Toyota’s Cartridge Helps Make Hydrogen Portable

August 2, 2022 by Lewin Day 139 Comments

Hydrogen has long been touted as the solution to cleaning up road transport. When used in fuel cells, the only emissions from its use are water, and it eliminates the slow recharging problem of battery-electric vehicles. It’s also been put forth as a replacement for everything from natural gas supplies to laptop batteries.

Toyota has been pushing hard for hydrogen technology, and has worked to develop vehicles and infrastructure to this end. The company’s latest efforts involve a toteable hydrogen cartridge – letting you take hydrogen power on the go!

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Dead Spider Becomes Robot Gripper: It’s Necrobotics!

August 1, 2022 by Lewin Day 46 Comments

Robot arms and grippers do important work every hour of every day. They’re used in production lines around the world, toiling virtually ceaselessly outside of their designated maintenance windows.

They’re typically built out of steel, and powered by brawny hydraulic systems. However, some scientists have gone for a smaller scale approach that may horrify the squeamish. They’ve figured out how to turn a dead spider into a useful robotic gripper.

The name of this new Frankensteinian field? Why, it’s necrobotics, of course!

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Why Fedora Decided To Give CC0 Licensed Code The Boot

July 29, 2022 by Tom Nardi 57 Comments

The term “open source” can be tricky. For many people, it’s taken to mean that a particular piece of software is free and that they can do whatever they wish with it. But the reality is far more complex, and the actual rights you’re afforded as the user depend entirely on which license the developers chose to release their code under. Open source code can cost money, open source code can place limits on how you use it, and in some cases, open source code can even get you into trouble down the line.

Which is precisely what the Fedora Project is looking to avoid with their recent decision to reject all code licensed under the Creative Common’s “Public Domain Dedication” CC0 license. It will still be allowed for content such as artwork, and there may even be exceptions made for existing packages on a case-by-case basis, but CC0 will soon be stricken from the list of accepted code licenses for all new submissions.

Fedora turning their nose up at a software license wouldn’t normally be newsworthy. In fact, there’s a fairly long list of licenses that the project deems unacceptable for inclusion. The surprising part here is that CC0 was once an accepted license, and is just now being reclassified due to an evolving mindset within the larger free and open source (FOSS) community.

So what’s the problem with CC0 that’s convinced Fedora to distance themselves from it, and does this mean you shouldn’t be using the license for your own projects?

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Where Pollution Hits The Road: The Growing Environmental Hazard Of Rubber Tires

July 28, 2022 by Maya Posch 110 Comments

As ubiquitous as rubber tires are due to the many practical benefits they offer to cars, trucks, and other conveyances, they do come with a limited lifespan. Over time, the part of the tire that contacts the road surface wears away, until a tire replacement is necessitated. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the material that wears away does not magically vanish, but ends up in the environment.

Because of the materials used to create tires, this worn away material is counted as a microplastic, which is a known environmental pollutant. In addition, more recently it’s been found that one additive commonly found in tires, called 6PPD, is highly toxic to certain species of fish and other marine life.

There are also indications that these fine bits of worn-off tire contribute to PM_2.5 particulate matter. This size of particulates is fine enough to penetrate deep into the lungs of humans and other animals, where they can cause health issues and exacerbate COPD and similar conditions. These discoveries raise a lot of questions about our use of tires, along with the question of whether electric vehicles stand to make this issue even worse.

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The Surprisingly Manual Process Of Building Automotive Wire Harnesses

July 27, 2022 by Dan Maloney 117 Comments

Even from the very earliest days of the automobile age, cars and trucks have been hybrids of mechanical and electrical design. For every piston sliding up and down in a cylinder, there’s a spark plug that needs to be fired at just the right time to make the engine work, and stepping on the brake pedal had better cause the brake lights to come on at the same time hydraulic pressure pinches the wheel rotors between the brake pads.

Without electrical connections, a useful motor vehicle is a practical impossibility. Even long before electricity started becoming the fuel of choice for vehicles, the wires that connect the computers, sensors, actuators, and indicators needed to run a vehicle’s systems were getting more and more complicated by the year. After the engine and the frame, a car’s wiring and electronics are its third most expensive component, and it’s estimated that by 2030, fully half of the average vehicle’s cost will be locked in its electrical system, up from 30% in 2010.

Making sure all those signals get where they’re going, and doing so in a safe and reliable way is the job of a vehicle’s wire harnesses, the bundles of wires that seemingly occupy every possible area of a modern car. The design and manufacturing of wire harnesses is a complex process that relies on specialized software, a degree of automation, and a surprising amount of people-power.

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Biomimetic Surfaces: Copying Nature To Deter Bacteria And Keep Ship Hulls Smooth

July 26, 2022 by Maya Posch 25 Comments

You might not think that keeping a boat hull smooth in the water has anything in common with keeping a scalpel clean for surgery, but there it does: in both cases you’re trying to prevent nature — barnacles or biofilm — from growing on a surface. Science has looked to nature, and found that the micro-patterning formed by the scales of certain sharks or the leaves of lotus plants demonstrate a highly elegant way to prevent biofouling that we can copy.

In the case of marine growth attaching to and growing on a ship’s hull, the main issue is that of increased drag. This increases fuel usage and lowers overall efficiency of the vessel, requiring regular cleaning to remove this biofouling. In the context of a hospital, this layer of growth becomes even more crucial. Each year, a large number of hospital patients suffer infections, despite the use of single-use catheters and sterile packaging.

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How Does The James Webb Telescope Phone Home?

July 25, 2022 by Tom Nardi 31 Comments

When it comes to an engineering marvel like the James Webb Space Telescope, the technology involved is so specialized that there’s precious little the average person can truly relate to. We’re talking about an infrared observatory that cost $10 billion to build and operates at a temperature of 50 K (−223 °C; −370 °F), 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 mi) from Earth — you wouldn’t exactly expect it to share any parts with your run-of-the-mill laptop.

But it would be a lot easier for the public to understand if it did. So it’s really no surprise that this week we saw several tech sites running headlines about the “tiny solid state drive” inside the James Webb Space Telescope. They marveled at the observatory’s ability to deliver such incredible images with only 68 gigabytes of onboard storage, a figure below what you’d expect to see on a mid-tier smartphone these days. Focusing on the solid state drive (SSD) and its relatively meager capacity gave these articles a touchstone that was easy to grasp by a mainstream audience. Even if it was a flawed comparison, readers came away with a fun fact for the water cooler — “My computer’s got a bigger drive than the James Webb.”

Of course, we know that NASA didn’t hit up eBay for an outdated Samsung EVO SSD to slap into their next-generation space observatory. The reality is that the solid state drive, known officially as the Solid State Recorder (SSR), was custom built to meet the exact requirements of the JWST’s mission; just like every other component on the spacecraft. Likewise, its somewhat unusual 68 GB capacity isn’t just some arbitrary number, it was precisely calculated given the needs of the scientific instruments onboard.

With so much buzz about the James Webb Space Telescope’s storage capacity, or lack thereof, in the news, it seemed like an excellent time to dive a bit deeper into this particular subsystem of the observatory. How is the SSR utilized, how did engineers land on that specific capacity, and how does its design compare to previous space telescopes such as the Hubble?

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