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Category: sustainability – Page 624

Made in China motto is gaining speed in China.

SHANGHAI Foreign firms say they are struggling to gain access to China’s vast railway market as the country, seeking to transform its domestic industry into an export powerhouse, tightens the bidding criteria on rail tenders.

The complaints echo similar concerns raised in other industries including technology and renewable energy, and highlight what some foreign companies see as an uneven playing field when operating in China.

Four rail suppliers with offshore funding said they were finding it harder to win contracts thanks to the proliferation of government-supported rivals, with at least one saying it was already experiencing discrimination.

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Tesla buys SolarCity.

(Reuters) — SolarCity Corp agreed to be acquired by sister company Tesla Motors Inc in a deal worth $200 million less than the initial offer, sending shares of both companies down in early trading on Monday.

Electric vehicle maker Tesla expects to achieve “significant” cost savings and “dramatic improvements” in manufacturing efficiency as a result of the acquisition of solar panel installer SolarCity, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on Monday.

Musk said the combined companies will have a “stronger balance sheet,” but likely will require a “small equity capital raise” next year. Both companies have been burning through cash and have projected achieving positive cash flow later this year.

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Elon Musk has been a busy man lately as he works to transition the world to renewable energy and sustainable transportation with the goal of decarbonizing the global economy to meet the challenge of climate change. To meet that goal, Tesla will need to address “high passenger-density urban transport” – and Musk just confirmed plans to create a fully autonomous electric Minibus using the Model X chassis.

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Elon Musk is today set to merge Tesla Motors and SolarCity, Reuters is reporting, kicking off part two of his master plan to transform our cities and suburbs into environmentally friendly automated wonderlands.

In July Musk wrote of his plan to merge the two companies in a blog post entitled Master Plan, Part Deux, saying it was essential to “create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world.

“We can’t do this well if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies, which is why we need to combine and break down the barriers inherent to being separate companies. Now that Tesla is ready to scale Powerwall and SolarCity is ready to provide highly differentiated solar, the time has come to bring them together.”

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We spend our lives surrounded by hi-tech materials and chemicals that make our batteries, solar cells and mobile phones work. But developing new technologies requires time-consuming, expensive and even dangerous experiments.

Luckily we now have a secret weapon that allows us to save time, money and risk by avoiding some of these experiments: computers.

Thanks to Moore’s law and a number of developments in physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics over the past 50 years (leading to Nobel Prizes in Chemistry in 1998 and 2013) we can now carry out many experiments entirely on computers using modelling.

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Honda said in a press release that the AI will use conversations with the driver and other data it gathers ‘both to perceive the emotions of the driver and to engage in dialogue with the driver based on the vehicle’s own emotions.’ The just-announced partnership works toward application of the ‘emotion engine,’ which is ‘a set of AI technologies developed by cocoro SB Corp., which enable machines to artificially generate their own emotions.’

Image source: Getty Images.

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Driverless cars are already being developed by nearly every automaker. And despite the recent Tesla Model S crash in which a driver was killed while using the car’s semi-autonomous Autopilot feature, they’re typically much safer than human drivers, and they’re getting better all of the time.

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Smart bricks capable of recycling wastewater and generating electricity from sunlight are being developed by a team of scientists from the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). The bricks will be able to fit together and create ‘bioreactor walls’ which could then be incorporated in housing, public building and office spaces.

The UWE Bristol team is working on the smart technologies that will be integrated into the in this pan European ‘Living Architecture’ (LIAR) project led by Newcastle University. The LIAR project brings together living architecture, computing and engineering to find a new way to tackle global sustainability issues.

The smart living bricks will be made from bio-reactors filled with microbial cells and algae. Designed to self-adapt to changing environmental conditions the smart bricks will monitor and modify air in the building and recognise occupants.

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Nice.

PV Nano Cell has commercially developed ‘Sicrys’, a single-crystal, nanometric silver conductive ink delivering enhanced performance for digital conductive printing in mass production applications. The inks are also available in copper-based form, delivering all of the product’s properties and advantages with improved cost efficiency.

Problem

Solar cell metallization is not yet fully optimized for cost and resource conservation. Cell producers currently endure silicon cell breakage during cell metallization, and higher-than-necessary costs for silver. Traditional screen printing of conductive grid lines involves direct contact with brittle cells, resulting in breakage and silicon waste. Additionally, the current technologies for metallization create lines that are wider and thicker than necessary, inflating silver costs.

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Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.

The finding is reported in the July 29 issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed.

Unlike conventional , which convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, the new device essentially does the work of plants, converting into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such “artificial leaves” could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently.

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