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XCR1250

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Posts posted by XCR1250

    Carmakers say goodbye to EVs

    in Current Events

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Plissken said:

    I love how OP’s title doesn’t match article content at all.  EV’s are going away but here’s an article touting the investment that BMW is putting into FCEV’s!!!!!

    The title is from the article.

    Minneapolis guys ... the ones who smoke anyway

    in Current Events

    Posted

    14 minutes ago, ActionfigureJoe said:

    Most people that smoke don’t die. They end up in nursing care lingering after a stroke or heart event. Fortunately the anti smoke movement of social marketing during the “80’s and “90’s has proven very effective in reducing smoking. 

    I edited my post..my sister died at 63.

    Minneapolis guys ... the ones who smoke anyway

    in Current Events

    Posted · Edited by XCR1250

    18 minutes ago, ActionfigureJoe said:

    Give the money to a child cancer fund. Obviously those that smoke don’t care about their health. They also don’t care about the burden having a stroke puts on society. So take their money and give it to someone that does want to live. 

    Most of my family died from smoking, my mom at 62 and my sister at 63, many other relatives died young too. Dad & I never smoked, he died at 85.

    As most here know smoking was promoted years back even on TV,  magazines & even some newspapers, it was pretty much considered ok to smoke.

    As a kid I used to Puke out the car window when my mom smoked in the car, that smoke has an aweful stink to it made me sick.

    Carmakers say goodbye to EVs

    in Current Events

    Posted

    Carmakers say goodbye to EVs: this is the new engine that changes everything

       
    in Mobility
     
     
    hydrogen new engine, EV

    Credits: hydrogencentral.com

     
     
     

    The carmakers have just made an unexpected decision, taking the ecological transition much further than ever imagined. EVs have just been pushed into oblivion by a record-breaking hydrogen engine. The best part? It has solved the perennial problem of zero-emission cars and will now boost sales, but not with the ones you’ve known before.

     

    Legendary brand to forget about EVs: a better fuel has been found

    While hydrogen fuel is the focus for BMW now as opposed to battery electric vehicles, the German company has also been keeping up with the trends. Leading in the green technology, the German manufacturer revealed a project to manufacture limited copies of the iX5 Hydrogen, that is, the hydrogen fuel cell driven SUV.

    Ultimately, the iX5 Hydrogen will be compatible to the same platform like the all-electric iX5. Nevertheless, the BMW’s prototype hydrogen-powered car will set walnut battery pack aside in favor of the latest fuel-cell electric powertrain technology. As hydrogen gas is kept in tanks, that are located inside the SUV.

     

    There is also a reference to the fact that BMW is fifth generation of fuel cells that would give it 400 horsepower or even more of continuous power to work with. The hydrogen gas tanks takes less than half a minute to be full, which result in a range of 300 miles/refill. It is the particular feature that makes hydrogen a leader in the EVs.

    The iX5 – the official name of the Hydrogen – will start production with limited numbers of the model by the end of 2024. BMW intends to manufacture 100 e-ICVs for testing and demonstration purposes as a first step. The business perceives hydrogen as a zeer realize the word zero-emission alternative to batteries.

     

    The new hydrogen engine, in detail: what BMW has achieved

    Hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles call for several major advantages over battery electric vehicles. In addition to this, you will get an opportunity to fuel a hydrogen vehicle only within 3-5 minutes, similar as in case if it concerns the gasoline vehicles. It can’t be compared with an electric vehicle’s charger.

    Hydrogen cars, in addition, will need one refuel less since their range on the full tank is much longer. BMW Group’s approach is to demonstrate that their i Hydrogen NEXT concept can drive further than most EVs 374 miles compared to 300 miles respectively.

    Largely, hydrogen is a flammable, propellant gas having greater energy density; therefore, its distribution is similar to the other fuels as chains. Unlike EV chargers, the EV stations don’t need to source their supply from hydrogen generators or hydrolyzers, making the installation process of hydrogen dispensers easier.

    Speed of refilling, range, and availability for the convenient hydrogen are the major benefits for this fuel because they make themselves the alternative with environmentally friendly. A hydrogen powered cars transfer version comes in smoothly as it needs less time to refill than the cycle needed to charge an EV.

    BMW must face a challenge: attention to this almost-solved problem

    The hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are undermined by two common problems which is the high cost of hydrogen generation and the absence of an infrastructure to refuel. The majority of hydrogen is got from natural gas by the process of steam methane reformation mechanism today.

