Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have shown that the biomass of 12 previously unstudied strains of cyanobacteria from around the globe is efficient at the biosorption of the rare earth elements lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, and terbium from aqueous solutions. This allows these rare elements, for which demand is steadily growing, to be collected from wastewater from mining, metallurgy, and the recycling of e-waste, and reused.

Rare earth elements (REEs) are a group of 17 chemically similar metals, which got their name because they typically occur at low concentrations (between 0.5 and 67 parts per million) within the Earth’s crust. Because they are indispensable in modern technology such as light emitting diodes, mobile phones, electromotors, wind turbines, hard disks, cameras, magnets, and low-energy lightbulbs, the demand for them has increased steadily over the past few decades, and is predicted to rise further by 2030.

From zero to 100 km/h in less than a second: a racing car built by students has broken the world record for electric vehicle acceleration, a Swiss university said Tuesday.

Students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences designed and built the “Mythen” vehicle that achieved the feat, ETHZ said in a statement.

“Now, Guinness World Records has confirmed that Mythen broke the previous world acceleration record for electric vehicles,” it said.

Metal halide perovskites are semiconducting materials with advantageous optoelectronic properties, low defects and low costs of production. In contrast with other emerging semiconductors, these materials can be easily synthesized via affordable solution processing methods.

In recent years, some engineers have been exploring the potential of metal halide perovskites for creating highly solar cells and light emitting diodes (LEDs). Their favorable characteristics, however, could also facilitate their use for fabricating next-generation electronic components, including transistors.

Researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, the Chinse Academy of Sciences and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China recently introduced a new strategy to develop transistors based on a metal halide perovskite, specifically tin perovskite. In their paper, published in Nature Electronics, they showed that the resulting tin perovskite-based transistors could attain performances comparable to those of existing silicon-based transistors.

In a nutshell: Every September, the Guinness Book of World Records sits in on a little drag race between college students. The seat is reserved because these mostly untelevised races are known for pushing the absolute limits of tiny electric cars, and frequently, a team makes acceleration history.

Applied sciences students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University have broken the world record for acceleration in an electric car. The University of Stuttgart held the previous record, set last year when it sent its car screaming down the track, going from zero to 100 km/h (62.15 mph) in 1.461 of a second. This week, the students from Zurich crushed that showing with a time of just under one second (0.956 of a second) and a distance of 12.3 meters.

The students are Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ) members and spent a year building the car they named “Mythen.” The team suffered several setbacks and had to spend every minute of their free time tuning and swapping components. All their hard work paid off as driver Kate Maggetti set the world acceleration record for electric vehicles in front of Guinness judges on a test track in Duebendorf, Switzerland.

Researchers are even exploring the possibility of extracting lithium from seawater, potentially a game-changer for lithium accessibility globally.

A recent breakthrough by researchers at Princeton University provides renewed optimism for the future of the battery industry. An innovative method for extracting lithium presents a high potential to revolutionize clean energy sectors, such as electric vehicles and grid storage, while also reducing the environmental impact of lithium production.

Lithium, the silvery-white metal found in abundance in saline waters, has been a cornerstone of the clean energy transition. However, the environmental footprint of traditional lithium extraction is far from pure, requiring expansive plots of land and prolonged extraction processes. The solution? A new groundbreaking method that reduces both land use and time.

We could soon see more lithium-ion batteries made with recycled materials thanks to a new partnership. BASF, a battery materials producer, has announced that it’s teaming up with Nanotech Energy, a maker of graphene-based energy products, to produce lithium-ion batteries with recycled materials for customers in North America.

While BASF will create the cathode active materials using recycled metals from a Battle Creek, Michigan facility, Nanotech will use those materials to create the lithium-ion battery cells. Making the batteries with recycled metals could decrease their CO₂ footprint by around 25 percent, according to BASF.

Additionally, BASF and Nanotech Energy will also work with the American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) and the Canada-based TODA Advanced Materials Inc. ABTC will recycle the materials gathered by Nanotech, such as nickel, cobalt, manganese, and lithium. TODA will then use the materials to create battery precursors, which BASF will then convert into cathode active materials.

Morgan Stanley says Tesla stock may surge by $500 billion because of it’s Dojo Supercomputer, in lieu of robotaxis and network services.

Dojo can open up “new addressable markets,” just like AWS did for Amazon.com Inc., analysts led by Adam Jonas wrote in a note, upgrading the stock to overweight from equal-weight and raising its 12-month price target to a Street-high $400 per share from $250.

Shares of Tesla, which have already more than doubled this year, rose as much as 6.1% in US premarket trading Monday. The stock was on track to add about $46 billion in market value. Morgan Stanley is one of Musk’s key advisory firms, including on the $44 billion takeover of Twitter Inc., now known as X.

Continue reading “Tesla’s market value could surge by $500bn because of Dojo supercomputer” »

The German firm, which specializes in making automotive components, has achieved this by integrating its inductive transmitter into the rotor itself. The design promises to offer performance on par with permanent-magnet synchronous machines (PSMs).

MIT researchers have demonstrated the first system for ultra-low-power underwater networking and communication, which can transmit signals across kilometer-scale distances.

This technique, which the researchers began developing several years ago, uses about one-millionth the power that existing underwater communication methods use. By expanding their battery-free system’s communication range, the researchers have made the technology more feasible for applications such as aquaculture, coastal hurricane prediction, and climate change modeling.

“What started as a very exciting intellectual idea a few years ago—underwater communication with a million times lower power—is now practical and realistic. There are still a few interesting technical challenges to address, but there is a clear path from where we are now to deployment,” says Fadel Adib, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab.