Singularity Hub Daily

One of the biggest barriers to electric vehicle adoption is the fear of running out of juice before you get to your destination. Roads that can charge your vehicle as you drive could be a solution, and they may be getting closer.

Rapid improvements in battery technology have seen the range of electric vehicles creep steadily upwards in recent years. But most still fall far short of gasoline-powered cars in this regard, and they take significantly longer to refuel if they do run dry.

One solution that has been discussed for many years is the idea of embedding some kind of charging technology in roads so that vehicles can charge their batteries as they drive. Most schemes envisage using the same kind of technology as the wireless chargers you can buy to top up your smartphone.

Revamping thousands of miles of highway with high-tech charging equipment is obviously no trifling matter, though, and so far progress has been slow. But recent developments suggest that the idea might be gaining traction and edging closer to commercial reality.

Last month, Indiana’s Department of Transport (INDOT) announced a collaboration with Purdue University and German company Magment to test out whether cement with embedded magnetized particles could provide an affordable road-charging solution.

Most wireless vehicle charging technologies rely on a process known as inductive charging, where electricity pumped into a wire coil creates a magnetic field that can induce an electric current in any other nearby wire coil. The charging coils are installed at regular intervals under the road, and cars are fitted with a receiver coil that picks up the charge.

But installing thousands of miles of copper under the road is obviously fairly costly. Magment’s solution is to instead embed standard concrete with recycled ferrite particles, which are also able to generate a magnetic field but are considerably cheaper. The company claims its product can achieve transmission efficiency of up to 95 percent and can be built at “standard road-building installation costs.”

It will still be some time before the technology is actually installed in real roads. The Indiana project involves two phases of lab testing and a trial run on a quarter-mile test stretch before it gets installed in highways. But if the cost savings turn out to be genuine, the approach could be a game-changer.

There are several electric road test beds already underway, and so far Sweden seems to be leading. In 2018 an electric rail was installed down the middle of a 1.2-mile stretch of road outside Stockholm. It can transfer power to a vehicle via a moveable arm attached to its bottom. And an inductive charging system built by Israeli firm ElectReon has been used to successfully charge an all-electric truck on a one-mile stretch on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea.

These systems don’t come cheap. The first is estimated to cost about €1m per kilometer ($1.9 million per mile), while the second test project cost around $12.5 million in total. But given that it already costs several million dollars to build a mile of conventional road, it may not be such an unreasonable investment, at least on new roads.

Carmakers seem to be coming around to the idea, with German automotive giant Volkswagen leading a consortium that will integrate ElectReon’s charging technology into electric vehicles as part of a pilot project.

An alternative option is to leave the road itself alone, and instead string charging wires above the road that can charge trucks in much the same way urban trams are powered. The system, built by German engineering giant Siemens, has been installed on about three miles of road outside Frankfurt and is being tested by several trucking companies.

Installing the system is also not cheap at roughly $5 million per mile, but according to the New York Times, the German government thinks it may still be cheaper than having to switch to trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells or large enough batteries...

The final flight of British Airways’ Concorde took place in October 2003, going from New York to London in three and a half hours. Inaugurated in 1976, the supersonic jet flew more than 2.5 million passengers over its lifetime, at an average cruising speed of 1,350 miles per hour.

The Concorde was retired mostly because it wasn’t financially viable (the price of a ticket between Paris and New York was around $10,000, but even this wasn’t enough to make up for the cost of operating and maintaining the jets). A deadly crash in July 2000 didn’t help, nor did the aircraft’s noise pollution and fuel economy issues.

But despite the Concorde’s imperfections, neither NASA nor private industry gave up on supersonic flight. This week, NASA released a timelapse video showing construction of its new supersonic jet, the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (thankfully, it goes by QueSST or “son of Concorde” for short). The video shows work being done on the aircraft at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works factory in Palmdale, California between May 2019 and June 2021.

“We’ve now transitioned from being a bunch of separate parts sitting around on different parts of the production floor to an airplane,” said Jay Brandon, NASA chief engineer for the Low Boom Flight Demonstrator (LBFD) project. The video shows the fuselage (where the cockpit sits), wings, and tail coming together. Once complete, the aircraft will be 94 feet long and have a wingspan of 29.5 feet.

