At this year’s North American International Auto Show, BMW revealed the mid-life refresh for this clever machine. The engineers at BMW i have shown restraint, though. According to Alexander Kotouc, head of BMW i product management, that’s in large part due to feedback from customers.

“When we asked customers what we could improve, they said ‘not too much,'” he told me. “We didn’t change the styling because it still looks modern. But we did a lot inside the car.”

Primarily, that means further optimization of the hybrid powertrain. The most notable change is the car’s battery pack; out goes the old 7.1kWh pack, replaced by new 34Ah cells, to give the revised i8 a total of 11.6kWh.

“We were able to do that without adding too much weight,” Kotouc explained. “Now you have something close to 50km of electric range.” For Kotouc, this has meant his daily commute is now purely electric. (We should note that BMW North America’s press materials quote the pure electric range of the i8 at 18 miles.)

The other significant change under the hood is a tweaked electric motor/generator unit that powers the front wheels; this now provides 143hp/106kW (compared to 131hp/98kW). With a combined 369hp (275kW), that makes this a rather quick car—0 to 62mph in 4.2 seconds—although one of my abiding memories of the 2015 model was the way it always felt like it had 200hp more.
That extra juice is thanks to the way the electric motor and three-cylinder internal combustion engine work together. “That’s a big selling proposition for the i8; you don’t feel the two engines,” he said. “The seamlessness is perfect. We’ve improved the powertrain but kept the way the electric motor and engine interact the same.”

The other notable change is to the i8’s sound. “It’s a little bit more evil,” Kotouc explained, thanks to changes in the exhaust. Still, a louder exhaust doesn’t mean waking up the neighbors—one of the i8’s cool party tricks is being able to drive off purely under battery power.

But don’t expect the inline three-cylinder engine to be swapped out for something bigger. “The question I’m always being asked is when you’ll bring a ‘proper’ engine to the car,” he told me. “I always tell people that’s not the idea of the i8. It’s a super sports car with the consumption of a microcar. It fits the DNA of the car perfectly.”

While the i8 has always been an extrovert’s car—you can’t park anywhere without spending 10 minutes talking about it to inquisitive onlookers, particularly when they see the dihedral doors—there’s also a convertible i8 Roadster, first seen at last year’s LA Auto Show.

If you’ve ever had your doubts about Elon Musk’s grand visions, you aren’t alone. In fact, it’s become a thing to be bearish on Tesla. At some point maybe we should give serious consideration for hopping on board the Tesla fan-wagon where it’s warm inside — if the ride may get bumpy at times. Their well-documented production issues are a speed bump, while they’re simultaneously breaking ground all over the world.

There are two kinds of hype: the real and imagined. When hype is greater than the sum of its parts, it’s imagined, like the build-up for Star Wars 1, where we anticipated a foe worse than Darth Vader, but instead got way too much of cartoonish Jar Jar Binks.

Real hype anticipates and creates excitement that delivers. Think Apple. Indeed, there are times when it’s hard not to draw parallels between the audacious, notorious, perfectionistic, proprietary-minded Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

What about the Model 3? Are they ever going to get these things underway?

This past Friday, the Model 3 finally hit two retail centers, the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, and Westfield Century City mall in Los Angeles. People sat in Model 3s, kicked the tires, begged to take test drives (which they aren’t doing just yet), and learned about the features and equipment from Tesla staff. According to reports, there was a long line waiting to get inside the car.

The Century City showroom is actually located near the Apple and Amazon stores in the mall. This past November it was at the very same Century City Apple store where customers waited dutifully in line for the iPhone X.

The Model 3 generates buzz. 455,000 reservation-holders doesn’t hurt.

What about their market share?

Let’s move beyond the Model 3. Tesla shares are seeing a strong start to the year. Many expect further gains. The stock fell in last Tuesday’s trading, just one session after surging over 6 percent — its best day since September. Although the stock is still off 14 percent from its all-time high, if you were going to jump on the Tesla fan-wagon, now could be prime time.

