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Category: sustainability – Page 259

Alphabet X graduates robotic agtech firm Mineral

A little over two years after its public debut, Mineral is becoming its own Alphabet company. The team, which was formerly known as the “Computational Agriculture Project” (no prizes for guessing why they adopted the new name), just graduated from the X “moonshot” labs.

“After five years incubating our technology at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, Mineral is now an Alphabet company,” CEO Elliott Grant said in a blog post. “Our mission is to help scale sustainable agriculture. We’re doing this by developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world — and make it useful and actionable.”

Years after attempting to build a robotics division largely through acquisition, Alphabet appears to be growing one more organically in-house. Mineral follows Everyday Robots and Intrinsic in growing from X to a fully released Alphabet subsidiary.

In a first, the U.S. unveils plans to decarbonize its entire transportation sector

“The domestic transportation sector presents an enormous opportunity to drastically reduce emissions that accelerate climate change and reduce harmful pollution.”

In what can be hailed a significant and impactful move, the U.S. Department of Energy, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency released a Blueprint on how to decarbonize the entire U.S. transport system. The strategy is hoped to cut all greenhouse emissions from the transportation sector by 2050.

The Biden administration unveiled a comprehensive blueprint for decarbonizing the transportation sector, which accounts for the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

This new battery backup system can power your house during a blackout

Worried about a blackout during extreme weather? San Francisco-based EcoFlow Tech offers a battery backup system that can now power your home for an entire week and this includes heavy appliances like washing machines, coffee machines, and hairdryers too. The system is completely portable and can also be used to power your RV during an off-road trip.

Energy solutions such as Tesla Powerwall, which can be recharged using energy from sunlight but EcoFlow Tech is taking it a step further by delivering a power backup system that is entirely portable.

In a first, a solar-powered reactor converted plastic and greenhouse gases into sustainable fuels

Under normal temperature and pressure conditions, the reactor could efficiently convert plastic bottles and CO2 into CO, syngas, and glycolic acid.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge developed a first-of-its-kind system that can simultaneously convert plastic waste and greenhouse gases into two chemical products by drawing energy from the sun.

The results are reported in the journal Nature Synthesis.

Onurdongel/iStock.

In a solar-powered reactor, carbon dioxide (CO2) and plastics are converted into sustainable fuels and valuable products used in various industries.

Samsung’s new washing systems can help cut microplastic emissions

The brand’s Less Microfiber Cycle comes with a new filter.

Aiming to bring about a new era of sustainable living, Samsung has unveiled new innovations in washing technology that helps to reduce microplastic emissions from washers at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2023, which concluded in Las Vegas.

A typical cycle in a washing machine produces shreds of microplastics due to the friction between the clothes and the tumbler. The microplastics generated are often drained out into water bodies, resulting in pollution that can cause harm to both humans and animals in the long run.

Two-thirds of the glaciers will be melted by 2100, study indicates

The study was conducted by inspecting 215,000 land-based glaciers worldwide.

Climate change is a primal environmental problem of our century, and it’s getting worse day by day. The melting of glaciers increases the temperatures on the Earth and causes extreme cold. According to new research, glaciers melt faster than we thought. Apparently, two-thirds of glaciers on track will be disappeared by 2100, researchers say.

As reported by Phys.

Halbergman/iStock.

Published on January 5 in Science, the study looked at the 215,000 land-based glaciers worldwide. They also utilized computer simulations to estimate how many glaciers would vanish, how much ice would melt, and how much it would contribute to sea level rise under various warmer scenarios.

Ohio-based startup’s e-bikes come with swappable batteries

They can be your power source on the go.

A startup named LAND Energy offers its customers something that most companies don’t. The option to swap the batteries on the vehicle, keeping the vehicle brand new even as technology improves over the years.

Unlike gas-powered vehicles, where the engine is the core of the machine, the battery pack on an electric vehicle (EV) is where the most advanced technology lies. With the EV industry still in its infancy, we can surely expect technology to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years, and that means that the vehicle you buy now could likely be obsolete.

LAND Energy.

A Bayesian machine based on memristors

Over the past few decades, the performance of machine learning models on various real-world tasks has improved significantly. Training and implementing most of these models, however, still requires vast amounts of energy and computational power.

Engineers worldwide have thus been trying to develop alternative hardware solutions that can run artificial intelligence models more efficiently, as this could promote their widespread use and increase their sustainability. Some of these solutions are based on memristors, memory devices that can store information without consuming .

Researchers at Université Paris-Saclay-CNRS, Université Grenoble-Alpes-CEA-LETI, HawAI.tech, Sorbonne Université, and Aix-Marseille Université-CNRS have recently created a so-called Bayesian machine (i.e., an AI approach that performs computations based on Bayes’ theorem), using memristors. Their proposed system, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was found to be significantly more energy-efficient than currently employed hardware solutions.

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