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Fenix International launches Kickstarter campaign to bring $300 off-grid solar charger to U.S. customers while it seeks to expand in Africa.
It’s not often that technology designed in the United States for people in developing countries comes back to the U.S. But that’s exactly what’s happening with an off-grid solar charger.
Powerful X-ray images are showing for the first time what happens inside a working battery as it discharges power, and it could lead to improvements for a new type of battery that promises better storage capacity at a lower cost.
Electric cars and other technologies use lithium-ion batteries, which are useful in part because of their high energy density. Cheaper lithium-sulfur batteries could have even higher densities, but they stop working after only a few charge-discharge cycles. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are watching them work to determine how they could be improved.
SLAC postdoc Johanna Nelson used X-ray diffraction and transmission X-ray microscopy to capture nanoscale images of the battery’s components, a lithium anode and a sulfur-carbon cathode surrounded by an electrolyte. They captured images of sulfur particles before, during and after battery discharge, and found some unexpected results.
Previous research on these types of batteries showed the sulfur and lithium form certain compounds when they react, trapping the sulfur permanently in new compounds. Formation of these compounds, called polysulfides, can kill a battery in just 10 charge-discharge cycles – not nearly good enough for almost any tech, let alone something like an electric car. But this new research shows it may not be as bad as expected. Very few of these polysulfides actually went into the electrolyte, far less than other research had shown. This means it might not be too difficult to trap them at the cathode, preventing any from leaking into the electrolyte and harming the battery.
“If [scientists] really want to know what’s going on inside the battery, they can’t just use standard analysis. They need a technology that tells the whole story,” Nelson tells Stanford News.
The research appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
We’re rather big fans of the Nexus 7 here at Engadget HQ — it’s just hard not to like a $200 tablet with a Tegra 3 SoC and 7-inch glass-bonded IPS display running pure Jelly Bean. Of the few missing features, there’s one we’re bemoaning more than the lack of rear camera, and that’s the absence of any kind of HDMI or MHL video output. So far, watching movies with the Nexus 7’s been relegated to using a Nexus Q and streaming content from Google Play or YouTube.
Enter Wi-Fi Media, an app available for free on Google Play that lets most Android devices like the Nexus 7 play movies, music and stills on any screen via any Cavium PureVu-compatible streamer, such as HTC’s $90 Media Link HD. We tested Wi-Fi Media with our Nexus 7 and Media Link HD and found it to work pretty much as advertised except for some caveats. First the app doesn’t mirror your screen — you’re limited to playing content stored on the tablet or on the network via DLNA, which means no YouTube, Netflix or games. Second, the app doesn’t handle some common file types — like AVI, for example.
While it supports watching movies, listening to music and looking at pictures, keep in mind that Wi-Fi Media is not a particularly polished app. In addition to playing local and remote DLNA content, you’re able to login to Facebook and Picasa and stream images directly from these accounts, but that’s pretty much it in terms of functionality. There’s also no way to configure the Media Link HD, so you’ll need a sanctioned HTC handset to setup the multimedia streamer before using it with a Nexus 7. Want to know more? Peek at our screenshot gallery below and hit the break for our hands-on video.
Gallery: Wi-Fi Media hands-on
Update: Since there’s some confusion in the comments, we’d like to clarify that the Media Link HD is not a DLNA device. It normally only works with select HTC phones like the One X, One S and EVO 4G LTE. WiFi-Media’s primary purpose is connect with a Media Link HD — it also just happens to support DLNA.
[Thanks, Matt]
from Engadget
Filed under: Safety, Technology, Mercedes-Benz, Luxury
Mercedes-Benz can be credited with more technological firsts in the automotive industry than perhaps any other company, but it cannot lay claim to being the first automaker to offer a seatbelt airbag. Nor can it claim to be the second. Those two spots go to the Ford Explorer and Lexus LFA, both of which came out with seatbelt airbags in 2010.
Nevertheless, Mercedes isn’t the sort of company to let the glory of being first get in the way of doing something worthwhile, and so its new Beltbag system for rear seat occupants will be coming to a luxury car near you soon. Our best guess is that the inflatable straps will debut on the redesigned S-Class that bows in the first half of next year, and then quickly proliferate throughout the brand’s lineup.
Like the Fordsystem, Mercedes’ Beltbag system is relegated to rear seats only and powered by charged gas that inflates the strap to nearly three times its normal width, thus increasing the surface area across which to distribute the impact forces of a crash. Unlike the Ford system, Mercedes says only a frontal impact will trigger its belts to inflate, whereas the Explorer’s inflatable bags are triggered by both frontal and side impacts.
from Autoblog
You’ll find it inside the top-secret data centers that run Google. It provides extra speed at Apple, Facebook, Dropbox, and countless other operations across the web. And now, Amazon is offering it up to the rest of the world via its massively popular cloud service, letting you slip it under your own online applications — without actually installing it in your own data center. What is it? It’s flash — the super-fast storage hardware that’s gradually replacing traditional hard disks across the web and beyond.
from Wired Top Stories
Good news for your email inbox: You’ll be seeing less spam in it now, thanks to a global takedown effort that knocked one of the world’s biggest spammers offline this week.
