The global economic crisis is taking its toll on what has been one of the leading industries of the 20th centuries: automobiles. For the first time since World War II  it been gripped by a dramatic fall of production and profits, and the imminent prospect of insolvency of  GM, the symbol of the global automobile [...]

A team of scientists at MIT may have achieved a breakthrough in enabling lithium-ion batteries to become the centre-piece of the future generation of electric engines in light vehicles.
They found out that through appropriate design changes, it would become possible to charge and discharge these batteries 100 times faster than at present and to make [...]