Lifeboat Foundation

Nearly a century ago, physicists Max Born and J. Robert Oppenheimer developed a hypothesis about the functioning of quantum mechanics within molecules. These molecules consist of complex systems of nuclei and electrons. The Born-Oppenheimer approximation postulates that the movements of nuclei and electrons within a molecule occur independently and can treated separately.

This model works the vast majority of the time, but scientists are testing its limits. Recently, a team of scientists demonstrated the breakdown of this assumption on very fast time scales, revealing a close relationship between the dynamics of nuclei and electrons. The discovery could influence the design of molecules useful for solar energy conversion, energy production, quantum information science, and more.

The team, including scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, North Carolina State University, and the University of Washington, recently published their discovery in two related papers in Nature and Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

When Karl Wenner looks at his farm on Upper Klamath Lake in the mountains of southern Oregon, he sees a landscape in transition.

He and his partners converted part of their fields of barley into wetlands along the shore of the lake to filter runoff and protect the quality of the water that eventually flows back into the Klamath River, which empties into the Pacific on California’s coast. The project is part of a larger effort to clean up the river, remove dams and bring back salmon.

At Lakeside Farms, that transformation is being guided by a surprising source of information: the pollen collected by tens of thousands of honeybees. A Belgian start-up called BeeOdiversity enlisted Wenner, who is also a beekeeper, to help in a survey in the Klamath River Basin. Each colony, with 50,000 bees, harvests pollen over an area of more than two square miles, collecting as many as 4 billion tiny samples in a year. The resulting data creates a clear, accurate picture of the plant life and pollution present in the environment.

Kenya was a leader in mobile money. Now with highways with charging stations every 25km, and this.

Technology company Roam announced the launch of the ‘Made in Kenya’, fully electric, Roam Move shuttle bus mid last month. The zero-emissions shuttle bus and is equipped with a 170 kWh battery pack and can travel 200 kilometres on a single charge. It also has a fast plug-in battery charging that ensures it is fully charged in less than two hours.

By: kathryn hardison, austin business journal.

Posted: Oct 3, 2023 / 01:18 PM CDT

With Honda’s EV offensive finally starting, the Japanese automaker is already giving us a preview of what could be its next-gen electric SUV and sedan concepts in its latest video.

After releasing new details on its first electric SUV, the 2024 Prologue, Honda is showing off two new EV concepts.

The Honda Prologue is co-developed with General Motors. Built on GM’s Ultium platform (the same one powering upcoming EVs, including the Blazer, Equinox, and Silverado), Honda’s electric SUV will feature an expected range of over 300 miles.

Saltwater is plentiful, but no good for drinking. Desalinization is the obvious solution, but a big problem isn’t taking the salt out, it’s where all that leftover salt goes. Excess salt accumulates, crystallizes, collects, and clogs a system. Dealing with this means maintenance, which means higher costs, which ultimately limits scalability.

The good news is that engineers at MIT and in China have succeeded in creating a desalination system that avoids this problem by intrinsically flushing accumulated salt as it is created, keeping the system clean. And what’s more, the whole thing is both scalable and entirely passive. The required energy all comes from gravity and the sun’s heat.

Continue reading “Passive Desalination Discovers How To Avoid Salt-Clogging” »

Small mobile robots carrying sensors could perform tasks like catching gas leaks or tracking warehouse inventory. But moving robots demands a lot of energy, and batteries, the typical power source, limit lifetime and raise environmental concerns. Researchers have explored various alternatives: affixing sensors to insects, keeping charging mats nearby, or powering the robots with lasers. Each has drawbacks: Insects roam, chargers limit range, and lasers can burn people’s eyes.

Researchers at the University of Washington have now created MilliMobile, a tiny, self-driving robot powered only by surrounding light or radio waves. Equipped with a solar panel-like energy harvester and four wheels, MilliMobile is about the size of a penny, weighs as much as a raisin and can move about the length of a bus (30 feet, or 10 meters) in an hour even on a cloudy day. The robot can drive on surfaces such as concrete or packed soil and carry three times its own weight in equipment like a camera or sensors. It uses a light sensor to move automatically toward light sources so it can run indefinitely on harvested power.

The team will present its research Oct. 2 at the ACM MobiCom 2023 conference in Madrid, Spain.

Google Maps can now calculate rooftops’ solar potential, track air quality, and forecast pollen counts.

The platform recently launched a range of services like Solar API, which calculates weather patterns and pulls data from aerial imagery to help understand rooftops’ solar potential. The tool aims to help accelerate solar panel deployment by improving accuracy and reducing the number of site visits needed.

As seasonal allergies get worse every year, Pollen API shows updated information on the most common allergens in 65 countries by using a mix of machine learning and wind patterns. Similarly, Air Quality API provides detailed information on local air quality by utilizing data from multiple sources, like government monitoring stations, satellites, live traffic, and more, and can show areas affected by wildfires too.

Renewable energy grids need lots of energy storage – and EVs plugged into charging stations represent a huge, city-wide battery just waiting to help out. The Dutch city of Utrecht is about to pioneer a clever way to kickstart two-way charging.

The idea has been done plenty at the domestic level – where devices like Toyota’s V2H (vehicle-to-home) charging system can turn an electric car into a high-powered backup power supply capable of running your whole home for days at a time.

And people have been talking about it on a broader, city-wide scale since the dawn of the EV revolution; the same high power density batteries that makes EVs so quick to accelerate make them perfect for quickly sending power back into the grid to smooth out demand spikes.