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Tesla Preps Bigger 100 KWh Battery For Model S and Model X

An anonymous reader writes: Tesla will soon offer a 100 kWh battery for the Model S and Model X that will allow for increased range — perhaps as much as 380 miles for the Model S. Currently, the 90 kWh batteries are the company’s largest capacity. Kenteken.TV is reporting that the Dutch regulator that certifies Tesla’s vehicles for use in the European Union, RDW, has recently published a number of new Tesla variants. RDW’s public database now includes entries for a Tesla “100D” and “100X, ” which are titles that follow Tesla’s current naming system based on battery capacity. The listing for the 100D claims the vehicle has a range of 381 miles or 613 kilometers. The motor output is reported as 90 kilowatts (121 horsepower), which is the maximum output the Tesla motors can sustain without overheating. Autoblog notes that EU range estimates tend to be more optimistic than those issued by the U.S. EPA. A more realistic range might be 310 to 320 miles. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tesla Preps Bigger 100 KWh Battery For Model S and Model X

We’re One Step Closer To Proving Stephen Hawking Was Right That Black Holes Evaporate

In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking made an audacious prediction that black holes aren’t totally black; they evaporate over time, emitting tiny amounts of radiation in the process. Now Israeli physicists have reported the strongest evidence to date that Hawking was right in a new paper in Nature Physics . Read more…

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We’re One Step Closer To Proving Stephen Hawking Was Right That Black Holes Evaporate

Obsessed Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles To Improve Sound

To an audiophile, there’s no such thing as ‘too expensive’ if it means an upgrade to their setup could improve their listening experience. And in Japan, some acoustic connoisseurs are now installing their own utility poles , with custom transformers, to ensure all of their audio gear is getting the purest power possible. Read more…

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Obsessed Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles To Improve Sound

Orbital angular momentum states may vastly increase fiber’s bandwidth

(credit: NASA ) We live and die by data these days. Data rates and latencies are everything, with data centers and chips designed to maximize communication speeds. The hero in the world of data is the optical fiber. Thanks to light’s very high base frequency, it is possible to modulate it very quickly without using a huge amount of bandwidth. Optical fiber’s ability to modulate light quickly allows network designers to choose a wavelength band, divide it up into slots, and use each slot to communicate its own data. So a typical fiber will carry several channels, each operating at multi-gigabit-per-second speeds. This approach, already many, many years old, has served us very well. But all good things come to an end. Researchers are always looking for ways to carry more information, and one idea—that one, at the back of the class, ignored by all the other ideas—is to use special states of light to encode information. These orbital angular momentum (OAM) states have the potential to vastly increase bandwidth, but they are difficult to handle. Some recent research, however, suggests that we might well be using OAM states before too long. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Orbital angular momentum states may vastly increase fiber’s bandwidth

Sea anemones could be the key to treating hearing loss

Sea anemones could soon do a lot to help those of us living above the water. Researchers have discovered that proteins used by starlet sea anemones to repair their cells also repair the sound-sensing cells in mice and other mammals. If you bathe cells in those proteins for long enough (the team tried for an hour), they rapidly restore molecular links that bundle hearing-related hair cells together. In theory, you could reverse hearing damage among cells that haven’t been permanently lost — that exceptionally loud concert might not permanently limit your listening enjoyment. There’s a lot of work to be done before there’s an actual treatment. However, scientists don’t think you’d always need anemone cells to make this work. At least in mice, there are repair proteins that parallel those from the underwater creatures. If researchers can find a way to improve their effectiveness (mammal proteins are much less useful right now), you wouldn’t need to harvest them from sealife to deliver effective treatments. Via: ScienceNews Source: Journal of Experimental Biology

