After over a decade of research and testing, Caltech’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator arrived above Earth on Tuesday to begin testing.
We can expect to the latest and greatest in gaming and computer hardware, audio visual, electric vehicles and smart home technologies.
Year 2022 😗
Plastic foam like Styrofoam is a ubiquitous, harmful and nearly immortal single-use material that is long overdue for a good, green replacement — and Cruz Foam is here to supply it. The startup creates a durable yet backyard-compostable packing foam out of shrimp shells produced (and discarded) by the seafood industry. It recently extended its seed round to accommodate the interests of Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher, and is scaling up to meet the demands of its first major customer, Whirlpool.
I met Cruz Foam co-founder John Felts during the memorable Accelerator at Sea hosted by the Sustainable Ocean Alliance. His pitch made perfect sense: create a biodegradable alternative to expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam using a material provided in abundance by nature.
Continue reading “Cruz Foam taps DiCaprio and Kutcher in $3.5M greentech seed” »
H umans are at the center of most discussions about both the environment and technology. One goal of sustainability is to ensure that future generations of humans have opportunities to thrive on planet Earth. Debates about the ethics of technology often focus on how to protect human rights and promote human autonomy.
At the same time, some conversations about the environment and technology are now taking humans out of the equation. As Adam Kirsch points out in a new book, “The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us,” people in two very different schools of thought are coming to a similar conclusion: that the world might not have people much longer and might be better off as a result.
Kirsch takes readers on a guided tour of the discussions in these two camps. “Antihumanists” are obsessed with our having sown the seeds of our demise and bringing environmental apocalypse upon ourselves — possibly even deserving to go extinct. “Transhumanists” are obsessed with maintaining control and envision a future in which we use technology to become something greater than homo sapiens and even cheat death itself.
A new demo from Caltech will test the viability of unlimited solar power beamed back to Earth from orbit.
A new demo from Caltech is set to launch in January 2023, and it could shake up the way we collect and harvest solar power in the future.
Continue reading “We’re about to get our first demonstration of space-based solar power” »
250 feet down a cliff. Notice many of the Musk bashing news outlets are not reporting this. #PleaseShare
Montara, Calif. — A 4-year-old girl, a 9-year-old boy and two adults survived Monday after their car plunged off a Northern California cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway near an area known as Devil’s Slide that’s known for fatal wrecks, officials said.
The Tesla sedan plummeted more than 250 feet from the highway and crashed into a rocky outcropping. It appears to have flipped a few times before landing on its wheels, wedged against the cliff just feet from the surf, according to Brian Pottenger, a battalion chief for Coastside Fire Protection District/Cal Fire.
Aerones’ robot decreases downtime by almost ten times and increases annual production by 12 percent.
Although wind turbine towers create clean electricity, they frequently leak oil, damaging the blades, increasing wind resistance, and even polluting the ground below.
Continue reading “These robots inspect and repair wind turbines, so humans don’t have to” »
Image credit: Max Planck Institute of Plasma physics. Cutaway of a Fusion Reactor.
A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) and the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wein) have discovered a way to control Type-I ELM plasma instabilities, that melt the walls of fusion devices. The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
There is no doubt that the day will come when fusion power plants can provide sustainable energy and solve our persistent energy problems. It is the main reason why so many scientists around the world are working on this power source. Power generation in this way actually mimics the sun.
Laya Joshua from Kerala has used stones, old wood, and many such eco-friendly elements to build her dream sustainable home, for which no trees were cut.
This month, NASA launched a new Earth-monitoring satellite that will observe fresh water systems across the planet. Now, the satellite has unfurled in space ready to begin science operations, and NASA has shared a video showing the unfolding process.
Named the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, it had been folded up to fit inside the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket which launched it from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on December 16. Once the satellite reached space, it had to deploy its solar panel arrays, then unfold its mast and antenna panels. While deploying the solar panel arrays was a quick process, taking place shortly after launch, the unfolding of the antennae was much more involved and took four days.
As the SWOT satellite has a camera at the end of its long master, used for its Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) instrument, these cameras were able to capture the unfolding process on video. This instrument is a new type of interferometer that will be able to see the depth of fresh water bodies such as lakes and rivers by using radar pulses. It sends two radar pulses down to the surface with a slight offset, allowing researchers to see the depth of these features. This is possible because of the wide spread of its two antennae, spaced 10 meters apart.
