An EV from Chinese manufacturer Nio will soon go on sale with a "semi-solid state" 150kWh battery (140kWh usable) that’s the largest in any passenger car, Car News China reported. To show much range that will deliver, Nio CEO William Li drove a prototype version of the ET7 1,044km (650 miles) in 14 hours, a distance surpassing many gas-powered vehicles.
The test was run in relatively cool temperatures (between 28 – 54 F) and livestreamed. Driving was done mainly in semi-autonomous (or Navigate-on-Pilot+, as Nio calls it), and speed-limited to 90 km/h (56 MPH). The average speed was 83.9 km/h (a respectable 52.4 MPH), with a travel time of 12.4 hours excluding stops.
"The completion of this endurance challenge proves the product power of the 150kWh ultra-long endurance battery pack," said Li in a Weibo post (Google translation). "More importantly, all models on sale can be flexibly upgraded to 150kWh batteries through the Nio battery swap system."
In fact, the ET7’s 150kWh battery will only be available on a lease separate from the car, much as we’ve seen with some cars sold in Europe. Previously, the company said that the battery alone would cost as much as an entire car (the company’s entry-level ET5 EV), or around $42,000.
WeLion New Energy Technology
Manufactured by WeLion New Energy Technology, the battery has a single-cell energy density of 360 Wh/kg or 260 Wh/kg for the entire pack (Tesla’s latest cells are under 300 Wh/kg). Semi-solid state batteries use gel, clay or resin electrolytes, offering greater energy density and fire-resistance than current batteries. However, they’re still far from the promised land of full solid-state batteries, which could feasibly double energy density.
We likely won’t see the 150kWh battery pack stateside, though. With the Biden administration’s latest rules, some US cars like Tesla’s Model 3 Long Range that use specific Chinese battery components will no longer receive the full $7,500 tax credit.
Nio is a luxury EV manufacturer in China that offers vehicles without a battery, letting you sign up to a battery-as-a-service (BAAS) monthly subscription. That service also allows you to swap out your battery at any time for a larger one.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/LwcqbVU
The gravitational pull from black holes is so strong that nothing can escape its grasp. So could we ever harness the gargantuan power of black holes as a source of energy?
In a new study, scientists propose two ways to use black holes as energy sources someday. They predicted processes for extracting energy from black holes by using their rotational and gravitational properties.
"We know that we can extract energies from black holes, and we also know that we can inject energy into them, which almost sounds like a battery," lead author Zhan Feng Mai, a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University, told Live Science.
In the first hypothetical scenario, scientists would "charge" the black hole by injecting it with massive, electrically charged particles. These charges would continue being sucked in until the black hole itself had an electric field that began repelling any additional charges that they attempted to inject, the scientists explained in the study, published Nov. 29 in the journal Physical Review D.
When this electromagnetic repulsion was greater than the gravitational pull of the black hole, scientists would consider it "fully charged." In keeping with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which says that mass can be treated as equivalent to energy, the black hole’s available energy would come from a combination of the electrical charges injected into it as well as the mass of those electrical charges.
"The black hole battery is transforming the energy of the particle’s mass into charge energy," Mai said.
The researchers calculated the efficiency of the recharging process to be 25%, meaning that black hole batteries could transform about a quarter of the mass inputted into available energy in the form of an electric field. This would make the efficiency of the battery around 250 times higher than that of an atomic bomb, the team calculated.
To extract the energy, the researchers would utilize a process known as superradiance, which is based on the theory that space-time is literally dragged around the rotation of a spinning black hole because of its intense gravitational field.
Gravitational or electromagnetic waves that entered this region of rotation would get dragged along too, but assuming they had not yet passed the black hole’s event horizon — the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape — some waves might be deflected with more energy than they initially carried, the researchers wrote. This process would convert the black hole’s rotational energy, determined by its mass, into the waves that are deflected.
The other method of harnessing a black holes’ energy would involve extracting that energy in the form of so-called Schwinger pairs, or paired particles that form spontaneously in the presence of an electric field.
If we started with a fully charged black hole, the electric field near the event horizon might be so strong that it would spontaneously create an electron and positron, which is like an electron but with an opposite charge, Mai explained. If the black hole were positively charged, the positron would be shot out from the black hole due to repulsion. That runaway particle could then, theoretically, be collected as energy.
Mai said he does not know if we will ever see a battery like this, but the theoretical exercise was inspired by scientists’ previous attempts to theoretically extract energy from black holes.
