Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2019

Want superhero powers that let you see in the dark just like your cat? In the near future you may be able to—as long as you’re not too squeamish to get injections right into your eyeballs.

Continue reading “Nanoparticles Will Give You Superhuman Night Vision” »

HYBRIT and H2 Green Steel have launched projects in Sweden with a target to manufacture 10 million tonnes (mt) of fossil fuel-free crude (green) steel per year by 2030. Success, of course, depends on the numbers adding up, or rather, the numbers going down.

To make green steel, you need green hydrogen; to make green hydrogen, you need cheap renewable energy. HYBRIT and H2 Green Steel believe this will come from wind power at a LCOE of $30 per megawatt-hour. With the trajectory of costs for renewable energy going ever downward, it is likely they will be able to achieve this.

Add to the mix the increasing costs of carbon and the pressure to decarbonize, and you have a winner. It is expected that a carbon credits will be available to green steel producers of around $85 per ton.

Hydrogen is the simplest element in the universe. And excitement is growing from nations and investors looking to harness its power to make clean, green energy. In this edition of Bloomberg Green, we speak to Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest about his big pivot from dirty coal to clean hydrogen. And Snam CEO Marco Alvera talks to us about his price target for the gas over the next decade. Plus, we break down the difference between gray, blue and green hydrogen, and speak to our BloombergNEF analysts about the possible limitations of the gas.

RWE is using used lithium batteries from electric vehicles in the new storage unit. The 60 battery systems in the innovative storage unit on the site of the RWE pumped storage power plant in Herdecke, North Rhine-Westphalia, can buffer around 4.5 megawatt hours of electricity.

A wind turbine sitting idle on a calm day or spinning swiftly when power demand is already met poses a problem for renewables, and is one researchers think can be tackled under the sea.

In one vision, offshore wind farms could use seawater to essentially store energy until it’s needed, helping wean humanity off fossil fuels.

“We came up with a solution that we call the ocean battery,” Frits Bliek, CEO of Dutch startup Ocean Grazer told AFP while showing off the system at the CES tech fair in Las Vegas.

🚀

In the two weeks since its launch on December 25 at 7:20 am ET, Webb has successfully completed many milestones:

✨ Webb released and deployed its solar array, which means the telescope went off battery power and began to use its own generated power.
✨ Webb has had two planned mid-course correction burns. Webb was launched on a direct path to an orbit around the second Lagrange Point (L2), but its trajectory required correction maneuvers to get there.
✨ The 5-layer sunshield has been fully deployed and tensioned. Did we mention it is the size of a tennis court? 🤯
✨ Webb’s secondary mirror, which plays an important role in reflecting light collected by the primary mirror into the telescope’s instruments, has been deployed.

All-solid-state batteries are now one step closer to becoming the powerhouse of next-generation electronics, as researchers from Tokyo Tech, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), and Yamagata University introduce a strategy to restore their low electrical resistance. They also explore the underlying reduction mechanism, paving the way for a more fundamental understanding of the workings of all-solid-state lithium batteries.

All-solid-state lithium batteries have become the new craze in materials science and engineering as conventional lithium-ion batteries can no longer meet the standards for advanced technologies, such as electric vehicles, which demand high energy densities, fast charging, and long cycle lives. All-solid-state batteries, which use a solid electrolyte instead of a liquid electrolyte found in traditional batteries, not only meet these standards but are comparatively safer and more convenient as they have the possibility to charge in a short time.

However, the solid electrolyte comes with its own challenge. It turns out that the interface between the positive electrode and solid electrolyte shows a large electrical resistance whose origin is not well understood. Furthermore, the resistance increases when the electrode surface is exposed to air, degrading the battery capacity and performance. While several attempts have been made to lower the resistance, none have managed to bring it down to 10 Ω cm² (ohm centimeter-squared), the reported interface resistance value when not exposed to air.

A potential alternative to hydrogen-based energy storage systems that suffer from low energy density.

Many of these systems are kept out of equilibrium because individual constituents have their own power source — ATP for cells, gas for cars. But all these extra energy sources and mismatched reactions make for a complex dynamical system beyond the reach of statistical mechanics. How can we analyze phases in such ever-changing systems?

Vitelli and his colleagues see an answer in mathematical objects called exceptional points. Generally, an exceptional point in a system is a singularity, a spot where two or more characteristic properties become indistinguishable and mathematically collapse into one. At an exceptional point, the mathematical behavior of a system differs dramatically from its behavior at nearby points, and exceptional points often describe curious phenomena in systems — like lasers — in which energy is gained and lost continuously.

Now the team has found that these exceptional points also control phase transitions in nonreciprocal systems. Exceptional points aren’t new; physicists and mathematicians have studied them for decades in a variety of settings. But they’ve never been associated so generally with this type of phase transition. “That’s what no one has thought about before, using these in the context of nonequilibrium systems,” said the physicist Cynthia Reichhardt of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “So you can bring all the machinery that we already have about exceptional points to study these systems.”