Thawing permafrost threatens to undermine the supports holding up an elevated section of the pipeline, jeopardizing its structural integrity and raising the potential of an oil spill in a delicate and remote landscape.
A new laser that generates quantum particles can recycle lost energy for highly efficient, low threshold laser applications.
Scientists at KAIST have fabricated a laser system that generates highly interactive quantum particles at room temperature. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Photonics, could lead to a single microcavity laser system that requires lower threshold energy as its energy loss increases.
The system, developed by KAIST physicist Yong-Hoon Cho and colleagues, involves shining light through a single hexagonal-shaped microcavity treated with a loss-modulated silicon nitride substrate. The system design leads to the generation of a polariton laser at room temperature, which is exciting because this usually requires cryogenic temperatures.
A new pizzeria, called Pazzi, is staffed entirely by robots, which can handle everything from order-taking to prepping the dough, to boxing the finished meal.
The restaurant, found in the Beaubourg area of Paris, has taken eight years of research and development. Its creators are two inventors, Cyril Hamon and Sébastien Roverso – both passionate about robotics and electronics since childhood – who began designing the machines in a family garage. Their goal has been to reinvent the fast food experience with a fully automated system that is more convenient and empowering to customers, while maintaining the same or better quality food as conventional restaurants and also being environmentally sustainable.
Pazzi builds on the success of a pilot, tested at the Val d’Europe shopping centre in 2019. The 120m² establishment is more visible and centrally located than that earlier demonstration, being opposite the famous Pompidou centre, benefiting from a high attendance.
Adding absorbent nanoparticles to polymer membranes simplifies desalination.
University of California, Berkeley, chemists have discovered a way to simplify the removal of toxic metals. like mercury and boron. during desalination to produce clean water, while at the same time potentially capturing valuable metals, such as gold.
Desalination — the removal of salt — is only one step in the process of producing drinkable water, or water for agriculture or industry, from ocean or waste water. Either before or after the removal of salt, the water often has to be treated to remove boron, which is toxic to plants, and heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, which are toxic to humans. Often, the process leaves behind a toxic brine that can be difficult to dispose of.
Transportable tiny homes are complex operations, to say the least. Designing them to be sustainable makes building them that much more of an intricate process. First Light Studio, a New Zealand-based architecture group built their own tiny home with help from a local company Build Tiny, Ohariu, checking all of the above boxes. Built to be net-zero through several sustainable features and compact enough to meet all NZTA regulations for mobile homes.
Ohariu was built by First Light Studio and Build Tiny from a client’s brief calling for, “a refined tramping lodge on wheels.” That’s code for hiking, for all us Americans. Since the tiny home would primarily be used for hiking trips and traveling throughout the outdoors, Ohariu was built to be adaptable and versatile above all else. Inside, the living spaces are described by the architects at First Light Studio as being, “more a large and very detailed piece of furniture than a traditional house build, the fit-out [focusing] on the things that are important and necessary.”
Catering to the necessities and casual family pastimes, the tiny home is doused in modular and multifunctional design that’s surrounded by creamy poplar plywood walls and silvery fittings that add a touch of refinement to an otherwise bare interior. Each furniture piece inside Ohariu doubles as storage to maintain an open, clutter-free interior where the tiny home’s family would bond over pastimes like cooking, playing card games, and enjoying the surrounding landscape. Featuring a chef’s kitchen, Ohariu comes with plenty of prep space for cooking and integrates tilt-up tabletops to make even more for when there’s company. Outside, Ohariu is coated in a stealthy ebony corrugate to match its lightweight mobility, supported by aluminum joinery, lights, and utilities that were given the same ebony finish. Ohariu’s roof is asymmetrical with six solar panels lined up on its longer side and a mezzanine bedroom cozying up beneath its sloped short side.
The toilet could turn roughly a pound of solid human waste, the average amount a human poops in a day, into an impressive 50 liters of methane gas, according to Cho. That means it can generate half a kilowatt hour of electricity, enough to drive an electric car for three quarters of a mile.
And because its 2021 — a day and age in which nothing is safe from the world of cryptocurrencies — Cho came up with a virtual currency called Ggool, or “honey” in Korean. Every use of the toilet scores you 10 Ggool per day, which can be used to buy stuff on the university’s campus.
“I had only ever thought that feces are dirty, but now it is a treasure of great value to me,” a postgraduate student Heo Hui-jin who’s both earned and spent Ggool, told Reuters. “I even talk about feces during mealtimes to think about buying any book I want.”
The smart farm: To show just how much these technologies could help farmers, CSU and Food Agility have partnered to create the Global Digital Farm (GDF).
The smart farm will be built at CSU’s Wagga Wagga campus, and it will feature autonomous tractors, harvesters, and other farming robots, as well as AI programs designed to help with farm management and more.
Teachable moments: The plan isn’t for the GDF to simply demonstrate what a smart farm can look like — CSU and Food Agility want to use it to teach Australia’s farmers how to take advantage of all the tech that will be on display.
A new DIY robot called PetBot is a unique development that will help to recycle ordinary plastic bottles. The process is not yet fully automated, and the device does not claim to be used for commercial purposes, but the benefits of its operation are obvious. Built by JRT3D, the PetBot automates the plastic recycling process by cutting PET bottles into the tape and then turning them into filament. The robot combines several mechanics, each of which performs its part of the task. It carries out the two separate processes at the same time using the same stepper motor.
The machine automates the plastic recycling process by cutting PET bottles and turning them into filament.
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=aiRLejymIn8
When asked if Tesla is a threat to the oil and gas industry, he said he didn’t really think so. Then he paused, thought a bit, and added “Yet.”
Safe and readily available water is important for public health, whether it is used for drinking, domestic use, food production, or recreational purposes. Despite the vast quantity of water on Earth, just 2.5% of it is freshwater, and an estimated 785 million people lack a clean source of drinking water. Desalination of seawater could be a vital technology to meet the world’s drinking water needs.
Now, Korean engineers have developed a new desalination technique that takes just minutes to make seawater drinkable. They used a new nanofiber membrane distillation process that could desalinate water with 99.99% efficiency. Engineers believe that commercializing such technology could help humankind cope with the shortage of fresh drinking water in the future.
Amongst the most challenging issues in membrane distillation is membrane wetting that causes the pollution of permeate, reduction in vapor production, and finally, reduction in the performance of the membrane. If a membrane exhibits wetting during membrane distillation operation, the membrane must be replaced.
