In Germany Hydrogen Passenger Trains Service Begins

 

In the face of environmental concerns and long-distance travel cost escalation, many European countries have turned to hydrogen-powered trains for reducing both cost and emissions. France has committed to H2-powered inter-city service by 2020. China and Japan also plan to use H2 fuel in passenger trains. The first commercial H2 trains are now in operation in China, but the vast majority of domestic travel is still carried out by regular diesels.

Now the first German H2-powered train service is running from Stuttgart to Nuremberg, and more H2 trains are expected to go into service before the end of the year. The Stuttgart-Nuremberg project isn't big enough to meet Germany's entire demand for commercial H2-powered public transportation, but it's an important step toward the widespread use of H2 fuel for public transportation by 2050.

Scientist Dieter Kandrashnrz stressed that hydrogen technology is essential to a sustainable global energy mix, because hydrogen is so much more efficient than oil. This quarter's publication of Germany's first hydrogen tank vehicle registration figures is good news for all of us on the road who want to see more hydrogen-powered cars on the road in the near future.

If the trend holds, we could be driving hydrogen-powered vehicles in the not-too-distant future. -end- The post German Public Transit System Network To Become Hydrogen Fueled by 2050 appeared first on Solar Power Rocks.

US Joint Venture (LG, Honda) to Make EV Batteries

 

South Korea’s LG Chem, Japan’s Honda Motor and US firm battery manufacturer A123 Systems are set to establish a US joint venture to produce electric vehicle battery packs.

The joint venture, announced jointly by LG, Honda and A123, will be based in Michigan and could mark a substantial investment in both the auto and battery sectors, with A123 spending up to $1 billion and LG Chem committing up to $250 million.

The firm will be led by Sanjiv Ahuja, currently president and chief executive of A123 Systems, who will join the three companies in their new venture. Honda Fit EV Battery Market Projections to Reach $14.8 Billion over 2013–2022 Honda Motor Company (HMC) announced this week that it plans to introduce a range of electric vehicles to its lineup by 2015, including four hybrid or pure electric models. The company has already released a warning that battery cell shortages could delay the expansion of its highly popular electric vehicle initiative. HMC will rely entirely on the lithium-air battery technology it utilized to power the Honda FR-V Demonstrator with great success.

In North America, however, the company is developing its EV plans while in the process of recovering from a quality control scandal that has cost HMC millions of dollars. Honda’s previously announced commitment to launch its first production electric vehicle in 2015 is already endangered by the loss of thousands of workers at its Japanese battery division, which faces an uncertain path to more fruitful work.

Honda’s commitment to EVs has been under fire due to their failure to live up to initial hype initially. In a truly ironic twist, the EV controversy has been caused by poor quality control and poor time to market on a vehicle that will use floor-mounted batteries, the most challenging assembly of all.

It is a significant challenge for any automaker to overcome, but none has yet done so. Key executives at GM and Nissan have stepped down, and Toyota has withdrawn from the race. Honda should have a more compelling story to tell and that means it needs to double-down on integrity, transparency and quality.

This post was written by guest author Brian Luck. Brian has over 20 years experience in product marketing and is a current automotive enthusiast. You can view more of his writing at http://www.inside-automation.com. View full post on Inside Automation

California Is Expected to Enact a Ban on Gas-Powered Vehicles Today

 

The California Air Resources Board is set to vote on the measure Thursday afternoon. If passed, the ban will be enacted in phases over the next 13 years: 35% of new cars sold by 2026 must be gas-free, 68% of cars sold by 2030 must be gas-free, and by 2035, 100% of new cars sold must be gas-free. The ruling will not affect cars that are currently on California’s roads, just new cars that will be sold in the future.

The vote comes two years after Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order that banned the sale of cars with internal combustion engines. This is despite the fact that California is the second largest consumer of gasoline in the country according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The state is tackling car-based emissions because 50% of California’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector, according to California’s Energy Commission. Transportation also makes up about 90% of the state’s diesel particulate matter pollution, which is exhaust from trucks, buses, and other vehicles with diesel engines. Long-term exposure to this form of pollution is connected to cardiovascular and respiratory health issues. The state’s lawmakers site this, and long term climate impacts for their push to change car standards.

