Lifeboat Foundation

Ancient engineers might have built a canal on the Nile.

No one has solved the mystery of the Giza pyramids for centuries. Although archaeologists and scientists have tried to reveal how they were made over the years, it is difficult to say the “exact method” for sure. However, very recently, an idea has been put forward by researchers about how the pyramids were built.

According to a recent study — published in PNAS in August. 29 —the pyramids of Giza may have been built using a former arm of the Nile River. This river branch would have served as a navigable route for the transportation of goods not previously known.

Continue reading “Nile waterscapes facilitated the construction of the Giza pyramids during the 3rd millennium BCE” »

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) recently did some things to advance EV charging tech that are way over my head to make a battery that could theoretically charge an electric car in only one minute.

That might seem silly to people with a decent EV, but I recently found something that could eventually make EV charging so fast that even the owner of a Porsche Taycan might be shocked and amazed— and, as the owner of a Nissan LEAF, I’m lucky to get a 50 kW charge rate, but that’s only on the first charge. If I try to go anywhere on the highway, I quickly find that the second and third charges are a lot slower. If I keep going, I can expect to get charging rates as low as 14 kW on the second or third session, which is more like DC slow charging than DC fast charging. When I get a chance to test and review better EVs, it seems like witchcraft when getting charging over 100 kW, and faster 250 and 350 kW charging sessions look like alien technology.

“The hybrid lithium-ion battery, which has a high energy density (285 Wh/kg) and can be rapidly charged with a high-power density (22,600 W/kg), is overcoming the limitations of the current energy storage system,” Professor Jung-Goo Kang of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering said. “It will be a breakthrough.”

Alloy that exceeds the strength and ductility of other state-of-the-art additively manufactured materials. This breakthrough could lead to higher-performance components for applications in aerospace, medicine, energy, and transportation. The work was done by researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Georgia Institute of Technology. It was led by Wen Chen, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UMass, and Ting Zhu, professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, will be published today (August 3, 2022) in the journal Nature.

High entropy alloys (HEAs) have become increasingly popular as a new paradigm in materials science over the past 15 years. They are comprised of five or more elements in near-equal proportions and offer the ability to create a near-infinite number of unique combinations for alloy design. Traditional alloys, such as brass, stainless steel, carbon steel, and bronze, contain a primary element combined with one or more trace elements.

The world needs a bridge to the renewable energy future.

The world needs more oil and gas to deal with the energy shortages it is currently facing, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at an energy conference in Norway on Monday, Bloomberg.

The comment might seem strange coming from a person who sells electric vehicles, battery packs, and solar roofing products. However, this isn’t the first time Elon Musk has made such a comment.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Says World Needs More Oil and Gas as Bridge to Renewables” »

You are looking at a methanol-fed hydrogen fuel cell that may soon be powering marine shipping around the world.

For Maersk, the 12 new ships will help it reduce CO₂ emissions by 1.5 million tons annually or 4% of what the company produced in total in 2021. Maersk’s announced commitment is for all future new builds to only burn carbon-neutral fuels. That’s why fuel cells are high on its list of technologies to make that achievement possible.

Methanol Fuel Cells Are a Step Better Than Burning Methanol

Continue reading “Maersk Earmarks $2.1 Billion for Ships That Will Run on Methanol” »

A study of Li-metal batteries by the research team led by Dr. Byung Gon Kim at Next-Generation Battery Research Center of Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI) was published as a cover paper in the international journal ACS Nano.

While the current Li-ion batteries generate energy by taking Li-ions in and out of the graphite anode based on the intercalation mechanism, the Li-metal battery does not rely on this bulky and heavy graphite but uses metallic Li itself as the anode. As the Li-metal shows 10 times higher theoretical capacity (3,860 mAh/g) than graphite (372 mAh/g), it has steadily gained much attention from areas that need high-capacity batteries, such as electric vehicles and energy storage systems.

Despite this advantage, Li can grow in the shape of a tree branch, called a Li dendrite, if it is not uniformly and effectively stored when cycling process, leading to large volume expansion of the electrode, which in turn may shorten the battery’s cycle life and cause safety issue such as fire and explosion triggered by internal short-circuits.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology have recently created new solution-processed perovskite photodetectors that exhibit remarkable efficiencies and response times. These photodetectors, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, have a unique design that prevents the formation of defects between its different layers.

“There is growing interest in 3D range imaging for autonomous driving and consumer electronics,” Edward H. Sargent told TechXplore. “We have worked as a team for years on finding new materials that enable light sensing technologies such as next-generation image sensors and striving to take these in a direction that could have a commercial and societal impact.”

Photodetectors, sensing devices that detect or respond to light, can have numerous highly valuable applications. For instance, they can be integrated in robotic systems, autonomous vehicles, consumer electronics, environmental sensing technology, fiber optic communication systems and security systems.

The media is going nuts over Elon Musk calling for more oil and gas at an energy conference in Norway, but the full quote is not being widely reported and brings some important context.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk called to drill for more oil, which raised a few eyebrows, but it was in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how it sent gas prices skyrocketing:

Continue reading “Media goes nuts over Elon Musk calling for more oil and gas, but here’s the full quote” »

Gas turbines are widely used for power generation and aircraft propulsion. According to the laws of thermodynamics, the higher the temperature of an engine, the higher the efficiency. Because of these laws, there is an emerging interest in increasing turbines’ operating temperature.

A team of researchers from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, in conjunction with researchers from Ames National Laboratory, have developed an artificial intelligence framework capable of predicting high entropy alloys (HEAs) that can withstand extremely high temperature, oxidizing environments. This method could significantly reduce the time and costs of finding alloys by decreasing the number of experimental analyses required.

This research was recently published in Material Horizons.