    This steps is prohibitively costly that makes hydrogen cost $5-$10 in the result. As per comparison, the costs of measuring fossil fuels vary from $3 to $4. The most important factor preventing hydrogen-powered cars from being successful against ICE vehicles is definitely the lack of affordable hydrogen production.

    It is clear that this hydrogen engine will be a historic milestone in sustainable mobility, not only in the United States but also in the rest of the world. The carmakers have decided to back away from EV development, with brands that are leaving them for good. Will we see Tesla do so as well? Perhaps Elon Musk is too proud to go back on his words.

    • Like 1

    Israel has carried out a strike inside Iran

    in Current Events

    Posted

    CNN

    Israel has carried out a strike inside Iran, US official tells CNN, as region braces for further escalation

    Alex Marquardt, Helen Regan, Hamdi Alkhshali, Artemis Moshtaghian and Adam Pourahmadi, CNN
    Fri, April 19, 2024 at 6:31 AM CDT·6 min read

    Israel has carried out a military strike inside Iran, a US official told CNN Friday, a potentially dangerous escalation in a fast widening Middle East conflict that Iranian government officials have so far sought to play down.

    The United States was given advance notification Thursday of an intended Israeli strike in the coming days, but did not endorse the response, a second senior US official said. Secretary of State Antony Blinken later confirmed the US “has not been involved in any offensive operations,” but was focusing on Israel’s defense and de-escalation.

    Iran’s air defense systems were activated in the cities of Isfahan and Tabriz after three explosions were heard close to a major military airbase near Isfahan, state media reported early Friday morning.

    Maj. Gen. Abdolrahim Mousavi, the commander-in-chief of Iran’s army, said the explosions in the sky above Isfahan were related to anti-aircraft systems shooting at what he called a suspicious object, which did not cause any damage, Iranian state news IRNA reported. Other Iranian officials said air defenses intercepted three drones and there were no reports of a missile attack.

    Iran has not identified the source of the strike.

    Multiple state-aligned news agencies reported that sites associated with Iran’s nuclear program were secure and the attack appeared to be limited in scope.

    Iranian media appeared to further minimize the scale of the attack on Friday, broadcasting calm scenes from Isfahan showing residents walking through parks and visiting landmarks. Traffic was reported as normal and the airport was also reported to have reopened after flights were briefly canceled or suspended early Friday.

    Reports of Friday’s strike came hours after Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told CNN that if Israel takes any further military action against Iran, its response would be “immediate and at a maximum level.”

    “If the Israeli regime commits the grave error once again our response will be decisive, definitive and regretful for them,” he added, noting that this warning had been communicated to the White House via the Swiss Embassy in Tehran.

    Tensions across the Middle East remain on a knife edge, following Iran’s unprecedented direct strike against Israel late Saturday. The attack, during which Iran launched more than 300 drones and cruise missiles toward Israel, came in response to a suspected Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic complex in the Syrian capital, Damascus, on 1 April, which killed a top commander, and several others.

    Separately, “material losses” were reported in southern Syria after an Israeli strike, targeted “our air defense sites in the southern region,” Syrian state media SANA reported Friday citing a military source. The Israeli military said that it does not comment on reports in foreign media.

    The Israeli military said it was unable to provide a comment on Friday, when asked by CNN about reports of explosions in Iran.

    At the end of a three-day meeting in Capri, Italy, the Group of Seven (G7) nations urged all parties in the region to “prevent further escalation.” Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi also warned the strikes risk “dragging the region into further conflict,” adding that the “Israeli-Iranian retaliations must end.”

    Iran warned of ‘maximum’ response hours earlier

    Israel’s action in Iran is the latest escalatory move in a region that has been rocked by Israel’s devastating war in Gaza following Hamas’ brutal October 7 attack. That attack killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and saw more than 200 others taken hostage.

    Israel’s bombardment and siege of Gaza has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, according to Palestinian officials, caused widespread destruction of the enclave and sparked a humanitarian crisis where more than 1 million people face ‘catastrophic’ levels of hunger.

    Prior to Friday’s Israeli strike, the US expectation was the country would not target Iran’s civilian or nuclear facilities, the senior US official told CNN.

    CNN has previously reported that Israel told the US its response to the weekend attacks would be limited in scope. US intelligence had suggested Israel was weighing a narrow and limited strike inside Iran because they feel like they have to respond with a kinetic action of some kind given the unprecedented scale of the Iranian attack

    The range of targets was “never specified in precise terms but nuclear and civilian locations were clearly not in that category,” the senior official added.

