Though the Earth’s deeper layers have been raging at thousands of degrees for billions of years, new research involving Florida Tech has shown that tapping into that heat to produce geothermal heating for urban regions on the surface has a far, far shorter lifespan.
It summarizes the whole thing well.
““As important as Steve Jobs was, here’s the difference: Elon Musk is trying to invent a future, not by providing the next app,” says renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
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“What Elon Musk is doing is not simply giving us the next app that will be awesome on our smartphone,” deGrasse Tyson says. “No, he is thinking about society, culture, how we interact, what forces need to be in play to take civilization into the next century.”
Between Musk’s work at Tesla developing electric cars and his SpaceX plans to put humans on Mars by 2024 (and, eventually, to colonize the planet), the billionaire tech executive is attempting to revolutionize both human transportation and space exploration, deGrasse Tyson says.
Of course, as an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, deGrasse Tyson might be expected to have a soft spot for Musk’s grand intergalactic plans. But deGrasse Tyson, who also hosts the show “StarTalk” on the National Geographic Channel, argues that space colonization could have a tremendous impact on civilization, potentially eliminating the need for warring over dwindling natural resources.
“Because there’s unlimited resources in space; resources that, on Earth, we fight wars over,” deGrasse Tyson tells CNBC Make It. “In space, you don’t need to fight a war, just go to another asteroid and get your resources. A whole category of war has the potential of evaporating entirely with the exploitation of space resources, which includes the unlimited access to energy as well.”
That’s the sort of universal issue that Musk is trying to tackle, deGrasse Tyson argues, which gives him the potential to have the greatest long-term effect on our civilization. “[H]e will transform civilization as we know it,” deGrasse Tyson says.
Video of artificial leather. 😃
This lab-grown leather that leaves animals the fuck alone is ready to wear! About 80% of leather worldwide is tanned in a toxic process resulting in massive amounts of chemical waste flooding the environment. It also poses a serious health risk to industrial tannery workers, not to mention the animals who lose their lives for a pair of shoes. By using nature’s building blocks to create materials designed for functionality, performance AND style, Modern Meadow might just have found a win-win solution!
Use of waste heat contributes largely to sustainable energy supply. Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Tōhoku University in Japan have now come much closer to their goal of converting waste heat into electrical power at small temperature differences. As reported in Joule, electrical power per footprint of thermomagnetic generators based on Heusler alloy films has been increased by a factor of 3.4.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster will be able to fly a little bit, so perhaps the new Model S yoke will be used so that the driver pulls back on it to fly.
Fast, One-Step Assembly at Room Temperature Yields High Efficiency at Low Cost University of Houston-A team of researchers led by Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH,…
Google is using artificial intelligence to help EV owners plan their routes. Charging an electric vehicle can be very confusing, with stations offering different plugs and different speeds. Google wants to take some the guesswork out of it.
Indoor farms are bringing the change! 😃
Based in Appalachia, Kentucky, AppHarvet’s cutting edge indoor farms have delivered their first harvest of tomatoes to grocery stores.
Passenger plug-in electric car sales in Europe exceeded our expectations in December, overshadowing a few previous records with ease.
President Joe Biden plans to replace the government’s fleet of cars and trucks with electric vehicles assembled in the U.S., he said Monday when signing a new “Buy America” executive order.
The government is a major purchaser of vehicles. However, replacing such a fleet with American-produced EVs will be costly and take time. There are currently only a handful of all-electric vehicles being assembled in the U.S. Tesla, General Motors and Nissan Motor produce EVs domestically, while Ford Motor and others have announced plans to do so.
“The current offerings are pretty slim, but the industry’s about to unleash an avalanche of new product, and a lot of it built in North America,” Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research, told CNBC. “Just about every U.S. plant is going to have a hybrid or electric product.”