"We see the black hole as a place where quantum mechanics and gravity have to somehow get together," Daniele Faccio, a physicist at the University of Glasgow who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "By looking at them from the perspective of energy mining, we can understand a little more about what’s going on."
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Tesla is recalling more than two million vehicles, nearly all of the vehicles it has sold in the US to date, to fix a flawed system designed to make sure drivers are paying attention when they use Autopilot.
Rather than physically recalling vehicles, documents posted today by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that Tesla will send out a software update in an attempt to fix the problem.
The recall covers nearly all of the vehicles Tesla sold in the US, including the Model X, Model S, Model Y, and Model 3, and impacts those produced between October 5, 2012, and December 7 2023.
It comes after a two-year investigation by the NHTSA into a series of crashes that supposedly happened while Autopilot system was in use. Since 2016, the NHTSA has opened more than 40 special crash investigations involving Teslas and where advanced driver assistance such as Autopilot were suspected of being switched on. Nineteen crash deaths have been reported in these investigations.
NHTSA states that its investigation has found that Autopilot’s method of ensuring drivers are paying attention and in control are inadequate and “in certain circumstances when Autosteer is engaged, the prominence and scope of the feature’s controls may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse."
Aside from Tesla’s software update including added controls and alerts “to further encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility,” the NHTSA safety recall report states that update—already issued to some vehicles and with the rollout ongoing—will apparently limit where Autosteer can be used.
“Additional controls will include, among others, increasing the prominence of visual alerts on the user interface, simplifying engagement and disengagement of Autosteer, additional checks upon engaging Autosteer and while using the feature outside controlled access highways and when approaching traffic controls, and eventual suspension from Autosteer use if the driver repeatedly fails to demonstrate continuous and sustained driving responsibility while the feature is engaged,” the NHTSA report states.
According to Tesla’s own literature, “Autopilot is a hands-on driver assistance system that is intended to be used only with a fully attentive driver. It does not turn a Tesla into a self-driving car nor does it make a car autonomous.” So, despite its name, although Autopilot can steer, accelerate and brake automatically in lane, it cannot drive for you.
Sila, a Californian company cofounded in 2011 by Tesla’s seventh staffer, is going to supply Panasonic with a US-made silicon powder for EV batteries that could banish range anxiety, slash charge times, and even reduce reliance on China.
Panasonic’s main US customer is Tesla, and produces around 10 percent of EV batteries globally. Last year, Sila signed a supply agreement with Mercedes-Benz for its new long-range G-class electric SUV, expected to debut in 2025. (The German automaker led Sila’s Series E funding round in 2019.)
Sila’s Titan Silicon anode powder consists of micrometer-sized particles of nano-structured silicon and replaces graphite in traditional lithium-ion batteries. This switch-out for EVs could soon enable 500-mile nonstop trips and 10-minute recharges. What’s more, the anode swap doesn’t require new manufacturing techniques. The black powder already powers the five-day battery life of the latest Whoop activity-tracking wearable.
“It took us 12 years and 80,000 iterations to get to this point,” said Sila’s cofounder and CEO, Gene Berdichevsky. “It’s sophisticated science.” Berdichevsky started his career at Tesla, becoming the seventh employee in 2004. He was the lead for Tesla’s Roadster battery system, leaving when the company had about 300 employees. After further study, he cofounded Sila with Tesla colleague Alex Jacobs and Gleb Yushin, a materials science professor at Georgia Tech.
Swell New Battery Tech
Compared to graphite, silicon stores up to 10 times more energy, so using silicon instead of graphite for anodes—the part that releases electrons during discharge—can significantly improve a battery’s energy density. However, the material swells during repeated charging, with the resulting cracks radically reducing battery life.
Sila’s technology allows for this expansion by using nanoscale carbon “scaffolding” to keep the silicon in check. “Titan Silicon is a nanocomposite material,” says Berdichevsky. “It’s like raisin bread, where the raisins are the silicon, and there’s the squishy matrix around the raisins with a big outer rind on the particle itself. The rind holds the space, and the bread moves aside when the raisins expand. The scaffold is not holding the silicon—it’s accommodating the expansion.”
The patented scaffolding process involves silicon-derived silane gas infiltrating custom carbon lattices. The resulting micron scale powder is shipped to battery makers.