    Calls for restraint

    Israel’s Western allies have both rallied to its defense in the wake of Iran’s attack Saturday, while also urging restraint.

    US President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he should consider Iran’s strikes a win, since they had been largely unsuccessful and demonstrated Israel’s ability to defend itself.

    Biden had already made clear to Netanyahu that the US would not participate in any offensive operations against Iran in response, a senior administration previously told CNN.

    Benny Gantz, a key member of Israel’s war cabinet, had pushed for a swift response to the attack, two Israeli officials told CNN, arguing that the longer Israeli delayed its response, the harder it would be to garner international support for it.

    Some hardline officials have gone further. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said Israel should “go crazy” in response. Ben Gvir appeared to criticize Israel’s reported strike, publishing a one-word response on X early Friday morning – a slang word meaning “lame” or “weak.”

    Israel’s opposition leader Yair Lapid called Ben Gvir’s comment “unforgivable.”

    “Never before has a minister in the security cabinet done such heavy damage to the country’s security, its image and its international status,” Lapid said.

    Jasmine El-Gamal, a former Middle East adviser to the US Defense Department, told CNN that Israel and Iran’s tit-for-tat strikes were about “posturing and messaging.”

    “Neither side, obviously, is willing or ready to escalate into an all-out war. The Israelis in particular cannot get into an all-out war without the full support, both military and political, of the Americans, which President Biden made it clear he was not willing to give,” she said.

    El-Gamal said Israel’s reported strike was meant to tell Iran, “We can get to your nuclear sites if we want to. We know where they are, and even though we didn’t hit them this time – we can do it.”

    81 Million Walks Into Gas Station

    in Current Events

    Posted

    30 minutes ago, ViperGTS/Z1 said:

    What a contrast between the 2 🤣.  

    He will never be a people's president.   Has no idea how to relate to the common folk. How long has he been in politics again?   Somebody needs to put him down.

    Biden's the worst Potus in US history.

    • Like 1

    SETI

    in Current Events

    Posted

    SETI chief says US has no evidence for alien technology. 'And we never have'

     
     published 10 hours ago

    "The idea that the government is keeping something like this secret is just totally absurd. There's no motivation to do so."

     

    •  
    •  
    •  

    a series of large white radar dishes stand alone in the desert The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array is a radio astronomy observatory located in the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico. (Image credit: Getty Images/Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo)

     

    If all the reports of mysterious objects buzzing our skies are taken as true encounters, the Earth appears to be under assault. 

    But spoiler alert: For the chief leader of the SETI Institute, established to search for and understand life beyond Earth, there's a need to step back and cuddle up to a cup of cosmic reality. 

     

    "We don't have any evidence of any credible source that would indicate the presence of alien technology in our skies. And we never have," said Bill Diamond, president and chief executive officer of the SETI Institute, headquartered in Mountain View, California. "The idea that the government is keeping something like this secret is just totally absurd. There's no motivation to do so." 

     

     

    SETI is a key research contractor to NASA and the National Science Foundation, and collaborates with industry partners throughout Silicon Valley. Space.com caught up with Diamond for a close-encounter with his own thoughts and counterpoints to claims of alien visitation and to ask whether there's any signal in all the UFO noise.

     

    a man in a blue vest stands in a large room before a large red piece of equipment and a large dark circular disk towering over him.
     

     

    Bill Diamond, president and chief executive officer of the SETI Institute. (Image credit: Bill Diamond)

    Thought experiment 

    Diamond said that, while we should not outright rule out the possibility that we might someday discover evidence of alien technology in our skies, "we should equally not jump to the conclusion that UFOs are alien technology in the absence of any compelling evidence to that effect. And there is no compelling evidence," he contends.

    To help visualize why, Diamond urges people to try a thought experiment. 

     

     

    The fastest spacecraft that humans have ever built and continues to head outward from Earth is NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. It was hurled outward back in January 2006, cruising by Pluto and is still adding mileage to its odometer.

    "If you sent that spacecraft to our closest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri, it would take 80,000 years to get there," said Diamond. "Any civilization that has mastered the ability to traverse the incomprehensibly vast distances of interstellar space would have technology so far advanced from our own as to be beyond our comprehension."

     

    The binary stars of the nearby Alpha Centauri system, as seen by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. On the left is Alpha Centauri A, which is a sun-like G-type star. On the right is Alpha Centauri B, which is a slightly cooler K-type star.
     

