LG’s solar business panel business joins the company’s smartphone business in the graveyard, with the latter business being canned last April as it could not compete with other smartphone brands in the market. Prior to the smartphone business closing shop, it had recorded 23 consecutive quarters of loss.
The decision was approved by the board of directors on Monday night, LG said.
LG’s solar panel production will start winding down next month, the company said, with the business to officially shut down at the end of June.
Tesla asks for help… SpaceX stacks… Elon Musk pays in Doge. It’s the free edition of Musk Reads #286.
And for our premium members — last week, you learned about Moon Bikes. This week, you will hear from author Jimmy Soni about what Musk’s earliest success reveals about his management style.
“They will be fine” — Elon Musk tweeted in response to a user wondering “How can I feel good about bringing kids into the world given climate change?” The real answer is much more complicated; the next few decades are fraught, and some children are already experiencing the worst of what climate change has to offer. Read more onInverse.
Last year’s figures marked the first time the market saw sustained, subsidy-free growth across residential, commercial and utility scale projects, according to trade body Solar Energy UK.
Space colonization requires us to better understand how Earth sustains us.
In the coming decades, space agencies from around the world will be venturing farther out into space than ever before. This includes returning to the Moon (perhaps to stay this time), exploring Mars, and maybe even establishing human settlements on both. Beyond that, there are even proposals for establishing habitats in space that could accommodate millions. These plans build on decades of planning that go back to the dawn of the Space Age. In some cases, the plans are inspired by proposals made over half a century prior to that. While these grand visions for space exploration and colonization present many challenges, they also inspire innovative solutions. In particular, missions to deep-space require fresh thinking about environmental control and life-support systems (ECLSS) that can provide self-sufficiency in terms of air, water, food, and protection from radiation and the dangers of space. These are essential since missions that take astronauts far from Earth cannot depend upon resupply missions from the surface to Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
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Creating sustainability in space means we need a better understanding of how Earth sustains us.
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.
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 hydrogen 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 fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources.”
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?”
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.
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\.
