Aviation

The technology behind ZEVA’s plan to put an eVTOL in every garage

ZEVA plans to certify the Zero eVTOL as an experimental-class aircraft with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) within the next six months, placing it in the same company as kit planes. 

Stephen Tibbitts comes across as the antithesis of a maverick Silicon Valley CEO. The mild-mannered, soft-spoken chief executive of ZEVA has the even keel of a college professor as he explains his plans for the ZEVA Zero, a disc-shaped eVTOL his tech startup is developing in Tacoma, Washington.

He is not brash or bombastic. There is no hint of Elon Musk or Steve Ballmer-style showmanship. But his ambitions for the Zero are not small.

“I think eVTOL represents the largest opportunity of our lifetimes,” said Tibbitts, speaking over Zoom. “Bill Gates [predicted] a computer on every desk. We’re saying a ZEVA in every garage. That’s our goal.”

After about four years of development, that goal appears to have taken a leap forward. In early January, a full-sized prototype of the ZEVA Zero achieved its first untethered, powered, test flight.

Its eight zero-emission, electric-motor-driven propellers lifted the disc — 8.5 feet in diameter — into a steady hover, then smoothly maneuvered forward several meters before launching high over a grassy field in Washington’s rural Pierce County.

“I feel ecstatic, super proud of the team and our accomplishment,” Tibbitts said. “And hopefully, that’ll help us really get out of the starting blocks. We need to raise a significant amount of money to get through transition flight and certification and get it into production.”

Continue reading… “The technology behind ZEVA’s plan to put an eVTOL in every garage”
Metaverse

SOUTH KOREA TO INVEST $187M IN NATIONAL METAVERSE PROJECT

The government will provide $186.7 million to stimulate the growth of a metaverse platform that it hopes businesses and industries will thrive in. 

By BRIAN NEWAR 

South Korea’s Ministry of ICT, Science, and Future Planning pledged 223.7 billion Korean won ($186.7 million) to create a broad metaverse ecosystem to support the growth of digital content and corporate growth within the country.

The ministry wrote in an official statement on Sunday that funds will be spent on completing four main objectives in creating what appears to be an all-encompassing metaverse ecosystem titled the “Expanded Virtual World.”

The government agency intends on using its metaverse as a platform for expanding the virtual industrial growth of cities, education and media.

Content creators will enjoy support on multiple fronts to attract the right talent to help build the platform. The ministry said that it will host community-oriented creative activities, a metaverse developer contest and a hackathon.

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Money Talk

Wall Street Is Dominating The Crypto World

Though cryptocurrency may be a central building block to the decentralized finance movement, its user base is now solidly more institutional than…

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Though cryptocurrency may be a central building block to the decentralized finance movement, its user base is now solidly more institutional than underground.

In 2021, Wall Street upped its crypto investments in a big way, trading $1.4 trillion worth of cryptocurrency on exchange Coinbase Global — a massive increase from just $120 billion in 2020.

Continue reading… “Wall Street Is Dominating The Crypto World”
Electric Vehicles

Why The Future Of Long-Haul Trucking Is Battery Electric

In a factsheet, T&E examines the progress to reaching zero emissions in the freight sector and shows how EU truck CO2 standards can make or break the transition.

There is increasing consensus among European truck manufacturers and industry stakeholders that battery electric trucks will play a dominant role in the decarbonisation of the road freight sector, including for long-haul. With trucks being heavily used capital goods, the advantage of battery electric vehicles in terms of lower fuel and maintenance costs grows with increasing mileage, making them particularly competitive for long-haul transport.

Ambitious CO2 standards in the upcoming revision can create the necessary market certainty to enable truckmakers to scale up their production of zero-emission trucks and for logistics companies to transition their fleets to zero emission. To find out more, download the factsheet.

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Energy, Science & Technology News

America’s Power Grid Is Increasingly Unreliable

Behind a rising number of outages are new stresses on the system caused by aging power lines, a changing climate and a power-plant fleet rapidly going green

By Katherine Blunt 

The U.S. electrical system is becoming less dependable. The problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Large, sustained outages have occurred with increasing frequency in the U.S. over the past two decades, according to a Wall Street Journal review of federal data. In 2000, there were fewer than two dozen major disruptions, the data shows. In 2020, the number surpassed 180. 

Utility customers on average experienced just over eight hours of power interruptions in 2020, more than double the amount in 2013, when the government began tracking outage lengths. The data doesn’t include 2021, but those numbers are certain to follow the trend after a freak freeze in Texas, a major hurricane in New Orleans, wildfires in California and a heat wave in the Pacific Northwest left millions in the dark for days.

