Lifeboat Foundation

Developed at NTU Singapore, a new device can quickly rejuvenate and extend the life of old and new solar panels using heat and light.

Through an innovative use of heat and light, a new device developed at NTU Singapore can restore and extend the life of old and new solar panels.

These new wind turbine replacements could soon become Instagram celebrities, just like those Dyson fans.

Glasgow’s Katrick Technologies introduces Wind Panel, their bladeless gadget designed to replace wind turbines with efficiency and innovation.

Continue reading “This new bladeless fan is the future of wind turbines” »

Despite facing opposition and controversy, Tesla and Elon Musk continue to revolutionize the industry and gain support, with the company’s valuation and Musk’s outspoken personality driving outsized interest.

Questions to inspire discussion.

Continue reading “Tesla’s $1 Trillion Projection in 2024: Analysts Clash” »

East Antarctica’s Conger ice shelf – a floating platform the size of Rome – broke off the continent on March 15, 2022. Since the beginning of satellite observations in the 1970s, the tip of the shelf had been disintegrating into icebergs in a series of what glaciologists call calving events.

Conger was already reduced to a 50km-long and 20km-wide strip attached to Antarctica’s vast continental ice sheet at one end and the ice-covered Bowman Island at the other. Two calving events on March 5 and 7 reduced it further, detaching it from Bowman and precipitating its final collapse a week later.

The world’s largest ice shelves fringe Antarctica, extending its ice sheet into the frigid Southern Ocean. Smaller ice shelves are found where continental ice meets the sea in Greenland, northern Canada and the Russian Arctic. By restraining how much the grounded ice flows upstream, they can control the loss of ice from the interior of the sheet into the ocean. When an ice shelf like Conger is lost, the grounded ice once kept behind the shelf may start to flow faster as the restraining force of the ice shelf is lost, resulting in more ice tumbling into the ocean.

Emerging technologies such as nanotechnology can provide efficient approaches by which new materials with broad functions, such as durable and fire-retardant properties, can be developed and subsequently used for the treatment of wood materials.

In a study published in the Journal of Bioresources and Bioproducts, an international team from New Zealand (Scion) and China (Northeast Forestry University) report a review that nanotechnology-based methods can be employed to mitigate these weaknesses and create durable, sustainable wood materials.

These wood nanotechnologies also can be employed to develop wood products with antimicrobial surfaces for various applications. Furthermore, analytical tools used in nanoscience and nanotechnology enable the precise study of wood structure and its components on a nanometer scale, particularly those aspects that can affect wood products’ biodeterioration resistance properties.

Scientists have developed a new material from a mineral abundant on Mars that they claim could open the door to sustainable habitation on the red planet.

Researchers assessed the potential of a type of nanomaterials – ultrasmall components thousands of times smaller than a human hair – for clean energy production and building materials on Mars.

The study, published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, found that a material typically considered a waste product by NASA can be altered to provide clean energy and sustainable electronics.

Let’s face it: on a scorching hot day, the sweet hum of an air conditioner feels like a lifeline. But what if that lifeline is actually tying us into a knot of environmental woes?

It turns out, our reliance on air conditioning is heating up the planet just as much as it’s cooling our homes.

Enter a team of ingenious researchers from MIT with a revolutionary idea: aerogel. This isn’t just another tech buzzword; it’s a potential game-changer in our fight against climate change.

BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Dec 22 (Reuters) — Tesla (TSLA.O) has acquired land in Shanghai for a megapack battery manufacturing plant with production expected to start in the fourth quarter of 2024, Chinese state media reported on Friday.

Tesla paid 222.42 million yuan ($31.13 million) for use rights to a 19.7-hectare (48.7 acres) plot, a separate government statement said on Thursday. The site is near an existing Tesla plant producing Model 3 and Model Y cars.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For decades, achieving controlled fusion was a physics challenge. But now, as the ITER megaproject gears up to demonstrate fusion’s potential as an energy source—and startup companies race to beat it—the practical roadblocks to fusion power plants are coming into focus. One is a looming shortage of tritium fuel. Others could prevent reactors from ever running reliably—a necessity if fusion is to provide a constant “baseload” to complement intermittent solar and wind power.

Some of fusion’s fitfulness is innate to the design of doughnut-shaped tokamak reactors. The magnetic field that confines the ultrahot, energy-producing plasma is generated in part by the charged particles themselves, as they flow around the vessel. That plasma current in turn is induced by pulses of electrical current in a coil of wire in the doughnut’s hole, each lasting a few minutes at most. In between pulses the magnetic field ebbs, interrupting tokamak operations—and power delivery. The repetitive starts and stops of the reactor’s powerful magnetic fields also generate mechanical stresses that could eventually tear the machine apart.

In theory, the beams of particles and microwaves used to heat the plasma can also drive the plasma current. So can a quirk of plasma physics called the bootstrap effect. Near the edge of the plasma, a sharp pressure gradient causes the particles to spiral in such a way that they interfere with each other and push themselves—by their own bootstraps—around the ring.