Lifeboat Foundation

In a nutshell: Every September, the Guinness Book of World Records sits in on a little drag race between college students. The seat is reserved because these mostly untelevised races are known for pushing the absolute limits of tiny electric cars, and frequently, a team makes acceleration history.

Applied sciences students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University have broken the world record for acceleration in an electric car. The University of Stuttgart held the previous record, set last year when it sent its car screaming down the track, going from zero to 100 km/h (62.15 mph) in 1.461 of a second. This week, the students from Zurich crushed that showing with a time of just under one second (0.956 of a second) and a distance of 12.3 meters.

The students are Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ) members and spent a year building the car they named “Mythen.” The team suffered several setbacks and had to spend every minute of their free time tuning and swapping components. All their hard work paid off as driver Kate Maggetti set the world acceleration record for electric vehicles in front of Guinness judges on a test track in Duebendorf, Switzerland.

Researchers are even exploring the possibility of extracting lithium from seawater, potentially a game-changer for lithium accessibility globally.

A recent breakthrough by researchers at Princeton University provides renewed optimism for the future of the battery industry. An innovative method for extracting lithium presents a high potential to revolutionize clean energy sectors, such as electric vehicles and grid storage, while also reducing the environmental impact of lithium production.

Lithium, the silvery-white metal found in abundance in saline waters, has been a cornerstone of the clean energy transition. However, the environmental footprint of traditional lithium extraction is far from pure, requiring expansive plots of land and prolonged extraction processes. The solution? A new groundbreaking method that reduces both land use and time.

We could soon see more lithium-ion batteries made with recycled materials thanks to a new partnership. BASF, a battery materials producer, has announced that it’s teaming up with Nanotech Energy, a maker of graphene-based energy products, to produce lithium-ion batteries with recycled materials for customers in North America.

While BASF will create the cathode active materials using recycled metals from a Battle Creek, Michigan facility, Nanotech will use those materials to create the lithium-ion battery cells. Making the batteries with recycled metals could decrease their CO₂ footprint by around 25 percent, according to BASF.

Additionally, BASF and Nanotech Energy will also work with the American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) and the Canada-based TODA Advanced Materials Inc. ABTC will recycle the materials gathered by Nanotech, such as nickel, cobalt, manganese, and lithium. TODA will then use the materials to create battery precursors, which BASF will then convert into cathode active materials.

Morgan Stanley says Tesla stock may surge by $500 billion because of it’s Dojo Supercomputer, in lieu of robotaxis and network services.

Dojo can open up “new addressable markets,” just like AWS did for Amazon.com Inc., analysts led by Adam Jonas wrote in a note, upgrading the stock to overweight from equal-weight and raising its 12-month price target to a Street-high $400 per share from $250.

Shares of Tesla, which have already more than doubled this year, rose as much as 6.1% in US premarket trading Monday. The stock was on track to add about $46 billion in market value. Morgan Stanley is one of Musk’s key advisory firms, including on the $44 billion takeover of Twitter Inc., now known as X.

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The German firm, which specializes in making automotive components, has achieved this by integrating its inductive transmitter into the rotor itself. The design promises to offer performance on par with permanent-magnet synchronous machines (PSMs).

MIT researchers have demonstrated the first system for ultra-low-power underwater networking and communication, which can transmit signals across kilometer-scale distances.

This technique, which the researchers began developing several years ago, uses about one-millionth the power that existing underwater communication methods use. By expanding their battery-free system’s communication range, the researchers have made the technology more feasible for applications such as aquaculture, coastal hurricane prediction, and climate change modeling.

“What started as a very exciting intellectual idea a few years ago—underwater communication with a million times lower power—is now practical and realistic. There are still a few interesting technical challenges to address, but there is a clear path from where we are now to deployment,” says Fadel Adib, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab.

Tesla is still fighting for its North American Charging Standard chargers to become dominant over the Combined Charging System chargers, which are used by most other electric vehicles in the United States. Now, the company is releasing a new product that could help its cause.

The product, called the Tesla Universal Wall Connector, is a new version of the EV company’s home charging Wall Connectors. But unlike the old Tesla Wall Connectors, which are only compatible with NACS (and therefore can only charge Teslas), the Tesla Universal Wall Connector will also be compatible with CCS plugs.

As Electrek pointed out, this is similar to what Tesla has done with its Magic Dock adapters installed at some Supercharger stations, which can charge both Teslas and non-Teslas alike.

The long-promised more affordable Tesla electric car might debut alongside an automated robotaxi.

Tesla is reportedly preparing to build a $25,000 electric car built on the company’s next-generation engineering platform. Axios.

The $25,000 car reportedly has a futuristic design like the long-delayed Cybertruck — the angular pickup truck that Tesla first revealed in 2019. The Cybertruck will supposedly begin production this year, with production-at-scale beginning in 2024.

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New details of Musk’s involvement in the Ukraine-Russia war revealed in his biography.

Elon Musk holds many titles. He is the CEO of Tesla SpaceX and owns the social media company X, which was recently rebranded from Twitter. Going by an excerpt of his biography, published in the Washington Post.

According to the excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s book, Musk disabled his company Starlink’s satellite communication networks, which were being used by the Ukrainian military to attack the Russian naval fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea, sneakily. The Ukrainian army was using Starlink as a guide to target Russian ships and attack them with six small… More.

Continue reading “Did Elon Musk prevent a Russia-Ukraine nuclear war?” »