Much has been made of AI chatbots’ ability to summarize PDF files or long Web pages. But there’s a gigantic time-saver that Google’s Bard is beginning to deploy, and it’s worth checking out: Knowledge of the gazillion hours of YouTube video it’s already archived.
On November 21, Google took “the first steps in Bard’s ability to understand YouTube videos,” according to the list of Bard updates that Google publishes. Coming as it did the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday, the improvement didn’t generate much notice. But after playing around with it, I have to say that there’s an enormous amount of hidden potential.
Take YouTube in general. If you’re like me, you may listen to it as a podcast, or if you’re looking for specific instructions on how to complete a task. (My wife just used it to learn how to change a headlamp bulb in her vehicle, and she was immensely proud of her accomplishment as well as the money it saved us.)
But YouTube takes time — a lot of it, especially if you’re wading through hours-long podcasts to find an opinion or a factoid, or just the piece of advice you’re looking for. You can imagine, for example, how much information was communicated over radio during the last fifty years.
It’s this sort of deep learning that chatbots have started to lean more heavily upon. The first iterations of ChatGPT didn’t even offer up-to-date knowledge. Now they do, generally, especially with Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Bard. ChatGPT began adding plugins in March, but it requires users to pay $20 per month for ChatGPT Plus. Bard doesn’t — it’s all free.
That means Google can tap into its existing services: Google Flights, Hotels, and Maps, plus personalized information stored in Google Workspace. You have the option to turn these on and off via the Bard extensions page. But it’s YouTube’s Bard extension that holds the most promise.
Why use it? Two key reasons. First, Bard can summarize a YouTube video in much the same way that it can summarize a Web page or long PDF. That is incredibly handy: Let’s say that you were interested in the topic of how building a PC differs around the world. You might listen to the first few minutes to get a sense for whether it’s worth your time. But Google does it the right way: it summarizes the video, and embeds it, so that you can dive deeper if you want.
Consider this example:
Mark Hachman / IDG
Here, we see how Bard sums up some of the detail Gordon and Pedro get into, without giving the entire game away. Video, for example, thrives when it shows an engaging conversation between two people, and a summary can never eliminate that. What it does do, however, is help you decide whether you want to invest (in this case) ten minutes of your life into diving deeper.
Google’s AI search made a lot of people queasy because it sucks up the traditional list of links into a textual summary and links. Ask it a question, and it will try to answer it. This feels different, and much more fair to the content creator. Is it because Google gets paid if you actually watch the video, rather than going to a third-party web site? Very possibly.
Even in a short video where Bard does a nice job of summing up the points, you still benefit from watching the video itself:
Mark Hachman / IDG
Where Bard doesn’t do a great job is on longer videos — such as a traditional podcast, where various points of view and topics can be debated over a long period of time. Speakers ramble, get distracted, and segue into meaningless sidetracks — all potentially entertaining, but not always of interest to either Bard or you.
Of course, you can ask Bard to collate opinions, too, its second impressive feat. I’m not as impressed here with this search, given the sometimes totally irrelevant content that Bard can highlight. Bard does a nice job in finding (admittedly, just) one video that shows how Gordon thinks about the Apple Mac. But in the search (not shown in the image below) Google also shows a collection of shorts that include cancer being found in chickens and some other random videos. None are relevant.
Mark Hachman / IDG
One big question: can other chatbots like ChatGPT and Microsoft follow suit and deeply index YouTube’s video? I don’t know. They certainly don’t (can’t?) at present. If you ask Bing/Copilot to summarize a video, it refuses, even though Microsoft alluded to deeper search capabilities arriving in Copilot.
“I’m sorry, but I am not able to summarize the video for you,” Copilot replies, when asked to summarize a video. “However, there are some online tools that can help you with that.”
Google’s summaries aren’t perfect. As Google says, though, these are “first steps.” I’m not totally sure that Google could ever quite catch up and index the amount of content that users create daily, but Bard’s ability to make sense of it all is a noticeable improvement –and one that other chatbots simply don’t offer yet.
Since launching its first test mission to vaporize bits of an asteroid in space, AstroForge has struggled to keep a hold of its spacecraft and is now at risk of losing the ability to send commands to the in-orbit demonstration.
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The California-based AstroForge has big plans: mining asteroids for platinum and processing the materials in space before selling them on Earth for lucrative profit. The company’s demonstration mission, however, has had a series of issues since launch, proving once again that space is, like, really hard.
