Category Technology/Electronics

Inexpensive Battery Charges Rapidly for Electric Vehicles, Reduces Range Anxiety

Drawing of green modern car on a road attached by a plug to a charging station
A thermally modulated battery for mass-market electric vehicles without range anxiety and with unsurpassed safety, low cost, and containing no cobalt, is being developed by a team of Penn State engineers.
 IMAGE: CHAO-YANG WANG’S LAB, PENN STATE

Range anxiety, the fear of running out of power before being able to recharge an electric vehicle, may be a thing of the past, according to a team of Penn State engineers who are looking at lithium iron phosphate batteries that have a range of 250 miles with the ability to charge in 10 minutes.

“We developed a pretty clever battery for mass-market electric vehicles with cost parity with combustion engine vehicles,” said Chao-Yang Wang, William E...

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Blue-light Stride in perovskite-based LEDs

Blue-LED-perovskite in close-up.
Blue light perovskite-basedLEDs are key to creating white light. Thor Balkhe

Mixed halide perovskites for spectrally stable and high-efficiency blue light-emitting diodes. Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, have developed efficient blue light-emitting diodes based on halide perovskites. “We are very excited about this breakthrough,” says Feng Gao, professor at Linköping University. The new LEDs may open the way to cheap and energy-efficient illumination.

Illumination is responsible for approximately 20% of global electricity consumption, a figure that could be reduced to 5% if all light sources consisted of light-emitting diodes (LEDs)...

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Concept for a Hybrid-Electric Plane may Reduce Aviation’s Air Pollution problem

Caption:A proposed hybrid-electric plane could “eliminate aviation’s air pollution problem,” say MIT engineers.

Proposed design could reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by 95 percent, a new study finds. At cruising altitude, airplanes emit a steady stream of nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, where the chemicals can linger to produce ozone and fine particulates. Nitrogen oxides, or NOx, are a major source of air pollution and have been associated with asthma, respiratory disease, and cardiovascular disorders. Previous research has shown that the generation of these chemicals due to global aviation results in 16,000 premature deaths each year.

Now MIT engineers have come up with a concept for airplane propulsion that they estimate would eliminate 95 percent of aviation’s NOx emi...

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New State of Matter in One-Dimensional Quantum Gas

Experimental physicists have made a unique, one-dimensional quantum gas system that remains unusually stable as it’s pumped up to higher energy states. The researchers compare it to water being transported up an Archimedes’ screw. (Image credit: Getty Images)

By adding some magnetic flair to an exotic quantum experiment, physicists produced an ultra-stable one-dimensional quantum gas with never-before-seen ‘scar’ states – a feature that could someday be useful for securing quantum information.

As the story goes, the Greek mathematician and tinkerer Archimedes came across an invention while traveling through ancient Egypt that would later bear his name. It was a machine consisting of a screw housed inside a hollow tube that trapped and drew water upon rotation...

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