Lifeboat Foundation

Indian start-up Green Robot Machinery (GRoboMac) has developed a cotton picker with autonomous robotic arms, mounted on a semi-autonomous electric farm vehicle.

The robotic arms of the battery-operated machine are each capable of picking about 50 kgs cotton per day. That means that four arms, mounted on the vehicle, can pick about 200 kgs per day. High yielding farms can use additional arms, the company says.

When someone dies in the US, the vast majority of the time, their body is either embalmed, placed in a coffin, and buried in a cemetery, or cremated and the ashes returned to their loved ones in an urn — but those aren’t the only options.

A growing number of funeral directors, startups, and nonprofits are providing people with alternative ways to have their bodies honored after death — suggesting that the funeral landscape of tomorrow won’t be so binary.

Traditional burial and cremation has a cost for the environment, releasing chemicals into the ground or greenhouse gasses into the air, but a number of other funeral options are showing that death can be green.

The search is on worldwide to find ways to extract carbon dioxide from the air or from power plant exhaust and then make it into something useful. One of the more promising ideas is to make it into a stable fuel that can replace fossil fuels in some applications. But most such conversion processes have had problems with low carbon efficiency, or they produce fuels that can be hard to handle, toxic, or flammable.

Now, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed an efficient process that can convert carbon dioxide into formate, a liquid or solid material that can be used like hydrogen or methanol to power a fuel cell and generate electricity. Potassium or sodium formate, already produced at industrial scales and commonly used as a de-icer for roads and sidewalks, is nontoxic, nonflammable, easy to store and transport, and can remain stable in ordinary steel tanks to be used months, or even years, after its production.

“This is significant because it creates the opportunity for greater renewable energy storage.”

Through the use of solar collectors, concentrated solar thermal technology (CST) harnesses solar energy to produce heat or electricity. The process is simple although difficult to execute successfully: large mirrors or lenses focus sunlight onto a narrow region known as the receiver.

These mirrors are what are known as solar collectors and they come in a variety of formats each with a distinct design and focusing technique, such as dish systems, solar power towers, and parabolic troughs.

While European nations are ahead on dimensions like equality, social progress, and climate change redressal, they lack technological advancements in comparison to the United States. The European region, including the UK, still lacks the investment and culture necessary for a startup ecosystem prevalent in California’s Silicon Valley.

The Valley is a globally recognized hub for technology and innovation. Many of the world’s leading technology companies, like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, are based there. However, Europe also has notable… More.

Silicon Valley overshadows the EU in tech, but with the advent of new-age artificial intelligence, Europe’s leading entrepreneurs think it could offer the Euro startup ecosystem to be a key player in the race.

Airbus unveils a hydrogen-powered engine, marking a significant step toward zero-emission aviation and a greener future for the industry.

European aviation giant Airbus sets its sights on reducing carbon emissions throughout its production process, starting with overhauling its maritime fleet, the company announced in a press release.

In a move to align with its commitment to sustainable aerospace and reduce the carbon footprint of its industrial operations, Airbus is set to upgrade its maritime transport fleet for transatlantic assembly transport. The plan, unveiled in an official release, outlines a comprehensive strategy to reduce CO₂ emissions and enhance environmental sustainability in the aerospace sector.

A new “structure reduces the amount of materials necessary – bringing down the weight, volume, and, crucially, the cost of manufacturing.”

In what can provide a major boost to renewable energy generation initiatives, a cutting-edge tidal turbine blade has been indigenously developed in Scotland at a more affordable price.

The turbine was manufactured by a team of design engineers from the University of Edinburgh and is slated to help reduce the levelized cost of tidal energy. The new “structure reduces the amount of materials necessary – bringing down the weight, volume and, crucially, the cost of manufacturing the blade,” said the team in a statement.

An ancient landscape that has remained hidden beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) for at least 14 million years has been revealed by a new satellite data and radar imaging study. According to the researchers, the preservation of this primordial scenery attests to the fact that the EAIS has remained relatively unchanged for eons, yet this stability could soon be threatened by an unprecedented rise in global temperatures.

The study authors used satellite data to identify undulations in the ice sheet’s surface that provided clues as to the nature of the terrain beneath. Using radio-echo sounding techniques, they were then able to image the landscape covered by the ice over an area of 32,000 square kilometers (12,355 square miles).

“The land underneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is less well known than the surface of Mars,” explained study author Professor Stewart Jamieson in a statement. “And that’s a problem because that landscape controls the way that ice in Antarctica flows, and it controls the way it might respond to past, present and future climate change.”

Researchers at EPFL and Northwestern University have unveiled a groundbreaking design for perovskite solar cells, creating one of the most stable PSCs with a power-conversion efficiency above 25%, paving the way for future commercialization.

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) stand at the forefront of solar energy innovation, and have drawn a lot of attention for their power-conversion efficiency and cost-effective manufacturing. But the way to commercialization of PSCs still has a hurdle to overcome: achieving both high efficiency and long-term stability, especially in challenging environmental conditions.

The solution lies in the interplay between the layers of PSCs, which has proven to be a double-edged sword. The layers can enhance the cells’ performance but also cause them to degrade too quickly for regular use in everyday life.