Why? Because it’s become clear that many shareholders have adopted an “If you own it, you hold it” philosophy. Rich Ross, head of technical analysis at Evercore ISI, on CNBC’s Trading Nation sure thinks so. According to Ross, the stock has managed to hold what he calls a critical level of support at $300 per share, and absent a break below that level, the stock may shoot back up to its highs around $390 to $400 per share.

But it’s actually when you zoom out and look longer term that you can see the potential for the real upside. “Tesla loves the counter-trend rally. When the stock pulls back as it has from those highs last May, you’re setting yourself up for a slingshot off of that critical support. You see that prior resistance, which once again becomes support at $290, $300, you got the 50-week moving average…So I think Tesla is a buy here,” Ross says, analyzing Tesla stock from 2013.

According to Seeking Alpha’s Value Analyst, the above graph illustrates the number of the company’s outstanding shares has nearly doubled since its IPO. Specifically in mid-2011, late-2012, mid-2013, and mid-2016, Tesla tapped the secondary equity market to fund its future growth. In late 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity by issuing shares, which added to the company’s share count, currently at $168 million.

Basically, Tesla has $3 billion, which is more than management’s comprehensive capex guidance of $2 billion, and the company has several other levers it can pull in case of any short-term hiccups.

“After the company’s $1.5 billion debt offering, coupled with the potentially favorable 5.5% coupon rate, as well as additional cash inflows from new Model 3 reservations and deliveries of high-price, long-range Model 3 units, and finally its improved access to debt markets, do not expect the company to dilute its existing shareholders in the future.”

The demands for clean water have never been as pressing as they are today. Approximately 2.1 billion people around the globe do not have access to clean drinking water and that number keeps increasing by the day, as per a report by the World Health Organisation. Our water-rich planet, is home to more than 1,385 million cubic kilometres of water, but the issue is that most of that water, approximately 97 per cent of it, is sea water. The other three per cent of fresh water continues to dwindle. The growing global challenges of water scarcity, need to be addressed. We need to make the majority of the earth’s water consumable to us. Water desalination — the process of removing dissolved salts from water — is the way forward.

Today, there are a number of technologies that remove the salt from sea water, but these conventional thermal desalination plants consume a substantial amount of energy. Moreover, traditional power plants lead to high carbon emissions, generating a large carbon footprint. What we need is development of large-scale solar power plants to supply renewable energy. The new generation of reverse osmosis desalination plants are considerably more energy-efficient than thermal plants — as much as ten times more efficient in fact.

This new technology will not only make the desalination process carbon neutral, it would also free up a vast quantity of oil that was previously used to power these desalination plants, and hence actively contribute to the economy. This renewable energy solution would also offer more flexibility in terms of locating the desalination plant. Since they are not hazardous, the power plants would no longer need to be miles away from people. You can now have desalination plants closer to the towns and cities where the water is needed, which in turn reduces the cost of distribution and risk of waste through leakage. This innovative combination of renewable energy and battery storage holds enormous potential for the future of water.

Between 2007 and 2030 desalination capacity across the Middle East and North Africa region will expand from 21 million cubic metres per day to almost 110 million cubic metres per day. This, in turn, will triple electricity demand for desalination by 2030. So, the potential is clear for those who can drive the development of renewable energy-powered desalination. The Gulf Cooperation Council region has an opportunity to lead the world in this fast-developing field. By making the most of new technologies, and encouraging investment and innovation across the industry, the GCC can not only address its own water scarcity challenges, but also put itself at the forefront of a fast-growing, innovative sector that will become increasingly vital to global development in the coming years.

It seems that each year has brought with it a major development in smartphone technology. Each year we get better cameras with more impressive low light performance; bigger, brighter displays with less bezel; CPUs and GPUs that leave the previous year’s benchmarks in the dust. Yet the one place where we have seen little improvement is with the battery. Finally, companies have stopped trying to make phones thinner, and have started to embrace bigger batteries. But we should not rely on this for the future. Band-Aid solutions like quick charging help us to get more from our battery but also come with risks like overheating and faster battery degradation.

