Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday July 07 2015, @07:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the are-you-*sure*-that-will-scale-up? dept.

Converting the energy of a moving automobile into an efficient power source for that same automobile is one of the Holy Grails of motor transport, and new research suggests an important part of the solution could be to look at the friction generated between car tyres and the road itself.

Engineers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US have developed a nanogenerator that’s capable of harvesting the energy produced by the friction of a tyre rolling along the ground.

For those aren't going to RTFA no matter what: Their test vehicle was a toy car, so I've got some concerns about whether or not this will scale up to full-sized models. But if it does, it could potentially vast increase the range of electric cars, or allow them to use smaller batteries.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by mobydisk on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:52PM

    by mobydisk (5472) on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:52PM (#206568)

    I propose that Soylent add an auto-blacklist where sites and/or specific article authors (not submitters - the author of the linked article) can be automatically refused. All articles linking to ScienceAlert, which is nothing but a clickbait site with bad science summaries, should be automatically trashed.

    I moved to Soylent because of these kinds of poor-quality articles appearing on Slashdot. The article and summary make it sound like they are trying to generate a free energy machine, which they are not.

    Converting the energy of a moving automobile into an efficient power source for that same automobile is one of the Holy Grails of motor transport

    No it is not. It is not even a power source, and it is definitely not a holy grail of anything. The researcher made no such implication at all! That is like saying:

    Converting the light from an LCD display into an efficient power source for that same display is one of the Holy Grails of display technology

    Then the article says:

    How efficient is the technique? Well, it won't be replacing gas or electric charging stations any time soon,

    True! It will never replace gas or electric charging stations, because it is not meant to be a power source at all!

    I visited the site, and it is nothing but oversimplified clickbait article headlines with great big pictures. This makes me wonder if I could make a fully automated news site. It would:
    - Scan for news headlines
    - Submit the text to a Google image search
    - Overlay the headline and the image
    - Run one of those auto-summarizers on the results
    - Alternative: Submit a Mechanical Turk bid to create a summary of the article
    - Insert ads
    - Profit!