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Category: sustainability – Page 397

As part of his Master’s degree in civil engineering, an EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) student developed a connector for use in building sustainable structures. His initial project has expanded into an online program for designing bamboo furniture that’s stylish, modular and customizable. And now his connector is being looked at for use by astronauts in outer space.

During his time at EPFL under the Erasmus program, Romain van Wassenhove came up with an idea for a connector that could be used to make modular structures out of sustainable rather than wood, plastic or metal. “I wanted to focus my Master’s on a topic that had meaning to me and that would lead to a concrete application,” he says. “Working with bamboo was something I already had in mind while I was studying in Brussels.” His connectors can be 3D-printed in biosourced plastic and are customizable to the type of material used for the structure.

Van Wassenhove got the idea for his connector during a class at EPFL on composite materials and developed the concept further through his Master’s project, co-directed at EPFL by Senior Scientist Anastasios Vassilopoulos and by associate professor Lars De Laet at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). In September 2020, soon after graduating, he obtained research funds—through an EPFL Ignition Grant—to enhance the design and operation of his connector and test it on an initial application involving bamboo structures. Today van Wassenhove’s invention is EU patent-protected, and his research has just been published in Composite Structures.

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Circa 2020 o,.o.

Long known as the hardest of all natural materials, diamonds are also exceptional thermal conductors and electrical insulators. Now, researchers have discovered a way to tweak tiny needles of diamond in a controlled way to transform their electronic properties, dialing them from insulating, through semiconducting, all the way to highly conductive, or metallic. This can be induced dynamically and reversed at will, with no degradation of the diamond material.

The research, though still at an early proof-of-concept stage, may open up a wide array of potential applications, including new kinds of broadband solar cells, highly efficient LEDs and power electronics, and new optical devices or quantum sensors, the researchers say.

Their findings, which are based on simulations, calculations, and previous experimental results, are reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is by MIT Professor Ju Li and graduate student Zhe Shi; Principal Research Scientist Ming Dao; Professor Subra Suresh, who is president of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore as well as former dean of engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor Emeritus at MIT; and Evgenii Tsymbalov and Alexander Shapeev at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow.

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Flying taxis, more technically known as electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles, might actually — finally — become a feasible technology thanks to a new development in battery technology.

Ironically, the hardest part of designing and building eVTOLs isn’t the vehicle itself. Instead, it’s solving the challenging energy situation that eVTOLs face: Any battery that’s powerful enough to lift the thing is almost certainly too heavy and slow-charging to make a trip worthwhile. But a team of Pennsylvania State University engineers tested new batteries that can both recharge in a matter of minutes and survive thousands of charge cycles, according to research published Monday in the journal Joule, making eVTOLs seem a whole lot more realistic.

The energy-dense lithium-ion batteries represent a major leap forward in electric vehicle energy tech, according to The Independent. Both could be charged for a 50-mile journal in under ten minutes, making eVTOLs far more economically viable because each vehicle could take more trips per day.

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With the rise of the lithium-based battery, demand for this soft, silvery-white metal – the lightest solid element in the periodic table – has exploded. With the race to zero carbon by 2050 gathering steam, forcing the electrification of transport, lithium will be an even more valuable asset in the next 30 years.

The supply of raw materials for batteries could even end up being a national security issue, too; China’s global leadership on high-volume EV production has put it ahead of the game, and while the majority of ground-based lithium reserves are in the “lithium triangle” of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, China controls more than half’s the world’s supply simply through investments and ownership. It has shown in the past that it’s not afraid to wield commodity supplies as a weapon.

But as with other metals like uranium, land-based lithium reserves pale in comparison to what’s out there in the sea. According to researchers at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), there’s about 5000 times as much lithium in the oceans as there is in land deposits, and a newly developed technology could start extracting it cheaply enough to make the big time – while producing hydrogen gas, chorine gas and desalinated water as a bonus.

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In our series, Real Food, we take a look at the growing trend of vertical farming. Companies like Aerofarms are rethinking how we grow vegetables by going up to provided fresh and affordable produce. Michelle Miller reports.

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Continue reading “How Aerofarms’ vertical farms grow produce” | >

But the above-ground structure of the Baekdu-daegan Seed Vault belies the true size of this sprawling underground structure.

The idea of building a Seed Vault in South Korea initially began with the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing in 2010. Officially launched in 2016 and designated a national security facility since 2019, the Baekdu-daegan Seed Vault’s main purpose is to secure biodiversity from threats such as natural disasters, climate change and war, to support sustainable life for human beings.

The Baekdu-daegan Seed Vault in Korea is one of only two built worldwide — the other is Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which opened in 2008 on an arctic Norwegian Island. It currently stores over 90000 types of seeds.

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China has announced a milestone in the development of clean, sustainable energy by setting a new world record for the longest duration of temperatures needed for fusion to occur.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) located in Hefei, Anhui Province, is the successor to HT-7, China’s first superconducting tokamak, which retired in 2013. The Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HIPS) is conducting the experiment for the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Professor Gong Xianzu, a researcher at the CAS Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) who is leading the project, announced the breakthrough. The reactor achieved not one but two milestones. Firstly it reached a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds. This is 20% hotter and five times longer than last year, when EAST managed 100 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds. Secondly, it reached an even higher peak temperature of 160 million degrees Celsius, lasting for 20 seconds.

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The applications are for trademarks for the company’s ‘T’ logo design “and two other iterations of ‘Tesla’ stylised logo for use in the food industry”, the report said.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the report.

As per the report, the three applications are for “restaurant services, pop-up restaurant services, self-service restaurant services, take-out restaurant services” and are filed under a trademark law provision indicating that Tesla intends to use, but has not done so yet.

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