The Nissan Leaf can run 70-plus miles on a single charge. Now, it can also power a family home for two days if it needs to. The “Leaf to Home” project Nissan is rolling out in Japan allows the electricity stored in the Leaf’s lithium-ion battery to be fed back into a home, running major appliances for up to two days.
The “Leaf to Home” system simply allows for a quick charging port to be mounted on the home’s electricity distribution panel to receive energy from the car. Those 24 kilowatt hours stored in a fully energized Leaf can run the average Japanese household for two days, even when the refrigerator, climate control, and other large appliances are running at the same time.
Manufacturing and retail could get a much- needed boost from a newly- developed 3D chocolate printer. In the long term the technology could be used by customers to design many different products themselves — tailor-made to their needs and preferences.
Everyone gets anxious from time to time: there’s public speaking, job interviews, the dentist and all the rest.
For about one in six of us this will cross over into what psychologists term a disorder at some point in our lives. This is when people are almost continuously anxious and find it difficult to concentrate, have trouble sleeping and become irritable and restless. Women are roughly twice as likely as men to suffer from an anxiety disorder.
According to industry trade journal Ward’s, which added up both reported vehicle registrations and historical trends, the total crossed 1 billion sometime last year.
The vehicles include passenger cars, light-, medium-, and heavy-duty trucks, and buses, but not off-road or heavy construction vehicles.
The total at the end of 2009 was about 980 million, and with strong growth in emerging regions–particularly China, now by far the world’s biggest car market–the number powered past the 1-billion mark sometime last summer.
