Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sustainability – Page 405

One of electric aviation’s greatest challenges (beyond safety certification) is mass production. Designing a working prototype is now table stakes in this industry. As Tesla found out, heavy manufacturing at scale can easily bankrupt even the most well-funded companies.

To solve this problem, Archer turned to Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), which produces about 4 million cars per year at its 100 manufacturing facilities and 40 R&D centers. FCA described it as a mutually beneficial arrangement: It gains experience electrifying vehicles (where it lags behind), and Archer gains access to low-cost manufacturing expertise. FCA already helped design the aircraft’s cockpit and will allow the production of “thousands of aircraft” per year, according to a company spokesperson. The first aircraft is scheduled to be revealed in early 2021 with the first public flights in 2024.

Delays are likely given the complexity of launching, literally, a new vehicle. But the announcement fulfills the initial prediction made last year by John Hansman, director of MIT’s International Center for Air Transportation: “You’ve seen some shakeup in electric aviation, but also see it get closer to reality” in 2020, he said. “It’s clear there will be the emergence of a new class of electric airplanes. In 2021, you’ll see hybrid and battery aircraft in service or close to being in service.”

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Scientists in China and Sweden have determined that a pinch of capsaicin, the chemical compound that gives chili peppers their spicy sting, may be a secret ingredient for more stable and efficient perovskite solar cells. The research, published January 13 in the journal Joule, determined that sprinkling capsaicin into the precursor of methylammonium lead triiodide (MAPbI3) perovskite during the manufacturing process led to a greater abundance of electrons (instead of empty placeholders) to conduct current at the semiconductor’s surface. The addition resulted in polycrystalline MAPbI3 solar cells with the most efficient charge transport to date.

“In the future, green and sustainable forest-based biomaterial additive technology will be a clear trend in non-toxic lead-free materials,” says Qinye Bao, a senior author of the study from East China Normal University. “We hope this will eventually yield a fully green perovskite solar cell for a clean energy source.”

While metal halide perovskite semiconductors represent a promising component for state-of-the-art solar cell technologies, they are plagued by nonradiative recombination, an undesirable electron-level process that reduces efficiency and exacerbates heat losses. Bao and colleagues sought out a natural, forest-based, inexpensive additive to overcome this limitation and enhance solar cell performance.

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Meet the “Yangtze River Three Gorges 1”, an electric cruise ship, announced in December, that is poised to become the world’s largest of its kind (among EVs).

According to the brief info, it will be launched in July and enter service in November of 2021, on popular tourist routes: the Two Dams and One Gorge, the Yichang Yangtze River Night Cruise, and the Three Gorges Shiplift.

Not only will the size and passenger capacity be the highest, but also the battery capacity — roughly 7.5 MWh (an equivalent of 75–100 long-range electric cars). The LFP-type batteries (over 10000 cells) will be supplied by CATL.

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Review: Meat Planet (2019) by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

In the words of the book’s author, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (2019) is “not an attempt at prediction but rather a study of cultured meat as a special case of speculation on the future of food, and as a lens through which to view the predictions we make about how technology changes the world.” While not serving as some crystal ball to tell us the future of food, Wurgaft’s book certainly does serve as a kind of lens.

Our very appetites are questioned quite a bit in the book. Wondering about the ever-changing history of food, the author asks, “Will it be an effort to reproduce the industrial meat forms we know, albeit on a novel, and more ethical and sustainable, foundation?” Questioning why hamburgers are automatically the default goal, he points out cultured meat advocates should carefully consider “the question of which human appetite for meat, in historical terms, they wish to satisfy.”

Continue reading “Artificial Flesh” | >

The future is someone else’s problem. Tomorrow is just another day.

This is all well and good to think, but if we want to live a long, healthy life, then we ALL need to work to make tomorrow a better day…

Or we could just let Mad Max, Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, Animal Farm, etc., come to pass…anr then we can all moan about it as we are living in a nightmare…

Does it have to be that way?

Continue reading “Making The Future Better Together” | >

The potential foray into “personal air mobility” was announced as part of Cadillac’s portfolio of luxury and EV vehicles. It included an autonomous shuttle and an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, or more commonly known as a flying car or air taxi.

Michael Simcoe, vice president of GM global design, said each concept reflected “the needs and wants of the passengers at a particular moment in time and GM’s vision of the future of transportation.”

“This is a special moment for General Motors as we reimagine the future of personal transportation for the next five years and beyond,” Simcoe said.

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All the clean technologies that we need to combat climate change – whether that’s wind turbines, solar panels or batteries, they’re all really, really mineral intensive.

Cornwall, 1864. A hot spring is discovered nearly 450m (1485ft) below ground in the Wheal Clifford, a copper mine just outside the mining town of Redruth. Glass bottles are immersed to their necks in its bubbling waters, carefully sealed and sent off for testing. The result is the discovery of so great a quantity of lithium – eight or 10 times as much per gallon as had been found in any hot spring previously analysed – that scientists suspect “it may prove of great commercial value”.

But 19th-Century England had little need for the element, and this 50C (122F) lithium-rich water continued steaming away in the dark for more than 150 years.

Fast forward to autumn 2020, and a site nearby the Wheal Clifford in Cornwall has been confirmed as having some of the world’s highest grades of lithium in geothermal waters. The commercial use for lithium in the 21st Century could not be clearer. It is found not only inside smart phones and laptops, but is now vital to the clean energy transition, for the batteries that power electric vehicles and store energy so renewable power can be released steadily and reliably.

Continue reading “The new ‘gold rush’ for green lithium” | >

Capturing energy from the Sun with solar panels is only half the story – that energy needs to be stored somewhere for later use. In the case of flow batteries, storage is relegated to vats of liquid. Now, an international team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists has created a new version of these solar flow batteries that’s efficient and long-lasting.

To make the new device, the team combined several existing technologies. It’s a silicon/perovskite tandem solar cell, paired with a redox flow battery, which the team says will allow people to harvest and store renewable energy in one device. Not only is it efficient, but it should be inexpensive and simple enough to scale up for home use.

The energy-harvesting part of the equation combines the long-time industry-leading material – silicon – with a promising young upstart called perovskite. These tandem solar cells have proved better than either material alone, since the two materials capture different wavelengths of light.

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Anyone who has followed the career of Elon Musk knows that he formulated a set of goals many years ago, and has worked tirelessly and methodically to reach those goals, a process that he knew would take years or decades. Even casual observers are familiar with Tesla’s Master Plan, a three-part strategy to bring a mid-priced EV to the mass market.

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