The magnets powering electric cars and wind turbines come with a hidden environmental cost. Swedish researchers are working on a cleaner alternative.
Category: sustainability
Why Advanced Aliens Probably Don’t Build Dyson Spheres
🫣🤫🤔 Let’s face it: we’re still a Type 0 civilization on the Kardashev Scale… though, to be honest, we’re much closer to the Kardashian Scale 😁 endless entertainment, constant distractions, and celebrity obsession. 🙈🙉🙊 A true Type I civilization would be focused on mastering energy, advancing science, and solving humanity’s biggest challenges. We’ve still got a long way to go! While most people’s main concerns revolve around material comfort, entertainment, and instant gratification, who truly cares about the fate of the most vulnerable? About social exclusion? Inequality? The pollution and destruction of our environment? Who cares about the massive extinction of million of species now underway? Who cares about sustainable development and peace for everyone? A true Type I civilization would be collectively focused on optimizing how it functions and shaping a better future for everyone. We’re still very, very far from that.
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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about an interesting study on the Fermi paradox, type II civilizations and…bitcoin?
Links:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.23026
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03249
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.17516
#fermiparadox #bitcoin #science.
0:00 How we measure alien civilizations.
2:00 Kardashev scale conundrum.
3:25 New model using bitcoin and artificial intelligence.
4:08 Why bitcoin? The Karnac unit.
5:50 Energy required to change a unit of information — Landauer limit.
8:00 New definition for Type 2 civilization.
8:45 AI demand is changing energy consumption.
10:20 Energy limit speculations.
11:40 The great filter hypothesis.
12:30 The crossroads for humanity — conclusions.
Enjoy and please subscribe.
Growing Plants in Space: The Science Behind Future Moon and Mars Colonies | Mark Ciotola
Mark Ciotola, CEO and Co-Founder of Sustain Space.
Everyone talks about getting humans to Mars. But almost nobody talks about the harder question — how do you keep them alive once they get there? My guest today says the answer isn’t bigger rockets — it’s plants.
Mark Ciotola is CEO and Co-Founder of Sustain Space (https://www.sustainspace.com/), a company focused on developing regenerative life-support technologies for future space missions while translating those innovations to improve agriculture and sustainability on Earth. Through Sustain Space’s Orbital Genomics initiative, he is helping advance research into growing plants in space environments — an essential capability for long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Mark’s career spans entrepreneurship, academia, industry, and government, including work with NASA, Genentech, Applied Biosystems, Intuit, Carnegie Mellon University, Monash University, San Francisco State University, and Singularity University, where he served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence and faculty member in Space and Physical Sciences.
A physicist, entrepreneur, educator, and sustainability advocate, Mark is particularly interested in regenerative ecosystems, closed-loop life-support systems, space agriculture, and the broader question of how humanity can build a sustainable future both on Earth and beyond it.
New biobased polymers exhibit excellent tensile properties beyond polyolefins
The research group of Professor Kotohiro Nomura, Tokyo Metropolitan University, in cooperation with the research groups of Senior Researcher Hiroshi Hirano and Director Seiji Higashi of the Osaka Research Institute of Industrial Science and Technology, and Associate Professor Hiroki Takeshita of The University of Shiga Prefecture, has developed biobased poly(ester amide)s from inedible biorenewables that can be easily chemically recycled and exhibit better mechanical (tensile) properties in film than commodity plastics.
The work has been published in JACS Au.
The development of biobased polymers that are readily chemically recyclable and derived from nonedible renewable resources has been recognized as a promising sustainable material in the circular economy. However, there have been few examples of materials with mechanical properties (e.g. tensile strength and elongation at break) that exceed those of conventional polymers such as polyethylene and polypropylene.
