Arias Pistons 12.5:1 Compression 82mm Bore Honda B-series on 2040-parts.com

All the thrills & spills of F1 2008

The 2008 F1 Season was probably one of the best for many a year. Thrills, spills, arguments, back-stabbing, overtaking – you name it, F1 had it. But with the world’s economic woes currently biting at the heels of F1 (Honda leaving F1 being the first casualty) this could well be the last F1 season for some time that feels like a real celebration of the excesses of Motor Sport.

Electric cars enjoyed one of the best months of sales in June 2013

If you think you've been seeing more Teslas and Nissan Leafs on the streets, it's not your imagination -- there really are more of them on our roads. Just in the month of June of this year, almost 9,000 plug-in electric vehicles have been sold in the U.S. This adds to more than 110,000 plug-in electric vehicles that have been sold in this country in the last two and a half years, the Electrification Coalition reports.

MIT develops self-transforming materials that behave 'like robots without robots'

A cross-disciplinary research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a suite of programmable materials, including carbon fiber, printed wood grain, textile composites, rubbers and plastics, that self-transform when exposed to an external stimulus. Director of the Self-Assembly Lab, Skylar Tibbits, presented a TED talk on 4D printing in 2013, where he demonstrated how a flat sheet of material could effectively build itself when exposed to water, like a robot without a robot. Following positive feedback from industries including aviation, automotive and manufacturing, his lab has been working on developing materials that change according to different activation sources, including heat, light, and air pressure, in addition to water – all of which have automotive relevance.