Space engineers have long considered lunar soil as locally available material for building outposts on the Moon, and now ESA researchers are considering it as a means to store energy. The Discovery & Preparation study by the agency and Azimut Space aims to determine how the lunar regolith can soak up solar energy during the day, then use it to generate electricity during the 14-day night and protect equipment against freezing.
African farmers earned 41% more when using this method.
đ Learn more about innovative methods of growing rice: https://wef.ch/2GjlJjW
(21 Oct 2017) LEADIN:
Forget plugging in to charge up your new electric car, engineers are now working towards a future where you never need to plug in ever again.
Thatâs some time off, but a new generation of batteries is being designed to power the latest electric cars, from high energy cells to power sports models to those that power over long distances.
STORYLINE:
Electric cars are no longer concepts kept in top secret bunkers at a car manufacturers research unit.
Nor are they a seen as four wheeled status symbols of the wealthy elite.
Imagine having your cell phone start to charge when you walk into a room, or your electric car charge as you drive over a particular strip of land. Itâs like a sort of ambient charging environment surrounds you.
Harnessing the power of magnetic fields.
By Amanda Froelich The furniture retailer is looking at using biodegradable mycelium âfungi packagingâ as part of its efforts to reduce waste and increase recycling. âŠ
Home to the worldâs largest floating solar energy plant.
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Next stop: a cleaner future.
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Developing synthetic materials that are as dynamic as those found in nature, with reversibly changing properties and which could be used in manufacturing, recycling and other applications, is a strong focus for scientists.
In a world-first, researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Ghent University (UGent) and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have pioneered a novel, dynamic, reprogrammable materialâby using green LED light and, remarkably, darkness as the switches to change the materialâs polymer structure, and using only two inexpensive chemical compounds. One of these compounds, naphthalene, is well known as an ingredient in moth repellents.
The new dynamic material could potentially be used as a 3D printing ink to print temporary, easy-to-remove support scaffolds. This would overcome one of the current limitations of the 3D process to print free-hanging structures.