Lifeboat Foundation

Air conditioning is something you barely notice — until the power goes out, and it no longer works. But what if keeping cool didn’t require electricity at all?

A scientist has invented a material that reflects the sun’s rays off rooftops, and even absorbs heat from homes and buildings and radiates it away. And — get this — it is made from recyclable paper. The essential AC: Air conditioners are in 87% of homes in the United States, costing the homeowner $265 per year, on average. Some homes can easily spend twice that.

With global temperatures on the rise, no one is giving up their AC. More people are installing air conditioners than ever before, especially in developing countries where the middle class can finally afford them. 15 years ago, very few people in China’s urban regions had air conditioners; now, there are more AC units in China than there are homes.

Bill Gates founded Breakthrough Energy and has recently announced that its first Catalyst project funding will come in the form of a $50 million grant to LanzaJet’s Freedom Pines Fuels sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) plant in Soperton, Georgia.

Breakthrough Energy Catalyst is a unique program that brings together businesses and nonprofits to fund key first-of-its-kind commercial-scale projects that speed up the deployment of essential technologies.

Most efforts so far have relied on external heating and cooling systems, but these add a lot of bulk and also tend to use up a considerable amount of energy themselves. The researchers’ innovation, outlined in a recent paper in Nature , was to add an extra component to the batteries: a sheet of nickel foil just a few micrometers thick between the stacked electrodes of each cell.

This ultra-thin sheet is used as a heating element, and when a current is passed through it the cell heats up to 149° Fahrenheit in about a minute. This temperature is maintained through charging, but the cell then quickly cools back to room temperature as soon as the current is switched off.

When they tested their approach, the researchers found that they could charge a 265 watt-hour battery to 70 per cent in 11 minutes. They also showed that heating the battery didn’t seriously affect its lifetime, as it survived 2,000 cycles of charging, which would provide enough energy to drive more than 500,000 miles overall.

Hydrogen gas could someday replace fossil fuels as a “clean” energy source, producing only water and energy. However, handling large quantities of gaseous hydrogen is cumbersome, and converting it to a liquid requires vessels that can withstand extremely high pressures. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed a method to store and release highly pure hydrogen with salts in the presence of amino acids.

The reversible storage of hydrogen in solid salts has emerged as one potential way to make the fuel easier to transport and handle, but the reactions to do this require precious metals as catalysts and may produce carbon dioxide as an unwanted byproduct. So, Henrik Junge, Matthias Beller and colleagues developed effective storage-release systems with both bicarbonate and carbonate salts, as well as manganese, which is a more widely available metal catalyst.

The researchers found that converting bicarbonate and hydrogen into formate, and vice versa, was most effective with potassium salts, a manganese-based catalyst and lysine—an amino acid that acted as an additional promoter and reacted with carbon dioxide to capture it—at reaction temperatures below 200 F. After five storage-release cycles, the reaction system produced hydrogen with a high yield (80%) and purity (99%).

Picture an entire city charged by batteries. This new battery design may unlock a new era of energy.

If you’ve never heard of molten salt reactors before, prepare to have your mind blown. These cutting-edge pieces of technology might well be the answer to freeing our species from its addiction to fossil fuels.

First constructed and operated in the 1960s, molten salt reactors are an interesting and promising energy technology. There’s a variety of different designs for these reactors, but they all, in essence, primarily utilize molten fluoride salts kept under low pressure as the primary coolant for the reactor.

It came from the constellation Sagitta more than 2 billion years ago.

Earlier this month, on October 9th, one of the most intense gamma ray bursts hit the Earth.

Continue reading “Astronomers around the world weigh in on one of the most intense gamma-ray bursts ever” »

Technology to produce, convert and store energy is central to these researchers’ efforts.

The event will take place in a man-made city with a year-round winter sports complex. Can you make snow in the desert? It seems you can, as Saudi Arabia will be hosting the 2029 Asian Winter Games, according to a report published by the South China Morning Post on Tuesday.

Saudi Arabia plans to build the world’s largest buildings as part of its $500 billion development plan called NEOM, as the country looks to steer away from its heavy dependence on oil, Bloomberg reported.

At 10.8 million barrels a day, Saudi Arabia contributes 11 percent of the global oil production and is the largest exporter of crude oil. As the world looks towards a future that is powered by cleaner sources of energy, Saudi Arabia wants to diversify its income sources and has been looking at building destinations where it can attract industries and businesses in the future.

Continue reading “Saudi Arabia wants to build skyscrapers that will run for dozens of miles” »