The baseline: Lithium-ion batteries

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries power most of our electronic devices today, and they have a lot of good things going for them: they are cheap to produce, can have high capacities, and can recharge fairly quickly. But they also have their downsides: degradation in their capacity over time cause them to only last around two years, and charging them quickly produces a lot of heat. And Li-ion batteries do not like heat; it causes them to degrade faster and can also cause them to catch fire.

Luckily, we can only get better from here. What do we want to see in new smartphone batteries? Higher capacities, less degradation over time, increased stability (safety), and faster charging. Let’s see what new technology can offer us.

Changing the structure: Disordered Cathodes

Today’s Li-ion batteries are created by making neat layers of lithium atoms and transition metal atoms. Scientists refer to this as ‘ordered’. Having an ordered structure allows lithium to pass easily between the layers and provides a high capacity for batteries. But this can be improved by making batteries with a ‘disordered’ structure. However, until a breakthrough by Berkeley scientists, the problem was that there was no determinate way of creating disordered cathodes. Their research showed that certain types of disordered material could store more lithium than their ordered counterparts thus leading to higher capacities. The same team also found that they were able to make the batteries have longer lives and that are less likely to catch fire by a process called fluorination.

If disordered Li-ion batteries make it to the market, we could see smartphones with higher capacity batteries that are safer.

Graphene Ball – The next step?

One of the problems with quick charging is that it leads to faster battery degradation. But there is new research that shows how researchers from Samsung and Seoul National University were able to coat electrodes with graphene. This allowed them to create a battery that could charge to full in just 12 minutes, or five times faster than current technology. That battery also had a 45% increase in capacity. The project leader, Dr. Son In-hyuk, said that their research: ‘enables mass synthesis of multifunctional composite material graphene at an affordable price.’ This means that we could be seeing batteries using a graphene ball electrode coating relatively soon.

It would bring us batteries that have higher capacities, operate at a stable temperature, and charge very quickly without significant battery degradation. Samsung notes that this kind of battery would be very useful for electric vehicles, which currently take a long time to charge.

Magnesium solid-state

While the first two technologies are mostly improvements to the Li-ion battery, a solid-state magnesium-ion battery is far different. What sets it apart from its Li-ion counterpart is that the electrolyte is solid, not liquid like we find in batteries nowadays. This means that the battery is far safer than one that uses a liquid electrolyte because it will not catch fire like the Li-ion battery. In addition, the capacity of a magnesium battery would double that of a Li-ion battery.

Unfortunately, the technology for making such a battery is still in its very early stages. But when it sees the light of day, we will have one of the safest batteries ever made.

Gold Nanowire

Nanowire batteries provide benefits such as quick charging and higher power density. But the crux had been that they did not have a great life cycle. In September 2010, a silicon nanowire battery could only cycle, or discharge and recharge, 250 times before degrading below 80% of the original capacity. For reference, current Li-ion batteries can cycle around 400 times before experiencing significant degradation.

But in 2016, Mya Le Thai, a doctoral candidate at the University of California Irvine, solved this problem by coating gold nanowire with Manganese-oxide and placing it in a poly(methyl methacrylate) gel electrolyte. Don’t worry if that did not make any sense, the bottom line is that it makes the battery infinitely stronger than before. Her new method yielded a battery that could cycle over 100,000 times without experiencing significant degradation.

If this kind of battery could be mass-produced, we will have devices that are powered by batteries which will virtually never degrade during the device’s lifetime.

What can we look forward to in the meantime?

Yes, most of these technologies are far away on the horizon, but there is hope for the not so distant future. Samsung seems like they are capable of efficiently producing graphene ball batteries which would offer us major improvements. Until then, we can look forward to new ways to pack more li-ion power into our devices. For smartwatches, we could see watch bands with flexible batteries built in. In late 2016, Panasonic showed off a flexible Li-ion battery, and recently we have seen patents from Samsung indicating that they may also be working on such a development.

What matters most to you in a battery? High capacities, ultra-fast charging, safety? Let us know in the comments.

Japanese researchers say they have developed a ceramic material that self-repairs cracks in just a minute and could drastically change manufacturing methods for the transportation industry.

