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Archive for the ‘sustainability’ category: Page 413

Oct 13, 2020

HBO producirá una miniserie basada en la odisea espacial de Elon Musk

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space travel, sustainability

Esta producción, basada en el libro ‘Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future’, girará en torno a Musk y su trabajo en SpaceX para impulsar los vuelos espaciales privados.

Oct 13, 2020

Tesla To Release Order Configurator For India In January 2021

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, sustainability, transportation

My hero my love.


Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a rather interesting announcement for all-electric vehicle enthusiasts in India, when he mentioned that Tesla is planning on entering the Indian automobile market in 2021. The announcement comes after years of waiting for the Indians to get their hands on a Tesla, and it definitely has got the public buzzing with excitement. Now, Musk has also stated that Tesla will be coming up with a Booking Order Configurator for the Indian customers which will be going live in January 2021.

Oct 13, 2020

Channing Tatum will produce an HBO series about Elon Musk’s SpaceX

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space travel, sustainability

Elon Musk is among the few people on Earth that are working towards changing the course of humanity’s future in a drastic way. He founded SpaceX in 2002 to make life multiplanetary –colonize Mars. Since then, SpaceX has developed some of the world’s most advanced rockets and spacecraft. Throughout the years Musk’s bold ideas, ambitious goals, and ability to lead teams to achieve greatness has earned him a place in history. Hollywood actor Channing Tatum seems to be inspired by Musk’s space venture that he is now planning to produce an HBO drama television series about Musk and his journey at SpaceX.

According to Deadline reporters, who first reported the news, Tatum’s film production company, Free Association, will produce a six-episode scripted series. The story will be about how SpaceX started with a rocket that almost did not make it to orbit, to returning human spaceflight capabilites to the United States. “The project will be penned by Star Trek Beyond scribe Doug Jung based on Ashlee Vance’s book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, first published in 2017,” Deadline reports, “Free Association’s Tatum, Reid Carolin and Peter Kiernan will executive produce with Vance and Len Amato, HBO’s former President Of HBO Films, Miniseries & Cinemax.”

Oct 13, 2020

Research offers path to end world hunger within decade

Posted by in categories: climatology, policy, robotics/AI, sustainability

The world’s small-scale farmers now can see a path to solving global hunger over the next decade, with solutions—such as adopting climate-resilient crops through improving extension services—all culled rapidly via artificial intelligence from more than 500,000 scientific research articles.

The results are synthesized in 10 new research papers—authored by 77 scientists, researchers and librarians in 23 countries—as part of Ceres2030: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger. The project is headquartered at Cornell University, with partners from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

The papers were published concurrently on Oct. 12 in four journals— Nature Plants, Nature Sustainability, Nature Machine Intelligence and Nature Food —and assembled in a comprehensive package online: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger.

Oct 13, 2020

Solar meets 100 per cent of South Australia demand for first time

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

The combination of rooftop and utility scale solar met 100 per cent of demand in South Australia for the first time on Sunday, reaching a milestone that will surely be repeated many times over – and for longer periods – in the future.

The milestone was reached at 12.05pm grid time (Australian eastern standard time), with rooftop solar providing 992MW, or 76.3 per cent of state demand, and utility scale solar providing a further 315MW – meaning all three of the state’s big solar farms, Bungala 1m Bungala 2 and Tailem Bend were operating at full capacity.

Oct 13, 2020

World’s largest solar plant goes online in China

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

Huanghe Hydropower Development has connected a 2.2 GW solar plant to the grid in the desert in China’s remote Qinghai province. The project is backed by 202.8 MW/MWh of storage.


Chinese state-owned utility Huanghe Hydropower Development has finished building the world’s largest solar power project in a desert in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai.

Chinese inverter manufacturer Sungrow, which supplied the inverters, said that the 2.2 GW solar plant was built in five phases. It involved an investment of RMB15.04 billion ($2.2 billion) and includes 202.8 MW/MWh of storage capacity. The company announced the storage system as a solar+storage project in mid-May, but at the time it did not reveal that it was to be connected to a giant solar plant.

Continue reading “World’s largest solar plant goes online in China” »

Oct 13, 2020

How recycled astronaut poop might sustain a mission to Mars

Posted by in categories: space travel, sustainability

Circa 2018


In the 2015 movie “The Martian,” astronaut Mark Watney survives on Mars by growing potato plants in his own waste. The scenario is fictional, of course, but it underscores a real-world challenge for NASA: How can the space agency ensure an uninterrupted supply of safe, nutritious food for astronauts who are tens of millions of miles from the nearest supermarket?

The successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket marked a big step toward developing the technology needed to transport colonists to Mars, though the strategy for keeping them and deep-space astronauts fed remains a work in progress.

Continue reading “How recycled astronaut poop might sustain a mission to Mars” »

Oct 13, 2020

Study uncovers the role of exciton lifetimes in enabling highly efficient organic solar cells

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

Organic photovoltaics are a third-generation solar cell technology made of electron donor and electron acceptor materials instead of conventional semiconductor p-n junctions. The performance of this alternative solar cell technology has improved significantly over the past few years and it is now comparable to that of classical inorganic solar cells, both in terms of charge carrier yields (i.e., electrical current generation) and solar spectrum matching.

The only feature of organic photovoltaics that still lags behind traditional solar cells is its achievable voltage (VOC, which stands for open circuit voltage). As electrical power is the product of voltage and current, however, the poor VOC of organic solar cells currently prevents their successful commercialization.

Researchers at the Institute of Materials for Electronics and Energy Technology (i-MEET) in Germany and the National Hellenic Research Foundation (NHRF) in Greece have been investigating specific features of materials used to build organic photovoltaics that could enable greater efficiencies and achievable voltages. Their paper, published in Nature Energy, shows that materials with long exciton lifetimes could be particularly promising for the creation of efficient organic solar cells.

Oct 12, 2020

Tesla is looking to move to steer-by-wire with new motor and geartrain team in Austin

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Tesla is looking into moving “current and future vehicle programs” to steer-by-wire with a new motor, geartrain, and chassis team in Austin, Texas.

Over the last few months, we have been reporting on how Tesla plans to establish new teams in Austin that are not directly related to the new Gigafactory under construction.

For example, we previously reported on Tesla building a new video game and user interface team in Austin.

Oct 12, 2020

This Flying Hypercar Is Powered By Tesla

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Mankind has mastered the art of flight for well over a century, and the concept has become so normalized that we tend to take for granted this amazing accomplishment, but as advanced as modern airplanes are, we are still not much closer to developing a vehicle that can travel as well on land as it can in the air. The concept of a flying car has haunted engineers for decades, and companies such as Hyundai have dedicated some serious research and development to make this dream come true. But now an Italian upstart named Firenze has come up with a new and exciting concept that will be powered by the same electric motors that power the Tesla Model S.