These were the most popular (by number of page views) posts on our blog in 2018. Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel (2008) NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover (2011) * Backyard Wildlife: Red-tailed Hawk (2018) * Home Engineering (Halloween edition): Gaping Hole Costume (2010) * 500 Year Floods (2008) Growing Citrus in the Snow (2018) * Science Toys You […]
Photo-illustration: Stuart Bradford I have no animosity toward cars and planes. For decades I have depended for local travel on a succession of reliable Honda Civics, and for years I have flown intercontinentally at least 100,000 miles annually. At these two extremes—a drive to an Italian food store, a flight from Winnipeg to Tokyo—cars and […]
Photo: Amionx Flame Out: Punctures such as this one can cause lithium-ion batteries to catch fire by creating an internal short inside the cell. For the most part, lithium-ion batteries are extraordinarily safe. But if a battery is overcharged or develops an internal short, it can catch fire and explode. Unfortunately, this happens frequently enough […]
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Many of us are ready to throw our collection of tangled charging cables in the garbage and replace it with technology that relies on wireless power transfer. So far, though, wireless power transfer (WPT) systems have mostly been limited to supplying power to a single load, such as an individual phone. The few systems that […]
There are at least 1.47 million solar installations of varying sizes in the 48 contiguous U.S. states, from home rooftop panels to utility-owned solar power plants. That’s the conclusion of DeepSolar, a machine learning algorithm developed by researchers at Stanford University that searches satellite images for solar panels. The count is higher than some previous estimates, […]
Widespread, occasional use of antibiotics in USA linked with resistance The increasing prevalence of antibiotic resistance in the U.S. appears more closely linked with their occasional use by many people than by their repeated use among smaller numbers of people, according to a large new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The […]
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The chance that SpaceX’s planned Starlink satellite constellation will cause an injury or death is 45 percent every six years, according to an IEEE Spectrum analysis of figures submitted by the company to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. Elon Musk hopes the nearly 12,000 satellites in the constellation will eventually carry half of all Internet traffic. […]
Two industry groups, Japan’s CHAdeMO and the China Electricity Council, which are the world’s strongest proponents of electric vehicles (EVs), announced in late August they would codevelop an ultrafast charging protocol for EVs. Now, the partners, under the supervision of both the Japanese and Chinese governments, are inviting other countries to join the endeavor. Their […]