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Potter Crafts Portable Clay Fridge To Keep Veggies, Curd Fresh Without Electricity

“As our health has started deteriorating, more people are moving towards old habits now. We have been following a simple life since our birth and are healthy. I am happy that people are learning about the benefits of clay pots and cooking in them. To help people live sustainably, I have built this fridge,” he adds.

However, he notes, due to a shortage of potters, he is unable to make more fridges and other products.

“I used to have four people helping me, now only two of them continue, and even they are old. No youngster comes to this field nowadays. They think that those who do pottery are dirty, as our hands get dirty. That’s why we have to limit our production,” he laments.

Novel proton-conductive membranes for automobile fuel cells

Fuel cells are compact energy conversion units that utilize clean energy sources like hydrogen and convert them into electricity through a series of oxidation–reduction reactions. Specifically, proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), an integral part of electric vehicles, utilize proton-conductive membranes for operation. Unfortunately, these membranes suffer from a trade-off between high durability and high ion conductivity, affecting the lifetime and performance of PEMFCs.

To overcome this issue, scientists have synthesized chemically and physically modified perfluorosulfonic acid polymer membranes, such as Nafion HP, Nafion XL, and Gore-Select, which have proven to be much more durable than unmodified membranes conventionally employed in fuel-cell operations.

Unfortunately, none of the existing proton-conductive membranes have fulfilled the highly challenging technical target—passing an accelerated durability test or a combined chemical and mechanical test—set by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to facilitate their use in automobile fuel cells by 2025.

Indian lunar landing mission enters moon’s orbit

India’s latest space mission entered the moon’s orbit on Saturday ahead of the country’s second attempted lunar landing, as its cut-price space program seeks to reach new heights.

The world’s most populous nation has a comparatively low-budget aerospace program that is rapidly closing in on the milestones set by global space powers.

Only Russia, the United States and China have previously achieved a controlled landing on the .

MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

The two materials, the researchers found, can be combined with water to make a supercapacitor — an alternative to batteries — that could provide storage of electrical energy. As an example, the MIT researchers who developed the system say that their supercapacitor could eventually be incorporated into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day’s worth of energy while adding little (or no) to the cost of the foundation and still providing the needed structural strength. The researchers also envision a concrete roadway that could provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel over that road.

The simple but innovative technology is described this week in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT professors Franz-Josef Ulm, Admir Masic, and Yang-Shao Horn, and four others at MIT and at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

MIT engineers created a carbon-cement supercapacitor that can store large amounts of energy. Made of just cement, water, and carbon black, the device could form the basis for inexpensive systems that store intermittently renewable energy, such as solar or wind energy.

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