The biggest component left to attach is the 30-foot-long nose, which is key for controlling the way air moves around and away from the body. The aircraft was very much designed with sound in mind; its tagline claims it will “reduce loud sonic booms to a quiet thump.”

Simply put, when an aircraft flies faster than the speed of sound (which is about 761 miles per hour at sea level), pressure waves created by displaced air molecules combine to generate shockwaves, which people on the ground hear as a sonic boom.

Among other features to decrease noise pollution, the X-59 has a single high-thrust engine that’s placed on top of its body, directing its sound away from the ground.

Initial flight tests of the aircraft are scheduled to start in 2022, with Lockheed Martin planning to run flight tests for nine months. If all goes well, the company will deliver the aircraft to NASA in 2023, and the space agency will begin its own flight tests. The technology could ultimately be used for commercial flights or military applications.

It will have to clear some significant hurdles before that happens, though. Supersonic flight over land has been prohibited since 1973, when the Federal Aviation Administration banned it due to the impact of sonic booms. In January of this year, the FAA proposed a set of rules for supersonic flight testing, an encouraging sign that the technology may make a comeback.

Environmental considerations are at the forefront of the FAA’s guidelines; given the amount of fuel they burn (by one estimate, around eight times as much as a 777 for a trans-Atlantic trip), supersonic jets are far worse than regular planes in terms of emissions. “One of the big problems with the Concorde was it was considered very bad for the environment,” University of Dayton professor Janet Bednarek, who studies aviation history, told Recode. “It burned a lot of fuel, but it also polluted at the upper levels of the atmosphere.”

Nevertheless, NASA and Lockheed Martin aren’t the only ones forging ahead with supersonic flight technology. United Airlines announced in June that it’s buying 15 supersonic planes from Denver-based Boom, at a cost of $200 million apiece. United and Boom claim the flights will use sustainable fuel and be net-zero carbon, but scaling up production of these fuels to the level needed for supersonic flight—and even for regular commercial flights—won’t be easy.

Finally, there’s the question of how big of a market there will be for these flights. This is mostly post-pandemic mode talking, but tr...

Scanning through data fresh off the telescope, we saw two ghosts dancing deep in the cosmos. We had never seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what they were.

Several weeks later, we had figured out we were seeing two radio galaxies, about a billion light years away. In the center of each one is a supermassive black hole, squirting out jets of electrons that are bent into grotesque shapes by an intergalactic wind.

But where does the intergalactic wind come from? Why is it so tangled? And what is causing the streams of radio emission? We still don’t understand the details of what is going on here, and it will probably take many more observations and modeling before we do.

We are getting used to surprises as we scan the skies in the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, using CSIRO’s new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a radio telescope that probes deeper into the universe than any other. When you boldly go where no telescope has gone before, you are likely to make new discoveries.

A Deep Search Returns Many Surprises

The Dancing Ghosts were just one of several surprises found in our first deep search of the sky using ASKAP. This search, called the EMU Pilot Survey, is described in detail in a paper soon to appear in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

The first big surprise from the EMU Pilot Survey was the discovery of mysterious Odd Radio Circles (ORCs), which seem to be giant rings of radio emission, nearly a million light years across, surrounding distant galaxies.

These had never been seen before, because they are so rare and faint. We still don’t know what they are, but we are working furiously to find out.

We are finding surprises even in places we thought we understood. Next door to the well-studied galaxy IC5063, we found a giant radio galaxy, one of the largest known, whose existence had never even been suspected.

This new galaxy too contains a supermassive black hole, squirting out jets of electrons nearly five million light years long. ASKAP is the only telescope in the world that can see the total extent of this faint emission.

What EMU Can Do

Most known sources of radio emissions are caused by supermassive black holes in quasars and active galaxies, which produce exceptionally bright signals. This is because radio telescopes have always struggled to see the much fainter radio emission from normal spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way.

The EMU project goes deep enough to see them too. EMU sees almost all the spiral galaxies in the nearby universe that were previously seen only by optical and infrared telescopes. EMU can even trace the spiral arms in the nearest ones.

EMU will help us understand the birth of new stars in these galaxies.

