Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: sustainability – Page 417

Things we already know: The world is growing uncomfortably warm due to humanity’s insistence on burning fossil fuels. Elon Musk is currently the wealthiest human on the planet. Yet for being among the wealthiest people on the planet, Musk’s philanthropic track record over the years has been paltry compared to the likes of Jeff Bezos. So, yeah, it did come as a bit of a surprise on Thursday when the Tesla CEO took to Twitter to announce that he plans to donate $100 million as a prize towards a winning carbon capture system.

Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 212021

Details on Musk’s upcoming carbon capture competition have not been released but are expected to arrive “next week.” This is not the first time that a company has sought the public’s help with carbon capture technology, which seeks to pull this element from the atmosphere and squirrel it away to help slow the rate of human-induced climate change. In 2018, X-Prize held a similar competition and awarded five finalist teams a share of its $20 million grand prize. But with a $100 million purse on the line, Musk’s competition will not only offer five times the funding as X-Prize, it’ll also constitute his single-largest philanthropic investment to date (10 times the amount of his second-largest donations so far). Of course, this is far from the first effort to collect and convert atmospheric CO2 into consumer products.

Read more | >

The DMC DeLorean has been out of production for almost 40 years, but now we’ve learned that the iconic vehicle might be coming back as an electric car.

The DMC DeLorean was the only vehicle produced by John DeLorean’s DeLorean Motor Company (DMC).

It became famous for being featured in the ‘Back to the Future’ series of movies, but it is also a well-known vehicle in the industry for a few reasons.

Read more | >

Alibaba is one of the best places around to find the coolest and sometimes weirdest electric vehicles in the world. As part of a new series known as Awesomely weird Alibaba electric vehicle of the week, we’re taking a look at some of our favorites.

This week’s feature is a small-yet-mighty electric pickup truck designed for utility and off-road usage, though it may even be street legal as an NEV in the US.

If the proportions look at bit odd on this electric pickup truck, that’s because they are.

Read more | >

“This is the first study to use pressure to control this stability, and it really opens up a lot of possibilities,” Yu Lin, researcher at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), said in a statement.

“Now that we’ve found this optimal way to prepare the material, there’s potential for scaling it up for industrial production, and for using this same approach to manipulate other perovskite phases,” Lin added.

The “black” phase, the one successfully stabilized by the scientists, of perovskite has intrigued scientists for years since it has been found to be extremely efficient in converting sunlight to electricity, making it the Holy Grail for solar panel technology.

Read more | >

  • Hyundai’s new campaign showcases the technology of the Hyundai NEXO, the first fuel cell electric SUV registered in Spain
  • The video shows how the brand’s ambassador Mireia Belmonte trains while connected to the vehicle’s exhaust system
  • The Hyundai NEXO, which only emits water vapor and purifies 99.9% of air, truly portrays Hyundai’s commitment to the development of eco-friendly vehicles

Hyundai Motor Spain has launched a campaign featuring brand ambassador and sportswoman Mireia Belmonte, which tests out Hyundai NEXO’s clean hydrogen fuel-cell technology.

Read more | >

Advanced optoelectronics require materials with newly engineered characteristics. Examples include a class of materials named metal-halide perovskites that have tremendous significance to form perovskite solar cells with photovoltaic efficiencies. Recent advances have also applied perovskite nanocrystals in light-emitting devices. The unusually efficient light emission of cesium lead-halide perovskite may be due to a unique excitonic fine structure made of three bright triplet states that minimally interact with a proximal dark singlet state. Excitons are electronic excitations responsible for the emissive properties of nanostructured semiconductors, where the lowest-energy excitonic state is expected to be long lived and hence poorly emitting (or ‘dark’).

In a new report now published in Science Advances, Albert Liu and a team of scientists in physics and chemistry at the University of Michigan, U.S., and Campinas State University, Brazil, used multidimensional coherent spectroscopy at cryogenic (ultra-cold) temperatures to study the fine structure without isolating the cube-shaped single . The work revealed coherences (wave properties relative to space and time) involving the triplet states of a cesium lead-iodide (CsPbI3) nanocrystal ensemble. Based on the measurements of triplet and inter-triplet coherences, the team obtained a unique exciton fine structure level ordering composed of a dark state, energetically positioned within the bright triplet manifold.

Read more | >

Circa 2008

December 122008 Massachusetts-based FloDesign has developed a wind turbine that could generate electricity at half the cost of conventional wind turbines. The company’s design, which draws on technology developed for jet engines, circumvents a fundamental limit to conventional wind turbines. Typically, as wind approaches a turbine, almost half of the air is forced around the blades rather than through them, and the energy in that deflected wind is lost. At best, traditional wind turbines capture only 59.3 percent of the energy in wind, a value called the Betz limit.

Jet engine wind turbine

FloDesign is a spin-off from the aerospace company FloDesign based in Wilbraham, MA which recently raised $6 million in its first round of venture financing. Their turbine design surrounds its wind-turbine blades with a shroud that directs air through the blades and speeds it up, which increases power production. The shroud concept is based on the same principles as a high bypass jet engine design that is used by all commercial jet aircraft engines to reduce noise and significantly improve efficiency. The new design generates as much power as a conventional wind turbine with blades twice as big in diameter. The smaller blade size and other factors allow the new turbines to be packed closer together in the field compared to conventional turbines, increasing the amount of power that can be generated per acre of land.

Read more | >

There were the cleaners, with large padded feet, who were apparently polishing their way the whole length…’ — Arthur C. Clarke, 1972.

IceBot Antarctic (Planetary?) Robotic Explorers Made Of Ice ‘Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures, like excavators or centipedes.’ — Greg Bear, 2015.

Study: Robots Encourage Humans To Take Risks Not exactly Three Laws compliant.

Read more | >