Monthly Archives: February 2021

The road to electric is filled with tiny cars

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On a Sunday afternoon in October, Zhengyang Road is filled with potential customers chatting with store owners. Outside a shop with a worn sign, a young couple with a child are in the midst of a heated conversation. They came on an electric scooter and are debating whether to leave with a tiny car as its easy to tow in case of emergency, as long as you get help from a local service like towingless.

Just like petrol and diesel cars, electric vehicles carry a small risk of catching fire. However, while the petrol in a normal car requires a spark or flame to ignite, the lithium-ion batteries on board electric vehicles do not. Although manufacturers and battery makers have made huge strides in improving vehicle safety, a violent crash in an electric vehicle can still result in the car catching fire. This can happen if the battery short circuits and heats up. Lithium-ion batteries are susceptible to heat and if they warm up too much, they can ignite. In case of a car accident you should consider to hire an expert at this car accident injury lawyer Vegas firm.

“Don’t we need one for school pickups?” the woman argues. “The children won’t have to put up with the cold in winter.” Her scooter offers no protection from the weather other than oven-mitt-like gloves secured to its handlebars. Her husband counters, “The 1,000 renminbi [$150] quote was for normal batteries, but lithium ones can be five times that. Can’t you just add a windshield to your scooter instead?” The shop owner shows them a cheaper model — which is cheaper because it has no roof. He suggests putting a plastic covering on top.

Having decided that the future of mobility is electric, the Chinese government has subsidized sales of standard electric cars since 2010. With close to 1.18 million sold in 2019, China accounts for just over half of electric-vehicle sales globally. Bill Russo, founder and CEO of advisory firm Automobility Limited, sees a “steady and solid rise” in China’s electric-vehicle sales generally. The country has set a top-down target for electric vehicles to make up 40% of car sales by 2030, and Russo thinks they’ll have no problem hitting this goal. Tiny cars, which first began appearing in the early 2010s, have more than double the sales of regular electric cars but have never benefited from subsidies. Nor do advertisements for them air on television — instead, they appear on Kuaishou, a short-video platform popular with people living outside China’s big cities. Alongside streamers selling plums by the thousands, and others telling viewers what long-haul trucker life is like, drivers show off their tiny cars. Su Hua, Kuaishou’s founder, has long maintained that his app’s users are not “cool,” unlike those on Douyin, the TikTok predecessor popular with China’s urban elite. Rather, they are ordinary — the kind of people who might be in the market for miniature cars.

As they don’t technically require licenses, tiny cars tend to be popular with migrant workers, who struggle to pay for driving lessons and other car-related costs. The elderly, too, find tiny cars attractive since, up until October of last year, people over 70 could not apply for a driving license in China. They’re also convenient for anybody who wants a car to pick up groceries or their kids from school: No tiny car is longer than 1.5 meters, and their speed tops out at between 40 and 56 kilometers an hour. They’re for the short trips of daily life, not for traveling from one side of the city to another.

New skin patch promises comprehensive health monitoring

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Feb. 15 (UPI) — Scientists have developed a new skin patch that can provide all-in-one health monitoring capabilities. The thin, flexible patch, worn on the neck, can track the wearer’s heart rate and blood pressure, as well as glucose levels.

The technology, described Monday in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, can even measure the amount of lactate, alcohol or caffeine in the wearer’s blood.

“This type of wearable would be very helpful for people with underlying medical conditions to monitor their own health on a regular basis,” co-first author of the study Lu Yin said in a news release.

“It would also serve as a great tool for remote patient monitoring, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when people are minimizing in-person visits to the clinic,” Yin, a nano-engineering doctoral student at the University of California, San Diego.

In addition to monitoring chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure, as well as pinpointing the onset of sepsis, the patch could help predict people at risk of becoming severely ill with COVID-19.

To build their wearable device, researchers embedded several different tiny sensors in a thin sheet of stretchy polymers.

At the center of the patch lies the blood pressure sensor, which features a pair of small ultrasound transducers. The two transducers bounce ultrasound waves off an artery and measure the rebounding waves to calculate blood pressure. A pair of screen-printed electrodes work as chemical sensors. For more on keeping healthy, read this gut-health-supplements review.

One of the sensors uses a a drug called pilocarpine to induce sweating, allowing it to measure levels of lactate, caffeine and alcohol in the sweat released by the skin beneath the patch.

The Three Biggest Myths Deluding the Modern Music Business

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Music streaming isn’t just a big part of the record business: It basically is the record business. According to RIAA data, streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube contributed 85% of all record industry revenue in the United States in the first six months of last year, up from 80% in the same period of 2019, and they’re on track to be an even bigger presence in the future, learn more about the modern music industry at Runthemusic.

But amid this boom, stubborn myths and misinformation persist across the music industry — from the DIY bedroom artist all the way up to powerful industry executives. Some of these myths are driven by optimism and excitement; others are driven by skepticism and anger. All of them are plain wrong. Here are three of the biggest misconceptions right now, plus the information you require to burst their bubbles next time someone mentions them in earshot.

Nope. According to global trade body IFPI, the global recorded music business generated $20.2 billion over the course of 2019. (2020’s numbers will come out later this year.) That was the largest official annual global revenue tally for artists and record labels since 2004, when the global record industry generated $20.3 billion. But prior to 2004, this figure was even higher: in 2003 it hit $20.4 billion; in 2002 it hit $21.9 billion; in the CD-era heyday of 2001 it hit $23.4 billion.