Lifeboat Foundation

Stretch of road outside Stockholm transfers energy from two tracks of rail in the road, recharging the batteries of electric cars and trucks.

Nurdles. The name sounds inoffensive, cuddly even… However, nurdles are anything but. “Nurdle” is the colloquial name for “pre-production plastic pellets” (which is in itself rather a mouthful); these are the raw material of the plastic industry – the building blocks for plastic bottles, plastic bags, drinking straws, car components, computer keyboards – in fact almost anything you can think of that’s made of plastic.

However, nurdles are also covering our beaches. I found that out for myself when Fauna & Flora International (FFI) first started researching this issue in 2009. Having read about them I went looking on my local beach, and was shocked to find so many nurdles in the strandline and trapped in washed-up seaweed. I had never noticed them before, but they had clearly been accumulating for some time.

While pictures of the tide of larger plastics in the ocean are front page news, the issue of nurdle pollution has received much less attention. Recent storms, however, have resulted in higher levels of nurdles being reported from a range of sites around UK coasts, highlighting the numbers of nurdles that are in our waterways, seas and sediments – a level of pollution which we can only see when they are flushed out and onto the beach. The Great Nurdle Hunt (an initiative of our partner Fidra) has mapped nurdle finds from around the UK and Europe, which has identified a number of nurdle hotspots in key industrial estuaries. However, this problem isn’t unique to Europe; nurdles are reported worldwide, but only hit the headlines when there are significant local spills from containers lost at sea, as recently occurred in South Africa. However, such one-off events aren’t the only source of nurdle pollution.

How close are we really to space travel? Our featured contributor Lola Akinmade Åkerström talks to Space Nation, a company that’s researching both space tourism and how space technology can help us on Earth.

Thanks to Google, it can often feel like there are no mysterious places left on earth to explore—and finding new places to call the ‘final’ frontier seems increasingly difficult. Even the Pacific Ocean’s Marianna Trench, at over 36,000 feet deep and arguably the most legit final frontier on earth, has been explored by Hollywood director James Cameron in a submersible. As a result, the past few decades have seen us looking upwards to the most mysterious of places: Our own galaxy.

Blockbuster movies set in space and fictional alien encounters continue to intrigue us. Space discovery programs on TV science channels continually pique our curiosity. Even kids’ cartoons such as the 1960s American series The Jetsons brought the concept of commercial space travel closer to us, thanks to its flying space cars, pod-like apartments, and a robot maid called Rosie.

next is an advanced smart transportation system based on swarms of modular self-driving vehicles, refined by italian designers and engineers. the modules can drive autonomously on regular roads, joining themselves and detach even when in motion. when joined, the doors between modules fold, creating a walkable open space among modules. founded by tommaso gecchelin, the concept would greatly outperform conventional transportation when used in conjunction with other modules. the collection of next modules would improve traffic fluidity, commute time, running costs and pollution prevention by optimizing each module occupancy rate.

once linked, passengers would be able to walk between modules the modules would be individualized shipping and goods transportation could be adapted companies would offer specific modules to the system piotr boruslawski I designboom.

Mechanical engineers at the University of California, Riverside, have reported success in using inexpensive materials to produce thermoelectric devices that transform low-level waste heat into electricity.

Their advance could enable a wide variety of commercial applications. For example, integrating thermoelectric generating devices into computer chips could enable the heat they produce to provide a power source. Waste heat from automobile engines could run a car’s electronics and provide cooling. Photovoltaic solar cells could be made more efficient by harnessing the heat from sunlight striking them to generate more electricity.

Also, using the same basic technology, economical thermoelectric refrigerators could be produced that would be more energy efficient and with fewer moving parts than refrigerators that use compressors and coolant. Current thermoelectric refrigerators are expensive and relatively inefficient. In essence, they operate in reverse of thermoelectric generators, with an electric current applied to generate a temperature gradient that could be used in cooling.

Continue reading “Harnessing ‘Rashba spin-Seebeck effect’ phenomenon will enable commercial devices to turn waste heat into electricity” »

Pod transportation company, Skytran, has received $32.5 million in funding. Skytran is a NASA Space Act company that is developing a pod-based personal rapid transportation system.

Some of the funding is from former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt.

They will have a network of computer-controlled, 2-person jet-like vehicles using SkyTran magnetic levitation technology.

Continue reading “Skytran magnetic levitation personal pod transportation gets $32.5 million in funding” »

Closing the infrastructure gap before the year 2050 by strengthening existing infrastructure with ET3 is entirely feasible and it can be achieved in three coordinated phases:

1) bringing ET3 to maturity, including full-scale commercial deployment (2−5 years); 2) expanding ET3 networks around the globe at national levels (30 years); 3) connecting national ET3 networks into the international network (15 years) and creating one city called Earth.

MIT spin off company Ayar Labs is combining light and electronics to create faster, more efficient computers. The new optoelectronic chips are designed to speed up data transmission to and from conventional processor chips in a way that will also reduce energy consumption in chip-to-chip communications by 95 percent and could cut overall energy usages by large data firms by up to 50 percent.

Since the invention of the silicon chip 60 years ago, the power of computers has doubled every two years, but the speed at which computer systems work hasn’t shown quite such dramatic progress. The problem is one of data transmission and the bottlenecks that any technology runs into, slowing down the whole to the speed of its most sluggish part.

Think of a computer as like an air passenger system. If you concentrate on the aircraft, airport runway architecture, supply logistics, and air traffic control, it’s easy to speed up travel between, for example, New York and Washington DC to under one hour. That sounds fantastic, but if it takes you two hours to get through security at one hand and another two hours to collect your baggage at the other, then it’s faster to drive.

Imagine driving and being warned when you’re too close to the edge of the road.

That’s exactly what space technology developed by German researchers can do, and it could be in Northland trucks in the next year.

Researchers from the German Aerospace Agency have been in Whangarei with the Intelligent Positioning System, which has been designed to navigate the rover on Mars.