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Category: sustainability – Page 488

Philippine-made ocean waste collector and dengue mapper to join the NASA global hackathon

MANILA, Philippines — A deployable, autonomous ocean waste collection system utilizing space data to locate nearby garbage patches built by students from De La Salle University and an automated information portal which correlates dengue cases with real-time data from satellite, climate, and search engines won the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s International Space Apps Challenge last October 18–20, 2019 in Manila, in collaboration with the Philippine Council for Industry, Energy and Emerging Technology Research and Development of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST-PCIEERD), Animo Labs technology business incubator, PLDT InnoLab, American Corner Manila, the U.S. government, and part of the Design Week Philippines with Department of Trade and Industry-Design Center of the Philippines.

Using NASA’s Ocean Surface Current Analysis Real-time (OSCAR) data to determine possible locations of ocean garbage patches using GPS, PaWiKAN uses a pair of deployable, dynamically reconfigurable boats capable of trapping and returning ocean waste back to ground. It is equipped with extended-range radio system based on LoRa technology and Arduino to communicate with sensors and controlled by a deployment station. It was developed by Lasallian electronics and communications engineering students Samantha Maxine Santos, Antonio Miguel S. Alejo, Grant Lewis Bulaong, and Janos Lance L. Tiberio of Ocean’s 4, who also joined the last year’s hackathon, creating a hyper-casual puzzle game utilizing images from the Hubble Space Telescope and intuitive physics concepts.

Continue reading “Philippine-made ocean waste collector and dengue mapper to join the NASA global hackathon” | >

Forget the latest Hollywood film noir and spend some time learning about this story instead. The story is that of Reno, Nevada, and the location of the original Tesla Gigafactory. The historical drama, a true story, unfolds with twisting and dark details.

The story came to light due to the notable new podcast series The City (USA Today’s investigative podcast). Episode 4 of season 2 is titled “West World.”

“We go east of the city, where wild horses roam and business is booming. City boosters say Tesla is driving New Reno, but the truth is darker and more complicated than it first appears.”

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Sugar poses one of the most pressing health problems in the modern world – not least because it’s just so delicious. Rather than quitting sweets cold turkey, low-calorie alternatives to sucrose could make tasty treats that are at least less bad for us. And now, researchers from Tufts University have developed a more efficient method for producing one such sweetener, using farms of bacteria.

The sugar in question is called tagatose, which the FDA says is “generally regarded as safe.” It’s 92 percent as sweet as sucrose – regular old table sugar – but because the human digestive system doesn’t metabolize as much of it, it only has 38 percent of the calories. That, in turn, means tagatose has a much smaller effect on blood glucose and insulin, making it safe for diabetics. And to cap it off, tests show that it doesn’t contribute to cavities or tooth decay.

But, of course, there’s a catch – tagatose is a little complicated to produce. Normally, it’s done by hydrolyzing lactose to make galactose, which is then isomerized into tagatose, which then needs to be purified and crystallized into a solid, usable form. Yields from this process are low, at less than 30 percent.

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What could the UK’s recent investment announcement mean for the future of sustainable energy?
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There are many directions we could go when it comes to the future of sustainable energy—but the UK made a bold move when it announced a huge investment (220 million pounds huge) in a prototype fusion power facility that could be functioning as a commercial power plant by 2040.

So it’s safe to say the race to fusion power is on. Fusion energy could provide us with clean, basically limitless energy.

But the thing is, fusion power isn’t really a reality yet, but does this prototype facility have a shot at making fusion a reality?

Continue reading “The UK Is Racing to Build the World’s First Commercial Fusion Power Plant” | >

Researchers from the University of Houston have reported a new device that can both efficiently capture solar energy and store it until it is needed, offering promise for applications ranging from power generation to distillation and desalination.

Unlike and , which rely on photovoltaic technology for the direct generation of electricity, the hybrid device captures heat from the sun and stores it as . It addresses some of the issues that have stalled wider-scale adoption of solar power, suggesting an avenue for using around-the-clock, despite limited sunlight hours, cloudy days and other constraints.

The work, described in a paper published Wednesday in Joule, combines molecular energy and latent heat storage to produce an integrated harvesting and for potential 24/7 operation. The researchers report a harvesting efficiency of 73% at small-scale operation and as high as 90% at large-scale operation.

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Heliogen is a startup that wants to “replace fuels with sunlight.” And the Bill Gates-backed solar startup, which has flown under the radar until today, has made a major green-energy breakthrough for heavy industry. Heliogen “has created the world’s first technology that can commercially replace fuels with carbon-free, ultra-high temperature heat from the sun.”

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