     

    The closest star system to the Earth is the Alpha Centauri group at a distance of 4.3 light-years. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope snagged this view of Alpha Centauri A (on the left) and Alpha Centauri B (on the right), appearing as cosmic headlamps in the dark.   (Image credit: ESA/NASA)

    It would be much like a smartphone to a Neanderthal, Diamond suggested. 

    "If such beings exist, they would likely send hardware here first and not biology, and they certainly wouldn't crash-land in our deserts," he said, like the alleged and highly acclaimed 1947 nose-dive of a UFO and its accident-prone occupants near Roswell, New Mexico.

    In short haul language, that's a long way to travel and run out of braking fluid.

    Where's the mothership? 

    "Long before they sent any craft into our sky they would have some understanding of what they were dealing with," Diamond observed, "as they would already know everything about our atmosphere, our airspace, our technology and more." 

    It just wouldn't happen, Diamond emphasized.

    "And if it did they wouldn't leave them behind. And by the way, if you have a small craft zipping around in our airspace, where is the mothership? And if they didn't want to be observed, they wouldn't be!"

     

    an image of space with the words SETI INSTITUTE
     

     

    For many, the SETI logo signals a universal question of 'are we alone?'. (Image credit: SETI Institute/Trevor Beattie)

    Connective tissue 

    All the same, in the public mind, is there some kind of connective tissue between SETI and UFOs?

    "There is definitely connective tissue," Diamond responded. "Why do people have these beliefs? It is because they want to believe. Nobody really wants to think that this Earth is the only place in the vastness of space where life has emerged. Even that idea is also kind of absurd."

    For example, Diamond points to the revelations cranked out by the NASA Kepler mission, lofted in March 2009. 

    That hunter/data-gatherer spacecraft discovered more than 2,700 planets beyond our solar system. Compiling deep space data for nine years, the message from Kepler: there are billions of unseen planets, indeed, more planets than stars.

    Statistical probability 

    "Statistically speaking, every single star in the sky has one or more planets around it," Diamond pointed out. Furthermore, 50 percent or more of these are Earth-like (rocky surface and similar size) and in the habitable zone of their host star, he said.

    "That implies the existence of tens of billions of potentially habitable worlds in our galaxy alone," Diamond said. "So indeed, the statistical probability that we are alone in the Universe is zero. Surely there is life beyond Earth!"  

    But the presence, both in space and time, as well as proximity, of advanced alien civilizations is another matter completely, Diamond continued. "There are innumerable variables, all of which in the sciences of astrobiology, planetary science, astronomy and astrophysics, we are trying to figure out."

    Accidental observations 

     

    The SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, California is now searching 20,000 red dwarf stars for signs of intelligent life.
     

     

    The SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array is the first radio telescope to be designed from the ground up to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.   (Image credit: Seth Shostak, SETI Institute)

    Diamond questions why any alien civilization would send biology when they could isntead send hardware. 

    "The farthest things we have sent into space are hardware. And that's logical," said Diamond. "But if you did send beings and the most interesting thing you can do is draw circles in crops … come on!"

    One other scoop of skepticism Diamond added is that every single UFO — now tied to the term Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) — are all "accidental observations."

    RELATED STORIES:

     

    "Therefore, they are highly unreliable. They don't have instrumentation, technology, or methodology to discern what they are looking at," said Diamond.

    Lastly, the SETI Institute leader said if the government actually believed in ET buzzing our planet, where's the study money? 

    "The lack of government funding to study UAP/UFO is evidence of either the government being quite certain that there's nothing to these accidental observations — or — the government preferring that we not use available technology to closely watch our skies because of our own human technologies that are being developed — in secret," said Diamond.

    "I think that's the most compelling bit of evidence against the idea that we've got visitors in our skies," Diamond concluded.

    For more information on the SETI Institute and its programs, go to https://www.seti.org/ 

    55 Mwhs of electricity.

    in Current Events

    Posted

    2 minutes ago, NaturallyAspirated said:

    Just like hail damage on the roof, windows, or siding of your house would. 

    Put the solar system on, have it covered under insurance, and sit back and let it make money for ya.

    Neal
     

    Haven't for years now, but I used to make and sell solar panels, still have lots of new glass here. They were for heat, not electricity.

    Insurance was very expensive so I never insured them.

    Irony

    in Current Events

    Posted

    5 minutes ago, Steve753 said:

    And you would be cheering on Biden.

    So you agree about MC, he does what ever the Dem underground tells him to do, he has no brain.

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