This week, AstroForge provided a worrying update on its Brokkr-1 satellite demo mission. The satellite launched on April 15 onboard SpaceX’s Transporter-7 mission and immediately experienced a setback. AstroForge had difficulty identifying its satellite among the 50 other spacecraft that were part of SpaceX’s rideshare mission, eliciting the help of other space companies to find a signal from Brokkr-1 20 days after launch.
The company then had trouble deploying the spacecraft’s solar panel array, because the magnetic field generated by its refinery system prevented the satellite’s ability to actively orient it, according to AstroForge.
AstroForge said it had actually discovered the issue with the magnetic field ahead of launch but decided to go ahead with the mission anyway, risking the satellite settling into a wobble that could prevent communication rather than delay the mission by nine months and lose out on the cost of launch. “It was high-risk but even with the decreased communication link margin due to the wobble, we could still complete the demonstration as long as the panels were deployed,” the company wrote in a statement. “However, our analysis and planning did not account for how long it would take to identify our satellite.”
Brokkr-1 satellite launched while preloaded with asteroid-like material that the refinery spacecraft will attempt to vaporize before sorting the material into elemental compounds. The company now has about three months to complete its refinery checkouts and demonstrate the satellite technology before it loses the ability to send commands to the spacecraft altogether.
AstroForge is moving ahead with its second mission, which will launch in 2024 with the objective of pulling off a flyby of an asteroid and taking high-resolution images of it surface. “Demo missions like Brokkr-1 are like the months of practice leading up to a big game,” AstroForge wrote. “In our case, Brokkr-1 was the practice and the big game is our upcoming deep space mission.”
For startups like AstroForge, asteroid mining represents the potential for massive profit, if they can find a way to extract precious resources that are hard to come by on Earth. Platinum, for example, is valued at almost $15,000 per pound. As to whether asteroid mining will actually be worth all the effort, well, that remains to be proven.
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Just how fast do you need your home internet to be? More importantly, how much are you willing to fork over to Google each month to turn your home into a miniature data center? According to Google, the answer is an eye-gouging $250 a month plus fees for blistering 20-Gig speeds on a WiFi 7-enabled, plus-sized router.
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The Mountain View tech giant proclaimed it was finally rolling out its fabled 20-Gig Google Fiber subscription Tuesday, which inevitably comes with that enormous price tag attached. The company also sells 1 Gig services for $70 all the way up to 8 Gbps for $150, so the $250 for 20 Gbps isn’t that far off the mark.
Also, you’ll need to live in Kansas City, North Carolina’s Triangle Region (the area around the towns of Raleigh and Chapel Hill) or the states of Arizona and Iowa to be the first to access these speeds. Google said it was working to bring the service to more areas, though the company is notoriously selective about its areas of operation. Google expects installations to start in Q1 of 2024.
It’s all very experimental, obviously. The company’s head of Google Fi, Nick Saporito, wrote in the blog post that the new service works on Nokia’s 25G PON and should offer the same multi-gig uploading and downloading speeds throughout one’s home. It’s also on WiFi 7, which Google has previously bragged was “not even fully certified yet.” WiFi 7, compared to WiFi 6 and 6E, also enables signals to transmit across multiple GHz bands simultaneously.
It’s also working on a custom router that’s a fair bit bigger than your traditional box. Google worked with broadband company Actiontec to design the “pre-certified” WiFi 7 router. When you start paying for the service, the company says it will send trained technicians to install the ultra-fast Google Fiber in your home. In a recent Reddit AMA, Saporito said you could also use your own router hardware for the 20-Gig service, though you’ll need an SFP28 cage supporting 25G optics. “Thousands” of people have already inquired about access to the new service when it was still in beta, according to Google.
GFiber 20 Gig + Wi-Fi 7 Demo
It all seems a fair bit excessive, but Google is promoting the service to developers who may be creating apps or games from home that need excessively fast internet connections throughout their residences. While one can imagine there are a few people out there wondering if they could host the most epic LAN party ever devised, all over WiFi. Saporito said in his AMA that Fiber “envisions a future in which the internet is far richer” than today, with even more AR/VR, 3D, and AI content needing to stream directly into people’s homes without any compression.
Of course, such a future necessitates that these newfangled routers get smaller and the services get far cheaper.
“As for the exact speeds of the future… we’ve already said we’re on a quest to 100G,” Saporito wrote.
