Circa 2009
Whizz electrocatalyst frees the hydrogen from ‘liquid gold’
US researchers have developed an efficient way of producing hydrogen from urine — a feat that could not only fuel the cars of the future, but could also help clean up municipal wastewater.
French company Nawa technologies says it’s already in production on a new electrode design that can radically boost the performance of existing and future battery chemistries, delivering up to 3x the energy density, 10x the power, vastly faster charging and battery lifespans up to five times as long.
Nawa is already known for its work in the ultracapacitor market, and the company has announced that the same high-tech electrodes it uses on those ultracapacitors can be adapted for current-gen lithium-ion batteries, among others, to realize some tremendous, game-changing benefits.
Continue reading “‘World’s fastest electrodes’ triple the density of lithium batteries” »
The Japanese carmaker’s North America division will be partnering with Hino USA, a commercial vehicles manufacturer, to produce the “heavy” Class 8 fuel cell truck specifically for the North American market.
The truck itself will be based on the existing Hino XL Series chassis and powered by Toyota’s fuel cell technology.
Toyota is planning to show off the first demonstration vehicle in the first half of 2021, but we still know little about it. The prototype of a prior initiative called Project Portal 2.0 may provide some clues: revealed in 2018, the prototype was a 670 horsepower semi with 1,325 pound-feet of torque and a towing capacity of 80,000 pounds. Its fuel cells gave it a reported range of 300 miles, CNET reports.
The next decade is going to be a transforming decade as many many technologies (some of which we all like to share in this group) are converging and maturing enough to rearrange our society in almost any aspect we can conceive.
I’m calling to those who are interested in creating and implementing an alternative model for the current social and governance systems, let’s build an open state that we can all support and trust regardless of our age, sex, geographical location, or belief system.
In the next 10 years, key technologies will converge to completely disrupt the five foundational sectors—information, energy, food, transportation, and materials—that underpin our global economy. We need to make sure the disruption benefits everyone.
The crusts of the Moon, Mercury, and many meteorite parent bodies are magnetized. Although the magnetizing field is commonly attributed to that of an ancient core dynamo, a longstanding hypothesized alternative is amplification of the interplanetary magnetic field and induced crustal field by plasmas generated by meteoroid impacts. Here, we use magnetohydrodynamic and impact simulations and analytic relationships to demonstrate that although impact plasmas can transiently enhance the field inside the Moon, the resulting fields are at least three orders of magnitude too weak to explain lunar crustal magnetic anomalies. This leaves a core dynamo as the only plausible source of most magnetization on the Moon.
The Moon presently lacks a core dynamo magnetic field. However, it has been known since the Apollo era that the lunar crust contains remanent magnetization, with localized surface fields reaching up to hundreds of nanoteslas or higher and spanning up to hundreds of kilometers (1). Magnetic studies of Apollo samples and the lunar crust indicate that the magnetizing field likely reached tens of microteslas before 3.56 billion years (Ga) ago (1, 2). The origin of the strongest lunar crustal anomalies and the source of the field that magnetized them have been longstanding mysteries.
Although magnetic fields in rocky bodies are commonly explained by convective dynamos in their metallic cores, a convective dynamo on the Moon may not have had sufficient energy to produce the strongest implied surface paleofields (3, 4). This may imply that a fundamentally different nonconvective dynamo mechanism operated in the Moon or that a process other than a core dynamo produced such magnetization.
Applying a temperature gradient and a charge current to an electrical conductor leads to the release and absorbtion of heat. This is called the Thomson effect. In a first, NIMS and AIST have directly observing the magneto-Thomson effect, which is the magnetic-field-induced modulation of the Thomson effect. This success may contribute to the development of new functions and technologies for thermal energy management and to advances in fundamental physics and materials science on magneto-thermoelectric conversion.
The Seebeck effect and the Peltier effect have been extensively investigated for their application to thermoelectric conversion technologies. Along with these effects, the Thomson effect has long been known as a fundamental thermoelectric effect in metals and semiconductors. Although the influence of magnetic fields and magnetism on the Seebeck and Peltier effects has been well understood as a result of many years of research, the influence on the Thomson effect has not been clarified because it is difficult to measure and evaluate.
This NIMS-led research team observed heat release and absorption induced in an electrical conductor by simultaneously creating a temperature gradient across it, passing a charge current through the gradient, and applying a magnetic field. The team precisely measured temperature changes in the conductor associated with the heat release and absorption using a heat detection technique called lock-in thermography. As a result, the amount of heat released and absorbed was found to be proportional to both the magnitude of the temperature gradient and charge current. In addition, the team observed strong enhancement of the resultant temperature change when a magnetic field was applied to the conductor. The systematic measurements performed in this study demonstrated that the heat release and absorption signals detected under a magnetic field were indeed generated by the magneto-Thomson effect.
Turbulent Past
Several companies and teams of scientists have tried to make wave energy a reality in the past, but as Greentech notes, many of their projects fell apart or ran out of money. But with renewed interest — and funding — in the industry, more companies are starting to test out their devices.
“We’re in that valley of death, climbing out of there at the moment,” naval architect Christopher Ridgewell, CEO of AW-Energy, a Finnish company working on a wave energy device called the WaveRoller, told Greentech.
The world’s first shipment of blue ammonia is on its way from Saudi Arabia to Japan, where it will be used in power stations to produce electricity without carbon emissions.
Saudi Aramco, which made the announcement Sunday, produced the fuel, which it does by converting hydrocarbons into hydrogen and then ammonia, and capturing the carbon dioxide byproduct. Japan will receive 40 tons of blue ammonia in the first shipment, Aramco said.
World hunger is a persistent problem despite all of humanity’s progress in recent years. However, I believe that we have a real shot at defeating world hunge…
Scientists are using high-energy pulses of electricity to turn any source of carbon into turbostratic graphene in an instant. The process promises environmental benefits by turning waste into valuable graphene that can then strengthen concrete and other composite materials.
Continue reading “Lab turns trash into valuable graphene in a flash” »
Scientists typically prefer to work with ordered systems. However, a diverse team of physicists and biophysicists from the University of Groningen found that individual light-harvesting nanotubes with disordered molecular structures still transport light energy in the same way. By combining spectroscopy, molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical physics, they discovered how disorder at the molecular level is effectively averaged out at the microscopic scale. The results were published on 28 September in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The double-walled light-harvesting nanotubes self-assemble from molecular building blocks. They are inspired by the multi-walled tubular antenna network of photosynthetic bacteria found in nature. The nanotubes absorb and transport light energy, although it was not entirely clear how. “The nanotubes have similar sizes but they are all different at the molecular level with the molecules arranged in a disordered way,” explains Maxim Pshenichnikov, Professor of Ultrafast Spectroscopy at the University of Groningen.
