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The problem of limited range has been an important factor curbing the wide-spread adoption of electric cars. But scientists in South Korea have developed a new technology which could solve the problem. The lithium-ion batteries used in most of the current generation of electric cars have limitations. They are expensive and store insufficient power for the needs of many drivers, requiring frequent top-ups. And when they have to be recharged the charging process is time consuming. The technological breakthrough could solve these problems. And in the process, Dr Lu Wu of the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South...

Traveling to the Moon just got a whole lot cheaper. A NASA-funded study (PDF) has found that the cost of lunar missions could be reduced by a factor of 10 using a number of techniques – and it could also have implications for getting humans to Mars. The extensive NexGen Space study by the National Space Society (NSS) and the Space Frontier Foundation (SFF) said that partnerships with private companies could return humans to the Moon for $10 billion (£6.4 billion), rather than the previosuly estimated $100 billion (£64 billion) that had turned off potential suitors. Utilizing fuel sourced from...

Tesla Motors has earned more than $295 million in state cap and trade-type emission credits during the past three years for a battery-swapping technology customers weren’t getting, a Watchdog investigation reveals. In fact, the electric car company, owned in part by billionaire Elon Musk, may have earned credits up to nearly half a billion dollars in value from the 11 states that use the Zero Emission Vehicle barter as part of a green auto industry mandate. California created the program and leads the pack, doling out $173 million in credits to the Silicon Valley-based Tesla. Tesla claimed the credits between...

The names of the tech workers in this story have been changed.Ten thousand miles from Silicon Valley, in a room near the Black Sea, Yegor Karpenchekov dreams of money. At night, while the rest of Odessa sleeps and cocaine smugglers drift in and out of the port under cover of darkness, Yegor logs onto FaceTime and talks to a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Her name is Sally Faubion, and five months ago she recruited Yegor from the freelancer marketplace UpWork to code her apps. She believes "divine intervention" brought them together; for Yegor, it was likely $20 per hour...

Self-repairing pipes. Printed organs. Bulletproof t-shirts. Seriously?In April I was asked to speak at the annual TED conference in Vancouver (following Bill Gates…gulp) on the topic of 3D printing production and its implications. I have detailed my thoughts on why the shift to 3D printing production is not only likely but inevitable in articles one, two and three in this series for Forbes. Now, let’s take a step into a fascinating future, where daily life will be shaped by several powerful forces directly related to 3D printing production. What it will be like to live in a 3D-printed world? Imagine...

Toyota has been very vocal about its lofty plans for the new Mirai. After severing ties with Tesla in 2014, Toyota has shifted its focus toward fuel cells and away from all-electric cars. On Wednesday, Toyota announced that the Mirai had achieved an EPA-estimated range of 312 miles. That’s the longest range of any zero-emission vehicle on the market today, including electric vehicles. “Toyota realized in the early 90’s that electrification was key to the future of the automobile,” said Toyota’s North America CEO Jim Lentz in a statement “Just as the Prius introduced hybrid-electric vehicles to millions of customers...

As of early Monday morning, founder Elon Musk tweeted, no cause had been determined after ”several thousand engineering-hours” of review, meaning more than 100 engineers were working to investigate the problem. Investigators were using software to recover the "final milliseconds" before the explosion, he tweeted. Officials have said that all nine of the rocket’s engines had fired normally and that the rocket's trajectory was “right on target.” The Dragon capsule, which contained the cargo, was “healthy” and sending data back for “some time” after the incident, officials said. The rocket was about 28 miles above Earth when it broke up....

Musk, Schmidt, Simons and billionaire buddies build empire based on climate and energy BS Elon Musk and his fellow barons of Climate Crisis, Inc. recently got a huge boost from Pope Francis. Musk et al. say fossil fuels are causing unprecedented warming and weather disasters. The Pope agrees and says Catholics must “ask God for a positive outcome” to negotiations over another UN climate treaty. It matters not that the predicted calamities are not happening. There has been no warming in 19 years, no category 3-5 hurricanes making US landfall for a record 9-1/2 years, indeed none of the over-hyped...

Besides food and experiments, the Dragon cargo ship ordered up by NASA holds a new docking port, or parking place, for future commercial crew capsules. Liftoff is scheduled for 10:21 a.m. Sunday. Good flying weather is forecast for SpaceX's unmanned Falcon rocket. This shipment is especially critical because the space station has lost two deliveries since fall. A Russian supply ship spun out of control shortly after liftoff in April and burned up on re-entry with all its contents. In October, an Orbital Sciences Corp. cargo carrier was destroyed in a Virginia launch explosion. Once again, SpaceX is picking up...

