Following yesterday’s popular discussion on Americans and trucks , we got to wondering: Whatever happened to Via Motors ? To refresh your memory, back in January we brought you the story of an American company taking fresh-off-the-assembly-line trucks from Detroit and turning them into E-REVs (Extended Range Electric Vehicles): Powerful yet environmentally-friendly 100-m.p.g. beasts of burden. The company estimated delivery of the first models by mid-2013, but that vague date period has decidedly come and gone. We looked into it mostly afraid to find they’d gone belly-up, but were pleased to find they’re alive and well, and still leaping hurdles on their way to production. Vehicles have to be crash-tested to meet American safety regulations, and even though the trucks Via aims to produce are existing models that have already been crash-tested by their original manufacturer (General Motors), re-rigging them with electric motors requires a whole new crash test. So last month they smashed up a bunch of their cargo van models—and passed with flying colors. “The engineering work done to integrate the VIA’s electric technology has been exceptional and the vehicles have exceeded our expectations in all tests that were performed, ” says Alan Perriton, president of VIA Motors. “We are now moving on to complete certification and begin mass production.” To that end, just weeks ago Via brought their factory online in Mexico, near the GM factory that cranks out Silverados, one of the vehicles Via hacks up. Here’s a look at the facility: (more…)
Read More:
Checking In with Via Motors: Yep, Those Full-Sized Electric Pick-Up Trucks are On the Way
Something very strange happened in the R&D lab of a UK-based electronics engineering company. A research team at Roke Manor Research was working on text-based radio frequency systems when a team member suddenly detected a signal—coming from a random bag of components off to the side. A small movement had apparently turned mechanical energy into electrical energy within the bag. After figuring out how this phenomena occurred, a Roke team subsequently harnessed it and created a new tiny tracking device. Their invention works over a greater distance than most existing tags, and here’s the killer quality that makes it really different from nearly all tracking devices: It works without batteries. The device is called Agitate and it’s a self-charging miniature device, no larger than a quarter. The agitate tag’s signal “can be tracked through walls and up to 20 kilometres in built-up areas, ” writes the company, “with an estimated range of 200 kilometres in free space.” So how does it work? Basically Agitate is made of two plates, one is metal and the other a charged material. When either of the two plates are moved, even just slightly, mechanical energy is turned into electrical and is used to transmit a radio pulse. The signal only lasts a few seconds but is more powerful than a cell phone. And it’s very precise—the shorter the radio pulse, the more precise the signal to a specific location. (more…) 
An anonymous reader writes “CPU water cooling may be more expensive than air cooling, but it is quieter and moves the bulk away from your CPU. It’s also improving, as Zalman has just demonstrated with the announcement of the Reserator 3. Zalman is claiming that the Reserator 3 is the world’s first liquid cooler to use nanofluids. What’s that then? It involves adding refrigerant nanoparticles to the fluid that gets pumped around inside the cooler transporting the heat produced by a CPU to the radiator and fan where it is expelled. By using the so-called nanofluid, Zalman believes it can offer better cooling, and rates the Reserator 3 as offering up to 400W of cooling while remaining very quiet. The fluid and pump is supplemented by a dual copper radiator design and “quadro cooling path, ” which consists of two copper pipes sitting behind the fan and surrounded by the radiators. The heatsink sitting on top of the CPU is a micro-fin copper base allowing very quick transfer of heat to the nanofluid above.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
bshell writes “The Verge has a great photo-essay about Tûranor PlanetSolar, the first boat to circle the globe with solar power. ‘The 89,000 kg (nearly 100 ton) ship needs a massive solar array to capture enough energy to push itself through the ocean. An impressive 512 square meters (roughly 5,500 square feet) of photovoltaic cells, to be exact, charge the 8.5 tons of lithium-ion batteries that are stored in the ship’s two hulls.’ The boat is currently in NYC. Among other remarkable facts, the captain (Gérard d’Aboville) is one of those rare individuals who solo-rowed across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, journeys that took 71 and 134 days, respectively. The piece has a lot of detail about control systems and design.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
“How can ride-app outfits like Lyft, Uber and Sidecar operate in a town with strict rules about how and where taxis can do business?,” asks Dennis Romero at the LA Weekly . “Los Angeles Department of Transportation taxicab administrator Thomas Drischler this week came up with an answer. They can’t.” 
David M. Patrick has accidentally re-invented the wheel. The California-based inventor was toying around with six short, curved lengths of cable that he had connected into a sort of helical loop–and then he accidentally dropped it. What he observed next was surprising: The loop began to roll… and roll… and roll. It was a self-balancing wheel. Even stranger was that no one expected it to roll; Patrick’s loop actually looks square when it is rolling. A lifelong skater, Patrick then prototyped a skateboard wheel based on his design, this one comprised of side-by-side helical coils. He call it the Shark Wheel : (more…) 