“For too many decades, we have allowed cars to pollute the air that our children and families breathe. Californians shouldn’t have to worry if our cars are giving our kids asthma,”said Governor Newsom in a 2020 press release about the proposed ban. “Our cars shouldn’t make wildfires worse – and create more days filled with smoky air. Cars shouldn’t melt glaciers or raise sea levels threatening our cherished beaches and coastlines.”

And though California is the country’s largest car market, it’s also a growing market for electric cars. The state accounts for 39% of all EVs and has the highest rate of electric vehicle adoption, but those cars only make up 2% of all the cars on the road in California, Axios reported. There is hope for the transition, especially because many states often follow California’s lead in auto emission standards.

Other efforts have been proposed in the state to curb car-based emissions, mitigate climate change, and improve public health. This past June, L.A. Councilman Paul Koretz proposed a ban on new gas stations in the city. The proposal was inspired after the city of Petaluma, California became the first place in the U.S. to ban new stations.

Google Flights -Google Changed Emission Calculations Making Air Travel Look Cleaner

 

When Google launched a carbon emissions tool for its flight tracker last fall, allowing consumers to see the individual emissions created by each flight they were browsing, it received widespread attention and praise from industry leaders and climate scientists alike. But last month the tech giant quietly shifted the algorithm to exclude a crucial component of the overall greenhouse gas impact of air travel—meaning that emissions data on the flights it lists now are much lower than they were before.

“Google has airbrushed a huge chunk of the aviation industry’s climate impacts from its pages,” Dr Doug Parr, the chief scientist and policy director of Greenpeace UK, told the BBC.

The change, Google said in a public Github post from last month, was made after consultations with the tech giant’s “academic and industry partners.” In the Github post, Google said it has decided to only calculate carbon dioxide emissions from flights, rather than the cumulative effect of all greenhouse gasses—known as CO2E, or “carbon dioxide equivalents,” in climate-speak. In particular, Google has decided to temporarily do away with calculations related to contrails, the clouds that form behind planes, that can have a big impact on flight emissions.

While carbon dioxide makes up the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions from flights, the exclusion of contrails—which form after the water vapor in jet fuel freezes, creating the clouds that streak the sky following flights—is a curious one. The clouds produced by frozen jet vapor can actually produce a temporary greenhouse gas effect by trapping heat in the atmosphere.

The warming effect of individual contrails is pretty short-term, since the clouds disappear within a few hours. But given the thousands of flights that are in the sky at any given moment—the U.S.’s Federal Aviation Administration alone handles more than 45,000 flights each day—those “temporary” warming clouds can cause real damage.

Google says that calculating contrail impacts on individual flights is tricky, and while it’s worth doing, they want to develop a mechanism to make more accurate predictions for specific flights. “We strongly believe that non-CO2 effects should be included in the model, but not at the expense of accuracy for individual flight estimates,” a Google spokesperson told Earther in an email. “To address this issue, we’re working closely with leading academics on soon-to-be-published research to better understand how the impact of contrails varies based on critical factors like time of day and region, which will in turn help us more accurately reflect that information to consumers.”

While accuracy might not be easy, some of the findings on the overall impacts are scary: A 2011 analysis concluded that the warming impact of contrails could be greater than the impact from plane fuel itself. Another study predicted contrails’ warming effect could triple by 2050, as air traffic continues to grow.

By making changes to the carbon emissions calculation, Google might radically lower its estimates for some flights. The BBC calculated that before the shift in the equation, the tool may have shown that a flight from Seattle to Paris emits 1,070 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent (kgCO2e) per person; after the shift, it’s down to just 521 kgCO2e.

A Google spokesperson said in a phone interview that the goal of the tool is to provide carbon emissions to customers who may want to compare similar flights—for instance, providing the ability to choose between leaving for vacation on a flight from one airport near New York at one time of day versus a different airport at another time of day—rather than just viewing how much CO2 you’re going to be emitting on that vacation in general. The spokesperson said that internal research showed that customers don’t necessarily respond to the actual numerical of the CO2 involved, but rather just to the comparison between products, which is still maintained even with the contrail equation taken out. The spokesperson emphasized that in addition to speaking to “industry partners”—like the airline industry as well as other online travel platforms—researchers at MIT and the Imperial College of London are also helping to adjust the equation. There’s no current timeline for reintegrating contrails back into the tool.

