The Chinese billionaire will be teaching students about sustainable agriculture and food production.
Jack Ma, the co-founder of the multinational technology company, Alibaba, marks his return to teaching as he begins a public role as visiting professor at the Tokyo College in Japan today, Business Insider.
Once the richest man in China, Ma had humble beginnings and worked as an English lecturer for several years before he co-founded Alibaba.
World Economic Forum/ Wikimedia Commons.
The first deliveries of the Tesla Cybertruck are expected to take place later this year, and there are still a handful of unknowns about the futuristic truck. In recent weeks, however, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared some details about the vehicle, alongside some included in the automaker’s latest Master Plan.
In its Master Plan 3 unveiled on April 5, Tesla stated that the Cybertruck will have a 100 kWh battery pack. However, it’s not clear if this refers to a base model or another specific variant, as reported by The Street. The battery pack size is the same as those of the Model S and X, Tesla’s premium-level sedan and SUV, despite the truck being a wider and heavier vehicle than these.
Cybertruck rivals in the electric pickup sector include the Rivian R1T and the Ford F-150 Lightning, which feature 135 kWh and 131 kWh battery packs, respectively. The Cybertruck will also include a 3,500-pound payload capacity, adjustable air suspension, and lockable exterior storage measuring about 100 cubic feet.
More than one in three new vehicles sold in 2030 will be electric thanks to “explosive” growth in the market, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The influential Paris-based group says electric cars are already on track to make up 18% of sales in 2023. With new policies driving growth in the US and the EU, the share of electric models in 2030 is now set to be more than double what it expected just two years ago.
The expansion means that the demand for oil-based fuels such as petrol and diesel in the road transport sector will start to decline within just two years. Around 5% of current oil demand will have been wiped out by 2030, it adds.
In a new study, scientists have observed long-lived excitons in a topological material, opening intriguing new research directions for optoelectronics and quantum computing.
Excitons are charge-neutral quasiparticles created when light is absorbed by a semiconductor. Consisting of an excited electron coupled to a lower-energy electron vacancy or hole, an exciton is typically short-lived, surviving only until the electron and hole recombine, which limits its usefulness in applications.
“If we want to make progress in quantum computing and create more sustainable electronics, we need longer exciton lifetimes and new ways of transferring information that don’t rely on the charge of electrons,” said Alessandra Lanzara, who led the study. Lanzara is a senior faculty scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and a UC Berkeley physics professor. “Here we’re leveraging topological material properties to make an exciton that is long lived and very robust to disorder.”
University of Alberta researchers have developed a new catalyst that could revolutionize how we generate power and purify water. When placed in any type of water and provided with a small amount of power, the catalyst produces hydrogen that can be fed into a fuel cell to generate electricity along with distilled water that is safe to drink.
The catalyst was discovered almost entirely by chance when Robin Hamilton was creating an electrode for an undergraduate student working on a waste biomass upcycling project. He mixed up a combination of powders and allowed them to sit overnight in water, intending to finish the cell the following day. When he returned in the morning, the mixture was bubbling—a reaction that was extremely out of the ordinary.
“It ends up being that when you mix these two things together, they interact, they work together and hydrogen comes off. It floored us,” says Hamilton, a senior research associate in the Department of Chemistry.
Tesla received a large order for Model 3s from an Emirati taxi company, Arabia Taxi Dubai, helping the company to cut its carbon footprint.
Tesla’s retail consumer pressure is undeniably large. Still, the automaker has also grown in popularity in the commercial space, especially from customers looking to cut operating costs while reducing their carbon footprints. Predominantly, these orders have been coming from ride-hailing companies and car rental services. Now, a Dubai-based taxi company is also looking to capitalize on the cut-cutting opportunity.
According to the announcement from Arabia Taxi Dubai, it will buy 269 Tesla Model 3s to become part of its taxi fleet in the United Arab Emirates. Currently, Arabia Taxi advertises itself as the largest taxi fleet in Dubai and one of the largest in the country. With this new purchase, it looks to double down on that lead.
The system helps to plug the gap when it comes to renewable energy sources.
As a solution to the unpredictable nature of renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, gravity batteries are being pitched as an ideal remedy. To further this cause, Swiss startup Energy Vault is now completing two such units, which are situated near Shanghai in China and Texas in the United States.
The basic idea behind a gravity battery system is to lift a heavy object, such as a large mass of concrete or a weight, on a pulley, using energy from a power source. When energy is needed, the thing can fall, and the potential energy is converted back into electricity.
Today is Earth Day.
That said, Americans don’t fully trust the reliability of renewable sources and 67% of the population favors a mix of renewables and fossil fuels, with only about 31% in favor of completely phasing out fossil fuels altogether.
This week’s Current Climate, which every Saturday brings you the latest news about the business of sustainability. Sign up to get it in your inbox every week.
Today is Earth Day, when people take time out to reflect on preserving the environment. And according to polling, at least, Americans are committed to improving it. According to a new poll from Pew Research looking at attitudes towards the environment, 69% of the U.S. population favors steps towards a goal of the country being carbon neutral by the year 2050. The same percentage says the country should prioritize developing renewable energy sources to do so.
A new study published in Ecology and Evolution by Henrik Svensmark of DTU Space has shown that the explosion of stars, also known as supernovae, has greatly impacted the diversity of marine life over the past 500 million years.
The fossil record has been extensively studied, revealing significant variations in the diversity of life forms throughout geological history. A fundamental question in evolutionary biology is identifying the processes responsible for these fluctuations.
The new research uncovers a surprising finding: the fluctuation in the number of nearby supernovae closely corresponds to changes in biodiversity of marine genera over the last 500 million years. This correlation becomes apparent when the marine diversity curve is adjusted to account for changes in shallow coastal marine regions, which are significant as they provide habitat for most marine life and offer new opportunities for evolution as they expand or shrink. Thus, alterations in available shallow marine regions play a role in shaping biodiversity.
Remark: This article is from The Conversation France written by Victor DOS SANTOS PAULINO & Nonthapat PULSIRI (V&N) — Experts from Toulouse Business School and The SIRIUS Chair (France)
Lorsque nous parlons d’espace, nous pensons aux étoiles que nous voyons la nuit ou à de bons films de science-fiction. Or, l’espace comprend également tous les satellites et engins qui sont lancés depuis la Terre. Dans certains engins spatiaux, il y a des astronautes, comme l’Américaine Christina Koch ou le Français Thomas Pesquet, qui voyagent pendant plusieurs jours ou mois pour de nombreuses missions.
Pendant ce temps, plus de 8 000 satellites non habités opèrent sur les orbites terrestres pour améliorer la vie quotidienne. Par exemple, les satellites de communication contribuent à améliorer l’accès à Internet dans les zones blanches, les satellites d’observation sont essentiels pour les prévisions météorologiques et les satellites de navigation (GPS) sont indispensables pour les besoins de transport actuels et futurs tels que les véhicules autonomes.
Les progrès dans le secteur spatial offrent aujourd’hui de nouvelles opportunités dans la mise en orbite de constellations de milliers de satellites (par exemple, la flotte Starlink lancée par SpaceX, la société de l’homme d’affaires américain Elon Musk) ou encore dans l’exploitation minière spatiale et le tourisme spatial. Certains pays (dont la France et les États-Unis) ont par ailleurs annoncé que soutenir leur écosystème spatial constituait une priorité pour dynamiser l’économie.