Lifeboat Foundation

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With an investment of $4.3 billion, this joint venture (JV) aims to meet the soaring demand for electric vehicles and further solidify the position of both companies in the global EV market. Both LGES and Hyundai Motor Group will each hold a 50 percent stake.

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have succeeded in creating a “superlattice” of semiconductor quantum dots that can behave like a metal, potentially imparting exciting new properties to this popular class of materials.

Semiconducting colloidal quantum dots have garnered tremendous research interest due to their special optical properties, which arise from the quantum confinement effect. They are used in solar cells, where they can improve the efficiency of energy conversion, biological imaging, where they can be used as fluorescent probes, electronic displays, and even quantum computing, where their ability to trap and manipulate individual electrons can be exploited.

However, getting semiconductor quantum dots to efficiently conduct electricity has been a major challenge, impeding their full use. This is primarily due to their lack of orientational order in assemblies. According to Satria Zulkarnaen Bisri, lead researcher on the project, “making them metallic would enable, for example, quantum dot displays that are brighter yet use less energy than current devices.”

Last February, the Biden administration unveiled its $5 billion plan to expand EV charging infrastructure across the country. Not only with the Department of Transportation help states build half a million EV charging stations by 2030, the White House also convinced Tesla to share a portion of its existing Supercharger network with non-Tesla EVs. On Thursday, Ford became the first automaker to formalize that pact with Tesla, announcing during a Twitter Spaces event that “Ford electric vehicle customers access to more than 12,000 Tesla Superchargers across the U.S. and Canada,” starting in Spring 2024, per the company release.

Because Teslas uses a proprietary charger port design for its vehicles, Ford owners will initially need to rely on a Tesla-developed adapter connected to the public charging cable in order to replenish their Ford F-150 Lightning, Mustang Mach-E and E-Transit vehicles. Ford also announced that, beginning with the 2025 model year, it will switch from the existing Combined Charging System (CCS) port to Tesla’s now open-source NACS charge port. These 12,000 additional chargers will join Ford’s 84,000-strong Blue Oval charging station network.

“Tesla has led the industry in creating a large, reliable and efficient charging system and we are pleased to be able to join forces in a way that benefits customers and overall EV adoption,” Marin Gjaja, chief customer officer of Ford Model e, said in the release. “The Tesla Supercharger network has excellent reliability and the NACS plug is smaller and lighter. Overall, this provides a superior experience for customers.”

Biden’s energy policy is paying off big time.

SEOUL, May 26 (Reuters) — South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution Ltd (LGES) (373220.KS) on Friday said they will build a $4.3 billion electric vehicle (EV) battery plant in the United States amid a push to take advantage of tax credits.

Manufacturers must adhere to new U.S. sourcing requirements for EV battery components and critical minerals so that buyers of their vehicles can qualify for up to $7,500 in tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Continue reading “Hyundai Motor Group, LG Energy to build $4.3 billion EV battery plant in US” »

Automated irrigation systems in the Northern part of Israel were briefly disrupted recently in an attack that once again shows how easy it can be to hack industrial control systems (ICS).

The Jerusalem Post reported that hackers targeted water controllers for irrigation systems at farms in the Jordan Valley, as well as wastewater treatment control systems belonging to the Galil Sewage Corporation.

Farms were warned by Israel’s National Cyber Directorate prior to the incident, being instructed to disable remote connections to these systems due to the high risk of cyberattacks. Roughly a dozen farms in the Jordan Valley and other areas failed to do so and had their water controllers hacked. This led to automated irrigation systems being temporarily disabled, forcing farmers to turn to manual irrigation.

The Tesla Model Y was the world’s best-selling car in Q1 2023, marking the first time ever that an EV has achieved this feat, according to industry analyst JATO Dynamics.

Model Y sales have been growing around the world for the last few years, putting the car on the trajectory to become the world’s best-selling vehicle. The feat was first predicted even before the car came to market, as Tesla thought the car could see up to a million units of demand per year.

It was an ambitious goal at the time, with many considering it another example of an “optimistic” Tesla prediction, but last year Tesla said the Model Y was on track to become the world’s best-selling car in 2023.

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New Tesla Cybertruck interior photos reveal an improved yoke steering wheel and other new tiny details to the all-electric pickup truck.

The interior photos revealed an improved yoke steering wheel that’s closed up, similar to a traditional round steering wheel.

Continue reading “Tesla Cybertruck interior photo shows improved yoke steering & more” »

Lightyear’s sleek O sedan has solar panels that can provide up to 44 miles of range per day.

When most people think of crystals, they picture suncatchers that act as rainbow prisms or the semi-transparent stones that some believe hold healing powers. However, to scientists and engineers, crystals are a form of materials in which their constituents—atoms, molecules, or nanoparticles—are arranged regularly in space. In other words, crystals are defined by the regular arrangement of their constituents. Common examples are diamonds, table salt, or sugar cubes.

However, in research just published in Soft Matter, a team led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Sangwoo Lee, associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, discovered that crystal structures are not necessarily always regularly arranged. The discovery advances the field of materials science and has unrealized implications for the materials used for semiconductors, solar panels, and electric vehicle technologies.

One of the most common and important classes of crystal structures is the close-packed structures of regular spheres constructed by stacking layers of spheres in a honeycomb arrangement. There are many ways to stack the layers to construct close-packed structures, and how nature selects specific stacking is an important question in materials and physics research. In the close-packing construction, there is a very unusual structure with irregularly spaced constituents known as the random stacking of two-dimensional hexagonal layers (RHCP). This structure was first observed from cobalt metal in 1942, but it has been regarded as a transitional and energetically unpreferred state.