It’s laudable that Google is trying for real accuracy here. But the whole episode raises questions about the purpose and clarity of individual tools like these. There’s no note on the tool about the changes made last month to the reading, or a warning that the actual warming impact could be twice as high as what the tool actually shows. Even if Google’s tool is mostly for shopping comparisons as the company says, a consumer should be told that the numbers they’re looking at may be much higher. And given the substantial carbon reductions the world needs over the next decade, it is arguably even more important now to consider short-term greenhouse effects like contrails. There’s an argument to be made for overestimating emissions of flights, rather than underestimating.

Meta’s next VR headset will launch in October and will focus on ‘social presence’ - Zuckerberg says

Meta is launching its next VR headset this October at the company’s Connect conference. CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement late Thursday, fittingly, in an equally surreal environment: the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Spotify.

He said that the new VR headset, a sequel to the popular Oculus 2, will focus on “social presence,” with features like eye-tracking and face-tracking. Zuckerberg said that the headset is designed to capture users’ facial expressions and have them replicated on their avatars in real time to enhance non-verbal communication. He also noted that while Meta’s AR glasses are a few years away, the headset launching in October will have some mixed reality features.

At last year’s Connect conference, Meta teased a high-end headset codenamed “Project Cambria,” and going by Zuckerberg’s description, the headset launching in October is the final consumer version of it. A report from Bloomberg last month noted that code in Meta’s companion iPhone app for VR headsets suggested that the upcoming headset will be named Meta Quest Pro.

On the Joe Rogan podcast, Zuckerberg repeatedly stressed the fact that VR can”unlock” a sense of being in the presence of another person.

“When you’re on a video call you don’t actually feel like you’re there with the person. To me, what virtual reality unlocks is that it really convinces your brain that you’re there [in person],” he said.

Since Facebook was rebranded to Meta, the company has been recasting the whole company as a “metaverse” business rather than a social media one, pitching its strategy as one of building a universe of multiple, virtual worlds for all users. Some may be skeptical of the premise and the motivation behind the messaging pivot, but the company has marched onwards and has made efforts to better knit together the different kinds of experiences it’s developing. Horizon Worlds, for example, is a social platform tailored for VR headsets available in select countries. It’s been criticized for hacky graphics, however, so claims of the next VR headset capturing facial expressions will be put to test.

Meta’s announcement comes weeks after the company raised the price of Oculus 2 from $299 to $399. While there’s no price information about the upcoming headset, Zuckerberg described it as a “pretty big step above Oculus 2,” so it will be significantly costlier than $400.

Rare Apple items Auctioned at Staggering Prices

 

Rare Apple items auctioned at staggering prices - Apple iPhone at Rs 28 lakh &  iPod at Rs 20 lakh- Only

This auction (Apple, Jobs And Computer Hardware) was organised by RR Auction. There were 70 items up for bid in this. The deadline for submitting bids for the goods was August 18.

 

1.       First-generation iPhone was just auctioned off with its sealed box for an astounding sum in the US. ZDNet reported that the 2007 8 GB model iPhone was sold at auction for $35,414 (about Rs 28 lakh).

 

2.       Circuit Board Apple-1 - This auction (Apple, Jobs And Computer Hardware) was organised by RR Auction. There were 70 items up for bid in this. The deadline for submitting bids for the goods was August 18. The circuit board for the Apple-1 was sold in this auction for $677,196. (Rs 5.41 crore). Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple, soldered this circuit board by hand.

 

3.      Apple 1st generation iPod - The first-generation original iPod from Apple was also put up for auction. At the auction, it went for $25,000 (about 20 lakh rupees Only).

 

4.      Apple: 1983 Macintosh Introduction Plan and Logo Leaflet - The fascinating document offers a summary of the Macintosh product and outlines a detailed marketing plan to include national advertisements, promo materials, educational resources, and support for software developers. Macintosh is an advanced personal productivity tool for knowledge workers. It was sold for $12,044 in the auction (about 9 lakh rupees)

 

 

 

5.       Apple II Floppy Disk Drive signed by Steve Wozniac - Apple II computer 5.25" floppy disk drive, 6 x 3.75 x 8.75, signed on the top in black felt tip by Steve Wozniak, "Think Different! Woz." It was sold at an auction for $1000.