Once again, SpaceX will try to recover a very expensive part of its rocket after launching it into space. If SpaceX succeeds in recovering the first stage of its rocket after its 10:21 a.m. ET launch on Sunday at Florida's Cape Canaveral, it will be a historical achievement. It will push space travel further toward a future in which people, satellites and other items can be inexpensively launched into orbit.

n an op-ed published in Florida Today on Wednesday, Jeff Kottkamp, a former lieutenant governor of Florida, and Rich Ramos, a Florida businessman, proposed a new justification for sending humans to Mars. A Mars program would serve, in their view, as a means to foster national unity of the sort that is rarely achieved outside times of war. Some recent polling data suggests that they may be on to something.

According to a Tuesday piece in Motherboard, Noam Chomsky, a philosopher and political commentator, and Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and cosmologist, had a public dialogue about space exploration. Being both men of the far left, they concluded that space travel should be best left to robots and conducted by governments. The conclusions are the exact opposite of what the prevailing trends are in space policy.

The first thing to notice is how rapidly Elon Musk's SpaceX is altering the market for government-sponsored rocket launches. Witness how frequently the words "to compete with SpaceX" appear in industry statements and press coverage. To compete with SpaceX, say multiple reports, the United Launch Alliance, the Pentagon's traditional supplier, is developing a new Vulcan rocket powered by a reusable engine designed by Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. Because of SpaceX, says Aviation Week magazine, Japan's government has instructed Mitsubishi to cut in half the cost of the Japanese workhorse rocket, and China is planning a new family of kerosene-fueled Long...

But can it ever hope to compete with SpaceX? Like the Falcon 9, Adeline is only partially reusable -- but the way it's meant to work is quite creative. While most of the rocket's fuselage goes unrecovered after launch, the bottom portion of the rocket housing the main engine (most expensive part and arguably the most important) is designed to safely return back home. The design calls for the first stage of the rocket to come equipped with wings and propellers, allowing it to travel back to Earth like a small plane and land gently on a runway. The key...

Elon Musk our billionaire, whose Stimulus funded Tesla Motors, Solarandra City and (only option to Russia, NASA is out) Space X has received $4.9 billion in FedSlush. Is Elon Musk a billionaire welfare queen of Federal grants, discounted loans, tax breaks, government RICO & Carbon credits? Tesla is set to receive an incentive worth $1.3 billion from the state of Nevada. Anyone who buys a Tesla gets a $7,500 federal income tax credit, Californians receive an additional rebate of $2,500 from the state. In all, Tesla Motors Inc. has received close to $2.391 billion in form of government subsidies. SolarCity,...

Tea Party-backed Senate candidate Ted Cruz points with pride to the army of small conservative donors supporting him. But his largest longtime contributor is a gay billionaire who supports same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization, campaign finance filings show. Peter Thiel, a German-born hedge fund manager and founder of the online payment system PayPal, gave Cruz $251,000 in 2009 for his aborted run for attorney general. The money represented 19 percent of the total raised for that campaign, which Cruz ended after Attorney General Greg Abbott decided to run for re-election. ...

The drama surrounding funding for NASA’s Commercial Crew program has started up once again. In the wake of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s cutting funding for the program by over $300 million, supporters have fallen back on familiar patterns of futile complaining. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden claimed that the funding shortfall would delay the restoration of American spaceflight capability by as much as two years. Bolden was mild compared to some of Commercial Crew’s supporters on the Internet.

Fast-growing Tesla Motors has leased a Fremont building once occupied by Solyndra before the solar company’s high-profile implosion, the Silicon Valley Business Times reported Thursday. The 500,000-square-foot facility, at 901 Page Ave., was the last of Solyndra’s former buildings to remain empty. Seagate Technologies snapped up Solyndra’s main factory — built with $528 million in federal loans — in 2012. And earlier this year, SolarCity leased a two-building Solyndra complex at 47700 Kato Rd. Tesla CEO Elon Musk chairs SolarCity’s corporate board.

Elon Musk's 'Hyperloop' was dismissed as a pipe dream that would never get off the ground. But now the billionaire's plans to shoot capsules of passengers along a tube at around the speed of sound may launch as soon as next year. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies has secured land for the first full-scale Hyperloop with a 2016 launch in the California town of Quay Valley.

Alt-energy/transport-tech CEO Elon Musk and his trio of companies (Tesla,SolarCity andSpaceX) didn’t cooperate with the Los Angeles Times on its article that tabulated his businesses’ whopping sum of corporate welfare ($4.9 billion) , and he was predictably miffed by the (accurate) portrayal. So he went about trying to fix things on CNBC and with the Times on Monday, but not by denying the conclusions reached by reporter Jerry Hirsch, but instead by essentially pointing at fossil fuel industries and saying “they do it more.” “If I cared about subsidies,” Musk told Hirsch in a follow-up to his Sunday expose’,...