Tesla Model S
Tesla has had it’s ups and downs while Fisker has had it’s blips and boops, but Elon Musk’s (Tesla and SpaceX) has proven to be a serial innovator with a bloodhound nose for the right technical – business mash up. This MIT Technology Review piece comparing these two iconic eCar companies seems right on. And points to the government force fed A123 battery company as a compounding problem.
Fisker Karma
Edited the title only…
Do Wind Turbines Need a Rethink? | Innovations.
Windmills don’t stink, and they have a grace that few industrial artifacts stain. I just hope they don’t rust.
Graphene, the material in pencil ‘lead’ has come to be seen as the new wonder carbon, fist it was Buckyballs (Bukminsterfullerene) then nanotubes, now graphene. Each a version of molecular carbon, one in the form of various size soccer ball like structures ( hexagonal flats giving it the form and name since Buckminster Fuller was the prophet of geodesic structures like domes, the last generation of fabric over structure aircraft, etc.) Nanotubes are fine latticework tubes (hexagonal lattice) and graphene is at its most basic a single atom thick sheet lattice (hexagonal again!) graphene has some extraordinary properties of interest to electrical, electronic, electo-optic, structural and other engineering technologies, it could be the basis of ‘the next industrial revolution.’
One of the latest latest graphene breakthroughs is its formation into open cell foams, some that are actually lighter than air! On the order of helium making it potentially possible to form foam balloons that fly. This piece describes the potential to use this ultra light material as a bio scaffold for the creation of organs etc,
Had not realized this was progressing as fast as it appears to be, still it is years not months, but neither is it decades.
Short Wired piece with a fantastic video of a precision take off flight and landing of the Xombie test vehicle.
Another use for low cost 3D Printing, think about it, exact models of all sorts of biological specimens: surface, organs, bones, shells, exoskeletons, etc, scaled to a size that students or scientists can use for discussion, learning, planning, etc.
John Deere hybrid front loader, YeaHawwwww!
Very cool! All snark aside.
Simply remarkable book review / self awakening memoir of the UFW, Caesar Chavez, and the sixties.
There seems something ineffably right about this piece, it captures the sadness one feels looking back at the 60’s 70’s and the soaring optimism that so rapidly became a disastrous fall into ruin, ruin most tragically for those the movements believers sought to help.
This World and Others 