Lifeboat Foundation

India’s largest commercial oil company, Indian Oil Corporation Ltd., will partner with Lod-based energy start-up Phinergy to develop and produce innovative metal-air batteries, often regarded as the solution for long-distance electric-vehicle travel.

Indian Oil said it had bought a minority stake in Phinergy on Tuesday, which specializes in aluminum-air (Al-air) and zinc-air technologies. Unlike conventional lithium-ion batteries that carry oxygen within a heavy electrode, metal-air systems produce energy by combining aluminum, water and oxygen from the air.

The future incorporation of the long-pursued battery solution into electric vehicles, Phinergy said, will enable long-range driving, five-minute energy recharges and lowering the cost of electric vehicles.

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Its design shines a light on technical skills that researchers didn’t think Neolithic people possessed.

Archaeologists have discovered a 7,000-year-old Neolithic well in eastern Europe, which they believe is the oldest wooden structure in the world.

The square well was built with oak by farmers around 5256 B.C., according to researchers who pinpointed its origin after analyzing the tree rings in the wood, which is the scientific method known as dendrochronology. The well’s age makes it the oldest dendrochronologically dated archaeological wooden construction worldwide, according to the researchers in the Czech Republic.

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O.o.

While eating takeout one day, University of Chicago scientists Bozhi Tian and Yin Fang started thinking about the noodles—specifically, their elasticity. A specialty of Xi’an, Tian’s hometown in China, is wheat noodles stretched by hand until they become chewy—strong and elastic. Why, the two materials scientists wondered, didn’t they get thin and weak instead?

They started experimenting, ordering pounds and pounds of noodles from the restaurant. “They got very suspicious,” Fang said. “I think they thought we wanted to steal their secrets to open a rival restaurant.”

Continue reading “Breakthrough creates tough material able to stretch, heal and defend itself” »

Study Links Autism To ‘Insulation’ That Coats Brain Cells And Speeds Signals : Shots — Health News Brains affected by autism appear to share a problem with cells that make myelin, the insulating coating surrounding nerve fibers that controls the speed at which the fibers convey electrical signals.

US biotech companies are working towards plasma therapies to tackle age-related diseases in humans.

It’s hard to imagine today, but Wright Electric is trying to build an electric aircraft for 186 passengers.

Wright Electric announced the start of the electric propulsion development program for the 186-seat electric aircraft — Wright 1.

A new Einsteinian equation, ER=EPR, may be the clue physicists need to merge quantum mechanics with general relativity.

We were unsure if wormholes could exist long enough to allow a person through. Now calculations indicate they are extremely rare, but could last the age of the universe.

O.o.

This paper describes a new and efficient method of defining an annular region of a curl-free magnetic field with specific physics and coil properties that can be used in stellarator design. Three statements define the importance:

Codes can follow an optimized curl-free initial state to a final full-pressure equilibrium. The large size of the optimization space of stellarators.

Approximately fifty externally-produced distributions of magnetic field, makes success in finding a global optimum largely determined by the starting point.

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