Ford Electric Car Plant Builds Electric Focus And Hybrid Vehicles

Korean engineers may have found a way to allow electric vehicle batteries to recover and reuse energy from braking. “These guys have built high-performance supercapacitors out of graphene that store almost as much energy as a lithium-ion battery, can charge and discharge in seconds and maintain all this over many tens of thousands of charging cycles.” [MIT Technology Review]

Engineers at Duke University have built a “harvester” that can convert stray microwave signals into enough electricity to charge a cell phone or other small electronic device. “The researchers think the harvester could be tuned to harvest the signal from other energy sources, including satellite signals, sound signals or Wi-Fi signals.” [Voice of America]

There’s a slightly depressing article in Quartz about how every step forward in reducing carbon dioxide emissions is offset – perhaps more than offset – by rising consumption of fossil fuels in developing countries. [Quartz]