Lifeboat Foundation

Italian company Energy Dome has opened the first of its remarkable grid-level energy storage plants. These “CO2 batteries” can store renewable energy over long periods and release it quickly, at less than half the cost of big lithium batteries.

Large-scale energy storage is going to be required on an epic scale all round the world, as green energy begins to take over the world’s power supply. Renewable energy is often generated at times and places where it’s not needed, and a variety of grid-level storage technologies are jockeying for various energy market niches, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

We took a close look at Energy Dome’s CO₂ battery technology last July, but here’s the guts of it: carbon dioxide expands dramatically when it moves to a gaseous state from a liquid state, which it’ll only settle in under pressures at least five times higher than the Earth’s atmospheric pressure. How much does it expand? Well, at room temperature, 2.5675 litres of liquid CO₂ kept at 56 atmospheres of pressure will expand into 1,000 litres of gaseous CO₂. That’s a factor of nearly 400.

A new drug therapy for breast cancer helped stop tumors from growing for twice as long as traditional chemotherapy, adding months to patients’ lives.

UK scientists have designed a new type of aqueous organic redox flow battery based on ion-exchange membranes made of a polymer of intrinsic microporosity. The battery showed a very low-capacity decay rate of 0.0335% per day for 2,100 charge-discharge cycles.

A team of researchers at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, working with one colleague from MIT and another from the University of Stuttgart, has developed a biomimetic elastomeric robot skin that has tactile sensing abilities. Their work has been published in the journal Science Robotics.

Roboticists continue to work on improving robot abilities and to make them more human-like. In this new effort, the researchers gave a robot arm the ability to detect such sensations as a pat, tickling, wind, or something stroking its surface. They accomplished this by partially imitating human skin.

Continue reading “Biomimetic elastomeric robot skin has tactile sensing abilities” »

To capture the information that a brain contains, you need to cut it into billions and billions of slices.

Žilvinas DeveikaIt’s much sooner than that. My prediction (that is almost 10 years old now) of an “early” appearance of a strong AGI is 2029. I am completely sure that it will either emerge or will already be there in 2030s.

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Marc O MonfilsAnd what strategies do we have in place to guarantee humanity’s continued relevance in the era of super intelligent machines?

Continue reading “Chinese hacking group Aoqin Dragon quietly spied orgs for a decade” »

Elon Musk tells customers not to use Tesla’s recirculation mode because it spikes carbon dioxide levels in the car cabin.

Machines bristling with cameras and controlled by artificial intelligence are bringing supernatural precision to weeding, harvesting and fertilizing.

You may want to think twice before giving the parking attendant your Tesla-issued NFC card.