Over the years I have been covering electric vehicles, I’ve seen several companies attempt to add value to EVs by using swappable battery packs.
The idea is that if charging takes longer than refueling a tank of gas, we could just swap a battery pack for a fully charged one.
A startup called Better Place built its entire business model around it and went bankrupt.
A new way of making large sheets of high-quality, atomically thin graphene could lead to ultra-lightweight, flexible solar cells, and to new classes of light-emitting devices and other thin-film electronics.
It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, but the newly revealed Shadow-Effect Energy Generator (SEG) is a real prototype device. The fascinating concept could help us to transform the way renewable energy is generated indoors.
The SEG uses the contrast between darkness and light to produce electricity. It’s made up of a series of thin strips of gold film on a silicon wafer, placed on top of a flexible plastic base.
Whereas shadows are usually a problem for renewable solar energy production, here they’re actually harnessed to keep on generating power. The technology — which is cheaper to produce than a typical solar cell, according to its developers — produces small amounts of power and could be used in mobile gadgets, for example.
Russian President Vladimir Putin of Russia declared a state of emergency in a region of northern Siberia after a huge oil spill last week turned a river crimson. It is threatening significant damage to the Arctic region. [ 317 more words ].
Norilsk Nickel is the world’s largest producer of platinum and nickel.
The company, along with the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry, dispatched hundreds of personnel to clean up the spill. So far, Norilsk Nickel said they had managed to gather up only around 340 tons of the oil.
Barges with booms could not contain the slick because the Ambarnaya River was too shallow. Some media is calling the spill, “Russia’s Exxon Valdez.” In that 1989 incident, more than 37,000 metric tons of crude oil were spilled in Alaska.
In this new installment of our series on the highest-mileage Tesla Model X (and one of the highest mileage EVs in the world), we look into battery degradation and replacement on a Tesla with over 400,000 miles.
Earlier this year, I bought one of the cheapest and most high-mileage Tesla Model X vehicles ever.
With over 400,000 miles (650,000 km), it’s one of the highest-mileage electric vehicles in the world and serves as a great case study for the longevity of electric cars, in general, and Tesla vehicles in particular.
The number of startup companies and the amount of investment dollars going into the field of cultivated meat has exceeded—and will likely continue to exceed—annual exponential growth.
As we race to find sustainable ways to feed the world’s insatiable appetite for meat, the field of cultivated meat has exceeded annual exponential growth— more than doubling every year in terms of the number of startup companies and investment dollars. In late 2015, one startup raised a few hundred thousand dollars. In 2020, there are dozens of cultivated meat companies around the world pursuing everything from shrimp and bluefin tuna to steak and kangaroo.
This year, the sector took another significant step forward when cultivated meat first-mover Memphis Meats closed a $161 million Series B funding round from lead investors Softbank, Norwest, and Temasek. This amount is greater than all other publicly disclosed investments in cultivated meat companies combined and brings total investment in the startup to $181 million.
What does an investment like this mean for cultivated meat companies and the field as a whole? Having tracked the sector since its inception, I think there are three key takeaways.
Pleased to have been the guest on this most recent episode of Javier Ideami’s Beyond podcast. We discuss everything from #spaceexploration to #astrobiology!
In this episode, we travel from Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage to the first mission to Mars with Bruce Dorminey. Bruce is a science journalist and author who primarily covers aerospace, astronomy and astrophysics. He is a regular contributor to Astronomy magazine and since 2012, he has written a regular tech column for Forbes magazine. He is also a correspondent for Renewable Energy World. Writer of “Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System”, he was a 1998 winner in the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards (AJOYA) as well as a founding team member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Science Communication Focus Group.
EPISODE LINKS:
Bruce web: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/#47e297264d03
Distant Wanderers Book: https://www.amazon.es/Distant-Wanderers-Search-Planets-Beyond/dp/1441928723
Renewable Energy World: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/author/bruce-dorminey/#gref
Bruce’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/bdorminey
INFO:
Podcast website: https://volandino.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3O74ctu6Hv5zZdHYT9Ox3Z
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beyond/id1509949724
RSS: https://volandino.com/feed/podcast
Full episodes playlist:
OUTLINE:
01:21 — Magellan’s journey to the indies; first circumnavigation of the earth — Risk: today vs previous centuries.
02:15 — On route to the Spice Islands — Moluccas — Treaty of Tordesillas.
03:07 — Spain and Portugal on top of the world.
