On a cloudy Christmas morning last year, a rocket carrying the most powerful space telescope ever built blasted off from a launchpad in French Guiana. After reaching its destination in space about a month later, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began sending back sparkling presents to humanity--jaw-dropping images that are revealing our universe in stunning new ways. Every year since 1988, Popular Science has highlighted the innovations that make living on Earth even a tiny bit better. And this year--our 35th--has been remarkable, thanks to the successful deployment of the JWST, which earned our highest honor as the Innovation of the Year. But it's just one item out of the 100 stellar technological accomplishments our editors have selected to recognize. The list below represents months of research, testing, discussion, and debate. It celebrates exciting inventions that are improving our lives in ways both big and small. These technologies and discoveries are teaching us about the ...

Nissan Motor Co. is betting that its experience pioneering lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles over a decade ago will give it an upper hand in producing a new battery type that, despite being new and still relatively unproven, is considered by some as key to unlocking the future potential of EVs. Nissan is producing prototype solid-state battery cells -- which replace the electrical current-conducting liquid found in conventional batteries with a solid substance -- at a facility resembling a pop-up lab inside its research grounds near its Yokohama headquarters. The Japanese automaker plans to bring the new type of batteries to market by fiscal year 2028, readying a pilot plant for them ahead of that around 2024. If they can be manufactured, solid-state batteries would unlock cheaper, safer and faster-charging EVs, according to automotive executives and battery experts. Using different material combinations, Nissan predicts it will eventually be able to produce a solid-state battery pack that costs $65 (¥8,063) per kilowatt-hour -- a level at which analysts say EVs could reach price parity with gasoline-engine cars.

The TriRhenaTech alliance presents the accepted papers of the 'Upper-Rhine Artificial Intelligence Symposium' held on October 27th 2021 in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Topics of the conference are applications of Artificial Intellgence in life sciences, intelligent systems, industry 4.0, mobility and others. The TriRhenaTech alliance is a network of universities in the Upper-Rhine Trinational Metropolitan Region comprising of the German universities of applied sciences in Furtwangen, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe, Offenburg and Trier, the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Loerrach, the French university network Alsace Tech (comprised of 14 'grandes \'ecoles' in the fields of engineering, architecture and management) and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. The alliance's common goal is to reinforce the transfer of knowledge, research, and technology, as well as the cross-border mobility of students.

GM has increased the money it's earmarking for its combined EV and self-driving investment from 2020 through 2025 to $35 billion. The largest automaker in the US originally planned to pour $20 billion into the endeavor but decided to give it a boost and up it to $27 billion late last year. Now, as CNBC reports, it's spending even more on efforts to go electric and driverless. The company will use the additional investment to accelerate the production of its battery and fuel cell technologies. It will build two more battery plants to the US in addition to the two that are already in construction, most likely in an effort to ensure that it doesn't come across battery shortages as it ramps up its EV production.

New York (CNN Business)Talk of a possible Apple car is back. Apple (AAPL) hasn't commented publicly on its plans for the project, nicknamed Titan, so it's not clear exactly what will come of the effort. Some who follow the company think it could release a whole Apple-branded, electric, self-driving car. Others think it's more likely Apple will partner with existing automakers to sell an operating system (iDrive, maybe?), self-driving tools or other technology. There are some clues available, though.

Elon Musk is hailed as an innovator and disrupter who went from knowing next to nothing about building cars to running the world's most valuable automaker in the space of 16 years. But his record shows he is more of a fast learner who forged alliances with firms that had technology Tesla lacked, hired some of their most talented people, and then powered through the boundaries that limited more risk-averse partners. Now, Musk and his team are preparing to outline new steps in Tesla's drive to become a more self-sufficient company less reliant on suppliers at its "Battery Day" event on Tuesday. Musk has been dropping hints for months that significant advances in technology will be announced as Tesla strives to produce the low-cost, long-lasting batteries that could put its electric cars on a more equal footing with cheaper gasoline vehicles. New battery cell designs, chemistries and manufacturing processes are just some of the developments that would allow Tesla to reduce its reliance on its long-time battery partner, Japan's Panasonic, people familiar with the situation said.

To overcome range anxiety problem of Electric Vehicles (EVs), an accurate real-time energy consumption estimation is necessary, which can be used to provide the EV's driver with information about the remaining range in real-time. A hybrid CNN-BDT approach has been developed, in which Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to provide an energy consumption estimate considering the effect of temperature, wind speed, battery's SOC, auxiliary loads, road elevation, vehicle speed and acceleration. Further, Bagged Decision Tree (BDT) is used to fine tune the estimate. Unlike existing techniques, the proposed approach doesn't require internal vehicle parameters from manufacturer and can easily learn complex patterns even from noisy data. Comparison results with existing techniques show that the developed approach provides better estimates with least mean absolute energy deviation of 0.14.

Since the last decade, the auto industry has experienced technological breakthroughs that have transformed the automotive landscape. Keeping up with the growing demand, almost every major carmaker has launched or has plans to dive into the electric vehicles market. Mumbai -based ION Energy was born out of the desire to tackle the threat of climate degradation by enabling a much more environment-friendly mobility solution. Founded in 2016, ION acquired an 8-year-old French Battery Management System (BMS) developer – Freemens SAS, in a first of its kind cross-border acquisition. In 2018, ION came out of stealth mode and unveiled its first product UDYR, a portable battery for electric scooters and started commercialising its flagship BMS platform.

With 100 million Toyota vehicles on the planet emitting greenhouse gases at a rate roughly comparable to those of France, the Toyota Motor Corporation has set a goal of reducing all tailpipe emissions by 90 percent by 2050, according to Brian Storey, who directs the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) Accelerated Materials Design and Discovery program from its Kendall Square office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He gave the keynote address at the MIT Materials Research Laboratory's Materials Day Symposium on Oct. 9. "A rapid shift from the traditional vehicle to electric vehicles has started," Storey says. "And we want to enable that to happen at a faster pace." "Our role at TRI is to develop tools for accelerating the development of emissions-free vehicles," Storey said. He added that machine learning is helping to speed up those innovations, but the challenges are very great, so his team has to be a little humble about what it can actually accomplish.

They were ineligible to be looked at by the Genius Bar, for instance, meaning that getting a battery replacement could mean passing up the chance for any other service work. That was the case even if the problem was with another component and not the battery, meaning that the entire phone would be banned from repairs just for having a third-party battery. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view. But a new note seen by Macrumors shows that Apple Stores and Apple's approved service providers will be able to fix those phones.