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The LiveWire One, Harley-latest Davidson's battery-powered vehicle, is reviving the company's effort into electric motorcycles. While the new bike will have similar specifications to the company's initial LiveWire motorcycle, it will be more affordably priced in order to attract more customers.

The LiveWire One will be priced at $21,999 before any federal, state, or local tax incentives are applied. (Any electric motorcycle capable of travelling at least 45 miles per hour is eligible for a federal tax credit of up to $2,500.) When these credits are factored in, Harley-Davidson claims that the price will fall below $20,000 for the majority of consumers.

HARLEY-DAVIDSON SAID THE PRICE WILL ACTUALLY FALL BELOW $20,000 FOR MOST CUSTOMERS

Customers in only three states will be able to purchase the LiveWire One at first: California, New York, and Texas. The business is embracing a "hybrid" approach to retail, allowing customers to complete the majority of their buying online before picking up their bike at a local Harley-Davidson dealership. The LiveWire One will be sold by 12 dealerships at first, but the business expects that number to rise next year.

The LiveWire One will be able to travel 146 city miles on a single charge, according to Harley-Davidson, although it is unclear how that would translate on the highway. (This is presumably due to the fact that the range decreases as you speed up.) Even so, it's only a smidgeon.

There are a few additional significant variations, albeit Harley-Davidson did not provide a spec sheet at the time of publication. The LiveWire One's battery will charge from 0 to 100% in 60 minutes or 0 to 80% in 45 minutes when plugged into a DC fast charger. This new bike will incorporate a six-axis IMU (inertial measuring unit) for traction control and anti-lock braking, similar to the original LiveWire.

In an interview, Harley-Davidson CEO Jochen Zeitz noted, "It's a very different riding experience." “It's exhilarating because it's such a quick and nimble motorcycle... you can go from 0 to 100 [mph] in no time.”

A comparison of the two LiveWire motorcycles, as well as other electric two-wheelers, will show more about the new brand's ability to attract new customers. We'll have to wait until July 18th, when Harley-Davidson plans to reveal the LiveWire One at the Northern California International Motorcycle Show. If you can't wait that long, you can place an order at LiveWire.com.

While the first LiveWire was commended for being well-made and enjoyable to ride, it was frequently chastised for being too expensive, with a starting price of $29,799. Within the company's lineup, there was also an apparent dearth of options. If you truly desired to purchase an electric vehicle,

It put Harley-Davidson at a disadvantage in the developing electric motorbike market, where businesses like Zero Motorcycles are selling a variety of models for $10,000 to $16,000.

However, whereas the initial LiveWire was intended to show what Harley-Davidson could achieve with an electric motor, the LiveWire One is intended to be a more serious attempt to acquire those city-dwelling customers that the firm sees as critical to its long-term survival. The question is if this market niche exists at all.

“This is not a product sold through a regular dealer network,” Zeitz explained. “It's a new brand,” says the narrator. It's a different way of approaching the market.”

Zeitz disputed the notion that the company's main customers, the ageing "boomers," were a problem unique to Harley-Davidson. “Isn't it true that the world's population is ageing?” he joked. “So this isn't just a Harley issue.”

“IT’S A NEW BRAND. IT’S A NEW GO-TO-MARKET APPROACH.”

However, he admitted that the idea with LiveWire is to appeal to a new generation of moviegoers who didn't grow up seeing classics like Easy Rider. “Every brand needs to innovate... and excite the next generation about your product and the experience you deliver,” Zeitz said, citing the 2020 television series Long Way Up as an example of the appeal of electric motorcycles, in which actor Ewan McGregor and TV presenter Charley Boorman ride LiveWires from Argentina to Los Angeles.

With the LiveWire One, the company is recommitting itself to the electrification of an entire product line. Earlier this year, Harley-Davidson decided to spin off LiveWire into its own brand, with the goal of launching multiple electric motorcycles under that nameplate. LiveWire One is the first product of that effort, and there will be more to come.

The company telegraphed this move in its Hardwire strategic plan to reinvigorate its flagging sales over the next five years. This dedicated division would be “focused exclusively on leading the future of electric motorcycles,” the company said in its plan.

But while LiveWire will certainly play a significant role in Harley-Davidson’s future, the company is not planning to phase out gas-powered vehicles anytime soon. That’s not the case in the auto industry, with giants like Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, Honda, Volvo, and others promising to go EV-only within the next decade. Meanwhile, California has said it would ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035. Other states are sure to follow.

A LOT OF FACTORS HOLD HARLEY-DAVIDSON BACK FROM GOING WHOLE HOG (PUN INTENDED) ON ELECTRIFICATION

There are a number of obstacles preventing Harley-Davidson from going all-in on electrification. For one thing, there is less space on a motorcycle than in a car, therefore the battery must be more compact. This reduces the bike's range, making it more difficult to sell to consumers interested in cross-country or touring journeys. And those individuals make up a sizable chunk of the company's clientele. Furthermore, the EV charging infrastructure in the United States is fragmented, unreliable, and frankly, a shambles.

“There is no path to electrifying a touring bike and giving it the three or four hundred miles that you would want,” Zeitz said. “And also bearing in mind that fast charging infrastructure is not common yet outside of the city. And even within the city, it’s not always available.”

Zeitz, who joined Harley-Davidson in 2020 after 18 years as CEO of Puma, said that “synthetic fuels are not something that you can fully disregard,” and that he was hoping for a “major revolution in that space” to help the company navigate the post-fossil fuel future.

“However, electrification will play a huge role,” he continued. “On the other hand, only time will tell. We will undoubtedly be prepared for both as a company.”

Hubble's issues began in June, when the payload computer that controls the orbiting telescope's scientific instruments went offline. When this happened, all of the instruments went into safe mode, which means they are still healthy and working, but they aren't gathering data at the moment.

