It's not hard to make things safer. But sometimes people don't think about the tools they already have. With a simple reprogramming of an engine computer and perhaps with the addition of a sensor or two, the Jeep that killed Anton Yelchin could have saved his life. If cars were able to detect that their driver had exited, accidental rolling of a car could be a thing of the past. If we're lucky, it will quickly become one.
As more and more EV's make it onto our roadways, people start to freak out about how we're going to charge all these things. The thing is, they shouldn't. EV's are so much more efficient than their gasoline powered counterparts that they don't consume all that much electricity, in fact the size of the grid only needs to increase about 4.5% to accommodate an entirely electric commuter fleet. But people still worry about charging them. In this video, I explain why this shouldn't worry you in the slightest.
The technological advances that we've investigated so far have revolved around the vacuum tube. But the invention of the transistor really sparked a whole new era of sound. The advent of small circuits for sound reproduction meant that things could shrink. Tape went into cartridges. Amplifiers used less energy. And everything became more robust.
We've come along way since the invention of the phonograph. But up to this point, artificial sound was still decidedly artificial sounding. "High fidelity" isn't really one technology, but a collection of technologies that combined to create natural sounding recordings. Similarly, stereo sound, though now completely universal, had to be introduced. This episode explores what makes a good high fidelity recording, and how stereo came to be.
From the Chevy Volt, to the Nissan Leaf, to the Tesla Model S, electric cars seem to be the way of the future. Join me as we explore a typical wind farm and discuss the potential for wind energy and electric cars. While today's electric grid propels these bastions of modern engineering with a fair bit of fossil fuel, it's clear that electric cars are pretty green and will only continue to get greener.
Rather than use electromagnets to cut a groove, why not use them with other magnets? By using materials that could be magnetized, the electromagnets used in the phonograph cartridge could be adapted into a magnetic recorder. This technology is still very much in use today, but in this episode of Technology Connections, we're exploring the two earliest forms of audio reproduction done with magnets: the wire recorder, and the magnetic tape recorder.