Scientists have found a clever way to generate hydrogen straight from salty seawater. This could be another step towards a clean energy future, if renewables power the process.
The new device makes a few chemical modifications to existing technologies, making it possible to extract hydrogen from untreated, unpurified seawater – which could alleviate concerns about using precious water supplies.
“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen… to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyzer,” explains chemical engineer Shizhang Qiao of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
We’ve got a new kind of ice on the block – medium-density amorphous ice (MDA).
It’s amorphous, which means that the water molecules are in a disorganised form instead of being neatly ordered like they are in the ordinary, crystalline ice you find floating in your Scotch on the rocks…
Amorphous ice is super rare on Earth, but scientists think that it might be the main type found in the frigid environment of outer space – because ice wouldn’t have enough thermal energy there to form crystals.
The offshore wind farm is expected to lower China’s carbon dioxide emissions by 1.36 million tonnes and claims to provide more than 1.6 billion kilowatts of power annually.
China claims to have begun the construction of its first extensive offshore wind farm using 16-megawatt turbines on Saturday.
This represents a significant change from the smaller, less effective turbines that China’s offshore wind farms have often employed, claimed a report on Sunday by China Global Television Network (CGTN), a state-run media.
In a bid to make wood stronger and lighter than glass to move towards an energy-efficient future, a team of researchers at the University of Maryland has found a new way to make wood completely transparent which they believe to be better than the previous techniques.
The paper, published in the journal Science Advances, details the making of their transparent wood which was found to be 50 times stronger than the ones made using the conventional way.
BMW Group will present the first electric drive system for a wingsuit with which the centuries-old dream of flying can be realised in a completely novel way. The innovative drive module and the likewise entirely newly designed wingsuit were developed in a cooperation between BMW i, Designworks and the professional wingsuit pilot Peter Salzmann from Austria. His maiden flight with the Electrified Wingsuit by BMW i was visually captured in an elaborately staged video documentation. The spectacular film, which will be seen for the first time in the run-up to the #NEXTGen 2020, shows impressively how BMW eDrive technology is able to make a lasting change to the individual mobility experience.
The long-term experience and the BMW i brand’s pooled development competence have now been utilised in a completely innovative way. The result is an extremely powerful, compact and light drive and energy storage package for a unique flying experience with the Electrified Wingsuit by BMW i. The fly unit of the Electrified Wingsuit by BMW i comprises two encased carbon propellers, so-called impellers, each delivering a power output of 7.5 kW, a speed of around 25,000 rpm and a total output of 15 kW, which is available for approximately 5 minutes. The design of the drive unit and the likewise exclusively developed wingsuit is the result of a cooperation between Peter Salzmann and the creative team from Designworks. The BMW Group subsidiary has strongly influenced the BMW i brand’s design from the outset, applying its creative capabilities not only in the automotive sector, but also on behalf of numerous international clients from other branches of industry.
Around 3 years passed from the idea of a wingsuit flight with electric extra boost to the premiere in the Austrian alps. During this time the air sports pioneer Peter Salzmann and his partners at BMW i and Designworks worked jointly on the details of the suit and the drive system. The electric twin-propeller drive system including an energy storage unit were perfectly integrated into the front of the wing suit. The tests in the wind tunnel at the BMW Group Aerodynamics Testing Centre in Munich were a significant part of the development programme for the project.
