Month: May 2023

Enlarge / Like the FedEx arrow or the elephant in GM's new logo, once you see the bandito mustache, you'll never unsee it. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Ford is reopening its order books for the Mustang Mach-E battery-electric vehicle, and it's cutting prices in the process. The automaker has also switched battery chemistry for the standard-range models, boosting their power and range in the process. The price drops were announced shortly after Ford's Q1 2023 financial results were published, and it was a good three months for the company, which saw profits grow 20 percent, year on year.

"We continue to find ways to improve the value of the Mustang Mach-E. Upgraded BlueCruise rolling out for new and existing Mustang Mach-E owners, increased range and faster DC charging times on standard range models show how we are relentlessly improving our products for our customers," said Marin Gjaja, chief customer officer at Ford Model e.

Ford's switch to LFP (or lithium iron phosphate) batteries has been in the works for some time now. The cell chemistry has a lower energy density than the nickel cobalt manganese cells that are more common in US and European BEVs, but it's also much less susceptible to thermal runaway and requires much less crash protection as a result. Consequently, LFP battery packs can devote more volume to cells, and while cell energy density is worse than NCM, things don't look quite so bad at the pack level.

Enlarge (credit: LSOphoto via Getty)

An international team of scientists who spent five years studying the poo of 647 Danish babies found something astonishing. The nappy samples contained 10,000 species of virus—10 times the number of bacterial species in the same children. Most of the viruses had never been described before.

This may alarm many readers. Viruses haven’t exactly had a good reputation in recent years. But what many people don’t realize is that the overwhelming majority of viruses do not make people sick and do not infect humans or animals at all.

The viruses I’m referring to are bacteriophages. They exclusively infect bacteria and make up a large part of the human microbiome. It’s these bacteriophages that the researchers found so abundantly in baby poo. Indeed, around 90 percent of the viruses found in the nappies of the Danish babies were these bacteria killers.