Show Notes 24 June 2022
Story 1: GM and Lockheed Martin are developing electric moon rovers for commercial missions
Source: Interestingengineering.com Story by Chris Young
Link: https://interestingengineering.com/gm-and-lockheed-martin-electric-moon-rovers
Source: Axios.com Story by Joann Muller
Link: https://www.axios.com/2022/06/13/gm-lunar-rover-moon-driving
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5869l2cKLZw
- General Motors and Lockheed Martin recently announced plans to produce a series of two-passenger electric moon rovers for future commercial space ventures and to support NASA.
- They also announced the ambitious goal of testing a prototype vehicle on the moon before NASA’s upcoming Artemis project sends astronauts to the moon in 2025.
- Ben, you and I have seen the artist renderings of this thing, and it looks like something right out of a Star Wars movie!
- Picture a super sophisticated, large, four-wheel, big go cart with two seats up front, and a pickup truck-like cargo bed.
- One feature I found really interesting is the wheel design.
- The first chassis design, which used the Hummer EV as a baseline, didn’t move, so they softened the suspension and gave the vehicle mesh wheels.
- These unusual wheels have segmented mesh-like treads designed to deal with the moon’s rough surfaces.
- The new rovers will share the same Ultium battery technology underpinning GM’s new lineup of electric vehicles, like the GMC Hummer EV and Cadillac Lyriq.
- And, no surprise, the state-of-the-art electric moon rover will be able to operate both autonomously or with astronauts driving.
- It will have a top speed of roughly 12 mph, which is more than twice the speed of the original Apollo lunar rovers.
- And to test the vehicles here on Earth, GM is using a highly advanced “driver-in-the-loop” simulator borrowed from its NASCAR racing activities at its research center in Warren, Michigan that emulates the terrain of the moon’s surface, complete with craters, rocks and one-sixth Earth gravity.
- And regarding the low gravity of the moon, the developers noted:
- “driving on the moon is like driving on ice,” Jeff Vogt, GM’s advanced vehicle dynamics lead engineer, told me.
- “We learned pretty quickly that if you accelerate too hard to climb an incline, with lower gravity, you launch into space.”
Story 2: Toyota is working on experimental portable hydrogen cartridges to power future cars
Source: Inputmag.com Story by Matt Wille
Link: https://www.inputmag.com/tech/toyota-hydrogen-cartridges-electric-vehicles
- All-electric vehicles are hot now in the auto industry, but not every automaker has given up on other alternative power sources.
- Toyota, for example, is still researching whether or not hydrogen could be a viable option for powering its future vehicles.
- The potential huge appeal of hydrogen as a fuel has to do with its ultra-climate friendly exhaust – just water vapor and heat!
- But, today hydrogen remains extremely expensive to produce, store, and transport.
- To make dealing with hydrogen as a fuel source for the individual car owner more practical, Toyota has developed a new experimental portable “cartridge” to make the use and transportation of hydrogen much safer.
- Each cylindar cartridge weighs about 11 pounds and are16 inches long with a diameter of 7 inches.
- The idea is to have rechargeable hydrogen fuel cartridges that are easy to plug into and out of special ports on the car.
- Reality check: this is all just an early experimental effort. A lot would have to be in place in terms of hydrogen production and distribution to make this viable possibility for the future.
Story 3: MIT Scientists Propose Space Bubbles to Reverse Global Warming
Source: Gizmodo.com Story by Angely Mercado
Link: https://gizmodo.com/mit-space-bubbles-climate-change-1849065455
- Ben, this news nugget that sounds like something right out of a Sci-Fi fantasy movie!
- Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe we can tackle global warming by assembling in space a massive disk-shaped shield comprised of thousands of individual balloon-like bubbles made of thin silicon and linked together.
- The goal is simple: to deflect sunlight (and thus heat) to stop further global warming.
- According to the MIT team, “If we deflect 1.8% of … solar radiation before it hits our planet, we could fully reverse today’s global warming.”
- This astonishingly ambitious proposal calls for assembling the bubble shield while in a stable Earth orbit.
- In specific, the gigantic bubble cluster would be placed in outer space at a Lagrange Point, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravitational pulls create a stable orbit.
- The researchers also said that if the plan becomes a reality, the completed shield array would be roughly the size of Brazil! And Brazil is 8.5 million square kilometers, so that’s about 3,282,000 square miles!
- The MIT team admits there would be huge challenges, including:
- Transporting all the components into space,
- the logistics of assembling the large bubbles in space,
- and finally linking all the bubbles together to create the circular disk-like shield.
- And here’s another reality check noted by the MIT team: They also pointed to the difficulties of maintaining the integrity of the bubble shield. “Effective replenishment rate will be studied to ensure the shield maintains its size, together with strategies to guarantee a smooth end-of-life transition.
Story 4: Woman receives world’s first 3D-printed ear made from her own cells
Source: The Verge Story by Nicole Wetsman
Link: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/2/23151690/3d-printed-ear-transplant
Source: Science.org.au Story by Melissa Little and Gordon Wallace
- Around 1,500 babies born in the US each year have microtia, a condition where one or both ears are underdeveloped or missing entirely.
- Typically, microtia patients have prosthetic ears constructed from synthetic materials or cartilage from rib grafts [which involves 2 to 4 surgeries].
- But recently doctors successfully transplanted the world’s first 3D-printed ear made from human cells onto a woman born with this rare deformity.
- The remarkable 3D tissue printing technology behind this achievement comes from an outfit called 3DBio Therapeutics.
- 3D bioprinters work in almost the exact same way as 3D printers, with one key difference. Instead of delivering materials such as plastic, ceramic, metal or food, they deposit layers of biomaterial, which may include living cells, to build complex structures like blood vessels or skin tissue.
- 3DBio Therapeutics’ experimental process involved taking cartilage cells from the patient’s existing good ear.
- Those cells were then grown in a lab and 3D bioprinted into a shape to match the patient’s intact ear.
- Here’s a key benefit of 3DBio Therapeutics’ process — The 3D printed ear will keep regenerating cartilage over the patients’ lifetime, and because it is made from her own cells, it’s less likely to be rejected.