Innovating at the leading edge of electric aviation technology, we have developed BlackFly, the world’s first ultralight all-electric fixed-wing VTOL personal aircraft.
Directly converting electrical power to heat is easy. It regularly happens in your toaster, that is, if you make toast regularly. The opposite, converting heat into electrical power, isn’t so easy.
Researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have developed a tiny silicon -based device that can harness what was previously called waste heat and turn it into DC power. Their advance was recently published in Physical Review Applied.
“We have developed a new method for essentially recovering energy from waste heat. Car engines produce a lot of heat and that heat is just waste, right? So imagine if you could convert that engine heat into electrical power for a hybrid car. This is the first step in that direction, but much more work needs to be done,” said Paul Davids, a physicist and the principal investigator for the study.
The evidence is increasingly clear: 2018 is the year of the Chinese venture deal.
With half of the year now complete, China is driving ahead of Silicon Valley and the rest of the United States on venture capital dollars invested into startups, according to a number of data sources including Crunchbase, China Money Network, and Pitchbook.
These sorts of top line numbers are always driven by large deals, and the Chinese VC market is no exception. Monster rounds this year have included a $1.9 billion investment from Softbank Vision Fund into Manbang Group, a truck hailing startup formed from the merger of two competitors, Yumanman and Huochebang, as well as Ant Financial, which raised a whopping $14 billion from investors.