device that is considered one promising method for performing controlled fusion.

The JET experiment’s success has also made researchers optimistic about another experimental nuclear fusion facility in France, called ITER.

ITER, which is expected to begin operation in 2026, uses the same technology as JET but is larger. It is backed by many European countries, the United States, China, Japan, India, South Korea and Russia.

Stephanie Diem of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said the technology used by JET to achieve the result, using magnets to control ultra-hot plasma, show that harnessing fusion — a process that occurs naturally in the stars — is physically feasible.

“The idea is to try and generate enough scientific knowledge to produce a power plant perhaps in the early 2040s or 2050s,” Professor Hole said.

There's been a 'big moment' in nuclear fusion research. Could it lead to a...

[Bevo]

[morgo]

Lol, dunno if this is true but the fact that it’s plausible deception says a lot anyway. Fact chuckers and goggle are in overdrive, a search brings multiple postings of seemingly the same ball, but a different team, demonstrating zero gravity, though this version is still there when you dig for it.

Astronaut Drops Ball . . . . in Fake Space 🚀

[drumphil]

Are they talking about the 8.5 ton satellite or the 20 something ton rocket booster?

[brainio]

Pretty neat that Blender is getting an addon that provides parametric CAD functionality. I don’t see this dethroning any decent or better CAD software anytime soon, but who knows how far it could go if some companies began funding it. There is the Blender gui to contend with though.

CAD Sketcher, It’s Parametric CAD For Blender

CAD Sketcher | Blender Parametric Precision Modeling

[brainio]

RISC-V gpu’s coming (embedded for now). Not exactly new news.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/06/15/2462749/0/en/Think-Silicon-to-Unveil-Industry-s-First-RISC-V-3D-GPU-at-Embedded-World-2022.html

https://libre-soc.org/3d_gpu/

[Bevo]

No idea what date this actually aired

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZS8FjEG5u/

[Bevo]

Why 21 cm is the magic length for the Universe

[brainio]

It could have aired in pretty much any decade, since fusion is always a decade away.

[Bevo]

But now its a decade closer…

[brainio]

And always will be.

[Bevo]

[Snookoda]

Rolls Royce are building those here. Nuclear power’s a bit like air travel too, accidents are terrible but so much can be learned from every one of them.

[brainio]

Nuclear is great until something goes wrong. Last I remember seeing the biggest risk we have with it is over-aged nuclear plants. Then natural disasters. Kind of hard to scream both ‘climate change’ and ‘more nuclear’.

[Snookoda]

Nifty delivery system that seems friendlier than an angrily buzzing drone trying to land on your dog:

Zipline Unveils New Autonomous System | Zipline