Biggest Hurdle for Electric Vehicles

The Biden administration just unveiled a proposal for some of the most aggressive auto climate rules in the world — the latest step for a White House that has gone all-in on electric vehicles. But America’s EV transition faces a threat few are talking about — not because of high car costs or a lack of automaker support, but the country’s broken and dysfunctional public charging system.


Most EV drivers charge their vehicles at home. But as Americans buy EVs — to the tune of 7 percent of all new vehicle registrations in January — more and more people are finding that the public charging system is unreliable, inconvenient and simply confusing.


“I’ve seen people wait because there are only four chargers and two of them are out of service,” said Bill Ferro, the founder of EVSession, a software firm that tracks charger reliability. “Everything that I’ve seen shows that it’s driving away current and potential EV owners.”


Drivers might show up at a DC-fast charging station — which can fill a vehicle’s battery by 80 percent in about 20 minutes — to find that most of the chargers are broken. Or one might work, but only if the driver installs a particular app on their phone, creates an account and loads money onto it.


Last year, in a study conducted by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the climate advocacy group Cool the Earth, researchers tested every single fast charging station in the San Francisco Bay Area.


They found that more than a quarter of the 657 charging points didn’t function during a two-minute charging test. Sometimes the charging cable couldn’t reach the vehicle’s charging port; other times the payment system wouldn’t work; sometimes the charger’s screen was broken or the network was down.  READ MORE...

Radical NASA Propulsion

A newly proposed propulsion system could theoretically beam a heavy spacecraft to outside the confines of our Solar System in less than 5 years – a feat that took the historic Voyager 1 probe 35 years to achieve.

The concept, known as 'pellet-beam' propulsion, was awarded an early-stage US$175,000 NASA grant for further development earlier this year.

To be clear, the concept currently doesn't exist much beyond calculations on paper, so we can't get too excited just yet.

Still, it's attracted attention not only because of its potential to get us into interstellar space within a human lifetime – something that traditional, chemical-fueled rockets can't – but also because it claims it can do so with much larger crafts.

"This proposal examines a new propulsion architecture for fast transit of heavy (1 ton and more) payloads across the Solar System and to interstellar medium," explains the lead researcher behind the proposal, aerospace engineer Artur Davoyan from the University of California, Los Angeles.

The pellet-beam concept was partly inspired by the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which is working on a 'light-sail' propulsion system. With the help of millions of lasers, a tiny probe would theoretically be able to sail to neighboring Proxima Centauri in just 20 years.

The new proposal starts with a similar idea – throw fuel at a rocket instead of blast it out of one – but it looks at how to shift larger objects. After all, a small probe isn't necessarily what we need if we want to one day explore, or colonize, the worlds outside our Solar System ourselves.

To work, the conceptual propulsion system requires two spacecraft – one that sets off for interstellar space, and one that goes into orbit around Earth.

The spacecraft orbiting Earth would shoot a beam of tiny microscopic particles at the interstellar spacecraft.  READ MORE...

Galaxies Newr the Dawn of Time

The small red dot highlighted inside the white box on this James Webb Space Telescope image is an early galaxy, seen as it looked just 350 million years after the Big Bang.       STScI/NASA

New baby pictures of the universe, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, show that galaxies started forming faster and earlier than expected.

The telescope launched back in December and it now orbits the sun about a million miles away from Earth. Its giant mirror allows it to detect faint light that's been traveling for almost the entire history of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe. That means it can effectively see what galaxies looked like way back in time.

The snapshots captured so far have both thrilled and perplexed scientists, because it turns out that many luminous galaxies existed when the universe was very young.

"Just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, there are already lots of galaxies," says Tommaso Treu, an astronomer at the University of California at Los Angeles. "JWST has opened up a new frontier, bringing us closer to understanding how it all began."

In research papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Treu and other astronomers report the discovery of one galaxy that dates back to just 450 million years after the beginning, and another that dates back to 350 million years.  READ MORE...

Brain Changes in Autism

According to new research, brain changes in autism are comprehensive throughout the cerebral cortex rather than just particular areas thought to affect social behavior and language




UCLA study is the most comprehensive effort ever to study how autism affects the brain at the molecular level.

Brain changes in autism are comprehensive throughout the cerebral cortex, not only confined to particular regions traditionally considered to affect language and social behavior. These are the findings of a new study, led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which substantially refines scientists’ understanding of how autism spectrum disorder (ASD) progresses at the molecular level.


Published on November 2 in the journal Nature, the study represents a comprehensive effort to characterize ASD at the molecular level. Although neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease have well-defined pathologies, autism and other psychiatric disorders have had a lack of defining pathology. This had made it particularly difficult to develop more effective treatments.


The new study finds brain-wide changes in virtually all of the 11 cortical regions analyzed. This holds true regardless of whether they are higher critical association regions – those involved in functions such as reasoning, language, social cognition, and mental flexibility – or primary sensory regions.

“This work represents the culmination of more than a decade of work of many lab members, which was necessary to perform such a comprehensive analysis of the autism brain,” said study author Dr. Daniel Geschwind, the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics, Neurology and Psychiatry at UCLA.  READ MORE...

Massive Triple Star System Detected

Artist’s interpretation of HD 98800, a quadruple-star system located 150 light-years away in the constellation TW Hydrae. Bin Liu and Alejandro Vigna-Gomez suggest that the more massive 

tertiary-star system TIC 470710327 could have started in a similar configuration – two binary 

systems with one of them eventually merging into one, bigger star. TIC 470710327 is located 

very close to “Cassiopeia”. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Compact, massive triple star system detected by University of Copenhagen researchers.

Earlier this year, researchers revealed the discovery of an extraordinarily compact “one-of-a-kind” system of three stars. A partnership between two young researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen is currently focusing on how this unusual combination of a binary set of stars and a revolving larger star can form.

Tertiary star formation on a massive scale
The star system is made up of a binary set of stars, two stars that orbit each other, and one more massive star that orbits the binary.

“As far as we know, it is the first of its kind ever detected”, Alejandro Vigna-Gomez says. “We know of many tertiary star systems (three star systems), but they are typically significantly less massive. 

The massive stars in this triple are very close together – it is a compact system. The orbital period of the binary (~1 d) is the same as that of the rotation of Earth (1 day). The combined mass of the two of them is twelve times the mass of our Sun – so rather big stars. 

The tertiary star is approximately 16 times the mass of our Sun, so even bigger! The inner orbit is circular in shape with close to six revolutions of the tertiary star around the binary per year. 

Pretty fast, when you consider the size of them – unsurprisingly, the system is very luminous, so at first they were detected as a stellar binary”.  READ MORE...