New 4D-printing method creates lighter, faster-spinning wind turbine blades
A new manufacturing technique developed by Concordia researchers could make small wind turbines lighter, less expensive and easier to produce. Using a process known as 4D printing of composites, Ph.D. candidate Emad Fakhimi and Suong Van Hoa, a professor at the Concordia Center for Composites, created curved blades for vertical-axis wind turbines from flat carbon-fiber composite panels. The study is published in the journal Polymer Composites.
Vertical-axis wind turbines are increasingly used on buildings and in urban settings, but their curved blades are typically made using specialized forming processes that require complex molds. These molds add cost, manufacturing time and weight to the final product.
To address this problem, the researchers developed a new, first-of-its-kind “inverse” design procedure. Rather than starting with a particular layup—the arrangement and orientation of carbon-fiber layers—and observing the resulting shape, they began with the desired blade geometry and worked backward to determine how the layers should be arranged and oriented to produce it.
Team uses 3D printing to develop zinc-ion hybrid battery with seven times more energy
Storing solar and wind energy to meet the increasing power needs of the electrical grid calls for devices that can deliver power quickly, recharge quickly and last for decades at low cost. A new study led by UCLA has uncovered a technology that could meet all these criteria: a zinc-ion hybrid battery with a 3D-printed electrode that stores more than seven times the charge of similar hybrids.
Energy storage based on zinc instead of lithium would be cheaper and more sustainable because zinc is 100 times more abundant, easier to mine and easier to recycle.
“The future of energy storage won’t be defined by a single technology,” said co-corresponding author Maher El-Kady, an assistant researcher in UCLA College’s chemistry and biochemistry department. “At some point, we will need to look for something to complement the current options for grid-scale energy storage. What we’ve done in this study essentially gives us zinc-ion hybrid devices that can store nearly one order of magnitude higher capacity.”
Common nanostructures may explain shared photoproperties in two widespread dark materials
A newly developed framework for understanding the photoproperties of both natural organic matter and eumelanin, a natural pigment responsible for dark colors in organisms, may inspire advanced sustainable technologies, scientists say.
Although they are some of the most widespread substances on Earth, not much is known about eumelanin or natural organic matter (NOM)—a dark-colored substance formed by the decomposition of biological material. In humans, eumelanin is a vital pigment in skin and other tissues that protects cells from damage caused by ultraviolet radiation. In nature, NOM gives rivers and soils their color and affects light-driven reactions like photosynthesis.
Although these compounds have been studied individually for decades, researchers in a new study, by scrutinizing them alongside each other, have shown that eumelanin and NOM have common properties beyond their dark colors.
How giant tropical trees transport water 70 meters to stay as drought-resilient as smaller trees
The giant trees of tropical forests are important allies in the fight against climate change because of their ability to store carbon, yet they are still poorly understood by science. However, a study published in the journal Science reveals a crucial survival mechanism: These trees, which exceed 70 meters (230 feet) in height, have no difficulty transporting water to their tops and are no more vulnerable than smaller trees.
They have developed internal adaptations that compensate for the challenges of transporting water to the highest branches. Furthermore, tests conducted during severe droughts showed that they did not experience a more pronounced decline in growth than smaller trees. This contradicts the hypothesis that very tall trees would be more susceptible to water stress.
Spontaneous current loops in a kagome metal point to hidden quantum order
Quantum materials, materials exhibiting physical behavior governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, have proved promising for the development of numerous advanced technologies, including quantum technologies, memory devices and solar panels. In some of these materials, electrons can collectively arrange themselves in unusual patterns, giving rise to states that cannot be explained by classical physics theories.
For more than two decades, theoretical physicists have predicted the existence of a loop current order in some quantum materials. This is a state characterized by tiny electrical currents circulating around microscopic loops inside a crystal, which would produce no measurable electric current flowing through a material.
These current loops were predicted to emerge when electrons spontaneously organize themselves into a less symmetrical pattern than the crystal itself, even if atoms remain in similar positions. While this phenomenon was widely studied and described by theorists in the past, it has so far proved difficult to observe experimentally.