In response to an independent range test, Tesla has reportedly claimed that the EPA range on its vehicles can be achieved by draining the battery pack beyond the zero-mile displayed range.
Last month, we reported on Edmunds conducting independent range tests on a bunch of electric vehicles to compare them to their EPA estimates.
The results showed that Tesla is using the most optimistic versions of its EPA estimated range in its advertising compared to other automakers.
A one-way ticket (including a cliffside condo!) starts at $300000.
An architecture firm has released ambitious plans for Nüwa, a sustainable city on Mars that could hold up to 250000 people in mostly underground cave systems.
Nüwa, named for the Chinese mythological goddess who melted five stones to give robust societal pillars, would be housed inside a sheer rock face where residents would be protected from damaging cosmic and solar radiation.
If you decide to move to Mars, your $300000 ticket will include a one-way trip to Nüwa, a residential unit of 25 to 35 square meters, full access to facilities, life support services and food, and “a binding work contract to devote between 60 [percent] and 80 [percent] of [your] work time to tasks assigned by the city,” according to ABIBOO, the architecture studio behind the concept.
Dedicated to those who argue that life extension is bad because it will create overpopulation problems. In adittion to the fact that natality rates are dangerously decreasing in some developed countries, this is only one example of changes that may will take place well before life extension may create a problem of such type, if ever.
Plenty, an ag-tech startup in San Francisco co-founded by Nate Storey, has been able to increase its productivity and production quality by using artificial intelligence and its new farming strategy. The company’s farm farms take up only 2 acres yet produce 720 acres worth of fruit and vegetables. In addition to their impressive food production, they also manage the production with robots and artificial intelligence.
The company says their farm produces about 400 times more food per acre than a traditional farm. It uses robots and AI to monitor water consumption, light, and the ambient temperature of the environment where plants grow. Over time, the AI learns how to grow crops faster with better quality.
While this is great for food quality, it also helps conserve resources. The water is recycled and evaporated water recaptured so there is virtually no waste. The Startup estimates that this smart farm is so efficient that it produces better fruits and vegetables using 95% less water and 99% less land than normal farming operations.
# **MARS: A GATEWAY TO THE SOLAR SYSTEM**
Today’s highlight: **Bruce MacKenzie**, founder of the Mars Foundation.
Bruce gave us a detailed view of what will be the economical and industrial development in the solar system, in a broad and strategical concept: Mars, a gateway to the Solar System. How will a future trade and export take place on Mars, to facilitate the civilization expansion into the Solar System. Lot of works will focus on Phobos and Deimos, the Mars’s moons. A space elevator between Mars and Phobos will be key. Thousands of independent space settlements will allow to study and understand how ecosystems work, how water, food, wastes cycles can be better combined and integrated, and such a knowledge will have a fallout back on Earth too. Several favorable conditions suggest to start with Mars, to open the solar system to humanity and life: water, carbon, nutrients, raw materials. Trading among different space settlements is key. Mars infrastructures will include: greenhouses, manufacturing, materials processing, residential areas, ice road, desert trek, farm communities, truck stops, polymer production, fuel production. Key productions to start: polymers and fiber glass. Cargo transportation from Mars surface to the moons and orbital facilities with e.g. space elevators, magnetic guns, regolith rockets. Mars can produce finished goods, food, and bulk materials (gas, ice, liquids, fuel, fertilizers), delivered to Mars orbit, and then to other destinations. Floating towns in Venus atmosphere is another possible location for settlers communities. For a period of time, Mars will be the “bread-basket” of the Solar System.
Here’s the whole **Webinar on Mars, the Asteroid Belt and Beyond**: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S57G71SURYc.
Also see the other speeches of the Webinar, that will be proposed in the newsletters to come.
It could revolutionize electric vehicles and aircraft.
In groundbreaking new research, scientists have made a structural battery 10 times better than in any previous experiment.
