Month: June 2023

Enlarge / Formula 1 battery tech and light, compact, but powerful electric motors would power the Mercedes-Benz Vision One-Eleven. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

CARLSBAD, CALIF.—In 1969, a couple of short months after humans first walked on the surface of the moon, Mercedes-Benz debuted a revolutionary new concept car at that year's Frankfurt auto show. Called the C111, this orange-and-black coupe featured dramatic gullwing doors but also served as a testbed for new technology, including a four-rotor Wankel rotary engine. Now, 54 years later, it has drawn inspiration from that car for its newest concept, the Vision One-Eleven. It, too, is orange, and it also showcases new technology—in this case very small and lightweight axial flux electric motors.

Axial flux motors aren't exactly new—most optical drives use them, for example, but they're not very common in automotive applications. The one-off Jeep Magneto used axial flux motors, as do production hybrid supercars from Acura, McLaren, and Ferrari. In the case of the Italian OEM, it sources the motors from Yasa, a British company that was acquired by Mercedes in 2021.

Like the much more common radial flux motor, an axial flux motor uses magnets (in this case, permanent magnets), soft iron to transport the flux, copper as the material that's connected to the inverter, and an aluminum housing.

Enlarge / Top: An invasive carp collected during scheduled fish sampling at the Wilmington Substation. (credit: USFWS)

Over the past 50-some years, invasive carp, a stunningly destructive invasive species, have infested almost every waterway in the Midwest, from South Dakota to beyond the Mississippi Delta, and have even reached West Virginia. In some waters, it’s been reported that around 90 percent of the fish are invasive carp; in one section of the Illinois River, a Mississippi tributary, they make up more than 75 percent of the total biomass in the water. They are obnoxious invaders, overwhelming other fish species, muddying clear waters, and—in some cases—jumping out of the water when startled. A passing boat can throw hundreds of fish into a frenzy, creating an airborne blizzard of 25-pound lunkers that have broken the arms and jaws of recreational boaters.

So far, however, the prolific fish have mostly stopped short of the Great Lakes, blocked by the subtle ridge of a continental divide that circles the lakes’ southern and western shores. Water to the west and south of the ridge flows to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Water to the east and north flows to the Great Lakes, which contain about 20 percent of the world’s surface fresh water and attract boating, fishing, and other recreation, which all together have been estimated to generate between $14 billion and $42 billion a year.

But the fish, formerly called Asian carp, could still find a way in. There is a single year-round connection between those two main watersheds of eastern North America: the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

Enlarge / Intel's Core CPUs are about to get a bit more Ultra. (credit: Intel)

As part of an effort to "simplify the Intel brand portfolio," Intel has announced some changes to its processor branding starting with its next-generation Meteor Lake CPUs.

The smallest change is that Intel's mainstream CPUs are losing their "i," shifting from Core i3/i5/i7/i9 to simply Core 3/5/7/9. Intel will also stop using "generational" messaging in its processor branding—none of the new CPUs will be announced, released, or advertised as "14th-generation" anything.

Intel's generational branding has always been a bit arbitrary, anyway. The "first-generation" Core chips followed several generations of Core and Core 2 processors, the branding Intel started using for its chips in the mid-2000s at the end of the Pentium 4 era. And the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad branding was used for several distinct generations of chips that used different manufacturing technologies and revised architectures.

Enlarge / Intel's Core CPUs are about to get a bit more Ultra. (credit: Intel)

As part of an effort to "simplify the Intel brand portfolio," Intel has announced some changes to its processor branding starting with its next-generation Meteor Lake CPUs.

The smallest change is that Intel's mainstream CPUs are losing their "i," shifting from Core i3/i5/i7/i9 to simply Core 3/5/7/9. Intel will also stop using "generational" messaging in its processor branding—none of the new CPUs will be announced, released, or advertised as "14th-generation" anything.

Intel's generational branding has always been a bit arbitrary, anyway. The "first-generation" Core chips followed several generations of Core and Core 2 processors, the branding Intel started using for its chips in the mid-2000s at the end of the Pentium 4 era. And the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad branding was used for several distinct generations of chips that used different manufacturing technologies and revised architectures.