MIT-designed windows can rapidly switch from clear to opaque

Imagine not having to use curtains or blinds anymore. Instead of covering your windows when the sun’s too strong, you simply have to flip a switch to turn them completely opaque. A team of MIT researchers have developed a method that could make that scenario a reality. Their technique uses electrochromic materials that can instantly change the color of glass from transparent to nearly black by applying a bit of electricity. It’s certainly not the first method developed to change a window’s color, but according to the researchers, their creation has a much faster response time and requires lesser energy. Other techniques take a few minutes to change the shade of the material, and some can’t achieve the opacity that it can. Further, there are methods that need a constant flow of voltage for the window to remain opaque. This one only needs electricity when switching colors — the window can remain in its nearly black state without being connected to a source of energy. To make sure it has near instantaneous response time, the researchers used sponge-like materials called metal-organic frameworks that can quickly conduct electrons and ions. Electricity is applied to give the window a negative charge, and positive ions attack in an effort to neutralize it. That is what causes the color-changing effect. They also mixed two different chemicals that dye the window red and green to get to a color that’s very nearly black. MIT professor of chemistry Mircea Dincă said the technique could lead to “pretty significant energy savings” by reducing the need for air conditioning. “You could just flip a switch when the sun shines through the window, and turn it dark, ” he added. He also believes that it could lead to low-power smart displays, similar to e-ink found on Kindles. While the researchers already proved that their method works in the lab, they still need to create an actual working sample to entice investors and get their creation into our homes. Source: MIT

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MIT-designed windows can rapidly switch from clear to opaque

Why are these children "sieg heiling" the American flag?

In this 1915 photo, the children appear to be raising their arms in a siege heil salute of the American flag. Actually, this gesture was part of the Pledge of Allegiance ritual for decades. Then, um, Hitler happened. From Smithsonian : Originally known as the Bellamy Salute, the gesture came to be in the 1890s, when the Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis J. Bellamy. The Christian socialist minister was recruited to write a patriotic pledge to the American flag as part of magazine mogul Daniel Sharp Ford’s quest to get the flag into public schools. At the time… Bellamy and his boss both agreed that the Civil War had divided American loyalties and that the flag might be able to bridge those gaps. His campaign centered around the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the new world. He published his new Pledge as part of a unified Columbus Day ceremony program in September 1892 in the pages of the Youth’s Companion, a popular children’s magazine with a circulation of 500,000. “At a signal from the Principal,” Bellamy wrote, “the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute—right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag…’” Then in the 1930s, Hitler reportedly saw Italian Fascists doing a similar gesture, likely based on an ancient Roman custom, and adopted it for the Nazi party.

Personal Information of Nearly 200 Democrats Leaked in Latest Hack

We already knew that a recent hack that targeted Democratic officials was going to be more than just access to possibly incriminating emails, but we didn’t realize it would be this soon. Read more…

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Personal Information of Nearly 200 Democrats Leaked in Latest Hack

12 Things You Can Now Do With Windows 10 After the Anniversary Update

It’s Windows 10 update time! The so-called “Anniversary Update” marks a year since the OS officially made it out of Redmond and it’s the biggest update yet. We’ve already posted our initial impressions of the update, but with the hefty patch now rolling out for everybody, here are 12 new tricks to try on your Windows 10 machine. Read more…

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12 Things You Can Now Do With Windows 10 After the Anniversary Update

‘GoldenEye: Source’ Updated: A Classic, Free Multiplayer Game

An anonymous reader quotes The Verge: GoldenEye: Source received its first update in more than three years this week. It’s free to download and it features 25 recreated maps, 10 different multiplayer modes, and redesigned versions of the original game’s 28 weapons. It was created using Valve’s Source engine, the same set of tools used to create Counter Strike and Half-Life games. So it’s a massive step up in both visuals and performance for one of the more drastically dated gaming masterpieces of the last 20 years… GoldenEye 007, the beloved N64 first-person shooter, has been recreated in high-definition glory by a team of dedicated fans over the course of 10 years…the attention to detail and the amount of effort that went into GoldenEye: Source make it one of the most polished HD remakes of a N64 classic. With 8 million copies sold, Wikipedia calls it the third best-selling Nintendo 64 game of all-time (although this version doesn’t recreate its single-player campaigns). Anyone have fond memories of playing Goldeneye 007? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘GoldenEye: Source’ Updated: A Classic, Free Multiplayer Game

Ken May

Author: kenmay