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China unveils 373-mph ‘levitating’ train, fastest ground vehicle in the world

The Chinese train uses “maglev” technology, meaning it levitates above the track with no contact between body and rail.

By Theo Wayt

China unveiled a futuristic “levitating” train on Tuesday that has a top speed of 373 miles per hour — making it the fastest ground vehicle in the world.

By comparison, Tesla’s Model S Plaid — which the company bills as the fastest production car in the world — tops out at just 200 mph. 


The Chinese train uses “maglev” technology, meaning electromagnetic forces allow the train to levitate above the track with no contact between body and rail. The lack of friction lets the train reach blistering speeds.

Continue reading… “China unveils 373-mph ‘levitating’ train, fastest ground vehicle in the world”
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Automobiles, Electric Vehicles, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News, Tesla

Tesla opens world’s largest Supercharger station

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It is located between two of Tesla’s biggest markets.

Tesla has been quickly expanding its Supercharger network lately and it just reached another milestone by opening the world’s new largest Supercharger station.

Tesla’s fleet is growing at a fast pace and the automaker is adding more electric vehicles to the road than any other automaker.

At the same time, the company is trying to keep up its infrastructure, like service centers, mobile service fleet, and charging infrastructure in order to support its growing fleet.

Tesla’s charging infrastructure mainly consists of the Supercharger network, arguably one of the company’s greatest assets.

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Alternative Transportation, Engineering, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News, Transportation

Hyper loop achieves 1,000 KM/H speed in Korea, days after Virgin passenger test

South Korea hopes to launch first hyperloop network in 2024

A hyperloop prototype in South Korea has reached speeds over 1,000km/h, just days after a rival system performed the first successful passenger test using the technology.

The Korean Railroad Research Institute (Korail) announced on Wednesday that a “hyper-tube train” travelling through a vacuum hit a top speed of 1,019km/h (633mph).

The test took place on a scale model and is the first of its kind in the world, according to Business Korea. The previous top speed, also set by Korail, was 714km/h.

South Korea is hoping to launch a hyperloop network by 2024, cutting the journey time between Seoul and Busan from three hours to 30 minutes.

Continue reading… “Hyper loop achieves 1,000 KM/H speed in Korea, days after Virgin passenger test”

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Engineering, Green Friendly, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News, Transportation

Fehmarnbelt Tunnel will be the world’s longest immersed tunnel

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(CNN) — After more than a decade of planning, work has begun on the world’s longest immersed tunnel. Descending up to 40 meters beneath the Baltic Sea, Fehmarnbelt Tunnel will link Denmark and Germany, slashing journey times when it opens in 2029.

The tunnel, which will be 18 kilometers (11.1 miles) long, is one of Europe’s largest infrastructure projects, with a construction budget of over €7 billion ($8.2 billion).

By way of comparison, the 50-kilometer (31-mile) Channel Tunnel linking England and France, completed in 1993, cost the equivalent of £12 billion ($15.5 billion) in today’s money. Although longer than the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel, the Channel Tunnel, was made using a boring machine, rather than by immersing pre-built tunnel sections.

It will be built across the Fehmarn Belt, a strait between the German island of Fehmarn and the Danish island of Lolland, and is designed as an alternative to the current ferry service from Rødby and Puttgarden, which carries millions of passengers every year. Where the crossing now takes 45 minutes by ferry, it will take just seven minutes by train and 10 minutes by car.

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cutting edge, New Discoveries, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

Meet the zeptosecond, the shortest unit of time ever measured

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ABOVE – A particle of light, called a photon (yellow arrow), produces electron waves out of an electron cloud (grey) of a hydrogen molecule (red: nucleus). The result of those interactions is what’s called an interference pattern (violet-white). The interference pattern is slightly skewed to the right, allowing researchers to calculate the time for the photon to get from one atom to the next.

Scientists have measured the shortest unit of time ever: the time it takes a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule.

That time, for the record, is 247 zeptoseconds. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second, or a decimal point followed by 20 zeroes and a 1. Previously, researchers had dipped into the realm of zeptoseconds; in 2016, researchers reporting in the journal Nature Physics used lasers to measure time in increments down to 850 zeptoseconds. This accuracy is a huge leap from the 1999 Nobel Prize-winning work that first measured time in femtoseconds, which are millionths of a billionths of seconds.

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Energy, Engineering, New Discoveries, new technology, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

Scientists create the world’s first room temperature superconductor

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Superconducting materials typically require extremely cool temperatures to operate, which is demonstrated in this photo. But a new discovery could change that

Since its discovery more than a century ago, superconductivity has come to play a powerful role in many modern day technologies, such as maglev trains and MRI scans, but its utility has been limited by the need for extremely cool operating temperatures. Scientists are now claiming a big breakthrough in this area, creating what they say is the first material capable of superconductivity at room temperature.

The work was led by Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester, and aims to overcome one of the major roadblocks in expanding the uses of superconductive materials. These materials exhibit no electrical resistance and expel a magnetic field, but because they typically only function at temperatures below -140 °C (-220 °F), they require expensive equipment to maintain.

“Because of the limits of low temperature, materials with such extraordinary properties have not quite transformed the world in the way that many might have imagined,” says Dias. “However, our discovery will break down these barriers and open the door to many potential applications.”

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NASA, New Discoveries, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News, Space, Space Flight

For the first time in its history, NASA successfully collects sample from asteroid

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Touchdown!

