Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: sustainability – Page 321

Circa 2017

(Inside Science) — On the fictional Star Wars planet Tatooine, moisture farmers erect tall white structures called vaporators to pull valuable water from the desert air. Now researchers on planet Earth have built a device to perform the same basic task. They estimate a suitcase-sized version could harvest enough drinking water per day for a family of four. The device is described in a paper published in the journal Science.

The team, made up of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, expects the device to be most useful in arid regions and in areas where the traditional water supply is polluted. The system relies on the unique properties of a relatively new type of material called a metal organic framework, or MOF.

MOFs were originally created in the mid-1990s by stitching together metal clusters and organic, or carbon-containing, molecules to form a fine porous structure. The tiny pores help the materials absorb large amounts of liquids or gases.

Read more | >

Fraunhofer ISE has developed a process for recycling the silicon in old solar panels.

The big knock on new technology like electric cars and solar panels is that they are not recyclable. People haven’t cared a flying fig leaf about recycling stuff for the past 100 years. If they did, citizens would be at the gates of the corporate headquarters of Nestlé, Coca Cola, and Pepsi with flaming torches and pitchforks demanding they stop inundating the Earth with their endless profusion of waste products.

But suddenly, people are all atwitter about what will happen to the batteries of electric cars. Fearmongers on the internet are telling people they will have to drive their old electric cars into lakes and rivers when they stop working. The amazing thing is, people believe that codswallop and repeat it to their friends as if it were carved on the stone tablets Moses brought down with him when he descended the mountain. So much for public education making people smarter.

Another cry you hear from the anti-technology crowd is that millions of old solar panels will be dumped into landfills to fester for centuries. Horse-puckey! Do we need a way to recycle solar panels? Yes, we do. And are responsible adults working on such systems as we speak? Yes, they are. Calm down, people. Everything you read on Twitter or Facebook is not gospel. And let’s not get started on the deliberate misinformation spewed by the talking heads on Faux News 24 hours a day.

Read more | >

The strongest part of a tree lies not in its trunk or its sprawling roots, but in the walls of its microscopic cells.

A single wood cell wall is constructed from fibers of cellulose—nature’s most abundant polymer, and the main structural component of all plants and algae. Within each fiber are reinforcing , or CNCs, which are chains of organic polymers arranged in nearly perfect crystal patterns. At the nanoscale, CNCs are stronger and stiffer than Kevlar. If the crystals could be worked into materials in significant fractions, CNCs could be a route to stronger, more sustainable, naturally derived plastics.

Now, an MIT team has engineered a composite made mostly from cellulose nanocrystals mixed with a bit of synthetic polymer. The organic crystals take up about 60 to 90 percent of the material—the highest fraction of CNCs achieved in a composite to date.

Read more | >

In its Series E financing round, Plenty Unlimited secured $400 million – the largest investment to date for an indoor farming company. In addition to Walmart and existing investor SoftBank, new partners One Madison Group and JS Capital also participated in the round.

Plenty Unlimited will use this funding to support its growth strategy, including leveraging its technology platform to sell multi-crop farms directly to partners.

“The indoor farming sector is at an exciting inflection point, poised to reach its full potential as a new asset class that addresses the significant need to provide access to fresh, nutritious food year-round, even in geographies where traditional farming is difficult,” said Omar Asali, Chairman and CEO of One Madison Group. “Plenty has truly ‘cracked the code’ on the technology and economics of indoor farming. It has developed an innovative and scalable model that can deliver fresh, sustainable produce to retailers, growers and governments anywhere in the world.”

Read more | >

Autonomous, electric vehicles are driving around Yellowstone National Park in a new test program that could become a permanent mode of transportation.

Last week, the park debuted its new “TEDDY” program — or The Electronic Driverless Demonstration in Yellowstone.

“As visitation continues increasing in Yellowstone, we are looking at a range of visitor management actions that focus on protecting resources, improving the visitor experience, and reducing congestion, noise, and pollution,” Superintendent Cam Sholly said in a statement. “Shuttles will unquestionably play a key role in helping achieve these goals in many of the busiest areas of the park.”

Read more | >

Swedish power company Vattenfall has announced plans to embark on further research into whether painting one of the three blades on a wind turbine black can help to reduce the number of bird collisions, with a new three-year study.

Despite stories spread by some media outlets and across social media platforms, wind turbines have been shown to be much less likely to kill birds compared to other man-made obstacles and threats, including coal-fired power plants, as one prime example.

Nevertheless, Vattenfall is seeking to mitigate the impact wind turbines can have on bird populations through a new study in the Dutch seaport of Eemshaven.

Read more | >

An EV may be your next tow vehicle — and the options just keep getting better.

If you’re looking for the best EV for towing a trailer or boat, you’re in luck. There are more electrified cars and trucks available in the automotive marketplace today than ever before, and quite a few are engineered to tow some substantial weight.

A complete compendium of those EVs offering maximum trailer weight ratings of at least 1,500 pounds could go on forever. You don’t have forever, so we rounded up a representative group of the electric vehicles available today that offer maximum trailer weight ratings ranging from 1,500 to 10,000-plus pounds. One of these smart and powerful EVs just might be your best EV that can tow.

Read more | >