Lifeboat Foundation

Vertical farming saves water, land, and energy — and it could be how we grow food on Mars.

For his work on liquid metal batteries that could enable the long-term storage of renewable energy, MIT Professor Donald Sadoway has won the 2022 European Inventor Award, in the category for Non-European Patent Office Countries.

Sadoway is a longtime supporter and friend of MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory and is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

“By enabling the large-scale storage of renewable energy, Donald Sadoway’s invention is a huge step towards the deployment of carbon-free electricity generation,” says António Campinos, President of the European Patent Office. “He has spent his career studying electrochemistry and has transformed this expertise into an invention that represents a huge step forward in the transition to green energy.”

Breaking the previous record by 60 percent.

The team behind the first Chinese X-ray astronomy satellite, Insight-HXMT, has discovered the strongest magnetic field directly measured in the universe hitherto.

It is a known fact that neutron stars generate the strongest magnetic fields in the universe. These magnetic fields, close to a neutron star’s surface, can only be measured accurately and directly by looking for cyclon resonance scattering features (CRSF). The Insight-HXMT team discovered a cyclotron absorption line with an energy of 146 keV in the neutron star X-ray binary Swift J0243.6+6124, which translates to a surface magnetic field of more than 1.6 billion Tesla.

What if you could power the smart thermostats, speakers and lights in your home with a kitchen countertop? Stones, such as marble and granite, are natural, eco-friendly materials that many people building or renovating houses already use. Now, in a step toward integrating energy storage with these materials, researchers have fabricated microsupercapacitors onto the surface of stone tiles. The devices, reported in ACS Nano, are durable and easily scaled up for customizable 3D power supplies.

It would be convenient if the surfaces in rooms could charge smart home devices or other small electronics without being connected to the electrical grid. And although stone is a widely used material for floors, countertops and decorative backsplashes, it hasn’t been integrated with energy storage devices, such as batteries and capacitors. But stones, even those that are polished and seem smooth, have microscopic bumps and divots, making it difficult to adhere electrical components to them. Researchers have recently figured out how to place microsupercapacitors, which have fast charging and discharging rates and excellent power supply storage, onto irregular surfaces with lasers. So, Bongchul Kang and colleagues wanted to adapt this approach to build microsupercapacitors on marble. For further information see the IDTechEx report on Supercapacitor Materials and Formats 2020–2040.

Hot, dry rock deep underground could be used to heat water and produce electricity.

Supplyve gives small independent retailers the technological tools to take control of their supply chains without spreadsheets.

Zap Energy said its experimental reactor core was ready for a milestone test. Skeptics routinely question whether the technology is currently possible.

Since April 1980, the overall yearly growth in energy prices is at its highest level. Gasoline prices increased by 11.2 per cent last month and a startling 59.9 per cent over the previous year, accounting for half of the monthly rise.

As per Government data released on Wednesday (July 13), in June, the United States saw a new peak of 9.1 per cent inflation. This faster-than-expected increase in the consumer price index (CPI) was driven by significant increases in gasoline prices, reports AFP. The US Labor Department has reported that this 9.1 per cent CPI spike over the past 12 months to June was the fastest increase in 40 years, the last such increase was witnessed in November 1981.

Berkeley Lab scientists assess the technology landscape for developing a domestic source of lithium.

If you had a jar of marbles of many different colors but wanted only the green ones, how could you efficiently pick them out? What if it wasn’t marbles but a jar of glitter, and there was sand, glue, and mud mixed in? That begins to describe the complexity of the brine pumped out from beneath California’s Salton Sea as part of geothermal energy production.

For geothermal fields around the world, produced geothermal brine has been simply injected back underground, but now it’s become clear that the brines produced at the Salton Sea geothermal field contain an immense amount of lithium, a critical resource need for low-carbon transportation and energy storage. Demand for lithium is skyrocketing, as it is an essential ingredient in lithium-ion batteries. Currently there is very little lithium production in the U.S. and most lithium is imported; however, that may change in the near future.

Continue reading “Sizing Up the Challenges in Extracting Lithium from Geothermal Brine” »

Motors are everywhere in our day-to-day lives—from cars to washing machines. A futuristic scientific field is working on tiny motors that could power a network of nanomachines and replace some of the power sources we use in devices today.

In new research published recently in ACS Nano, researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin created the first ever solid-state optical nanomotor. All previous versions of these light-driven motors reside in a solution of some sort, which held back their potential for most real-world applications.

Continue reading “Tiny motors take a big step forward” »