Lifeboat Foundation

Two of humanity’s most ubiquitous historical materials, cement and carbon black (which resembles very fine charcoal), may form the basis for a novel, low-cost energy storage system, according to a new study. The technology could facilitate the use of renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and tidal power by allowing energy networks to remain stable despite fluctuations in renewable energy supply.

The two materials, the researchers found, can be combined with water to make a supercapacitor—an alternative to batteries—that could provide storage of electrical energy.

As an example, the MIT researchers who developed the system say that their supercapacitor could eventually be incorporated into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day’s worth of energy while adding little (or no) to the cost of the foundation and still providing the needed structural strength. The researchers also envision a concrete roadway that could provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel over that road.

Perovskite-based light emitting diodes (LEDs) could be the key to developing internet bandwidths orders of magnitude faster than what is now available, while also keeping energy consumption and cost down, researchers have claimed. Other potential applications lie in laser technology.

Perovskite is a natural mineral first identified in Russia’s Ural Mountains in 1,839 and composed primarily of calcium, titanium, and oxygen – all in the 10 most common elements in the Earth’s crust. The mineral gave its name to a class of materials based on the same elements but doped with small quantities of others. For almost the first two centuries after their discovery, these perovskites were largely a curiosity of interest only to chemists.

More recently, however, the ability of perovskites to display different electrical properties depending on the atoms with which they are doped has turned them into a wonder material. Perovskites now represent one of the most efficient ways to trap energy from sunlight and are continuing to improve at unprecedented rates. Moreover, perovskites have the potential to be manufactured far more cheaply than traditional silicon-based solar cells, while a layer of perovskite over a silicon base could capture more light than either on their own.

The STAR party’s vision for Canada includes the research and development of self sustainable Mobile Airborne Cities; or Airborne Arcologies. Being an obviously semi-long term goal, the objective would be to at first, allocate budgeting towards research and development of components to build this project in a phased manner… and the scaling of the project as technology allows for it.

Phase I: research and development of scalable micro-prototypes.

Phase II: multiple prototype development / testing stages.

Continue reading “Complex brain cell connections in the cerebellum more common than believed” »

Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla is the frequent subject of rumors and speculation, all of which must be taken with a grain of salt. But if the newest batch of rumors is to be believed, Tesla is currently looking into an “extreme fast charging” technology developed by Israeli startup StoreDot, per Inside EVs.

The news comes via an article in USA Today that, as Inside EVs noted, “doesn’t cite any sources.” The USA Today article in question was written by a contributor and contained a disclaimer at the bottom reading, “Members of the editorial and news staff of the USA TODAY Network were not involved in the creation of this content.”

If the report is to be believed, Tesla’s interest in StoreDot could mean shorter charging times for Teslas, as the company claims to have developed batteries that can charge 100 miles of driving range in just five minutes, per Inside EVs.

Sodium-ion (Na-ion) batteries and solid-state batteries have both been in the news recently. Why? Because the need for battery storage is growing rapidly as the global economy seeks carbon-based energy alternatives in pursuit of the goal to achieve net-zero emissions by the mid-century.

Na-ion Battery News

In April I wrote about BYD, a Chinese electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer, that is using sodium-ion (Na-ion) battery packs instead of lithium-ion (Li-ion) in some of its models. In its latest report, IDTechEx, out of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, states that although Na-ion batteries are not the answer to all battery-power applications, they do provide a complimentary addition to battery packs used not just in EVs but also for backup power within utilities and factories.

In-cell engineering can be a powerful tool for synthesizing functional protein crystals with promising catalytic properties, show researchers at Tokyo Tech. Using genetically modified bacteria as an environmentally friendly synthesis platform, the researchers produced hybrid solid catalysts for artificial photosynthesis. These catalysts exhibit high activity, stability, and durability, highlighting the potential of the proposed innovative approach.

Protein crystals, like regular crystals, are well-ordered molecular structures with diverse properties and a huge potential for customization. They can assemble naturally from materials found within cells, which not only greatly reduces the synthesis costs but also lessens their environmental impact.

Although protein crystals are promising as catalysts because they can host various functional molecules, current techniques only enable the attachment of small molecules and simple proteins. Thus, it is imperative to find ways to produce protein crystals bearing both natural enzymes and synthetic functional molecules to tap their full potential for enzyme immobilization.

Since launching in July 2017, the Model 3 from Tesla Inc TSLA has been one of the bestselling electric vehicles of all time.

A recent Bloomberg survey reveals how Model 3 owners have felt about the company over time — and Tesla CEO Elon Musk might not love the results.

What Happened: The Model 3 and Model Y continue to be Tesla’s bestselling models and big reasons why the company has dominated the market share for electric vehicles around the world.

No, oxygen didn’t catalyze the swift blossoming of Earth’s first multicellular organisms. The result defies a 70-year-old assumption about what caused an explosion of oceanic fauna hundreds of millions of years ago.

Between 685 and 800 million years ago, the Avalon explosion — a forerunner era of the more famed Cambrian explosion — marked the emergence of multicellular organisms in Earth’s oceans. Prior to this era, the world was dominated by single-celled amoeba, algae, and bacteria for over 2 billion years. The Avalon explosion saw a sudden surge in biodiversity, with sea sponges and other complex multicellular organisms replacing their simpler, single-celled counterparts.

Previously, it was postulated that this significant leap in evolutionary complexity was triggered by increased oxygen levels. However, this is being disproved by recent research by the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the University of Southern Denmark, and Lund University, among others.

In its second-quarter earnings report for 2023, Tesla revealed its ambitious plan to address vehicle autonomy at scale with four key technology pillars: an extensive real-world dataset, neural net training, vehicle hardware, and vehicle software. Notably, the electric vehicle manufacturer asserted its commitment to developing each of these pillars in-house. A significant milestone in this endeavor was announced as Tesla started the production of its custom-built Dojo training computer, a critical component in achieving faster and more cost-effective neural net training.

While Tesla already possesses one of the world’s most potent Nvidia GPU-based supercomputers, the Dojo supercomputer takes a different approach by utilizing chips specifically designed by Tesla. Back in 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk christened this project as “Dojo,” envisioning it as an exceptionally powerful training computer. He claimed that Dojo would be capable of performing an exaflop, or one quintillion (10¹⁸) floating-point operations per second, an astounding level of computational power. To put it into perspective, performing one calculation every second on a one exaFLOP computer system would take over 31 billion years, as reported by Network World.

The development of Dojo has been a continuous process. At Tesla’s AI Day in 2021, the automaker showcased its initial chip and training tiles, which would eventually form a complete Dojo cluster, also known as an “exapod.” Tesla’s plan involves combining two sets of three tiles in a tray, and then placing two trays in a computer cabinet to achieve over 100 petaflops per cabinet. With a 10-cabinet system, Tesla’s Dojo exapod will exceed the exaflop barrier of compute power.