What’s a structural battery, and why is it such a big deal? The term refers to an energy storage device that can also bear weight as part of a structure—like if the studs in your home were all batteries, or if an electric fence also held up a wall.
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Tesla’s Elon Musk said he sees too much risk for Tesla to engage in espionage. His words come after China barred its officials from using Tesla vehicles.
Sustainable and responsible lunar services and transportation — yoav landsman, co-founder, moonscape.
Yoav Landsman is the Co-founder of Moonscape (https://www.moonscape.space/), a lunar services and payload transportation company, that is focused on providing necessary services like communication relay and cutting-edge imaging, while delivering payloads to the Moon.
Moonscape’s vision is to support humankind’s effort of reaching the Moon in a sustainable and responsible manner, as humanity’s first step towards the rest of the solar system and beyond.
Yoav graduated from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, with a B.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering in 2002. During his last year of studying, he began working at the Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI) as a Satellite Engineer in the AMOS communication satellite command center. In this role, he helped modernize operations methods, and lead the absorption of new satellites to the fleet. Later he became the Head of the Satellite Engineering team at the Operations Center. In 2011, he became the Chief Systems Engineer of Israeli Aerospace Industrie’s then most advanced satellite, AMOS-6. At the same time, Yoav studied his master’s degree in the department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences at Tel-Aviv University.
Yoav left the industry in 2012 to put his passion and skill into education and public outreach. He became a sought-after lecturer and interviewee for science, technology, and everything involving space. In mid-2013, Yoav was recruited by SpaceIL to the role of Senior Systems Engineer of the Beresheet Lunar Lander. In 2019, Yoav was the Deputy Mission Director of the first ever privately funded lunar mission.
Yoav is also an alumnus of the International Space University (ISU) Space Studies Program 2019, where he studied in the business and management department. In December 2019 he left SpaceIL to become a space entrepreneur.
Working in conjunction with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Insectta’s technology uses a proprietary and environmentally friendly process to extract lucrative substances such as chitosan, melanin and probiotics from the larvae, it said.
SINGAPORE (Reuters) — In a quiet, mainly residential district of Singapore, trays of writhing black soldier fly larvae munch their way through hundreds of kilograms of food waste a day.
The protein-rich maggots can be sold for pet food or fertiliser, but at Insectta — a startup that says it is Singapore’s first urban insect farm — they are bred to extract biomaterials that can be used in pharmaceuticals and electronics.
“What these black soldier flies enable us to do is transform this food waste, which is a negative-value product, into a positive-value product,” said Chua Kai-Ning, Insectta’s co-founder and chief marketing officer.
What a beautiful idea.
A woman from the Netherlands has come up with an innovative alternative design for a face mask. Marianne de Groot-Pons, a graphic designer living and working in Utrecht, has created 100% biodegradable masks made out of rice paper and embedded with flower seeds. Once you’ve gotten enough wear out of it, you simply plant the mask and wait for the flowers to grow.
What a lovely take on an object which has become a daily essential in our lives.
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A new, simpler solution process for fabricating stable perovskite solar cells overcomes the key bottleneck to large-scale production and commercialization of this promising renewable-energy technology, which has remained tantalizingly out of reach for more than a decade.
“Our work paves the way for low-cost, high-throughput commercial-scale production of large-scale solar modules in the near future,” said Wanyi Nie, a research scientist fellow in the Center of Integrated Nanotechnologies at Los Alamos National Laboratory and corresponding author of the paper, which was published today in the journal Joule. “We were able to demonstrate the approach through two mini-modules that reached champion levels of converting sunlight to power with greatly extended operational lifetimes. Since this process is facile and low cost, we believe it can be easily adapted to scalable fabrication in industrial settings.”
The team invented a one-step spin coating method using sulfolane, a liquid solvent. The new process allowed the team, a collaboration among Los Alamos and researchers from National Taiwan University (NTU), to produce high-yield, large-area photovoltaic devices that are highly efficient in creating power from sunlight. These perovskite solar cells also have a long operational lifetime.