The team from the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) and Yokohama National University said the material could be used in plane engines to keep them operating even if they are damaged in collisions with airborne objects.

“When the plane engine suffers a crack during a flight, the ceramic material will enable the aircraft to repair the damage by itself before landing without stopping the engine,” said Toshio Osada, a senior researcher at the NIMS.

Wataru Nakao, an engineering professor at the university, said the material “can be used for a wide variety of products,” and the team is planning studies to commercialize the ceramic.

Ceramics are lighter and more heat-resistant than nickel and titanium.

Ceramic-made engines had been seen as a possible way to significantly improve fuel-efficiency, but the material was considered too fragile for use in aircraft engines.

To solve the problem, the university added silicon carbide to a ceramic material made of aluminum oxide. When the ceramic cracked at high temperatures, the silicon carbide was exposed to air and turned into silicon dioxide that filled in the crack and repaired the damage.

The self-healing process initially required nearly 1,000 hours to complete.

The NIMS later reduced the time to one minute under temperatures of 1,000 degrees by adding a tiny amount of manganese oxide.

When silicon dioxide fills in the cracks, it reacts with the surrounding aluminum oxide and temporarily turns into a liquid-like substance. The manganese oxide promotes the phenomenon, according to the researchers.

The scientists said they are working on improvements so that the material can repair damage even at lower temperatures, making it possible for use in the undercarriages of Shinkansen. The bullet trains could continue running with cracked undercarriages because the material would fix the damage, they said.

Conjugated tetraenes are important key substructures in electronic materials, natural products and pharmaceutical molecules. However, they are difficult to synthesize. They are conventionally prepared by repetitions of the stoichiometric reactions using phosphorus reagents and subsequent reduction and partial oxidation. For making one C=C double bond, one needs to conduct 3 step reactions by this procedure. Each process produces wastes of phosphorus oxides and metal compounds such as lithium, aluminum and manganese. Removal of organic solvents and purification processes are also required. An alternative catalytic approach is the cross-coupling reaction catalyzed by a Pd complex but this method needs to prepare an activated alkenyl or dienyl metal species in advance.

TUAT researchers have achieved the new synthetic route of conjugated tetraenes from inexpensive and easily available 1,3-butadiene and substituted acetylenes by a one-pot approach under mild conditions. This is the most straightforward synthetic method ever reported. This new method has been published in the ACS journal, Organometallics.

“The Ru catalyst precisely distinguishes butadiene and substituted acetylene molecules and new carbon-carbon bonds are formed among a butadiene with two acetylenes just by migration of the terminal hydrogen atoms in butadiene. Interestingly, this catalysis proceeds regio- and stereoselectively and no wastes are produced from the reaction” said Masafumi Hirano, a TUAT professor of chemistry and principal of the study.

The current scope is, however, limited to internal alkynes (1,2-disubstituted acetylenes), and the present reaction entails internal side groups in the conjugated tetraenes. However, facile detachment of some side groups is possible to give the linear conjugated polyenes and this protocol will be disclosed in the 98th annual meeting of the Chemical Society of Japan.

Instead of 1,3-butadiene, 1-substituted 1,3-butadienes such as 1,3-pentadiene or 2,4-pentadienoate are also possible to use for the reaction but conjugated trienes are produced in this case.

The mechanism is revealed by the isotopic labeling experiments and the stoichiometric reactions by use the 1,3-butadiene complex of ruthenium. These studies demonstrate this reaction to be a formal syn addition of the terminal C-H bond in butadiene to acetyelene.

Conjugated tetraenes are important key substructures in organic-electronic materials, biologically active natural products such as vitamins, and anti-mycotic drugs and this new method may contribute to the preparations of them. “The ultimate goal is versatile synthesis of targeted conjugated polyene molecules and to supply conjugated polyene substructures by this inexpensive method”, said Masafumi. That could lead to facile and inexpensive synthesis of molecules for electronic materials and anti-mycotic drugs.

Masafumi and colleagues set out to prepare the targeted molecules containing conjugated tetraene substructures.