Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sustainability – Page 245

A breakthrough in electric vehicle battery design has enabled a 10-minute charge time for a typical EV battery. The record-breaking combination of a shorter charge time and more energy acquired for longer travel range was announced today (Oct. 12) in the journal Nature.

“The need for smaller, faster-charging batteries is greater than ever,” said Chao-Yang Wang, the William E. Diefenderfer Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State and lead author on the study. “There are simply not enough batteries and critical raw materials, especially those produced domestically, to meet anticipated demand.”

In August, California’s Air Resources Board passed an extensive plan to restrict and ultimately ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars within the state. By 2035, the largest auto market in the United States will effectively retire the internal combustion engine.

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Greece was entirely powered by renewables for the first time in its history last week, according to the country’s independent power transmission operator (IPTO).

On Friday (7 October), for a period of around five hours, the country was running off entirely renewable power, reaching a record high of 3,106MWh at eight o’clock (GMT).

“For the first time in the history of the Greek electricity system, the demand was covered 100% from renewable energy sources,” its IPTO wrote.

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Tesla has updated its in-car energy app to give a comparison between real energy use and the projected range, and it even gives you range advice to get closer to the optimal range.

Range calculations are difficult regardless of the type of powertrain – electric or internal combustion engine.

There are just so many factors that can affect the efficiency of a vehicle on a road that it is hard to determine how far it can go on a full battery pack or tank of gas.

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Siemens Gamesa’s 14–222 DD offshore wind turbine prototype has, according to the Spanish-German wind giant today, set a world record for the most power output by a single wind turbine in a 24-hour period: 359 megawatt-hours.

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This would be enough energy, according to the company, for a mid-sized electric vehicle – think a Tesla Model 3 – to drive around 1.12 million miles (1.8 million km).

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Tesla is considering several sites in Canada for its next Gigafactory according to reports. This comes as Francois-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s industry and innovation minister, recently confirmed talks with Tesla over a new factory. He stated the following (via Reuters):

“Yes, I’m talking to them,” Champagne said, in response to a question about reports of Tesla looking to build a factory in Canada. “I’m talking also to all the automakers around the world.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has hinted at a Canadian Gigafactory on numerous occasions, most recently at the automaker’s annual shareholders’ meeting last month. And now reports from Canada suggest representatives from Tesla have already visited numerous locations in Ontario and Quebec. Moreover, Tesla is currently looking for a high-volume recruiter in the Quebec area, indicating the automaker could be on the verge of hiring several thousand Canadian workers.

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It’s the stuff of science fiction: Solar panels in space that beam power directly to Earth equipping the planet with clean renewable and affordable energy. Yet, it could soon be reality.

Caltech has just received $100 million in funding for their Space Solar Power Project (SSPP). The project is described by Caltech as: “Collecting solar power in space and transmitting the energy wirelessly to Earth through microwaves enables terrestrial power availability unaffected by weather or time of day. Solar power could be continuously available anywhere on earth.”

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QNTYM Railway is a ‘software level’ application that can be deployed on current hardware meaning there will be no need for changes in physical network infrastructure (hardware). The QNTYM Railway is an inherently quantum secure, self-defending, resilient, digital infrastructure capable of lightning-fast speed with a significant sustainability proposition. From a command & control standpoint, the QNTYM Railway is also integrated with leading vendors where users can benefit from having threat intel, vulnerability, device & incident response management capabilities all automated and in one place, hence reducing complexity.

In terms of speed, the QNTYM Railway has demonstrated consistent throughput speeds of 350+ Mbit/s, (and above). The QNTYM Railway provides integration and interoperability that is in a class of its own allowing technology to reach new levels. For the past year, QDEx Labs has been stress-assessing the QNTYM Railway across three interconnected cloud environments (AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure); they found that not only are they consistently experiencing the minimum requirement of 250 Mbit/s for 8k video streaming, but they are also, in fact, recording data streams reaching 3 to 4 times that amount with little to no processor load and added latencies in the microsecond (NOT millisecond) range.

The bottom line is that this architecture has now proven capable of hosting an ultra-realistic 3D metaverse. Results like these are something that Web3 and Metaverse projects currently lack and will require.

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The naturally ‘carbon-eating’ microorganisms could mean the farms will be carbon negative too.

Cultivating marine algae on land-based farms could meet future nutritional demands from society and enhance environmental sustainability, according to a new study published in Oceanography.

Protein-rich microalgae could be the answer to food insecurity.

Charles H. Greene.

The proposed development may exceed the 56 percent increase in food production needed to feed the 10 billion humans projected to be on the planet by 2050.

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Inspired by insects, robotic engineers are creating machines that could aid in search and rescue, pollinate plants and sniff out gas leaks.

Cyborg cockroaches that find earthquake survivors. A “robofly” that sniffs out gas leaks. Flying lightning bugs that pollinate farms in space.

These aren’t just buzzy ideas, they’re becoming reality.

Robotic engineers are scouring the insect world for inspiration. Some are strapping 3D-printed sensors onto live Madagascar hissing cockroaches, while others are creating fully robotic bugs inspired by the ways insects move and fly.

Robotic engineers are scouring the insect world for inspiration, and creating machines that could be used for emergency response, farming and energy.

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face_with_colon_three circa 2021.

Think about where our energy comes from: drilling rigs and smokestacks, windmills and solar panels. Lithium-ion battery packs might even come to mind.

We probably don’t think about the farms that comprise over one-third of Earth’s total land area. But farms can also be an energy source. Barcelona-based battery company Bioo is generating electricity from the organic matter in soil and creating biological batteries that can power agricultural sensors, a growing 1.36 billion dollar global market.

Bioo’s tech eliminates the need for single-use chemical batteries, which have to be replaced frequently. The company will work with large players such as Bayer Crop Science to pilot its sensor tech on farms, while also experimenting with using bio-batteries to power lighting installations. Eventually, Bioo envisions a future where biology may even help power our largest cities.

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