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My sister is in the process of building a house in Ohio, and I’ve been having conversations with her about how to make it green. She and my brother-in-law both consider me to be eco-crazed (arguably rightly so given the climactic and political stakes) and so tend to raise eyebrows when I make one of my many helpful suggestions.

For example, I suggested they install a central heat pump instead of inefficient electric resistance heating, but only after consulting their HVAC guy, who is a fan of heat pumps, did they decide to install one (Woo-hoo! They’ll save thousands of dollars and pounds of CO2 with that choice). They are also making their home solar-ready and plan to install panels in the next couple of years — this is mostly because solar offers a sense of self-reliance that is perennially popular across political and geographic boundaries.

However, when I tried to talk them into installing a heat pump water heater, I ran into serious resistance. If you haven’t heard about heat pump water heaters, they are an enormously powerful energy/CO2 reduction technology lying hidden in plain sight in the most humble of appliances — the water heater.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy have created a low-cost molten salt battery that can store energy for months — potentially giving us a way to store and use energy from renewables year round.

The challenge: To stop climate change, we need to transition toward cleaner sources of energy.

Renewable energy (especially wind and solar) has become increasingly cheap to generate over the last couple decades, but storage is still an issue — we can burn as much coal or gas as we want, whenever we need it, but we can’t force the wind to blow.

Dr. Karen Miga, a co-lead of the T2T consortium and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Medical News Today, “The availability of a complete genome sequence will advance our understanding of the most difficult-to-sequence and repeat-rich parts of the human genome.”

“In the future, when someone has their genome sequenced, researchers and clinicians will be able to identify all of the variants in their DNA and use that information to better guide their healthcare. Knowing the complete sequence of the human genome will provide a comprehensive framework for scientists to study human genomic variation, disease, and evolution.”

In a new trial conducted by the University of Cambridge, scientists were successfully able to de-age human skin cells by 30 years.

With age, the ability of cells to function properly declines. As a result, the NDA blueprint of people starts to accumulate signs of aging.

Researchers have used regenerative biology to create ‘’induced’’ stem cells and produce fibroblasts that generates collagens that heal wounds and provide structure to tissues.

It relies on a new “freeze-thaw” design. A recent study has just been published by U.S. scientists who have managed to develop an aluminum-nickel molten salt battery that can retain over 90% of its initial capacity over a period of up to 12 weeks. Having an energy density of 260 W/hour per kg, the new battery was built with an aluminum anode and a nickel cathode, immersed in a molten-salt electrolyte.


The breakthrough could have many applications in soft robotics including in the Metaverse.