News

Tesla Looked Like the Future. Now Some Ask If It Has One

Researchers “heal” destructive dendrite growth in lithium-metal batteries

Dendrites—branching structures that look like tree limbs—are fun to draw and good on neurons, but they’re generally best avoided in lithium-ion batteries. As ions are exchanged between the anode and cathode over several charge and discharge cycles, lithium electrodes will sometimes grow dendrites that can expand through the electrolyte that separates the anode and cathode. These dendrites can reduce the battery’s capacity, shorten the life of the battery, or even start fires as the dendrites heat up.

13,000-year-old human footprints discovered in British Columbia

Thirteen thousand years ago, a small group of people walked on a beach on one of the thousands of low islands off the coast of British Columbia. These walkers were some of the first humans to settle here.

This spacecraft will get closer to the Sun than any before it—without melting

A Cruise self-driving car got a traffic ticket—GM says it did nothing wrong

Mars One Is a “Money Grab” Where Everyone Loses

The space tourism startup Mars One has been called many things over the years, some more flattering than others. Though it’s had the opportunity to fold many times, and in spite of claims it’s scamming its own customers, the project with the stated goal of sending people to Mars has come up with bewildering new techniques to keep its charade afloat.

Festo’s New Bionic Robots Include Rolling Spider, Flying Fox

We love Festo because every year they invest an entirely appropriate amount of time and money into bio-inspired robots that are totally cool and very functional but have limited usefulness. More often than not, it seems like Festo is able to take some of what it learns from designing and constructing these things and create practical new revenue-generating products. Which is good for them, and means they’ll keep making cool stuff.

Uber Is Ripping Off Frequent Riders and Here’s How to Avoid It

Teaching machines to spot essential information in physical systems

Two physicists at ETH Zurich and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a novel machine-learning algorithm that analyses large data sets describing a physical system and extract from them the essential information needed to understand the underlying physics.

How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry

One in 11 Americans pays an average of $91.14 per month to use self-storage, finding a place for the material overflow of the American dream. According to SpareFoot, a company that tracks the self-storage industry, the United States boasts more than 50,000 facilities and roughly 2.311 billion square feet of rentable space. In other words, the volume of self-storage units in the country could fill the Hoover Dam with old clothing, skis, and keepsakes more than 26 times.