These some of the first results the EMU project, which we started in 2009. The EMU team of more than 400 scientists in more than 20 countries has spent the past 12 years planning the project, developing techniques, writing software, and working with the CSIRO engineers who were building the telescope. It has been a long haul, but we are at last seeing the amazing data we have dreamed of for so long.

But this is only the start. Over the next few years, EMU will use the ASKAP telescope to explore even deeper in the Universe, building on these discoveries and finding more. All the data from EMU will eventually be placed in the public domain, so that astronomers from around the world can mine the data and make new discoveries.

But don’t take my word for it. You can already use EMU Pilot Survey data to explore the radio sky yourself, using the zoomable image on our website.

Use your mouse wheel to zoom in from the big picture down to the finest details, and see what you find. Perhaps you may even discover something there that the astronomers have missed.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Jayanne English/EMU/Dark Energy Survey

Extreme weather events seem to be getting more common. In the last month in particular, we’ve seen dramatic flash floods in various parts of the world, including Germany, China, and the US. But while some regions get an excess of rainfall, others are seeing a dearth of it. They’re not all waiting for Mother Nature to show them some love, though. Scientists in the United Arab Emirates are taking matters into their own hands. In the face of searing temperatures and ongoing drought, the UAE’s National Center of Meteorology is using a new technique to literally make it rain.

Given its location on the Tropic of Cancer in the Persian Gulf, the UAE was never going to be anything but hot; between the dry, desert-heated winds blowing in from neighboring Saudi Arabia and Oman and the humidity from the sea, winters tend to be toasty, and summers unbearable.

But the region has seen record high temperatures of 125 degrees Fahrenheit (51.8 degrees Celsius) this summer, coupled with characteristic low rainfall; Dubai gets a total of about 2.7 inches of precipitation per year. For comparison’s sake, London gets 27.2 inches, New York 44.8, and Las Vegas 6.2. The UAE is so dry it was used for a field test of a substance called liquid nanoclay, which is applied to sandy soil to help it hold moisture and nutrients for plants to grow.

The country imports a whopping 80 to 90 percent of its food, so while rain isn’t crucial for food production there, it’s important for alleviating heat waves, allowing at least some agriculture to take place, and for general water security. These are among the reasons the nation was willing to take extreme measures to make it rain (and absorb the expense—Forbes reports the UAE has spent more than $15 million on ‘rain enhancement projects’).

Cloud seeding has traditionally been done by releasing compounds like silver iodide into clouds. The chemicals function as a sort of scaffold that water molecules latch onto, becoming heavy enough to drop to the ground as rain. Despite its lack of naturally-occurring rain, the UAE does have plenty of clouds, which are generated by moisture and evaporation from the Gulf of Oman, the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Sea.

Amid concern that pumping silver iodide and other chemicals into clouds could cause invisible but harmful pollution on the ground, scientists started to look for new ways to catalyze rainfall. The UAE funded research at the University of Reading in the UK, where meteorologists developed a cloud seeding technology based on electricity. They discovered that when cloud droplets have a positive or negative electrical charge, the smaller droplets will combine and form raindrops.

“Our project is about changing the balance of charges on the tiniest cloud droplets, a neglected aspect of clouds which could revolutionize our ability to manipulate rainfall in areas that need it most,” said University of Reading professor Giles Harrison.

Custom-built drones with a six-foot wingspan fly at low altitudes, with sensors measuring temperature, charge, and humidity. Charge emitters on the drones deliver electric charges to the molecules in clouds.

Videos from the last few weeks show it not only raining in Dubai and surrounding areas, but raining so much that some streets started to flood, a rare if not unheard of occurrence there.

#Cloudseeding | When streets of hot and sweltering #Dubai looked like they were right out of a Bollywood #monsoon scene.

editorji (@editorji) July 22, 2021

View this post on Instagram

These downpours are hard to argue with, but some scientists would say it can’t be proved that the rain was caused by cloud seeding. On top of the larger controversy around geoengineering as a whole, this is an ongoing controversy with cloud seeding specifically: how can we be sure it really works? As one environmental science researcher put it, “The problem with the atmosphere is that you can never do a controlled experiment. You can never say what would have happened—in all ...