The copper fangs of these feisty marine worms could inspire future sustainable manufacturing processes.
Category: sustainability – Page 302
Israel is a desert, and water resources are scarce, but today it produces 20% more water than it needs. What can the world learn from Israel’s experience?
That’s 25 times faster, at 80 percent the cost of conventional means.
Combating climate change and biodiversity loss is a complicated matter, causing prolonged and perhaps tedious conversations. But what if there was a cooler way to achieve all that?
Enter Australian start-up AirSeed Technology and their swarms of seed-firing drones that are planting 40,000 trees a day to fight deforestation. The company and its incredible technology were featured Wednesday on * Euro Green News*. drone that can plant 40,000 trees a day could be essential in fighting deforestation.
Circa 2021
With SpaceX continuing the testing phase for Starship and enthusiasm spreading for an actual crewed flight to Mars, an interesting magnetic thrust rocket concept conceived by physicist Fatima Ebrahimi at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) might make the mission much more cost effective.
The feasibility of safe, sustainable propulsion systems that will outperform traditional chemical-based rocket engines on deep space voyages, not only in our own solar system but someday perhaps to a distant galaxy outside the Milky Way, is foremost on astrophysicists’ minds.
Ion thrusters, once the standard mode of acceleration for imaginative sci-fi authors and now the preferred positioning engine for NASA scientists and engineers in their satellites, might have greater endurance and are a lot cheaper to operate but generate a minuscule amount of thrust for acceleration purposes. This isn’t exactly a viable option for a trip to the Red Planet where hundreds of tons of spacecraft are being moved across the heavens.
Drones with ion drive. now if could rig it up with indefinite batteries and solar power skin and a tesla wave receiver system.
Undefined Technologies has revealed the new design of its ion drone MIAMI, APRIL 18, 2022 – Undefined Technologies, a Florida-based tech startup, has unveiled the new aesthetic design of its silent eVTOL drone powered by ion propulsion. The concept vehicle named “Silent Ventus™” uses proprietary technology to fully use the ion cloud surrounding the craft to generate high levels of ion thrust in atmospheric air. “Silent Ventus™ is a vivid example of our intent of creating a sustainable, progressive, and less-noisy urban environment,” says Tomas Pribanic, Founder and CEO of Undefined Technologies. “The design brings us closer to our final product and enables us to showcase the dual-use of our technology.”
The idea of deploying enzymes to break down plastic waste is gaining momentum through a string of breakthroughs demonstrating how they can do so with increasing efficiency, and even reduce the material to simple molecules. A new study marks yet another step forward, with scientists leveraging machine learning to engineer an enzyme that degrades some forms of plastic in just 24 hours, with a stability that makes it well-suited to large-scale adoption.
Scientists have been exploring the potential of enzymes to aid in plastics recycling for more than a decade, but the last six years or so has seen some significant advances. In 2016, researchers in Japan unearthed a bacterium that used enzymes to break down PET plastics in a matter of weeks. An engineered version of these enzymes, dubbed PETase, improved the performance further, and in 2020 we saw scientists develop an even more powerful version that digested PET plastics at six times the speed.
A team at the University of Texas set out to address some of the shortcomings of these enzymes so far. According to the scientists, the application of the technology has been held back by an inability to function well at low temperatures and different pH ranges, lack of effectiveness directly tackling untreated plastic waste, and slow reaction rates.