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Category: sustainability – Page 316

Successfully achieving nuclear fusion holds the promise of delivering a limitless, sustainable source of clean energy, but we can only realize this incredible dream if we can master the complex physics taking place inside the reactor.

For decades, scientists have been taking incremental steps towards this goal, but many challenges remain. One of the core obstacles is successfully controlling the unstable and super-heated plasma in the reactor – but a new approach reveals how we can do this.

In a joint effort by EPFL’s Swiss Plasma Center (SPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) research company DeepMind, scientists used a deep reinforcement learning (RL) system to study the nuances of plasma behavior and control inside a fusion tokamak – a donut-shaped device that uses a series of magnetic coils placed around the reactor to control and manipulate the plasma inside it.

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Cornell chemists have discovered a class of nonprecious metal derivatives that can catalyze fuel cell reactions about as well as platinum, at a fraction of the cost.

This finding brings closer a future where fuel cells efficiently power cars, generators and even spacecraft with minimal greenhouse gas emissions.

“These less expensive metals will enable wider deployment of hydrogen fuel cells,” said Héctor D. Abruña, the Émile M. Chamot Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “They will push us away from and toward .”

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Award Helps Move Cost-Effective, Productive, Robust Wave Energy Design a Step Closer to Commercialization and Widespread Use

In 1974, Stephen Salter, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, sent his “ducks” into the Scottish seas, launching the world’s first major wave energy project. But the ocean’s rough heaves and surges proved too much for his house-sized, floating generators. Like the more recent Pelamis’ P-750 model and Aquamarine’s Oysters, they succumbed to the power they were meant to harness.

“We have to ask ourselves,” said Krish Thiagarajan Sharman, the endowed chair in renewable energy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, “why have we been working on this for so long? Why don’t we have grid-ready, commercial-scale wave energy systems out in the world?”

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Soft sensing technologies have the potential to revolutionize wearable devices, haptic interfaces, and robotic systems. However, most soft sensing technologies aren’t durable and consume high amounts of energy.

Now, researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed self-healing, biodegradable, 3D-printed materials that could be used in the development of realistic artificial hands and other soft robotics applications. The low-cost jelly-like materials can sense strain, temperature, and humidity. And unlike earlier self-healing robots, they can also partially repair themselves at room temperature.

“Incorporating soft sensors into robotics allows us to get a lot more information from them, like how strain on our muscles allows our brains to get information about the state of our bodies,” said David Hardman from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering the paper’s first author.

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In a way, it could mean climate change is linked to an “immature technosphere”.

It’s called an epiphenomenon.

The idea is that the ordinary function of one thing can generate a secondary effect that seems unrelated and beyond its scope of influence. And when it comes to the interconnected systems of the Earth, we see it all the time.

Plants, for example, found their way via evolution to photosynthesis, which greatly improved their survival. But it also led to them releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, and that changed everything: One form of life seeded a planet-wide transformation, just by pursuing its own nature.

But, if the totality of life (called a biosphere) can radically reshape the Earth, some scientists speculate that cognition — and cognition-related actions — might exhibit the same effect.

This is the “thought experiment” of a group of scientists who blended empirical knowledge of the Earth with more generic ideas about how life changes worlds. And, in the * International Journal of Astrobiology*, they explored the possibility of a “planetary intelligence\.

Continue reading “Can a planet “think”? The bold idea gets new backing” | >

Elon Musk’s The Boring Company has submitted a proposal to construct a 6.2-mile underground transit system in Miami, Insider can reveal.

The North Miami Beach Loop would ferry Tesla vehicles between seven stations along State Road 826, between the Golden Glades Transit Center and Sunny Isles Beach at Newport Pier, according to the proposal, seen by Insider.

The Boring Company estimated that the loop would initially be able to carry more than 7,500 passengers per hour, and could be scaled to carry more than 15,000 per hour.

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Tesla has announced that it has produced 1 million of its next-generation 4,680 battery cell at its pilot factory in California.

The announcement comes as Tesla is expected to start deliveries of its new Model Y equipped with its 4,680 cell and structural battery pack.

In 2020, Tesla unveiled its new 4,680 battery cell, a new tabless cylindrical cell in a much bigger format that the company claimed produces six times the power and five times the energy capacity while significantly reducing the cost.

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Researchers have developed self-healing, biodegradable, 3D-printed materials that could be used in the development of realistic artificial hands and other soft robotics applications.

The low-cost jelly-like materials, developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, can sense strain, temperature and humidity. And unlike earlier robots, they can also partially repair themselves at room temperature.

The results are reported in the journal NPG Asia Materials.

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Also read: IIT delhi built solar panels that track sun’s movement to generate more electricity.

However, now an engineer from the Philippines has developed a new kind of solar panel that doesn’t really need sunlight to generate electricity. At least not directly.

Developed by Carvey Ehren Maigue, a student at Mapua University in the Philippines, the novel solar panels (called AuRES) are designed to feed off the UV rays of the sun — something that even dense cloudy days cannot block.

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