Lifeboat Foundation

The devices are so sensitive that even a soft tap is enough to make them glow. The researchers also made the devices glow by vibrating them, drawing on their surfaces, and blowing air on them to make them bend and sway—which shows that they could potentially be used to harvest airflow to produce light. The researchers also inserted small magnets inside the devices so that they can be magnetically steered, glowing as they move and contort.

The devices can be recharged with light. The dinoflagellates are photosynthetic, meaning they use sunlight to produce food and energy. Shining light on the devices during the day gives them the juice they need to glow during the night.

Continue reading “Algae-Powered Soft Devices Glow in the Dark When Squished or Stretched” »

Asphaltenes, a byproduct of crude oil production, are a waste material with potential. Rice University scientists are determined to find it by converting the carbon-rich resource into useful graphene.

Muhammad Rahman, an assistant research professor of materials science and nanoengineering, is employing Rice’s unique flash Joule heating process to convert asphaltenes instantly into turbostratic (loosely aligned) graphene and mix it into composites for thermal, anti-corrosion and 3D-printing applications.

The process makes good use of material otherwise burned for reuse as fuel or discarded into tailing ponds and landfills. Using at least some of the world’s reserve of more than 1 trillion barrels of asphaltene as a feedstock for graphene would be good for the environment as well.

face_with_colon_three circa 2020.

“I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable.” – Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island (1874).

We have come a long way since science fiction writer Jules Verne wrote this visionary sentence, but hydrogen has still not emerged as a major source of energy. ESA is setting out to change this through the latest Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP) call for ideas.

Continue reading “Recreating photosynthesis for unlimited hydrogen energy” »

It’s all thanks to nanoclusters.

A new nanoscale 3D printing material developed by Stanford University engineers may provide superior structural protection for satellites, drones, and microelectronicsAn improved lightweight, a protective lattice that can absorb twice as much energy as previous materials of a similar density has been developed by engineers for nanoscale 3D printing.

According to the study led by Stanford University, a nanoscale 3D printing material, which creates structures that are a fraction of the width of a human hair, will enable to print of materials that are available for use, especially when printing at very small scales.

Continue reading “Engineers designed a new nanoscale 3D printing material that can be printed at a speed of 100 mm/s” »

Four numbers that were in the news this week that should be a wakeup call for humanity.

8 billion is Earth’s human population. 419 PPM is atmospheric CO₂ levels. 636 are COP27 fossil fuel lobbyists. 100 are the countries at COP.

KNP Arises, a Delhi-based startup run by Kirti and Sushil Vaishnav, collects used cooking oils from restaurants and converts it into biodiesel, which generates 80% lower carbon emissions as compared to fossil fuels.

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Commercial deployment could be achieved as early as 2024.

Energy Dome, the Italian company that uses carbon dioxide for long-duration energy storage, has now entered the U.S. energy market, Electrek.

Continue reading “World’s first CO2-based energy storage solution will be available in the US soon” »

A major vulnerability in a networking technology widely used in critical infrastructures such as spacecraft, aircraft, energy generation systems and industrial control systems was exposed by researchers at the University of Michigan and NASA.

It goes after a network protocol and hardware system called time-triggered ethernet, or TTE, which greatly reduces costs in high-risk settings by allowing mission-critical devices (like flight controls and life support systems) and less important devices (like passenger WiFi or data collection) to coexist on the same network hardware. This blend of devices on a single network arose as part of a push by many industries to reduce network costs and boost efficiency.

Continue reading “Cyber vulnerability discovered in networks used by spacecraft, aircraft and energy generation systems” »