For the first time in its history, NASA has successfully collected samples from the surface of an asteroid, using the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on Tuesday.

The small spacecraft has been orbiting Bennu, an asteroid 500 meters across, for almost two years. Around 6 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, the spacecraft completed a “Touch-And-Go” maneuver before firing its thrusters to get back to a safe distance from the asteroid. The lonely space rock was more than 200 million miles away at the time.

“We did it,” principal investigator Dante Lauretta said during the agency’s live broadcast. “We’ve tagged the surface of the asteroid.”

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Electric Vehicles, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News, Transportation

Silver lightning custom electric motorcycle breaks 1/4-mile world record

The time to beat has remained in place for a whopping eight years.

 Hans-Henrik Thomsen pulled off an incredible 6.87-second 1/4-mile pass to break a record that has been in place for eight years. He was riding the custom-built Silver Lightning electric drag-racing motorcycle for Danish racing team True Cousins.

According to a report by Electrek, True Cousins set out to beat electric motorcycle racing records some 12 years ago. The team’s first bike had only 12 kW of electric power. However, they’ve been working hard for years to improve their chances. The team’s latest electric machine is 100 times more powerful, at a crazy 1,200 kW (1.2 Megawatts).

True Cousins’ goal was to beat the 1/4-mile electric motorcycle record of 6.94 seconds, which was set in 2012 by Larry McBride. They had nine total runs to see if they could pull it off. With two-thirds of the runs in the books, it didn’t look like they’d be able to beat the record. Their best time out of six total runs was 7.15 seconds. Ridiculously quick, but not quick enough.

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cutting edge, quantum computing, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

D-Wave’s 5,000-qubit quantum computing platform handles 1 million variables

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D-Wave Advantage System

D-Wave today launched its next-generation quantum computing platform available via its Leap quantum cloud service. The company calls Advantage “the first quantum computer built for business.” In that vein, D-Wave today also debuted Launch, a jump-start program for businesses that want to begin building hybrid quantum applications.

“The Advantage quantum computer is the first quantum computer designed and developed from the ground up to support business applications,” D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz told VentureBeat. “We engineered it to be able to deal with large, complex commercial applications and to be able to support the running of those applications in production environments. There is no other quantum computer anywhere in the world that can solve problems at the scale and complexity that this quantum computer can solve problems. It really is the only one that you can run real business applications on. The other quantum computers are primarily prototypes. You can do experimentation, run small proofs of concept, but none of them can support applications at the scale that we can.”

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IBM, quantum computing, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

IBM publishes its quantum roadmap, says it will have a 1,000-qubit machine in 2023

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IBM Quantum Hummingbird

IBM today, for the first time, published its road map for the future of its quantum computing hardware. There is a lot to digest here, but the most important news in the short term is that the company believes it is on its way to building a quantum processor with more than 1,000 qubits — and somewhere between 10 and 50 logical qubits — by the end of 2023.

Currently, the company’s quantum processors top out at 65 qubits. It plans to launch a 127-qubit processor next year and a 433-qubit machine in 2022. To get to this point, IBM is also building a completely new dilution refrigerator to house these larger chips, as well as the technology to connect multiple of these units to build a system akin to today’s multi-core architectures in classical chips.

Continue reading… “IBM publishes its quantum roadmap, says it will have a 1,000-qubit machine in 2023”

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Automobiles, Electric Automobile, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

Welcome to the age of the all-electric hypercar

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Boasting up to 2,000bhp with no fuel cap, a trio of new releases from Lotus, Pininfarina and Rimac are here for when your Ferrari just isn’t fast enough

Same old story. You wait ages for one 2,000bhp, all-electric hypercar to arrive, and then three come along at once. Three underdog brands with very different backstories, three cars that are almost impossible to resist comparing, each with startlingly similar statistics and almost identical price tags that sound more like government furlough bill

In Cambiano, the 1,900bhp Pininfarina Battista will become the most powerful Italian road-legal car ever — itself quite a record — and the first to be badged by the coachbuilder and design house behind some of the most beautiful sports cars of the 20th century (the Ferrari 250GT, Cisitalia 202 and Fiat 124 Spider among them), now launching as a carmaker in its own right.

In Norfolk, the £2.2m Lotus Evija is about to enter production as the most powerful road car in the world, in what is the latest comeback chapter for the British sports car maker that is impossible to introduce without using the word “plucky”.

And in Croatia, Rimac is the no-bullshit start-up-cum-electric-powerhouse that is finalising its ultra-technical C_Two hypercar, which has a top speed of 415kmph and promises 0–100kmph acceleration in the time it takes to read the words “faster than a motorbike”. For the record, 1.85 seconds.

Continue reading… “Welcome to the age of the all-electric hypercar”

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Architecture, Engineering, Housing, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

World’s tallest prefab skyscrapers will rise in Singapore — but they’re being built in Malaysia

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A pair of skyscrapers are set to become the tallest prefabricated buildings in the world.

And while the two 192-meter-tall (630 feet) towers will rise in densely populated Singapore, large parts of the structures are being built over the border in Malaysia.

The residential project, named Avenue South Residences, will see 988 apartments formed from almost 3,000 vertically stacked “modules.” The firm behind the project, ADDP Architects, says the building method, known as Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction (PPVC), is less labor-intensive and can help reduce waste and noise pollution.

Continue reading… “World’s tallest prefab skyscrapers will rise in Singapore — but they’re being built in Malaysia”

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