Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sustainability – Page 191

Fast charging stations have made the impossibility of driving from California to Florida in an EV possible.

In the past few years, the use of electric vehicles has grown significantly. Tesla is among the most popular EVs in the U.S., and its empire is growing daily. Many people may think traveling across the country in an EV is near impossible. But fast charging stations have recently made the impossible possible.

There are many types of fast chargers these days. Companies like Electrify America, Tesla, and EVgo have made fast chargers that can deliver +50 kWh.

Hapabapa/iStock.

Continue reading “Tesla Superchargers: EV charging stations innovating the world” | >

The self-driving vehicle features a bubble-like dome that resembles the space car from The Jetsons.

The Asahi Kasei AKXY2 concept car is designed to envision a future of sustainable and community-focused transportation.

The Tokyo-based firm hopes its concept will light up imaginations and reposition the automobile as a social device rather than a soulless commuting machine.

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Nearly a year after Sony and Honda shared plans to jointly make and sell electric vehicles, the two companies revealed a prototype under the brand name Afeela.

The four-door sedan was driven onstage at CES Wednesday as Kenichiro Yoshida, the CEO of Sony, talked through the company’s mobility philosophy, which prioritizes building vehicles that have autonomous capabilities and are transformed into “moving entertainment space[s].”

The first preorders of the Afeelas are scheduled in the first half of 2025, with sales to begin the same year, said Yoshida. Initial shipments will be delivered to customers in North America in the spring of 2026.

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SEOUL (Reuters) — South Korea’s antitrust regulator said it would impose a 2.85 billion won ($2.2 million) fine on Tesla Inc for failing to tell its customers about the shorter driving range of its electric vehicles (EVs) in low temperatures.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) said that Tesla had exaggerated the “driving ranges of its cars on a single charge, their fuel cost-effectiveness compared to gasoline vehicles as well as the performance of its Superchargers” on its official local website since August 2019 until recently.

The driving range of the U.S. EV manufacturer’s cars plunge in cold weather by up to 50.5% versus how they are advertised online, the KFTC said in a statement on Tuesday.

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The way electrons interact with photons of light is a vital part of many modern technologies, from lasers to solar panels to LEDs. But the interaction is inherently weak because of a major mismatch in scale: the wavelength of visible light is about 1,000 times larger than an electron, so the way the two things affect each other is limited by that disparity.

Now, researchers at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), MIT and other universities say they have come up with an innovative way to make more robust interactions between photons and electrons possible, that produces a hundredfold increase in the emission of light from a phenomenon called Smith-Purcell radiation. The findings have potential ramifications for both and fundamental scientific research, although it will require more years of investigation to put into practice.

The findings are published in Nature by Dr. Yi Yang (Assistant Professor of the Department of Physics at HKU and a former postdoc at MIT), Dr. Charles Roques-carmes (Postdoctoral Associate at MIT) and Professors Marin Soljačić and John Joannopoulos (MIT professors). The research team also included Steven Kooi at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, Haoning Tang and Eric Mazur at Harvard University, Justin Beroz at MIT, and Ido Kaminer at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

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Chemists from Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin discovered more isn’t always better when it comes to packing charge-acceptor molecules on the surface of semiconducting nanocrystals.

The combination of organic and inorganic components in hybrid nanomaterials can be tailored to capture, detect, convert or control light in unique ways. Interest in these materials is high, and the pace of scientific publication about them has grown more than tenfold over the past 20 years. For example, they could potentially improve the efficiency of solar power systems by harvesting energy from wavelengths of sunlight—like infrared—that are missed by traditional photovoltaic solar panels.

To create the materials, chemists marry nanocrystals of light-capturing semiconductors with “charge acceptor” molecules that act as , attaching to the semiconductor’s surface and transporting electrons away from the nanocrystals.

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Year 2022 😗

Plastic foam like Styrofoam is a ubiquitous, harmful and nearly immortal single-use material that is long overdue for a good, green replacement — and Cruz Foam is here to supply it. The startup creates a durable yet backyard-compostable packing foam out of shrimp shells produced (and discarded) by the seafood industry. It recently extended its seed round to accommodate the interests of Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher, and is scaling up to meet the demands of its first major customer, Whirlpool.

I met Cruz Foam co-founder John Felts during the memorable Accelerator at Sea hosted by the Sustainable Ocean Alliance. His pitch made perfect sense: create a biodegradable alternative to expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam using a material provided in abundance by nature.

This material, chitin, makes up the shells of shrimp, crabs and other crustaceans in and out of the sea. It’s tough and versatile but, like any part of a living creature, decomposes quickly and safely. Best of all, it’s produced in enormous quantities by the seafood industry — there are really almost no uses for the stuff, so thousands of tons of shells pile up outside shrimp processing plants, most of which ends up going to landfills. People are literally paying someone else to take this stuff.

Continue reading “Cruz Foam taps DiCaprio and Kutcher in .5M greentech seed” | >

H umans are at the center of most discussions about both the environment and technology. One goal of sustainability is to ensure that future generations of humans have opportunities to thrive on planet Earth. Debates about the ethics of technology often focus on how to protect human rights and promote human autonomy.

At the same time, some conversations about the environment and technology are now taking humans out of the equation. As Adam Kirsch points out in a new book, “The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us,” people in two very different schools of thought are coming to a similar conclusion: that the world might not have people much longer and might be better off as a result.

Kirsch takes readers on a guided tour of the discussions in these two camps. “Antihumanists” are obsessed with our having sown the seeds of our demise and bringing environmental apocalypse upon ourselves — possibly even deserving to go extinct. “Transhumanists” are obsessed with maintaining control and envision a future in which we use technology to become something greater than homo sapiens and even cheat death itself.

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