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Acciona

The Acciona 100% EcoPowered racing across the desert.

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Motorsport is never easy, but races don't come any tougher than the annual Dakar rally. Originally, the race used to run from Paris to Dakar, Senegal but security concerns about crossing North Africa in 2008 saw the race moved to South America the following year, where it has found a new home ever since. Cars, trucks, bikes, and quads all compete in the two-week long, 5,700-mile (9200km) race, through stunning but remote and arduous terrain. And this year an electric vehicle called the Acciona 100% EcoPowered put in an extremely credible performance.

The car in question is a technology demonstrator project from Acciona, a renewable energy multinational. It's a purpose-built machine (i.e., not based on an existing road car), powered by eight lithium-ion battery packs (that may well have come from Tesla road cars) to give it a total 150kWh. Those cells feed a 335hp/250kW electric motor, and Acciona say the car uses between 20 and 45kWh per 100km. Recharging takes an hour using a fast charging system, something the team was able to do at various checkpoints along the route with the help of a support truck.

Between the need to recharge for an hour at a checkpoint during the stages and the EV's limited top speed of 93mph (150km/h) the Acciona 100% EcoPowered was never going to trouble the factory-backed Peugeot and Mini teams for the win. But Ariel Jaton and his codriver Gaston Scazzuso put in a decent showing and were in 71st place by the end of the 10th day.

One of the earlier leading candidates to explain the odd behavior of this star. The new data suggest this explanation is unlikely.

For over a century, a star's bizarre behavior has been hiding in plain sight. Now, after unusual fluctuations in its light were spotted in the Kepler data, a researcher has gone back and looked at old photographic plates and found that its behavior has been unusual since some of the earliest images. The new findings make any mundane explanations for the star's erratic behavior even less likely.

"The star KIC8462852 (TYC 3162-665-1) is apparently a perfectly normal star." That's how a new paper from Louisiana State's Bradley Schaefer begins. It's an F-type star, which means it's a bit larger than the Sun, but is otherwise boring and stable. If you were to image it (as has happened many times over recent decades), it would look unremarkable.

It took the Kepler telescope to figure out that the star was anything but boring. Kepler was designed to stare at one patch of the sky and watch for signs of planets passing in front of their host stars. By chance, that patch of sky included KIC8462852. Its bizarre behavior—sudden dips in brightness of as much as 20 percent, lasting for seemingly random periods of time—wouldn't have been identified by the software that analyzes Kepler data.