coils

A new wireless EV charging pad can fill a car's battery as efficiently as a wired plug, at groundbreaking 100 kW power levels – unlocking the possibility of fast, efficient and super-convenient charging simply by parking in a designated spot.Wireless power transfer was famously first demonstrated in the 1890s by one Nikola Tesla. Today, it's fairly commonplace in many homes, where plenty of folk use wireless charging pads for phones, tablets and electric toothbrushes, as well as inductive cooktops. The power is…

At the midpoint of Olivia Wenzel’s zesty debut, the unnamed German-Angolan narrator is labouring through an almighty hangover. While “everything’s spinning and I puke bile onto my toes”, she mournfully “wishes I had a close-fitting wooden helmet to keep my thoughts together, there is no order anywhere”.Disorder informs the shape and spirit of Wenzel’s unusual novel, which seeks to capture the vertiginous, multifaceted experience of living in contemporary Germany as a queer woman of colour. It is a modishly fragmented…

The experimental form of Olivia Wenzel’s bold exploration of Black identity in Germany may distance some readers. She opens with a surreal image: “My heart is a snack machine made of tin.” The unnamed narrator then moves through a series of questions and answers. Her feelings of alienation are swiftly established. In a theatre with her friend-lover, Kim, they discover they’re the only non-white people in a room of a thousand. She resents being subjected to the white gaze and yearns to be invisible. As a kid, she wanted a…

Scientists are pursuing the proposition of clean and inexhaustible power from nuclear fusion through a variety of experimental reactor designs, and one of the more interesting examples is a roughly circular device known as a stellarator. While these have conventionally featured irregularly shaped magnetic coils, scientists have now developed simpler and straighter versions they say can offer some important benefits.Stellarators have some similarities to another popular fusion reactor design called the tokamak, in that…