Lifeboat Foundation

These guys have a great idea…but In true Zuckerberg style how does one steal and supercharge the idea. With food having salmonella, people need to grow more food at home. What technology can be created that uses technology to help people in urban settings grow their own food. This will help many in a post covid world, and the food should be safer, and also may promote nutrition. nnAmerican farmers also are having trouble, and would see the loss in demand. Global food production needs to increase. Japan offered to boost the continent of Africa’s rice production through cooperation. The same cooperation needs to be done with American farmers to boost Africa’s food production. Technology would be used to partner American farmers with African village cooperatives. The farmers and cooperatives would work together and share profits. This way the American farmer has revenue coming from two markets and continents. The same model can also be used in Mexico to prevent immigration. This way American farmers would also have revenue coming from Central and South America, however people who normally would be farm workers would be partners, and make more than they would having to cross borders dangerously, to make less money. This model can both reduce poverty, as well and insure food security. The capital for investment would have to come from many sources. Crowdfunding is one that can be good as the money can be paid back with profit. This way a crowd fund investment would gain better returns than interest rates. The next of course would be USAID. A project can be developed, in which USAID provides American farmers with start up capital. They manage the project pay back the loans, while sharing profits. Agreements can be developed for certain periods of time, After which the American farmer turns the project over to the cooperatives…just thinking out of the box it is a bit crazy. The farmers would be like a new Peace Corps thing. #VillageEconomics nnPortfolio company #ApolloAgriculture was recently featured in a Forbes article highlighting their machine-learning and automated-operations technology that helps small-scale farmers access everything they need to maximize their profitability. #impactinvesting #agtech

Between 2011 and 2014, engineer and Stanford grad Eli Pollak worked in agricultural technology in the U.S. for a company called the Climate Corporation. The enterprise where he was one of the early employees (which in 2013 was acquired by Monsanto for over $1 billion) worked on providing customized recommendations to increase production of large scale commercial farmers. What caught Pollak’s eye during his tenure at the company, however, was that some countries were planting way more seeds, but producing dramatically less agricultural products than the U.S.

This prompted Pollak to team up with Climate Corporation colleague Earl St Sauver, and Benjamin Ngenga (who himself grew up on a farm) to start Apollo Agriculture, a Kenyan ag-tech company which uses machine learning and automated operations technology to help small-scale farmers access everything they need to maximize their profitability.

Continue reading “Meet The Agritech Entrepreneurs Who Just Raised $6 Million To Help Farmers In Kenya Grow Their Business” »

Developed in the 1970s, rare-earth magnets are the strongest type of permanent magnets made today. The more common type are neodymium alloys made with iron and boron, while the other group is samarium-cobalt magnets. The occurrence and production of these chemical elements raise both political and environmental concerns, so to find a more sustainable solution, the UK’s Office of Low Emission Vehicles is funding a nine-partner study called OCTOPUS (Optimised Components, Test and simulatiOn, toolkits for Powertrains which integrate Ultra high-speed motor Solutions). With Bentley joining for the next three years, the program will aim for real-world applications by 2026. Coincidentally, Bentley’s first full EV is also due that year.

A machine-learning algorithm that can predict the compositions of trend-defying new materials has been developed by RIKEN chemists1. It will be useful for finding materials for applications where there is a trade-off between two or more desirable properties.

Artificial intelligence has great potential to help scientists find new materials with desirable properties. A machine-learning algorithm that has been trained with the compositions and properties of known materials can predict the properties of unknown materials, saving much time in the lab.

But discovering new materials for applications can be tricky because there is often a trade-off between two or more material properties. One example is organic materials for organic solar cells, where it is desired to maximize both the voltage and current, notes Kei Terayama, who was at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project and is now at Yokohama City University. “There’s a trade-off between voltage and current: a material that exhibits a high voltage will have a low current, whereas one with a high current will have a low voltage.”

As the world’s most popular shoe, flip-flops account for a troubling percentage of plastic waste that ends up in landfills, on seashores and in our oceans. Scientists at the University of California San Diego have spent years working to resolve this problem, and now they have taken a step farther toward accomplishing this mission.

Sticking with their chemistry, the team of researchers formulated polyurethane foams, made from algae oil, to meet commercial specifications for midsole shoes and the foot-bed of flip-flops. The results of their study are published in Bioresource Technology Reports and describe the team’s successful development of these sustainable, consumer-ready and biodegradable materials.

The research was a collaboration between UC San Diego and startup company Algenesis Materials—a materials science and technology company. The project was co-led by graduate student Natasha Gunawan from the labs of professors Michael Burkart (Division of Physical Sciences) and Stephen Mayfield (Division of Biological Sciences), and by Marissa Tessman from Algenesis. It is the latest in a series of recent research publications that collectively, according to Burkart, offer a complete solution to the plastics problem—at least for polyurethanes.

Dutch designers Eric Klarenbeek and Maartje Dros have developed a bioplastic made from algae, which they believe could completely replace synthetic plastics over time.

Klarenbeek and Dros cultivate algae – aquatic plants – which they then dry and process into a material that can be used to 3D print objects.

The designers believe that the algae polymer could be used to make everything from shampoo bottles to tableware or rubbish bins, eventually entirely replacing plastics made from fossil fuels like oil.

By formulating positively charged fluorescent dyes into a new class of materials called small-molecule ionic isolation lattices (SMILES), a compound’s brilliant glow can be seamlessly transferred to a solid, crystalline state, researchers report August 6 in the journal Chem. The advance overcomes a long-standing barrier to developing fluorescent solids, resulting in the brightest known materials in existence.

“These materials have potential applications in any technology that needs bright fluorescence or calls for designing optical properties, including solar energy harvesting, bioimaging, and lasers,” says Amar Flood, a chemist at Indiana University and co-senior author on the study along with Bo Laursen of the University of Copenhagen.

“Beyond these, there are interesting applications that include upconverting light to capture more of the solar spectrum in solar cells, light-switchable materials used for information storage and photochromic glass, and circularly polarized luminescence that may be used in 3D display technology,” Flood says.

Tesla’s Elon Musk has said on multiple occasions that Tesla’s vehicles can function as boats for a time. He doesn’t advise it, but it has been proven true.

However, significant roadblocks lie ahead for these start-ups, including embryonic charging infrastructure and the relatively high cost of making an electric car versus one with an internal combustion engine.

Investors are supercharging China’s largest electric vehicle start-ups to expand in the world’s largest car market.

A new study finds that wheat grown using a 10-layer, indoor vertical farm could have a yield between 220 and 600 times greater than current farming methods.