The U.S. power system is faltering just as millions of Americans are becoming more dependent on it—not just to light their homes, but increasingly to work remotely, charge their phones and cars, and cook their food—as more modern conveniences become electrified.

At the same time, the grid is undergoing the largest transformation in its history. In many parts of the U.S., utilities are no longer the dominant producers of electricity following the creation of a patchwork of regional wholesale markets in which suppliers compete to build power plants and sell their output at the lowest price. Within the past decade, natural gas-fired plants began displacing pricier coal-fired and nuclear generators as fracking unlocked cheap gas supplies. Since then, wind and solar technologies have become increasingly cost-competitive and now rival coal, nuclear and, in some places, gas-fired plants. 

Regulators in many parts of the country are attempting to further speed the build-out of renewable energy in response to concerns about climate change. A number of states have enacted mandates to eliminate carbon emissions from the grid in the coming decades, and the Biden administration has set a goal to do so by 2035.

Continue reading… “America’s Power Grid Is Increasingly Unreliable”
Electric Vehicles

Auto Service Companies Are Preparing For The Electric Vehicle Revolution

By Peter McGuthriey.

The auto industry’s burgeoning transition to electric vehicles poses new challenges to auto service centers, as higher hybrid and EV adoption rates require companies to understand and manage new hardware.

One such service company is Bridgestone Americas, which owns roughly 2,200 tire and vehicle service centers across the U.S, as detailed in a report last month from Forbes.

As electric motors and battery cell-operated motors become more common, Bridgestone’s service and tire centers require new equipment and updated training for technicians.

While current EV sales volume is still fairly low for the U.S. auto market, Bridgestone Retail Operations President Marko Ibrahim says the company is already making moves to be ready for the expected transition to electric and hybrid models in the years ahead.

“We don’t wait until demand is set, because then we’re behind,” Ibrahim said. “We try to anticipate where the puck is going, and we try to get there first.”

The U.S. auto market only had 24 different EVs available in 2020, that number is expected to increase to 153 by 2025, according to General Motors (GM) Chief Economist Elaine Buckberg in a recent web conference hosted by the Society of Automotive Analysts.

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Robots

Solar-powered robotic mower for vineyards

The Virtrover mower robot.

By EMILIANO BELLINI

Developed by a French start-up, the robotic mower can be used in a 50-unit herd across a property of around 50 hectares and a radius of 20 km. It is powered by polycrystalline cells and equipped with battery storage. The system can operate with a maximum slope of 15% and reach a speed of 300m/h.

French start-up Vitirover has developed an automated PV-powered robotic mower for applications in vineyards and other agricultural fields.

“The robots are built at our headquarters in Saint-Émilion, in the Gironde department of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region in southwestern France,” the company’s CEO and founder, Arnaud de la Fouchardiere, told pv magazine.

The 20 W device relies on polycrystalline solar cells, a battery and MPPT optimization. “Their price depends on the terrain, the state of the soil, the number of obstacles per hectare, the height of the solar panels, the way in which the motors are installed if they are trackers, and many other variables,” de la Fouchardiere explained.

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drones

Spright and Interpath Laboratory Launch Medical Drone Delivery Pilot Service

Spright, the drone division of Air Methods, announced today that it has partnered with Interpath Laboratory to launch a first-of-its-kind drone delivery network that will transfer lab specimens. The first proof-of-concept test flight was last week with the Yellowhawk Tribal Health Center to Interpath’s main medical laboratory location in Pendleton, OR.

The proof-of-concept initiative is expected to greatly reduce the turnaround time of critical diagnostic test results for clinics like Yellowhawk and Interpath patients, while also improving patient satisfaction, and enabling healthcare providers to implement follow-up care in a timelier manner.

The project, working with the Pendleton UAS Test Site team, will use a Wingcopter 198 drone leveraging beyond line of sight (BVLOS) technology to perform the 15-mile flight from Yellowhawk to Interpath’s clinical laboratory in Pendleton.

The current process for laboratory services takes patient samples throughout the day, then batches them together for pick-up by gasoline-powered vehicles in the evening for delivery to Interpath. These vehicles typically drive thousands of miles each day across the region to pick-up specimens from numerous clinics, hospitals and facilities.

In contrast, the new drone-delivery initiative will enable samples to be repeatedly picked up and delivered to Interpath throughout the day, providing a green solution that removes gasoline-powered vehicles from roads and lessens local traffic.

