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Category: sustainability – Page 383

Toyota’s first car in its new Beyond Zero brand will be the bZ4X electric SUV. Look for it before the end of 2022.

Car companies love to create new brands. The Japanese Big Three gave us Lexus, Infiniti, and Acura 30+ years ago when they wanted to go upmarket with high profit premium cars. People who would never consider dropping $30000 on a Toyota were happy to spend double that on a Lexus. Such is the power of branding.

In the electric car era, several companies have have created new brands for their battery powered cars. Mercedes has its EQ division, Volkswagen its ID branded cars, BMW uses a simple “i,” while Hyundai is employing the Ioniq moniker for its battery electric cars. While all those companies have been ramping up EV offerings, Toyota has been largely content to hang out in the background and sell variations of its Synergy hybrid powertrain, cars it often misleadingly characterizes as “self charging electric cars.”

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Pretty soon, you’ll start seeing this term on very expensive items.

New Material Absorbs and Stores Solar Energy ‘The light that is thus trapped can be released by making a small spark near the glass.’ — L. Sprague de Camp, 1940.

3D Printed Damascus Steel Now Possible ‘… lined with durite, that strange close-packed laboratory product.’ — Robert Heinlein, 1939.

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Engineers at Duke University have developed the world’s first fully recyclable printed electronics. Their recycling process recovers nearly 100% of the materials used—and preserves most of their performance capabilities for reuse.

By demonstrating a crucial and relatively complex computer component—the transistor—created with three carbon-based inks, the researchers hope to inspire a new generation of recyclable electronics.

“Silicon-based computer components are probably never going away, and we don’t expect easily recyclable electronics like ours to replace the technology and devices that are already widely used,” said Aaron Franklin, the Addy Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke. “But we hope that by creating new, fully recyclable, easily printed electronics and showing what they can do, that they might become widely used in future applications.”

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EcoTech Recycling’s patented thermodynamic process turns waste rubber into a nontoxic synthetic material for new tires, auto parts and insulation.

If you’ve ever seen a tire graveyard piled high with trashed rubber, you can easily understand that Israeli company EcoTech Recycling has a green gem of an idea.

EcoTech’s nontoxic process produces a unique material, Active Rubber (AR), from end-of-life tires. With1.6 billion tires manufactured annually, and 290 million tires discarded each year in the United States alone, tires are the world’s largest source of waste rubber.

“Rubber is a valuable commodity, and we are making it reusable,” says CEO and President Gideon Drori.

Continue reading “Here’s a cool green way to upcycle millions of old tires” | >

Have you seen those plant trees instead of go to space memes recently? Well, aside from believing we can do both, I wanted to remind people what great things we use everyday due to the technological developments that the space race has spawned. Not least, the monitoring of illegal deforestation, but right through to better baby food, cleaner water and incredible digital cameras!! But that is not all, so here is my Top 10 technologies, that we have the space industry to thank for…

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We have everything we need here Especially in Texas no one ever needs to freeze again if they come out of the Fossil Fuel stone age.

The idea is that when electric vehicles are not in use, the energy stored in their batteries is going to waste. If you make it possible for that energy to feed back into the grid, then it can help balance out dips in supply as renewables go offline, rather than relying on fossil-fuel plants to pick up the slack.

The technology that can make that happen is still in its infancy, though. When an electric vehicle is charged, the alternating current from the grid is converted to direct current that can be stored in its batteries. But most charging stations and cars don’t have the hardware to allow this process to run in reverse, meaning the power can’t be fed back into the grid.

That’s starting to change, though, and a city in the Netherlands is leading the charge. In the last two years Utrecht has installed nearly 500 bi-directional charging stations and is positioning itself as one of the world’s leading test beds for the technology.

Continue reading “A Small Dutch City Is Using Electric Cars to Feed the Grid” | >

For the first time, a spacecraft on another planet has recorded the sounds of a separate spacecraft. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used one of its two microphones to listen as the Ingenuity helicopter flew for the fourth time on April 30, 2021. A new video combines footage of the solar-powered helicopter taken by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z imager with audio from a microphone belonging to the rover’s SuperCam laser instrument.

The laser zaps rocks from a distance, studying their vapor with a spectrometer to reveal their chemical composition. The instrument’s records the sounds of those laser strikes, which provide information on the physical properties of the targets, such as their relative hardness. The microphone can also record , like the Martian wind.

With Perseverance parked 262 feet (80 meters) from the helicopter’s takeoff and landing spot, the rover mission wasn’t sure if the microphone would pick up any sound of the flight. Even during flight, when the helicopter’s blades spin at 2537 rpm, the sound is greatly muffled by the thin Martian atmosphere. It is further obscured by Martian wind gusts during the initial moments of the flight. Listen closely, though, and the helicopter’s hum can be heard faintly above the sound of those winds.

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In the last decade, lab-grown meat has emerged a sustainable alternative to traditional livestock methods. Livestock strain Earth’s land resources and account for about 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. But while scientists can grow thin sheets of cow meat and scrape it together to form a patty, people eat with their eyes as much as their mouths. For lab-grown meat to replace a fresh steak, it needs to look like a steak.

Growing lab-based meat into 3D structures is difficult because it needs constant delivery of oxygen and nutrients. In living organisms, vascular systems fill that need. Researchers at Boston College previously showed that skeletonized spinach leaves, stripped of everything but their veiny, oxygen-dispersing, vascular system, can support patches of heart muscle cells. Now, they show that lab-grown meat can grow on skeletonized spinach, an essential step to growing steak-shaped meat in the lab.

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A research team from Brown University has made a major step toward improving the long-term reliability of perovskite solar cells, an emerging clean energy technology. In a study to be published on Friday, May 7 in the journal Science, the team demonstrates a “molecular glue” that keeps a key interface inside cells from degrading. The treatment dramatically increases cells’ stability and reliability over time, while also improving the efficiency with which they convert sunlight into electricity.

“There have been great strides in increasing the power-conversion efficiency of solar ,” said Nitin Padture, a professor of engineering at Brown University and senior author of the new research. “But the final hurdle to be cleared before the technology can be widely available is reliability—making cells that maintain their performance over time. That’s one of the things my research group has been working on, and we’re happy to report some important progress.”

Perovskites are a class of materials with a particular crystalline atomic structure. A little over a decade ago, researchers showed that perovskites are very good at absorbing light, which set off a flood of new research into perovskite solar cells. The efficiency of those cells has increased quickly and now rivals that of traditional silicon cells. The difference is that perovskite light absorbers can be made at near , whereas silicon needs to be grown from a melt at a temperature approaching 2700 degrees Fahrenheit. Perovskite films are also about 400 times thinner than silicon wafers. The relative ease of the manufacturing processes and the use of less material means perovskite cells can be potentially made at a fraction of the cost of silicon cells.

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