Innovation Past & Present

In a recent article from the USA Today, the history of electric cars and AC Propulsion is detailed.

According to the article, AC Propulsion has had “their fingerprints on just about every performance-oriented electric car in the last 20 years.”

Recently, the company has been converting gas-powered cars to electric powered cars for personal use and for car companies like BMW. AC is currently under contract with the U.S. Postal Service to convert a mail truck into an electric car.

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As part of Wired‘s “This Day in Tech, ” the birth of RAM on May 11, 1951 was highlighted.

A team of professors and researchers at MIT “developed a three-diensional magnetic structure code -named Project Whirlwind.” The team was led by professor Jay W. Forrester, MA B 1939.

Forrester applied for a patent on the invention on this day in 1951. Another member of Project Whirlwind, Bernard Widrow (CA G ’51) said, “When we were working on this, in a million years we couldn’t imagine what would happen with memory.” Read more

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Japan’s largest chemical company, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corp., through KAITEKI Institute Inc. (TKI) is sponsoring a UCLA professor’s research on the conversion of CO2 using genetically modified algae.

According to the press release, “there is a worldwide need to recycle carbon dioxide in order to reduce the amount of CO2 that is released into the atmosphere.”

Professor James Liao from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science will work with TKI “for many years on recycling and converting CO2 into chemicals that can be used to produce a variety of industrial products, such as car bumpers, packaging materials, diapers and DVDs.”

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