Lifeboat Foundation

“Hyperuniform disordered” design delivers 66.5% solar absorption.

Perovskite solar cells might revolutionize how humans generate energy from sunlight.
https://brilliant.org/ElectricFuture.
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In this video we’ll explore the world’s fastest improving new solar technology, and provide an exclusive peek inside the lab of a team working on this breakthrough material.

Continue reading “Solar 3.0: This New Technology Could Change Everything” »

Mangrove trees inspire thermal and membrane-based desalination system.

Four US students, taking part in a program aimed at high school girls interested in engineering, have designed a desalinating water bottle. The currently hypothetical device would be compact and portable so could offer increased accessibility over existing desalinating designs that mimic transpiration.

Laurel Hudson, Gracie Cornish, Kathleen Troy and Maia Vollen met at Virginia Tech’s C-Tech2 program where they were given an assignment to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Choosing to focus on the global water crisis and inspired by drinking straws used by hikers to purify water, they considered if it was possible to make a bottle that produced drinking water from seawater. They reached out to Jonathan Boreyko, an associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering, who was researching synthetic trees at the time. He agreed to help, and, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the group met virtually at night to discuss their research. Along with Ndidi Eyegheleme, a graduate student in Boreyko’s lab, they planned and produced a model to evaluate the inner workings of their design.

Continue reading “High school students design a bottle that turns seawater into drinking water” »

Researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed the capability to use recycled glass in 3D printing, opening doors to a more environmentally sustainable way of building and construction.

Glass is one material that can be 100% recycled with no reduction in quality, yet it is one of the least recycled waste types. Glass is made up of silicon dioxide, or silica, which is a major component of sand, and therefore it offers significant untapped potential to be recycled into other products.

At the same time, due to growing populations, urbanization and infrastructure development, the world is facing a shortage of sand, with climate scientists calling it one of the greatest sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

Can humanity become a Type I civilization without causing our own Great Filter?

There are several ways we can measure the progress of human civilization. Population growth, the rise and fall of empires, our technological ability to reach for the stars. But one simple measure is to calculate the amount of energy humans use at any given time. As humanity has spread and advanced, our ability to harness energy is one of our most useful skills. If one assumes civilizations on other planets might possess similar skills, the energy consumption of a species is a good rough measure of its technological prowess. This is the idea behind the Kardashev Scale.

Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed the scale in 1964. He categorized civilizations into three types: planetary, stellar, and galactic. A Type I species is able to harness energy on a scale equal to the amount stellar energy that reaches its home planet. Type II species can harness energy on the scale of its home star, and Type III can harness the energy of its home galaxy. The idea was further popularized by Carl Sagan, who suggested a continuous scale of measurement rather than simply three types.

Continue reading “When Will Humanity Become a Type I Civilization?” »

This sustainable water technology represents a proven path to low-cost, safe, renewable drinking water.