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Category: sustainability

DP World has completed testing of the Boxbay fully automated container storage system at its Jebel Ali terminal in Dubai, accomplishing more than 63,000 container moves since the facility was commissioned earlier this year.

The facility, which can hold 792 containers at a time, exceeded expectations, delivering faster and more energy-efficient than anticipated, the Dubai-headquartered terminal operator said.

The solar-powered system stores containers in slots in a steel rack up to eleven high. DP World claims Boxbay delivers three times the capacity of a conventional yard in which containers are stacked directly on top of each other, reducing the footprint of terminals by 70% and energy costs by 29%. Boxbay delivered 19.3 moves per hour at each waterside transfer table to the straddle carrier and 31.8 moves per hour at each landside truck crane.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=3zLFLotBFbA

Do you remember the Zuckerland metaverse? (Yes, I know he borrowed the word, but when you are president of a digital country, does anyone dare challenge Zuck the First, Le Roi Numérique?)

Palantir Technologies (the Seeing Stone outfit with the warm up jacket fashion bug) introduced a tasty bit of jargon-market speak in its Q22021earnings call:

Palantir’s meta-constellation software harnesses the power of growing satellite constellations, deploying AI into space to provide insights to decision-makers here on Earth. Our meta-constellation integrates with existing satellites, optimizing hundreds of orbital sensors and AI models and allowing users to ask time-sensitive questions across the entire planet. Important questions like, where are the indicators of wildfires or how are climate changes affecting crop productivity? And when and where are naval fleets conducting operations? Meta-constellation pushes Palantir’s Edge AI technology to a new frontier.

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Battery-and carmakers are already spending billions of dollars on reducing the costs of manufacturing and recycling electric-vehicle (EV) batteries — spurred in part by government incentives and the expectation of forthcoming regulations. National research funders have also founded centres to study better ways to make and recycle batteries. Because it is still less expensive, in most instances, to mine metals than to recycle them, a key goal is to develop processes to recover valuable metals cheaply enough to compete with freshly mined ones. “The biggest talker is money,” says Jeffrey Spangenberger, a chemical engineer at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, who manages a US federally funded lithium-ion battery-recycling initiative, called ReCell.

Reducing the use of scarce metals — and recycling them — will be key to the world’s transition to electric vehicles.

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Elon Musk has mentioned that the Tesla Cybertruck’s production version would be extremely similar to the all-electric pickup truck’s controversial prototype from 2019. While this may largely be the case, Musk has hinted at some new features that would be included in the production Cybertruck. Apart from updated door handles and rear-wheel steering capabilities, for example, Musk also hinted at “other great things” coming for the vehicle.

A recently published patent application from Tesla has now hinted at a couple more updates that may be coming to the Cybertruck, at least on the design front. The patent, titled “Automotive Glass Structure Having Feature Lines and Related Method of Manufacture,” describes a way to form extremely durable glass structures with aggressive curves and folds. Using such a technique, Tesla stated that it could create components like windshields with very aggressive feature lines that would otherwise not be possible with conventional glass-forming methods.

The patent application’s illustrations showcased how the system would be used in a vehicle such as the Cybertruck. One of the images in the patent featured the far left and right side of the Cybertruck’s windshield having aggressive feature lines that make the all-electric pickup truck even more futuristic and CGI-esque. This is quite different from the windshield used on the prototype Cybertruck, which seemed completely flat.

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Determining if particular extreme hot or cold spells were caused by climate change could be made easier by a new mathematical method.

The , developed by physicists at the University of Reading and Uppsala University in Sweden, looks at the characteristics, or “fingerprints,” of a specific extreme weather event of interest, like a , in order to ascertain whether it can be attributed to natural variability of the climate or is a unique product of global warming.

The method also allows predictions to be made about how likely extreme climate events will be in the future.

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“A new study suggests that if Europe planted trees across all the land suitable for reforestation, it might not only sequester carbon but also partially ameliorate the increasingly dry European summers predicted by climate change models.”

Plant more trees! This message has been one of the cornerstones of the European response to worsening climate change. A new study published in Nature Geoscience suggests that if Europe planted trees across all the land suitable for reforestation, it might not only sequester carbon, but also partially ameliorate the increasingly dry European summers predicted by climate change models. In all, mass reforestation could increase summer rainfall by an average of 7.6%.

“When planned carefully, reforestation could result in additional benefits in regions where it is implemented,” said Ronny Meier, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH Zürich), and lead author on the study.

Scientists have long identified a link between forests and rainfall, with scientists in the 1850s expressing alarm at reduced rainfall following deforestation. The exact mechanisms of this relationship are, however, still not fully understood. Meier and his colleagues used data from 3,481 rain-gauge stations across Europe to build a statistical model linking forest cover and rainfall levels. The research team then used the model to predict how much rainfall might change if forest cover increased.

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