Detroit and Michigan are experiencing a Chinese invasion. Chinese car companies are opening offices in Detroit and hiring laid off American auto engineers. Meanwhile other Chinese businesses are buying up land to create economic zones and cities within Michigan.
A non-profit group is looking for four people to start a permanent colony on Mars. The group has opened up the search so anyone can apply online. You can live out your SciFi fantasies and actually head out into space to be one of the first Earth colonies on another planet. The first manned one way trip to Mars is expected to lift off in 2023.
Having had the misfortune of smartphones that took accidental baths with disastrous consequences, the thought of water anywhere near my phone makes me shudder. PowerTrekk’s new charger just might change that reaction into a sigh of relief.
Most electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrids utilize lithium ion, lithium polymer, or nickel metal hydride batteries. There are inefficiencies in all of them. Most EVs have a range of only 100 miles. Hybrids usually can achieve electric only distances of about 30 miles. Those numbers have greatly limited the market for these zero and low emission cars. Phinergy’s metal-air batteries might just change that.
You’ve heard of budget airlines where the seats are cramped and you pay for everything. Well, a former space tourist wants to send a married couple on a flyby of Mars on what can only be called a budget spaceflight. They won’t necessarily have to pay for everything as they go but the amenities will be sparse and the risk great.
Jim Kor is working towards creating a car you don’t build, but print. The engineer has spent the past few years working on the design of his newest vehicle, the Urbee 2. The car which, as Wired reports, is as strong as steel and weighs only 1,200 pounds. When finished, Kor said he plans on driving the car from San Francisco to New York City on only 10 gallons of fuel.
A private Chinese investment company has hired an American Architecture firm to design a high tech, high density suburb. When built the 1.3 square kilometer (not quite one square mile) “satellite city” will house 80,000 people along with shops and businesses. Tainfu will be built outside of Chengdu, China and is expected to use 48 percent less energy and 58 percent less water than cities of a similar population density.
Mozilla, the non-profit software company which made the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client, announced its new mobile operating system will be work on 17 different mobile carriers during the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain. The system, dubbed Firefox OS, will be loaded onto phones from five different handset manufacturers and is set to launch sometime around June.
The phone numbers, emails, and email subject lines of users who contacted three major Internet companies for support have been compromised after hackers infiltrated Zendesk’s system. The three customers: Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr, according to a Wired report.
The world’s first bionic hand capable of giving its user the ability to “feel” a given object while simultaneously being controlled through thought is ready to be attached to an amputee for the first time.
“Space. The final frontier.” For those of us who grew up either on the original series, the spin off series or the movies, going into outer space has been nothing but a fantasy. Now that fantasy may become a reality with the purchase of a simple $10 digital poster.
In many ways, fuel cells for electronic devices are a lot like the legendary Sasquatch: everyone’s heard of it, even if only in passing, but no one has truly seen one in the wild. That all might change with the PowerTrekk, a simple, portable, fuel cell charger made by Swedish-based company myFC.
It looks like car-sharing and summoning services hare getting a second chance in California, after state regulators struck deals with both Lyft and Uber which will eliminate each company’s $20,000 fines for violating public utilities code.
While 3D printing can give people the means to turn their ideas into reality, it can also provide a quicker way to bring products to market. Shapeway provides a way for designers to create objects to test without having to put a great deal of money into materials, molds or production processes. Once an idea is perfected, you can offer it for sale through Shapeway in a variety of materials.
By this time electric-gas hybrids are rather common place. Just about every automobile manufacturer has at least one model hybrid like this. Then there are electric cars that are still a novelty for most people because of the still high purchase price. Now Peugeot has decided to produce a different type of hybrid that uses compressed air with a gasoline engine to improve mileage and reduce emissions. According to Peugeot, this type of hybrid could have a lower purchase price and maintenance cost than either electric-gas hybrids and electric cars while producing greatly reduced pollution.
Imagine a M. C. Esher painting turned into a home and you will have a good idea of what is planned. Universe Architecture wants to build a 1,000 sq m (10,764 sq ft) house based on a möbius strip. It is called Landscape House or “Endless” house. The entirety of the building is expected to be created in sections using a huge 3D printer.
As everyone knows, incandescent light bulbs may be the cheapest bulbs you can buy but they don’t last very long and use a lot of electricity. Should you replace your incandescent light bulbs with compact florescent lights (CFLs) or light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that you find in stores? CFLs will save you money on your electric bill but not as much money as LEDs. A new company called NanoLight is claiming to have created a LED bulb that is even more efficient than those commonly found in stores. In order to get that bulb, you have to order it on Kickstarter.
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