Friday 3 May 2019

Asia in charge of electric car battery production

Global production of batteries for electric cars is concentrated in Asia, with Chinese, Japanese and South Korean firms dominating the sector and building factories in Europe to conserve their supremacy.

* This article was originally published here

Virtual human body models supplement crash-test dummies

Countless people die every year in road accidents. To improve the safety of vehicle occupants, it has been customary for decades to carry out crash-tests using dummies. These crash-test dummies are increasingly getting virtual support in the form of computer models that simulate the defensive behavior of humans before a collision. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, Ernst-Mach-Institut, EMI are among those using virtual human-body models in crash simulations, which yield more realistic conclusions about the injury risk. In their calculations, the researchers focus especially on muscle stiffness, which has not been taken into account in previous investigations.

* This article was originally published here

Running may have made dinosaurs' wings flap before they evolved to fly

Before they evolved the ability to fly, two-legged dinosaurs may have begun to flap their wings as a passive effect of running along the ground, according to new research by Jing-Shan Zhao of Tsinghua University, Beijing, and his colleagues.

* This article was originally published here