As anyone who has purchased jewelry can attest, platinum is expensive. That’s tough for consumers but also a serious hurdle for a promising source of electricity for vehicles: the hydrogen fuel cell, which relies on platinum.
Now a research team led by Bruce E. Koel, a professor of biological and chemical engineering at Princeton University, has opened a door to finding far cheaper alternatives. In a paper published April 4 in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers reported that a chemical compound based on hafnium worked about 60 percent as effectively as platinum-related materials but at about one-fifth the cost.
“We hope to find something that is more abundant and cheaper to catalyze reactions,” said Xiaofang Yang, principal scientist at HiT Nano Inc. and visiting collaborator at Princeton who is working with Koel on the project.
Researchers at Oregon State University have found that a chemical mechanism first described more than two centuries ago holds the potential to revolutionize energy storage for high-power applications like vehicles or electrical grids.
The research team led by Xiulei (David) Ji of OSU’s College of Science, along with collaborators at the Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California Riverside, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, are the first to demonstrate that diffusion may not be necessary to transport ionic charges inside a hydrated solid-state structure of a battery electrode.
“This discovery potentially will shift the whole paradigm of high-power electrochemical energy storage with new design principles for electrodes,” said Xianyong Wu, a postdoctoral scholar at OSU and the first author of the article.
As even casual Star Wars fans will know, lightsabers are probably the coolest weapon ever to make an appearance on the big screen. Lightsaber fights are so elegant that they are almost hypnotic and, even though not all of us might have a strong enough flow of Force running through our veins, a lightsaber in the right hand is by far the deadliest weapon to be found in the universe.
The idea behind a lightsaber is simple genius: a light-weight and immensely powerful tool that uses a blade of energy to not only slice up disciples of the Dark Side in a single blow but also act as an effective shield against laser blasts. So why don’t we have working lightsabers in real life? Surely physicists must be smart enough (and big enough Star Wars fans) to be able to produce one of these incredible objects.
The obvious way of building a lightsaber would be to use a laser, which can be seen as a particularly bright and directional burst of light. But even though laser technology is continuously striding towards more efficient and practical machines, we are still miles away from a working lightsaber. Let’s see why.
The combined company, with big footprints in both the fast-growing commercial aerospace business and an increase in military spending, may be emboldened to push back on big customers like Boeing, Airbus and Lockheed Martin in terms of pricing, aftermarket work and intellectual property.
United Technologies has struck a deal to combine its booming aerospace business with defense contractor Raytheon, a surprise twist capable of rattling customers and competitors alike.
The deal would create a giant, one-stop shop with products that range from Tomahawk missiles and radar systems to jet engines that power passenger planes and the seats that fill them.
Under one roof, the companies could put more pressure on suppliers and encourage their industrial conglomerate competitors to seek deals of their own.
THE PHOTONIC FENCE:
Laser Insect Monitoring and Eradication.
The Photonic Fence is poised to revolutionize response to and monitoring of harmful insect incursions in agriculture, hospitality, government, military and residential pest control markets.
The Photonic Fence monitors insects in flight and eliminates those identified as targets by shooting them down with a micro-burst of laser energy. The Photonic Fence also holds the potential to create entirely new methods of entomological study.
TOKYO — Toyota is ramping up electric vehicle deployment plans, pulling forward its goal of selling 5.5 million electrified vehicles by five years and aiming to develop a solid-state battery by next summer as it races to meet a “sudden surge” of EV popularization.
Toyota now aims to sell some 5.5 million traditional gasoline-electric hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles by 2025. Nearly 1 million of them could be pure EVs.
Executive Vice President Shigeki Terashi, Toyota’s r&d chief, outlined the new roadmap in a June 7 briefing about the company’s EV plans. In December 2017, the company had said it wanted to sell that many electrified vehicles by 2030, five years later than the revised outlook.
This pugnacious antipathy toward scientists, research funding and universities threatens to undercut the very advantages that have made the U.S. such a dominant technological power over the last century. Just as Hasan Ibn al-Haytham’s achievements draw a sharp contrast with the Middle East’s current lagging position in science, sepia-colored nostalgia for Isaac Newton will ring bitterly hollow if the West turns away from Newton’s legacy. A civilization is only as great as its last failure.
It’s absurd to claim otherwise — especially now, as America turns away from Newton’s legacy.