Lifeboat Foundation

Kyiv will lose nearly two-thirds of its deposits if the Kremlin is successful in annexing Ukrainian territory.

At least $12.4 trillion worth of Ukraine’s essential natural resources, including energy and mineral deposits, are now under Russian control.

“The Kremlin is robbing Ukraine” of its natural resources, the backbone of it’s economy, according to an analysis by SecDev posted by Washington Post on August 10.

It can generate 1.3 gigawatts of clean energy.

Hornsea 2, the world’s largest offshore wind farm located in the North Sea, has gone fully operational, a press release from its builder, Orsted, said. In its bid to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the U.K. is banking heavily on wind-generated power. To this effect, it commissioned the Hornsea One project, which was the largest offshore wind farm in the world at the time of achieving fully operational status in 2020. Two years later, the Hornsea 2 project is fully operational and has claimed the bragging rights for being the largest offshore wind farm in the world.

The Hornsea zone, an area of the North Sea covering more than 2,000 km2, is also set to include Hornsea 3. The 2.8 GW project is planned to follow Hornsea 2 having been awarded a contract for difference from the UK government earlier this year.

Hornsea 2 has played a key role in the ongoing development of a larger and sustainably competitive UK supply chain to support the next phase of the UK’s offshore wind success story. In the past five years alone, Ørsted has placed major contracts with nearly 200 UK suppliers. Ørsted has invested GBP 4.5 billion in the UK supply chain to date and expects to make another GBP 8.6 billion of UK supply chain investments over the next decade.

Continue reading “Hornsea 2, the world’s largest windfarm, enters full operation” »

Circa 2012 face_with_colon_three

(PhysOrg.com) — Sometimes total electrical isolation is a good thing — and that’s the idea behind a power-over-fiber (PoF) communications cable being developed by engineers at Sandia National Laboratories.

It’s common to isolate communications between systems or devices by using fiber optic cables, said Steve Sanderson of Sandia’s mobility analysis and technical assessment division. But when power also is required, sending it down a copper wire can at times be a safety issue, and substituting it with battery power may not be suitable or practical, he said.

Continue reading “Developing power-over-fiber communications cable: When total isolation is a good thing” »

Hydrogen fuel promises to be a clean and abundant source of energy in the future – as long as scientists can figure out ways to produce it practically and cheaply, and without fossil fuels.

A new study provides us with another promising step in that direction.

Scientists have described a relatively simple method involving aluminum nanoparticles that are able to strip the oxygen from water molecules and leave hydrogen gas.

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.”

face_with_colon_three circa 2018.

Gold is amazingly weird. For one thing, it’s now thought that much of it came from aftermaths of the collisions of two super-dense neutron stars. Some of this atomic gold, sprayed across the cosmos, managed to coalesce under gravity, get trapped in a newly-formed Earth, undergo a suite of geological processes, and ultimately pop up at the surface.

Continue reading “New Form Of Lab-Made Gold Is Better And Golder Than Nature’s Pathetic Version” »

NVIDIA, one of the tech sector’s power players, is pushing the Universal Scene Description protocol as the foundation of interoperable content and experiences in the metaverse. In a recent post the company explains why it believes the protocol, originally invented by Pixar, fits the needs of the coming metaverse.

Though the word metaverse is presently being used as a catchall for pretty much any multi-user application these days, the truth is that the vast majority of such platforms are islands unto themselves that have no connectivity to virtual spaces, people, or objects on other platforms. The ‘real’ metaverse, most seem to agree, must have at least some elements of interoperability, allowing users to seamlessly move from one virtual space to the next, much like we do today on the web.

To that end, Nvidia is pushing Universal Scene Description (USD) as the “HTML of the metaverse,” the company described in a recent post.