Solar-powered balloons floating 20 kilometres above ground have recorded inaudible low-frequency signals that have so far not been traced back to any known source.
Category: sustainability – Page 249
The future of generative AI is niche, not generalized
The relentless hype surrounding generative AI in the past few months has been accompanied by equally loud anguish over the supposed perils — just look at the open letter calling for a pause in AI experiments. This tumult risks blinding us to more immediate risks — think sustainability and bias — and clouds our ability to appreciate the real value of these systems: not as generalist chatbots, but instead as a class of tools that can be applied to niche domains and offer novel ways of finding and exploring highly specific information.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The news that a dozen companies have developed ChatGPT plugins is a clear demonstration of the likely direction of travel. A “generalized” chatbot won’t do everything for you, but if you’re, say, Expedia, being able to offer customers a simple way to organize their travel plans is undeniably going to give you an edge in a marketplace where information discovery is so important.
Stellantis halts battery plant construction over dispute with Canadian govt
OTTAWA, May 15 (Reuters) — Automaker Stellantis (STLAM.MI) has stopped all construction at a more-than C$5 billion ($3.74 billion) electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant in Windsor, Canada, over a disagreement with the federal government about subsidies, a spokesperson for the company said on Monday.
“Effective immediately, all construction related to the battery module production on the Windsor site has stopped,” the spokesperson said.
Canada’s industry ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Galaxy’s Hottest Exoplanet: Alien Atmosphere Holds Rare Terbium Surprise
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The rare metal terbium has been found in an exoplanet.
An exoplanet (or extrasolar planet) is a planet that is located outside our Solar System, orbiting around a star other than the Sun. The first suspected scientific detection of an exoplanet occurred in 1988, with the first confirmation of detection coming in 1992.
Massive autonomous robot is 3 to 5 times faster than a human construction crew
The robot can drive heavy steal beams into the ground at a rate of 1 per 73 seconds, which will help expedite solar farm construction.
Musk hires new Twitter CEO to start role in roughly 6 weeks
Rumor has it that NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino is lined up to take the role.
Elon Musk is finally ready to let go of the CEO role at Twitter as he announced the appointment of a new CEO at the company. Musk will take on the role of the CTO and oversee product, software, and sysops, he said in a tweet.
Musk, who is also the CEO of other companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, has been under pressure to dedicate more time to these companies. The Tesla stock price dropped significantly after Musk took over Twitter in a $44 billion purchase last year.
Hydromea Wireless Underwater Drones
The Hydromea Exray wireless drone is an underwater drone that uses optics instead of cables for many effortless applications.
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Automating remote, inspection and monitoring of submerged assets.
CUT THE CORD
At Hydromea, they believe that the restrictive underwater robotics space requires a paradigm shift to help the rapidly growing Ocean Economy become greener, more sustainable agent on our planet and at a price point that is affordable and scalable.
Hydromea are convinced that investing in hardware and software technologies that allow us to CUT THE CORD is the necessary and much awaited step towards this direction. With that, we disrupt the underwater inspection and monitoring market, making it significantly more efficient and affordable, enabling unprecedented access to submerged assets, never available before. Join us and be a part of the underwater robotics revolution!
Integrated solar combined cycle system with steam methane reforming: Thermodynamic analysis
A transition to a carbon-free economy is the reality of the modern energy industry. Reduction in CO2 emission is one of the main challenge in energy engineering in the last decades. Renewable energy sources are playing an important role on the way to a zero-carbon economy [1,2]. Solar energy is one of the main and almost unlimited energy sources in the World. The different technologies of solar energy use have been developed in the last years [[3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]]. However, even though the progress in the development of solar energy technologies is notable, there are a lot of challenges for energy science. One of them is the fact that more than 60% of electricity is produced by conventional technologies via hydrocarbon fuel combustion: steam turbines, gas turbines, etc. While the share of electricity produced by using solar energy is no more than a few percent [9].
Among various ways of utilization of solar energy for electricity generation, a combination of solar energy with the traditional steam and gas turbine cycles can be highlighted. The power plants where solar energy is combined with conventional power cycles are named integrated solar combined cycle systems (ISCCS). In these systems, solar energy is used to produce heat and after that heat is used to generate mechanical work or electricity.
Combined cycle power plants (CCPP) show one of the highest energy efficiency among conventional power plants [10]. The modern cycles with high-temperature gas turbines have an efficiency up to 70% and even higher. In such cycles, the high-temperature gas turbines with the turbine inlet temperature (TIT) up to 1,600 °C are applied [11,12]. In the last years, a lot of various integrated solar combined cycle systems (ISCCS) were developed by various scientists and engineers. The main way to use solar energy in such cycles is a steam generation in CCPP [[13], [14], [15], [16]]. In other words, solar energy in such ISCCS is utilized as an energy source in a steam turbine cycle.
Aqueos Lithium-Ion Batteries Won’t Catch on Fire — So Why Aren’t They the EV Gold Standard?
An aqueous lithium-ion battery would be safer than the ones being used in EVs today. So why aren’t car companies switching to it?
In the meantime, aqueous Li-ion technology is finding niche uses where limited resilience and longevity are less of an issue such as for the military.
Aqueous Li-ion Recyclability
If the fire and explosion issues aren’t enough to give battery developers reasons to look at other improvements, recyclability to reduce pollution should be high on the list. An aqueous Li-ion battery eliminates the use of toxic materials that require invasive and destructive methods to mine and transform for manufacturing. The processes are currently so complex and expensive that recycling Li-ion batteries is largely not done by companies that use them in EVs and other devices. Only recently have specialized Li-ion recyclers emerged like Li-Cycle, a Canadian-based company that announced the building of a new European recycling hub a few days ago. Changing the technology to aqueous Li-ion would make the job of recycling companies and the reuse of the recovered materials far more attractive.