Lifeboat Foundation

The company claims the aerial vehicle can top any regular airliner.

The five-seater VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) Ranger, developed by Aura Aerospace, claims to fly farther than any typical airliner and boasts roof-to-roof vertical takeoff and landing capability.

Aura’s plan for doing this is quite straightforward. An octocopter system with eight 70-inch (178-cm) two-blade props hanging fore and aft of the enormous main wing is used to achieve vertical takeoff and landing. A pair of turbofan jet engines start-up to give forward power once the vehicle is in the air and the wing has folded out to its full 75-ft (23-meter) width. This system brings you onto and off of the landing pad.

Researchers around the world are on a mission to relieve a bottleneck in the clean energy revolution: batteries. From electric vehicles to renewable grid-scale energy storage, batteries are at the heart of society’s most crucial green innovations—but they need to pack more energy to make these technologies widespread and practical.

Now, a team of scientists led by chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has unraveled the complex chemical mechanisms of a battery component that is crucial for boosting energy density: the interphase. Their work published today in Nature Nanotechnology.

The Orion spacecraft had a brief power issue on Sunday (Dec. 4) but did complete its planned engine burn to return home as planned today (Dec. 5).

Adamkaz/iStock.

A desert at Guelmim Oued Noun in central Morocco will primarily play host to the Morocco-UK Power Project, which aims to develop 10.5GW of renewable energy from solar and wind power, of which 3.6GW would be supplied to the UK, for an average of 20+ hours a day.

Europe just set a $60 price cap on Moscow’s oil — so the Russian president has “basically destroyed his most important market,” Dan Yergin said.

Although oxygen is now the most abundant element in our oceans and our atmosphere, comprising about 88.8 percent and 23.1 percent of the mass of the two, respectively, this wasn’t always the case. In actuality, the abundance of oxygen on Earth arose only 2.4 billion years ago thanks to the advent of photosynthesis, the process through which some of the first life-forms transformed sunlight into energy. It was only coincidence, scientists say, that one of the products of this process was oxygen. But it also would go on to completely transform the planet, creating the conditions for increasingly complex forms of life.

For all the importance of this so-called “Great Oxidation Event,” scientists have always wondered about the presence of oxygen on the planet prior to the emergence of photosynthesis.

The vehicle has a 900kg dry weight and 900hp (662kW) output.

Italian performance brand De Tomaso has released the P900, a track-only V12-powered hypercar with a 900kg dry weight and 900hp (662kW) output, according to a report.

The carmaker will produce only 18 units globally of these bad boys and price them at a whopping US $3 million each which will ensure their drivers know they have a truly unique car. Each car will be further customized to the customer’s choices.

Continue reading “De Tomaso unveils ‘world’s first’ carbon neutral synthetic-fuel-driven hypercar” »

Year 2020 face_with_colon_three Propellant free thruster.

I usually approach papers on the subject of alternative thrusters with a certain degree of cynicism. But we’ve finally been given a study on microwave thrusters that doesn’t rely on impossible physics. Instead, it used a plain old plasma thruster.

Plasma thrusters have generally been thought of as a means of propulsion in space, but now one has been designed to operate under atmospheric conditions. According to the researchers involved, it’s an air plasma thruster that has the potential to produce the same thrust as a commercial jet engine.

Continue reading “Microwave thruster makes for clean-burning jet” »

The field of epidermal electronics, or e-tattoos, covers a wide range of flexible and stretchable monitoring gadgets that are wearable directly on the skin. We have covered this area in multiple Nanowerk Spotlights, for instance stick-on epidermal electronics tattoo to measure UV exposure or tattoo-type biosensors based on graphene; and we also have posted a primer on electronic skin.

Taking the concept of e-tattoos a step further, integrating them with triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), for instance for health monitoring, could lead to next generation wearable nanogenerators and Internet-of-things devices worn directly on and powered by the skin.

In work reported in Advanced Functional Materials (“Triboelectric Nanogenerator Tattoos Enabled by Epidermal Electronic Technologies”), researchers report a tattoo-like TENG (TL-TENG) design with a thickness of tens of micrometers, that can interface with skin without additional adhesive layers, and be used for energy harvesting from daily activities.