03:41 — Reaching philippines and the wrong side of things.
05:20 — Killed in the Philippines.
06:08 — The reasons behind the expedition: trade and religion.
07:23 — Casualties — Magellan’s expedition vs today.
07:58 — Early astronauts, challenging missions — minimal computing power.
08:40 — Mission to Mars and tolerance to risk today.
10:03 — First Mars mission attempt — the odds.
10:37 — Watching the Apollo launches live.
11:23 — The uniqueness of the moment — Apollo 8.
12:12 — Putting risk in perspective: astronauts of the Apollo program vs today.
13:05 — Psychological risks of space missions — Harrison Hagan “Jack” Schmitt (last person that walked on the moon) — the impact of being on the moon.
15:54 — Psychological factors on a trip to Mars — can we predict them? — Experiences on the International Space Station.
17:03 — Shortening the trip to Mars.
19:02 — The drive to do these missions today vs the Apollo times.
20:00 — The lost time in the moon — natural resources, astronomy, practicing for future missions to mars.
20:37 — Terraforming Mars
22:33 — Second homes, platforms in space (example: at Lagrange points).
23:43 — Exoplanets — detecting signs of life.
26:18 — Methods of detection & verification vs going there (detecting microbial life through analysis of color, surface reflectivity and other means)
27:50 — Enceladus: plumes of gas and liquid — potential insitu analysis by probes.
28:43 — microfossils on Mars.
29:00 — Impact of finding life in another planet of our solar system, even if microbial.
29:54 — Intelligent life — David Kipping, Columbia University — 3:2 odds that intelligence is rare.
30:31 — Probability of finding life — 400 billion stars in our galaxy.
33:24 — Facing the discovery of new forms of intelligent life.
35:50 — People’s resilience and attention spans / Inter-species communication.
38:26 — Could we miss new kinds of lifeforms due to them having different structures, chemical arrangements, etc?
40:30 — What is life — lack of agreement.
41:48 — Scratching the surface on any topic — a neverending search for an ultimate truth.
43:50 — ALH 84001 Allan Hills meteorite
47:26 — Asteroid mining — natural resources — Planetary Resources startup (acquired by ConsenSys).
48:52 — Commercializing space travel — trips to go around the moon — translunar flights.
51:22 — Progress since the Apollo era and next steps.
52:55 — Spending a weekend on the moon.
54:00 — Next decade in Space — putting a crew on mars, robotic sample return missions, permanent or semi-permanet settlements on the lunar surface, optical and radio-based astronomy on the far side of the moon, space tourism, space based interferometers, etc
56:22 — will other intelligent life forms want to communicate? gregarious vs non-gregarious civilizations.
57:35 — Consequences of the pandemic.
59:06 — conclusion — “Distant Wanderers — search for planets beyond the solar system”
CONNECT:
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Singapore has only 1% of its land available for agriculture, so it imports 90% of its food requirements. The government is looking to curb this dependence on outside food sources under a programme titled ‘30 by 30,’ which aims to allow Singapore to grow 30% of its produce by the year 2030. Local vertical farms like Sustenir are at the forefront of bringing about this change. VICE visits the sustainable start-up to understand the future of food.
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Imperial College London has partnered with British startup Arborea to install the world’s first “Biosolar Leaf” technology on its roof. It is first of the kind system to use the microscopic plant to purify the air while producing plant-based food.
Julian Melchiorri CEO of Arborea who pioneered “Biosolar Leaf” technology said – “There has to be a way to feed all the world with healthy and sustainable food by making it the primary choice, not the alternative!”
The system works by growing microscopic plants like blue-green algae, phytoplankton on a solar grid-like layout. In fact, just one acre of “Biosolar Leaf” can remove carbon dioxide and produce breathable oxygen, then, one hundred acres of trees.
While it probably won’t make it to your dining table, a new scientific achievement might be able to help in everything from radar equipment to electric cars: scientists have been able to form salt, aka sodium chloride (NaCl), in a hexagonal shape.
This is work done at the smallest of scales, with researchers able to get a thin film of hexagonal salt to form on top of a layer of diamond, due to the chemical interaction of both film and diamond substrate – something the team actually predicted would happen in advance through simulations.
It’s the latest in a series of discoveries where scientists have been able to synthesise 2D materials with unusual crystal structures, and it’s partly this self-imposed restriction to two dimensions that is enabling new and exotic structures to be formed.
