Month: May 2024

Enlarge / These minerals were once part of lithium-ion battery cells and will be once again. (credit: Redwood Materials)

Battery recycling company Redwood Materials will start recycling battery production scrap from General Motors' new line of electric vehicles. This morning, Redwood announced that it is working with Ultium Cells, the joint venture between GM and LG Energy Solutions that makes Ultium battery cells. Approximately 10,000 tons a year of production scrap will be sent from the Ultium Cells plants in Ohio and Tennessee to Redwood's site in northern Nevada.

Redwood was started by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel in 2017 and in recent years has announced partnerships with multiple OEMs, including Ford, Volvo, Volkswagen, and now General Motors. Last year, the US Department of Energy approved a $2 billion loan to Redwood as part of its Advanced Technology Manufacturing program (which also funded Ultium Cells).

Redwood says that its hydrometallurgy facility is now a "commercial-scale source of lithium supply," the first to come online in the United States for decades. The facility also produces raw nickel and cobalt from battery scrap.

Enlarge / The Enterprise, caught in the wake of a temporal vortex, witnesses the Earth, assimilated long ago, in the altered timeline. (credit: Paramount Pictures)

A team of physicists has discovered that it’s possible to build a real, actual, physical warp drive and not break any known rules of physics. One caveat: the vessel doing the warping can’t exceed the speed of light, so you’re not going to get anywhere interesting any time soon. But this research still represents an important advance in our understanding of gravity.

Moving without motion

Einstein’s general theory of relativity is a toolkit for solving problems involving gravity that connects mass and energy with deformations in spacetime. In turn, those spacetime deformations instruct the mass and energy how to move. In almost all cases, physicists use the equations of relativity to figure out how a particular combination of objects will move. They have some physical scenario, like a planet orbiting a star or two black holes colliding, and they ask how those objects deform spacetime and what the subsequent evolution of the system should be.

But it’s also possible to run Einstein’s math in reverse by imagining some desired motion and asking what kind of spacetime deformation can make it possible. This is how the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre discovered the physical basis for a warp drive—long a staple of the Star Trek franchise.