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Archive for the ‘sustainability’ category: Page 317

Mar 23, 2021

2021 SpaceRenaissance Webinar Series: Webinar on the Development of Mars, the Asteroids, and Beyond

Posted by in categories: space travel, sustainability

# **MARS: A GATEWAY TO THE SOLAR SYSTEM**

Today’s highlight: **Bruce MacKenzie**, founder of the Mars Foundation.

Continue reading “2021 SpaceRenaissance Webinar Series: Webinar on the Development of Mars, the Asteroids, and Beyond” »

Mar 22, 2021

The Battery That Will Finally Unlock Massless Energy Storage

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability, transportation

It could revolutionize electric vehicles and aircraft.


In groundbreaking new research, scientists have made a structural battery 10 times better than in any previous experiment.

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Mar 22, 2021

Elon Musk explains why Tesla would never share data with China *or* the U.S.

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, sustainability, transportation

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· Yes-t-e-r——day—— ————-at-10—:—3–3 A-M—— ·


Tesla’s Elon Musk said he sees too much risk for Tesla to engage in espionage. His words come after China barred its officials from using Tesla vehicles.

Mar 22, 2021

Yoav Landsman, Co-Founder, Moonscape — Sustainable And Responsible Lunar Services And Transportation

Posted by in categories: business, education, engineering, satellites, sustainability

Sustainable and responsible lunar services and transportation — yoav landsman, co-founder, moonscape.


Yoav Landsman is the Co-founder of Moonscape (https://www.moonscape.space/), a lunar services and payload transportation company, that is focused on providing necessary services like communication relay and cutting-edge imaging, while delivering payloads to the Moon.

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Mar 20, 2021

Munching maggots help Singapore startup secure lucrative biomaterial

Posted by in categories: food, sustainability

Working in conjunction with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Insectta’s technology uses a proprietary and environmentally friendly process to extract lucrative substances such as chitosan, melanin and probiotics from the larvae, it said.


SINGAPORE (Reuters) — In a quiet, mainly residential district of Singapore, trays of writhing black soldier fly larvae munch their way through hundreds of kilograms of food waste a day.

The protein-rich maggots can be sold for pet food or fertiliser, but at Insectta — a startup that says it is Singapore’s first urban insect farm — they are bred to extract biomaterials that can be used in pharmaceuticals and electronics.

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Mar 19, 2021

These biodegradable face masks turn into flowers when you plant them

Posted by in categories: food, sustainability

What a beautiful idea.


A woman from the Netherlands has come up with an innovative alternative design for a face mask. Marianne de Groot-Pons, a graphic designer living and working in Utrecht, has created 100% biodegradable masks made out of rice paper and embedded with flower seeds. Once you’ve gotten enough wear out of it, you simply plant the mask and wait for the flowers to grow.

What a lovely take on an object which has become a daily essential in our lives.

Continue reading “These biodegradable face masks turn into flowers when you plant them” »

Mar 18, 2021

New perovskite fabrication method for solar cells paves way to large-scale production

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, solar power, sustainability

A new, simpler solution process for fabricating stable perovskite solar cells overcomes the key bottleneck to large-scale production and commercialization of this promising renewable-energy technology, which has remained tantalizingly out of reach for more than a decade.

“Our work paves the way for low-cost, high-throughput commercial-scale production of large-scale solar modules in the near future,” said Wanyi Nie, a research scientist fellow in the Center of Integrated Nanotechnologies at Los Alamos National Laboratory and corresponding author of the paper, which was published today in the journal Joule. “We were able to demonstrate the approach through two mini-modules that reached champion levels of converting sunlight to power with greatly extended operational lifetimes. Since this process is facile and low cost, we believe it can be easily adapted to scalable fabrication in industrial settings.”

The team invented a one-step spin coating method using sulfolane, a liquid solvent. The new process allowed the team, a collaboration among Los Alamos and researchers from National Taiwan University (NTU), to produce high-yield, large-area photovoltaic devices that are highly efficient in creating power from sunlight. These perovskite also have a long operational lifetime.

Mar 17, 2021

New perovskite design shows path to higher efficiency

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

Restructuring the way perovskite solar cells are designed can boost their efficiency and increase their deployment in buildings and beyond, according to researchers with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Perovskite photovoltaic (PV) cells are made of layers of materials sandwiched together, with the top and bottom layers key to converting sunlight to electricity. The new for the cells increases the area exposed to the sun by putting the metal contact layers side-by-side on the back of the cell.

“Taking the materials on top away means you are going to have a higher theoretical efficiency because your perovskite is absorbing more of the sun,” said Lance Wheeler, a NREL scientist and lead author of a new paper, “Complementary interface formation toward high-efficiency all-back-contact .”

Mar 15, 2021

Twisting, flexible crystals key to solar energy production

Posted by in categories: chemistry, solar power, sustainability

Researchers at Duke University have revealed long-hidden molecular dynamics that provide desirable properties for solar energy and heat energy applications to an exciting class of materials called halide perovskites.

A key contributor to how these materials create and transport electricity literally hinges on the way their atomic lattice twists and turns in a hinge-like fashion. The results will help materials scientists in their quest to tailor the chemical recipes of these materials for a wide range of applications in an environmentally friendly way.

The results appear online March 15 in the journal Nature Materials.

Mar 15, 2021

Producing highly efficient LEDs based on 2D perovskite films

Posted by in categories: food, mobile phones, space, sustainability

Energy efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have been used in our everyday life for many decades. But the quest for better LEDs, offering both lower costs and brighter colors, has recently drawn scientists to a material called perovskite. A recent joint-research project co-led by the scientist from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has now developed a 2-D perovskite material for the most efficient LEDs.

From household lighting to mobile phone displays, from pinpoint lighting needed for endoscopy procedures, to light source to grow vegetables in Space, LEDs are everywhere. Yet current high-quality LEDs still need to be processed at high temperatures and using elaborated deposition technologies—which makes their production cost expensive.

Scientists have recently realized that —semiconductor materials with the same structure as calcium titanate mineral, but with another elemental composition—are extremely promising candidate for next generation LEDs. These perovskites can be processed into LEDs from solution at room temperature, thus largely reducing their production cost. Yet the electro-luminescence performance of perovskites in LEDs still has a room for improvements.