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Stem cells

Newly Discovered Stem Cell Resembles Cells in Early Human Embryo

Researchers from the Reik lab have today published their latest work describing a new subset of human embryonic stem cells that closely resemble the cells present at the genomic ‘wake up call’ of the 8-cell embryo stage in humans. This new stem cell model will allow researchers to map out the key genomic changes during early development, and  help move towards a better understanding of the implications of genome activation errors in developmental disorders and embryo loss.

In all mammals, the early embryo undergoes a number of molecular events just after fertilisation that set the stage for the rest of development. During this key ‘wake up call’ the genome of the embryo takes over control of the cell’s activities from the maternal genome. In humans, this happens at the 8-cell stage and is called zygotic genome activation (ZGA). 

Before the findings of this study, investigating the details of human ZGA could only be done in human embryos; existing human stem cell models represented the embryo only at later stages of the developmental process. In the UK, experiments using embryos are permitted but highly regulated, meaning that research into early development relied in part on alternative, non-human models.

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Virtual Reality

HTC aims to turn your carpool into a VR roller coaster

By Andy Zahn

Boring carpool got you down? Road trips with the family turning your hair prematurely gray? Holoride and HTC might have just the solution to make you look forward to your daily commute, and to turn unruly passengers into quiescent drooling zombies. They intend to bring VR to your car.

More specifically, the concept they’re pitching involves XR (Extended Reality), which includes a wider selection of sci-fi goggle-based content than just VR. The tech being debuted today takes advantage of the new HTC Vive Flow VR headset, which Digital Trends mobile editor Ajay Kumar got to test out last fall. This device differs from your garden-variety VR headset in that it’s more like wearing a big pair of sunglasses.

It’s quite expensive, and limited in some ways compared to other stand-alone and PC-connected headsets, but it solves the weight and bulk issues that have been a part of what’s held back mainstream VR popularity. Where other headsets are designed to stay at home, the Vive Flow is designed for life on the go.

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Energy

Fusion tech is set to unlock near-limitless ultra-deep geothermal energy

Quaise says it has a plan, and the technology, to drill deeper than ever before and unlock the vast geothermal power of the Earth to re-power fossil-fired electricity plants with green energy

By Loz Blain

MIT spin-off Quaise says it’s going to use hijacked fusion technology to drill the deepest holes in history, unlocking clean, virtually limitless, supercritical geothermal energy that can re-power fossil-fueled power plants all over the world.

The heat beneath our feet.

Everyone knows the Earth’s core is hot, but maybe the scale of it still has the power to surprise. Temperatures in the iron center of the core are estimated to be around 5,200 °C (9,392 °F), generated by heat from radioactive elements decaying combining with heat that still remains from the very formation of the planet – an event of cataclysmic violence when a swirling cloud of gas and dust was crushed into a ball by its own gravity.

Where there’s access to heat, there’s harvestable geothermal energy. And there’s so much heat below the Earth’s surface, according to Paul Woskov, a senior fusion research engineer at MIT, that tapping just 0.1 percent of it could supply the entire world’s energy needs for more than 20 million years. 

The problem is access. Where subterranean heat sources naturally occur close to the surface, easily accessible and close enough to a relevant power grid for economically viable transmission, geothermal becomes a rare example of totally reliable, round-the-clock green power generation. The Sun stops shining, the wind stops blowing, but the rock’s always hot. Of course, these conditions are fairly rare, and as a result, geothermal currently supplies only around 0.3 percent of global energy consumption.

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Robots

Here’s an Idea: A Jumping ‘SpaceBok’ Robot Makes Giant Leaps Toward the Moon and Mars

The Spacebok robot (shown here) has the ability to leap across complex terrains.

The Mars-bound Perseverance rover is as sophisticated as it gets. The robotic vehicle features six science instruments, six cameras, six aluminum wheels, and even a helicopter. 

But can it jump?

Hendrik Kolvenbach, PhD researcher at the ETH Zurich Robotics Systems Lab, sees the best way to get around on the Moon as less of a step and more of a giant leap. Listen to our episode of Here’s an Idea to learn how Kolvenbach and his team are creating a technology that’s part space robot and part African springbok.

The “SpaceBok” can hop three feet in the air, continuously. The pogo-like hop is an efficient way to someday get around the low-gravity surfaces of the Moon, according to the robot inventor. 

“We have footage of astronauts who had been on the Moon and who would use a jump or a skipping gait, and they find it as the best way to travel,” Kolvenbach told us in our latest episode of Here’s an Idea.

SpaceBok measures about 2.5 feet long by 1.5 feet wide — the size of a small dog, says Kolvenbach. 

Continue reading… “Here’s an Idea: A Jumping ‘SpaceBok’ Robot Makes Giant Leaps Toward the Moon and Mars”