For a half-dozen or so years, researchers around the world have been on a feverish quest—to make electronic devices last a lot longer, electric cars go much further, and renewable power a broader reality, all at an affordable price. But the prize has remained elusive. We are still frustrated by dead phones, and most people can’t afford a $132,000 Tesla.
Until a century and a half ago, American presidents, not to mention senators, governors, and justices, were a relentless string of sourpusses. There was generally no sense of humor in major politics, mainly because winning and legislating didn’t seem to require one.
Traders momentarily pushed oil prices back over $50 a barrel this morning (June 2), betting that OPEC, currently meeting in Vienna, would dispel the growing belief that the once-mighty cartel has become largely irrelevant. But then OPEC did the usual–failing to vote for joint action–and returned to its deathbed, sending prices again below $49 a barrel.
Russian officials, under intense scrutiny in a growing doping scandal, are mounting a rear-guard effort to lift a ban on their track and field team for the Rio de Janeiro Olympic games this summer. But, in a new development, the Russian Olympic Committee admitted this weekend that eight of the country’s athletes tested positive in banned substance retests for the 2012 London Olympic Games, on top of the 14 athletes it had already admitted doped in the previous 2008 games in Beijing.
VW is in trouble. Its multi-year deception to hoodwink US environmental laws is costing it billions of dollars, in addition to inestimable public good will. Worse, the scandal has threatened the company’s future. Until last year the maker of the world’s best-selling cars, VW has had to pivot away from its long-term strategic bet on diesel-fueled vehicles, which are at issue in the deception, and to electrics.
Oil prices today (May 26) charged back above the symbolic $50-a-barrel threshold, buoying financially stricken petrostates and oil companies. A two-year bear market at one point pushed the oil price down by almost 80% from its peak, but Brent crude, the internationally traded benchmark, is now back up by some 80% from January lows.
Jeff Dahn, a leading battery researcher who teaches at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, will go on an exclusive contract with Tesla Motors on June 8, just as CEO Elon Musk is facing serious skepticism over his plans to rapidly transform into a mainstream carmaker. And Dahn says he is arriving with marching orders to do “whatever it takes” to improve the company’s battery performance.
Oil is in its biggest price surge in six months, sending a potential rescue line to desperate producers who have been shutting down rigs to stave off bankruptcy. Futures prices for Brent crude, the international benchmark, have risen as high as $49.47 a barrel today.
Once it had a deal lifting sanctions on its oil industry, Iran vowed to put an additional 1 million barrels of oil a day on the global market within a year. As recently as a month ago, most leading analysts said that was hubris, and that it would be lucky to achieve half of that.
One of the hottest subjects in Washington at the moment is the hot water in which The New York Times Magazine has found itself.
The world oil war is getting hotter, with Saudi Arabia vowing to produce even more than its record-setting output, and Iran slashing prices to capture market share from its rival.
A new debate has opened in oil, a field that leading experts have largely predicted wrongly for the last half-dozen years. It is whether we are moving toward a severe supply crunch, or a much longer period of glut.
Scientists have disputed a claimed breakthrough in one of the most promising fields of advanced battery research, casting fresh doubt on efforts to leapfrog current lithium-ion technology.
Elon Musk has wowed the world with sleek, high-tech, desirable automotive design, but he knows the proving ground has shifted. Now he needs to start making reliable cars—and a lot of them.
Bethesda, Maryland
If you’re a screenwriter imagining a fictional place, whether on Earth or in space, it’s become almost de rigueur to invest it with its own language. Valyrian, created by linguist David J. Peterson for Game of Thrones, is the best recent example.
For the last year, some 250 million miles from Earth, an American spacecraft called Dawn has been orbiting Ceres, a dwarf planet—really a big asteroid—between Mars and Jupiter. It is Dawn’s second stop within the asteroid belt: Four years ago, it took a close look at Vesta, another protoplanet. Depending on what NASA decides, it may travel to yet a third.
Donald Trump set out today to show that he is more than an insult-spewing, vulgarity-laced real estate mogul who is stressing out foreign allies and Americans alike.
Saudi deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman today announced an ultra-ambitious economic and social makeover that he said would allow the kingdom to survive without oil in just four years. He also said the reclusive kingdom would open up more broadly to tourism.
You are watching a generational free-for-all—one of those bare-knuckles, international brawls that can end up determining the winner in transformative new commercial spaces. Last time, it was smart phones (for those who have been living under a rock, Apple won); before that, it was portable music (again, Apple).
More evidence of mayhem among oil drillers has triggered a selloff in the market: Oil prices are down more than 5% in Monday trading in Asia, with no clear barrier to a continued plunge. The bloodletting came within hours of a failed effort by members of OPEC and Russia to stem the 22-month oil market glut. Meeting April 17 in Doha, the petro-states couldn’t even agree to freeze current sky-high production, much less cut it.
This story has been updated with oil prices plummeting.
Across the globe—in the US, Europe and China—oil companies big and small are scrambling to stay afloat, cutting expenses to the bone, and shelving flesh-and-muscle projects worth a collective millions of barrels a day in the future market. The likely repercussions include lower-than-expected profit in coming years, a crude oil shortage, and stunted global GDP growth.
In 2007, Nokia was the biggest and most fashionable name in cell phones, with an unassailable lead in hand-held technology. Things had been so good for so long that company executives saw little chance for any competitive challenge–phones were a tough business, they said, and Nokia was reaping the harvest of decades of hard work that no one else could hope to match.
