European drivers got a glimpse of the possible future of truck transportation earlier this month as six “trains” of trucks converged on the city of Rotterdam, Netherlands, during the European Truck Platooning Challenge.

The event showcased autonomous driving technology that enables two or more trucks to follow each other in close succession. Six European truck manufacturers participated in the challenge: The truck columns started out on March 29 from various cities in Sweden, Germany, and Belgium and arrived in Rotterdam on April 6.

In a platoon, trucks are connected by a Wi-Fi network. The lead truck determines the speed and route, and each vehicle’s Wi-Fi-enabled autonomous driving system ensures synchronized braking and maneuvering. The shorter gap between vehicles not only leaves more space for other cars on the road, it increases fuel efficiency by allowing trucks to drive in the draft of the truck in front.

Because of incompatible wireless technologies, trucks made by different manufacturers can’t yet platoon together. And each country has slightly different road platooning regulations. But the organizers of the challenge hope it will help standardize European rules and technologies needed for commercial truck platooning.

“The results of this first-ever major tryout in Europe are promising,” said the Netherlands’ minister for infrastructure and the environment, Melanie Schultz van Haegen, according to TruckingInfo.com. “This will open the door for upscaled, cross-border truck platooning.”

Electric drizzle

A solar panel that can generate electricity from rainwater? Strange as it sounds, scientists in China have developed just that.

The researchers at Ocean University of China and Yunnan Normal University created a solar panel with a layer of graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of pure carbon that is highly electrically conductive. The graphene attracts natural salts found in raindrops and creates layers of positive and negative ions, which then act like a capacitor to store electrical energy.

In tests, the graphene-modified solar panel generated hundreds of microvolts of electricity from simulated rainwater, according to IEEE Spectrum. —M.C.

Just the highlights

Trying to read web content on a computer, tablet, or smartphone is hard enough with all the pop-up ads and other distractions, so we often resort to skimming online articles as we quickly scroll down the pages. But the very act of scrolling works against us. Motion blur makes it difficult to focus on the words, and the content isn’t in the window long enough for us to comprehend it.

A new scrolling technique under development at Aalto University in Finland may solve that problem, helping us scroll through online documents even more quickly and with better recall.

The browsing tool, called Spotlights, locates visually important elements on a web page—such as headlines, tables, or pictures—and briefly freezes and displays them in a separate, transparent layer as the user continues scrolling down the page.

“It chooses what you should focus [on] and allows you enough time to do that,” Byungjoo Lee, a postdoctoral researcher who helped develop the tool, said in a university press release. Lee’s team found that people using the tool were able to scroll at a rate of as many as 20 pages per second and still retain information. —M.C.