Through the looking glass of silicon.
Category: transportation – Page 6
Microscopic imaging reveals how electric double layers form at battery nucleation sites
Electrochemical cells—or batteries, as a well-known example—are complex technologies that combine chemistry, physics, materials science and electronics. More than power sources for everything from smartphones to electric vehicles, they remain a strong motivation for scientific inquiry that seeks to fully understand their structure and evolution at the molecular level.
A team led by Yingjie Zhang, a professor of materials science and engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has completed the first investigation into a widely acknowledged but often overlooked aspect of electrochemical cells: the nonuniformity of the liquid at the solid-liquid interfaces in the cells.
As the researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, microscopic imaging revealed that these interfacial structures, called electrical double layers (EDLs), tend to organize into specific configurations in response to chemical deposition on the surface of the solid. The paper is titled “Nucleation at solid–liquid interfaces is accompanied by the reconfiguration of electrical double layers.”
Tesla’s New Strategy Has Uber Terrified
Questions to inspire discussion.
👥 Q: What is the ratio of robo taxis to supervisors in Tesla’s network? A: Tesla’s robo taxi network operates with a 10:1 ratio of robo taxis to supervisors, enabling efficient management and cost-effective operations.
Market Disruption.
📊 Q: How is Whim, a Tesla competitor, performing in the market? A: As of April 2025, Whim has 25% of San Francisco gross bookings, surpassing Lyft, with an average price of $20 per mile compared to Uber’s $15 and Lyft’s $14.
Technology Superiority.
🤖 Q: How does Tesla’s robo taxi software compare to human drivers? A: Tesla’s robo taxi software has crossed the uncanny valley, providing a smooth and comfortable driving experience similar to a human chauffeur, outperforming Uber’s inconsistent service.
Artificial neurons based on antiferromagnetic auto-oscillators as a platform for neuromorphic computing
A spiking neural network consists of artificial synapses and neurons and may realize human-level intelligence. Unlike the widely reported artificial synapses, the fabrication of large-scale artificial neurons with good performance is still challenging due to the lack of a suitable material system and integration method. Here, we report an ultrathin (less than10 nm) and inch-size two-dimensional (2D) oxide-based artificial neuron system produced by a controllable assembly of solution-processed 2D monolayer TiOx nanosheets. Artificial neuron devices based on such 2D TiOx films show a high on/off ratio of 109 and a volatile resistance switching phenomenon. The devices can not only emulate the leaky integrate-and-fire activity but also self-recover without additional circuits for sensing and reset. Moreover, the artificial neuron arrays are fabricated and exhibited good uniformity, indicating their large-area integration potential. Our results offer a strategy for fabricating large-scale and ultrathin 2D material-based artificial neurons and 2D spiking neural networks.
Things Tesla won’t tell you about Robotaxi (Highlights)
Questions to inspire discussion.
🛑 Q: How does the Robo Taxi handle blocked routes? A: The Robo Taxi demonstrates impressive rerouting capabilities, finding new paths when exits are blocked and making right-hand turns to circumvent blocked left-hand turn lanes.
🚦 Q: How does the Robo Taxi adapt to traffic situations? A: It shows human-like behavior by slowing down dramatically to enter the right-hand lane when a slower vehicle is ahead, and can accelerate and speed up to overtake slower vehicles.
💧 Q: How does the Robo Taxi handle standing water? A: The Robo Taxi demonstrates adaptability by avoiding standing water in parking lots, performing three-point turns to navigate around obstacles.
🔄 Q: How flexible is the Robo Taxi in changing its driving approach? A: It shows impressive adaptability by altering its method to slow down when encountering slower vehicles and changing again to make right-hand turns around blocked left-hand turn lanes.
Technical Considerations.
New physical model aims to boost energy storage research
Engineers rely on computational tools to develop new energy storage technologies, which are critical for capitalizing on sustainable energy sources and powering electric vehicles and other devices. Researchers have now developed a new classical physics model that captures one of the most complex aspects of energy storage research—the dynamic nonequilibrium processes that throw chemical, mechanical and physical aspects of energy storage materials out of balance when they are charging or discharging energy.
The new Chen-Huang Nonequilibrium Phasex Transformation (NExT) Model was developed by Hongjiang Chen, a former Ph.D. student at NC State, in conjunction with his advisor, Hsiao-Ying Shadow Huang, who is an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the university. A paper on the work, “Energy Change Pathways in Electrodes during Nonequilibrium Processes,” is published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C.
But what are “nonequilibrium processes”? Why are they important? And why would you want to translate those processes into mathematical formulae? We talked with Huang to learn more.
Elon Announces MOST Powerful FSD Update Ever
Questions to inspire discussion.
🛣️ Q: What specific improvements can we expect from the new FSD model? A: The new model will see and avoid potholes, drive better in parking lots, find parking spaces more efficiently, figure out pickup and drop-off zones for robotaxis, and handle high chaos situations like crowded areas more effectively.
Safety and Regulations.
🚦 Q: How does FSD’s safety compare to human drivers? A: Tesla’s FSD technology is already much safer than humans with the current Version 4, which has 8 cameras and 10x better parameters than previous versions, and it’s expected to improve further with future updates.
📊 Q: How significant are the improvements in the new FSD model? A: While the model has 10x better parameters, the features may not be 10x better, but improvements could be greater than 10x due to hard-to-measure benefits like reduced driving stress and increased safety.
🚫 Q: What’s limiting FSD’s full potential? A: Regulations currently hold FSD back from reaching its full potential, despite its ability to drive faster and handle high chaos situations more effectively.
Maximizing direct methanol fuel cell performance: Reinforcement learning enables real-time voltage control
Fuel cells are energy solutions that can convert the chemical energy in fuels into electricity via specific chemical reactions, instead of relying on combustion. Promising types of fuel cells are direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs), devices specifically designed to convert the energy in methyl alcohol (i.e., methanol) into electrical energy.
Despite their potential for powering large electronics, vehicles and other systems requiring portable power, these methanol-based fuel cells still have significant limitations. Most notably, studies found that their performance tends to significantly degrade over time, because the materials used to catalyze reactions in the cells (i.e., electrocatalytic surfaces) gradually become less effective.
One approach to cleaning these surfaces and preventing the accumulation of poisoning products produced during chemical reactions entails the modulation of the voltage applied to the fuel cells. However, manually adjusting the voltage applied to the surfaces in effective ways, while also accounting for physical and chemical processes in the fuel cells, is impractical for real-world applications.
Friction that cools: Threshold effects enable self-stopping robot swarms
How can a horde of active robots be automatically brought to a standstill? By arresting their dynamics in a self-sustained way. This phenomenon was discovered by physicists at Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf (HHU) and La Sapienza University in Rome. The threshold principle of static friction with the ground plays a decisive role here: it removes the kinetic energy of two robots after a mutual collision so efficiently that they can no longer set themselves in motion.
The researchers describe in the journal Nature Communications that this fundamental effect can also be used to construct controllable moving robot systems.
Friction creates heat, as anyone knows who has rubbed their hands together in winter weather. And friction costs energy. Road friction on vehicle tires, for example, will cause a moving car to steadily slow down unless the accelerator is used.
Israeli-made flying cars may be floating into our future
For nearly 60 years, the dream of flying cars that many Baby Boomers grew up on while watching TV’s George Jetson jet around the skyways has remained unfulfilled.
But the dream is still alive. A dozen startups around the world are developing VTOLs (“vertical takeoff and landing”) – the technical term for flying cars.
One of the most intriguing of those companies is right here in Israel. Yavneh-based Urban Aeronautics is developing CityHawk to be an eventual “Uber of the air.”