The NASA team on the ground went through numerous rounds of troubleshooting to figure out what was causing the issue. According to the most recent NASA report, the fault is in a unit called Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SI C&DH), which contains numerous pieces of hardware that could be the cause of the malfunction.

In an update, NASA outlines the next steps: “The Command Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF), which communicates and formats commands and data, is now under investigation by the team. They're also looking at a power regulator in the Power Control Unit, which is designed to keep the payload computer's hardware at a constant voltage.”

If one of these systems proves to be the source of the problem, the solution is to switch from the current units to the backups. Most Hubble hardware has both primary and backup versions, allowing the team to move from one to the other if something goes wrong with one. Switching to backup units, on the other hand, might be a difficult operation. Several pieces of hardware must be turned off before the backup CU/SDF or power regulator can be switched on due to the way the systems are coupled.

The team is ready to transfer to backup hardware this week, including utilising a simulator to test the operation. The good news is that this isn't the first time something like this has been done. “A similar swap was done in 2008, allowing Hubble to resume normal science operations when a CU/SDF module failed,” NASA noted. “In 2009, a servicing mission replaced the entire SI C&DH unit, including the malfunctioning CU/SDF module, with the current SI C&DH unit.”

History

No diamonds have survived from the ancient world, but evidence of their use in ancient times can be found. According to the American Museum of Natural History, "Beads from sites in Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Yemen and Egypt show the marks of diamond drills prior to 700 CE and as early as the 4th century BCE in Yemen." Much later on, In the 1870s, major diamond deposits were discovered in South Africa. After these deposits were discovered, diamond prices dropped considerably.

Properties

Diamond is the hardest natural substance. It is four times harder than corundum, the second-hardest substance. Diamonds have four points of weakness, known as "directions of cleavage." A sharp impact at these points causes a split to occur. Diamonds are highly transparent with better thermal conductivity than any other substance. They also have the highest melting point of any natural material.

Sources

About 35 countries have had diamond mines. For gem quality stones, the most prominent mines are in Botswana, Russia and South Africa. Australia is a major source of diamonds for industrial purposes. Wyoming, Arkansas and Colorado are the only U.S. sources of diamonds. The most common mineral host of diamonds is a blue rock called kimberlite. Diamonds are located mostly in areas that have had volcanic activity or erosion. Past glacial activity has also moved diamond deposits.

Uses

Diamonds with exceptional clarity and color are suitable for cutting and use as jewelry. Diamonds are embedded in some saw blades to increase tool effectiveness. Other industrial uses include drilling, grinding and polishing. Diamonds can be crushed to produce abrasive powders. This hard gemstone is also used in thin windows for vacuum chambers and laser devices. Diamonds are valuable when incorporated in various mechanical parts where low friction or wear resistance is important.

The inflatable electronic device is part of a spinal cord stimulator (SCS) setup, a type of well-established therapy that delivers mild electric currents to a person's spinal cord via implanted electrodes. That current is sent by a small, implanted pulse generator device, and the whole thing reduces pain because the electrical pulses help to mask pain signals traveling to the brain via the spinal cord.

If that all sounds rather invasive, that's because it is. But this new device, designed by a team led by scientists from the University of Cambridge in the UK, could help to change that - with less invasive surgery requirements.

"Spinal cord stimulation is a treatment of last resort, for those whose pain has become so severe that it prevents them from carrying out everyday activities," says University of Cambridge clinical neuroscientist Damiano Barone.

"An effective device that doesn't require invasive surgery could bring relief to so many people."

The trickiest aspect of currently available SCS devices is the part where you have to stick electrodes into a person's spinal column, laying them across the dura, the fibrous outer layer that wraps around the nerve cells within.

While these electrode implants are tiny - just a few millimeters across - getting to the spinal column through our bony, protective vertebra is no easy task. To implant the most effective devices currently available (shaped like tiny paddles), surgeons have to remove a small piece of a vertebra and thread it through.

Schematic of a typical paddle implant route. (Kumar et al., Neuromodulation, 2009)

Alternatively, there are smaller devices available which can be inserted with a large needle, but these have proven to be less effective at actually managing pain, possibly because they tend to control fewer electrodes over a smaller area.

The new inflatable device combines the best of both worlds. Ingeniously, it can be rolled up to a diameter of just 2 millimeters, allowing it to fit inside a standard hollow needle only slightly thicker than the ones typically used for epidural anesthetic.

Once in place, the device is then rolled out into the more effective paddle shape like a teeny tiny air mattress up to 60 micrometers thick, with just a small squirt of air or liquid.

The full device (top), shown in rolled up and unrolled shape (bottom). (Woodington et al., Sci. Adv., 2021)

This clever application is possible because the research team combined two paradigms in their design - flexible electronics that allow for a device to change its shape after implantation, and the addition of microfluidic channels for inflating it.

"Thin-film electronics aren't new, but incorporating fluid chambers is what makes our device unique – this allows it to be inflated into a paddle-type shape once it is inside the patient," explained engineer Christopher Proctor, also from the University of Cambridge.

The team tested their device in vitro, using a model of a spinal column to see how the electrodes would perform after all that rolling and inflating, and achieved excellent results. They then proceeded to validate the design with implantation surgeries on human cadavers donated to science.

"The intention behind this was to validate the underlying mode of operation for the device and to test its mechanical capability," the team wrote in their study.

Overall, the researchers believe that their design - already patented by the commercialization arm of the University of Cambridge - could not only reduce the need for invasive surgery to deliver life-changing SCS therapy to people living with severe pain, but enhances the availability of such devices for future applications.

"We envisage a device that could cover a much larger area while retaining a small insertion footprint, offering a new paradigm for central nervous system interfaces," they wrote.