iTunes U -A Daily Galaxy Weekend News Update

• An ambitious group of students at MIT have retrofitted a Porsche 914 with lithium-ion batteries to test the practicality of electric cars. The students removed the car’s original gas engine and replaced it with an electric motor that runs on 12 of these types of batteries. They estimate the Porsche to have a maximum speed between 70 and 100 miles per hour and that it will be able to run for up to 100 miles before needing to be recharged. Read more

• Scientists at Stanford University have conducted the first supercomputer simulations of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) pair, a new type of structure that can be from a hundred to a few thousand light years wide and from a few hundred million to a billion solar masses. Read more

• Google is teaming up with twelve of the nation’s biggest colleges and universities to digitize select collections in their libraries, an estimated 10 million volumes in total. The partnership includes the 11 schools that make up the Big Ten athletic conference and the University of Chicago. Read more

• Biologists from Pennsylvania State University have genetically linked more than a hundred species of frogs in remote jungles and caves on the Caribbean Islands from a single South American ancestor species. They speculate that the ancestor species made the ocean voyage aboard floating vegetation and washed up on shore 30 to 50 million years ago. Read more

• Magnetically-coupled Resonance: The Future of Wireless Power. Researchers at MIT have successfully developed a way to transmit power wirelessly efficiently, proving that wireless power may have a practical future. They reported that they transmitted 60 watts over a distance of 2 meters with 40 percent efficiency. Read more

• Engineering BioEnergy Alliance, Chevron Corp., and Texas A&M are teaming up to advance research in the conversion crops to produce biofuels and other renewable fuels from cellulose. Read more

• Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered significant clues to the evolutionary origins of the nervous system by studying the genome of a sea sponge, a member of a group considered to be among the most ancient of all animals. Read more

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