Science & Technology

Many barriers are holding up the automotive industry’s wide-scale transition to electric vehicles. Getting battery costs down, getting range up, and convincing car buyers to break up with gasoline for good are just some of the more commonly known ones. But there’s also one very powerful group that hasn’t been much help so far: the…

One question for Iris Berent, an Israeli-American cognitive psychologist at Northeastern University, where she investigates, among other things, language and how people reason about human nature. Photo courtesy of Iris Berent Why do people believe in ghost stories? The explanation that occurs to most people is that this is something that comes from culture, religion.…

A Twitter Space with Brian Wang, Bradford Fergeson, Randy Kirk, Gary Carson, Larry Goldberg, Lars Strandridder (Best in Tesla), John Gibb (Dr Know it All). Key insights – Tesla Semi could match the Tesla Car business in revenue if there is an accelerated shift to electric trucks by China and other nations in Asia. The…

CATL has achieved a mix of sodium ion and lithium ion which allows them to complement each other and thus increase the energy density of the battery system. This will help the transition to sodium ion batteries by using them at scale for suitable range electric cars and energy storage. Sodium-ion batteries will definitely become…

The Indonesian island of Java’s tallest volcano, Semeru, sent an ash cloud nearly a mile into the air this week—the latest uptick in unrest from a mountain that belches ash and volcanic gases almost constantly. The latest explosive activity is par for the course for Semeru, but this event was possibly exacerbated by a surprising-sounding…

When Douglas Adams’s U.S. publisher asked him to substitute something less offensive for the f-word in in his novel  Life, the Universe, and Everything (one of the sequels to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Adams made a cheeky decision to swap in the name of an entire country with a reputation for maintaining a…

As part of the push to electrify government fleets, employees at three national forests will test out Ford F-150 Lightnings for field operations in rugged and remote areasA Ford Lightning F-150 pickup truck next to a charging station during a media event in Healdsburg, California, US, on Friday, May 20, 2022. With the release of…

After 30 years of planning and negotiations, construction begins this week on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world’s largest radio-astronomy observatory. The giant instrument—to be built across sprawling sites in Australia and Africa—will collect the radio signals emitted by celestial objects and will hopefully shed light on some of the most enigmatic problems in…

In their quest to understand the first stars and galaxies that lit up the cosmos, astronomers are still in the dark—but getting closer to enlightenment one discovery at a time. That’s the almost inescapable conclusion from initial observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the $10-billion observatory that began science operations in July. Designed…

Last March, environmental advocates celebrated a landmark victory when United Nations negotiators agreed to write a binding global treaty on plastic pollution. As the meeting concluded, diplomats emotionally declared that multilateralism is “still alive,” and called the intergovernmental environmental deal the most significant since the 2015 Paris Agreement. The treaty couldn’t be more urgent, as…