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Businesses

Submission + - GM Admits to Losing Money on Every Volt Built (greencarreports.com)

Submitted by thecarchik
thecarchik writes: Doug Parks, vehicle line executive for the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, GM's range-extended electric vehicle, confirmed Tuesday that the company loses money on every Volt it sells. The expensive 16-kilowatt-hour battery pack, which likely costs GM somewhere between $8,000 and $12,000, is clearly too expensive to let the company build hundreds of thousands of Volts right away. Just 10,000 Volts will be built in 2011, though GM is working to increase that number. GM plans to chip away incrementally to lower the costs of the specialized components in the Volt, especially the power electronics. The price of consumer lithium-ion cells has fallen 6 to 8 percent annually since their 1989 launch; the large-format cells in automotive packs seem likely to follow the same curve and as costs are lowered the Volt may stop being a loss for the company/
Hardware

Submission + - MoNETA: A Mind Made from Memristors (ieee.org)

Submitted by Csiko
Csiko writes: Researchers at Boston University's department of cognitive and neural systems work on an artificial brain implemented with Memristors. A Memristor is a new class of electronic device that completes the two-terminal passive elements resistor, capacitor and inductor. Also theoretically described, solid state versions of memristors have not been implemented until recently.
Now researchers in Boston claim that memristors are the new key technology to implement highly integreated powerful artificial brains on cheap and widely available hardware within five years.

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