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Category: sustainability – Page 246

New electric boat motor uses wind and water to recharge its batteries at sea

It may not offer infinite range, but it’s close. The new Oceanvolt ServoProp saildrive has a regeneration feature that efficiently charges up an electric boat’s batteries while sailing.

Many people think of sailboats as being purely wind powered. While smaller sailboats usually are, most decently sized sailboats have a motor for maneuvering in a marina or when the winds die down.

Saildrive motors are an innovative propulsion system commonly found on modern sailboats, offering a compact and efficient alternative to traditional shaft-driven inboard engines.

China’s space agency reportedly tested a Stirling converter in orbit

Stirling converters could allow deep space missions to massively reduce their reliance on potentially scarce solar energy.

China’s Shenzhou-15 mission crew aboard the China Space Station (CSS) has reportedly completed testing on a free-piston Stirling thermoelectric converter, according to a report from state-owned media in China.

NASA and China have both experimented with Stirling converters.

Gremlin/iStock.

The successful test marks the first time China has verified this type of technology in orbit. The experimental technology, which NASA has also investigated, has the potential to provide crucial backup energy to deep space missions.

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Tesla teases 3 next-gen vehicles, each in different segments

The idea of a Tesla makes sense now that the company has started manufacturing and delivering its heavy-duty battery electric truck: the Semi. The Tesla Semi’s availability on the market hints that Tesla has solved certain constraints—including battery constraint issues—that prevented it from delivering heavy-duty vehicles.

In its Master Plan Part 3, Tesla notes that its electric bus will use 300 kWh battery packs using LFP cells.

Tesla’s Master Plan Part 3 teases a new direction for the company with its next-generation platform. Tesla’s new adventure will likely feature some challenging obstacles and more meme-worthy moments from Elon Musk. And more fun for Tesla investors and supporters.

China and the US are Going to the Moon

Bootprints have not been left on the Moon since the early 1970s, but that will soon change. With NASA’s Artemis and China’s CLEP programs both scheduled to return humans to the Moon before 2030, the two superpowers are apparently in a “race” to the Lunar surface. But this time, who gets there “first” matters little. Instead, this race is about building a sustainable human presence on the Moon.

Here is how China’s and America’s approaches differ, and what it means for the future of spaceflight and human progress.

A comparison of the hardware China and the US are developing to return humans to the Moon.

The Synaptic Extracellular Matrix: Long-Lived, Stable, and Still Remarkably Dynamic

In the adult brain, synapses are tightly enwrapped by lattices of the extracellular matrix that consist of extremely long-lived molecules. These lattices are deemed to stabilize synapses, restrict the reorganization of their transmission machinery, and prevent them from undergoing structural or morphological changes. At the same time, they are expected to retain some degree of flexibility to permit occasional events of synaptic plasticity. The recent understanding that structural changes to synapses are significantly more frequent than previously assumed (occurring even on a timescale of minutes) has called for a mechanism that allows continual and energy-efficient remodeling of the extracellular matrix (ECM) at synapses. Here, we review recent evidence for such a process based on the constitutive recycling of synaptic ECM molecules. We discuss the key characteristics of this mechanism, focusing on its roles in mediating synaptic transmission and plasticity, and speculate on additional potential functions in neuronal signaling.

An increasing number of studies are showing that synaptic function is strongly influenced by their local environment, including the molecules or cellular components in their vicinity. As a result, the classical synaptic framework (consisting of the pre-and postsynaptic compartments only) has gradually been extended to include the neighboring astrocytic processes (the “tripartite synapse”; Araque et al., 1999) and, ultimately, also the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM; the “tetrapartite synapse”; Dityatev et al., 2006). Nowadays, the synaptic ECM is recognized to play an essential role in physiological synaptic transmission as well as in plasticity, and its dysregulation has been linked to synaptopathies in a wide variety of brain disorders (Bonneh-Barkay and Wiley, 2009; Pantazopoulos and Berretta, 2016; Ferrer-Ferrer and Dityatev, 2018).

THE FIRST 2 YEARS ON MARS (Prequel) Timelapse

10 SpaceX Starships are carrying 120 robots to Mars. They are the first to colonize the Red Planet. Building robot habitats to protect themselves, and then landing pads, structures, and the life support systems for the humans who will soon arrive.

This Mars colonization mini documentary also covers they type of robots that will be building on Mars, the solar fields, how Elon Musk and Tesla could have a battery bank station at the Mars colony, and how the Martian colony expands during the 2 years when the robots are building. Known as the Robotic Age of Mars.

Additional footage from: SpaceX, NASA/JPL/University of Arizona, ICON, HASSEL, Tesla, Lockhead Martin.

A building on Mars sci-fi documentary, and a timelapse look into the future.
See more of Venture City at my website: https://vx-c.com.

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Books.

• The Martian book showcases the science, math, and physics of living on the red planet — told through the story of someone who has to survive there.

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Colloids get creative to pave the way for next generation photonics

Scientists have devised a way of fabricating a complex structure, previously found only in nature, to open up new ways for manipulating and controlling light.

The structure, which naturally occurs in the wing scales of some species of butterfly, can function as a photonic crystal, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Birmingham. It can be used to control light in the visible range of the spectrum, for applications for lasers, sensors, and also devices for harvesting solar energy.

Their computational study, published in Advanced Materials, demonstrates that the complex gyroid structure can be self-assembled from designer in the range of hundreds of nanometers.

Would building a Dyson sphere be worth it? We ran the numbers

In 1960, visionary physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that an advanced alien civilization would someday quit fooling around with kindergarten-level stuff like wind turbines and nuclear reactors and finally go big, completely enclosing their home star to capture as much solar energy as they possibly could. They would then go on to use that enormous amount of energy to mine bitcoin, make funny videos on social media, delve into the deepest mysteries of the Universe, and enjoy the bounties of their energy-rich civilization.

But what if the alien civilization was… us? What if we decided to build a Dyson sphere around our sun? Could we do it? How much energy would it cost us to rearrange our solar system, and how long would it take to get our investment back? Before we put too much thought into whether humanity is capable of this amazing feat, even theoretically, we should decide if it’s worth the effort. Can we actually achieve a net gain in energy by building a Dyson sphere?

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