The global rush to recycled batteries is excellent news for automakers, however, there isn’t nearly enough scrap to feed them all.
The wave of new factories poses a significant risk for the recycling industry itself, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
“Nobody is really looking at each other, and they seem to think there will be a lot of scrap and end-of-life batteries,” Hans Eric Melin, the founder of a UK-based consultancy Circular Energy Storage(CES), told Bloomberg.
Researchers have developed a machine learning algorithm that could help reduce charging times and prolong battery life in electric vehicles by predicting how different driving patterns affect battery performance, improving safety and reliability.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, say their algorithm could help drivers, manufacturers and businesses get the most out of the batteries that power electric vehicles by suggesting routes and driving patterns that minimize battery degradation and charging times.
The team developed a non-invasive way to probe batteries and get a holistic view of battery health. These results were then fed into a machine learning algorithm that can predict how different driving patterns will affect the future health of the battery.
A study 29 years in the making shows how bison reintroductions can create richer ecosystems and resilience against climate change in North America.
Although plant-based polylactic acid (PLA) bioplastic is acclaimed for its biodegradability, it can take quite a long time to degrade if the conditions aren’t quite right. Bearing this fact in mind, Washington State University scientists have devised a way of upcycling it into a 3D-printing resin.
“[PLA] is biodegradable and compostable, but once you look into it, it turns out that it can take up to 100 years for it to decompose in a landfill,” said postdoctoral researcher Yu-Chung Chang, co-corresponding author of the study. “In reality, it still creates a lot of pollution. We want to make sure that when we do start producing PLA on the million-tons scale, we will know how to deal with it.”
To that end, Chang and colleagues developed a process in which an inexpensive chemical known as aminoethanol is used to break down the long chains of molecules that make up PLA. Those chains are rendered into simple monomers, which are the basic building blocks of plastic. The process takes about two days, and can be carried out at mild temperatures.
Solar cell manufacturing just became easier, more efficient, and less costly. A team of researchers at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with UC Berkeley, has discovered a unique material that can be used as a simpler approach to solar cell manufacturing, the team reported.
This material is a crystalline solar material with a built-in electric field — also known as “ferroelectricity” — that was reported earlier this year in the journal Science Advances.
Light microscopy image of nanowires, 100 to 1,000 nanometers in diameter, grown from cesium germanium tribromide (CGB) on a mica substrate. The CGB nanowires are samples of a new lead-free halide perovskite solar material that is also ferroelectric. (Credit: Peidong Yang and Ye Zhang/Berkeley Lab)
Solar panels, also known as photovoltaics, rely on semiconductor devices, or solar cells, to convert energy from the sun into electricity.
Israeli startup Future Meat Technologies has opened what it says is the first industrial-scale cultured meat production facility — a move designed to finally get lab-grown meat onto consumers’ plates.
“Our goal is to make cultured meat affordable for everyone,” CSO Yaakov Nahmias said in a press release, “while ensuring we produce delicious food that is both healthy and sustainable, helping to secure the future of coming generations.”
Why it matters: Demand for meat is higher than ever before, but the traditional means of producing it — by raising and slaughtering animals — is bad for the environment and arguably unethical.
For the first time, RIPE researchers have proven that multigene bioengineering of photosynthesis increases the yield of a major food crop in field trials. After more than a decade of working toward this goal, a collaborative team led by the University of Illinois has transgenically altered soybean plants to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis, resulting in greater yields without loss of quality.
Results of this magnitude couldn’t come at a more crucial time. The most recent UN report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022, found that in 2021 nearly 10% of the world population was hungry, a situation that has been steadily worsening over the last few years and eclipsing all other threats to global health in scale. According to UNICEF, by 2030, more than 660 million people are expected to face food scarcity and malnutrition. Two of the major causes of this are inefficient food supply chains (access to food) and harsher growing conditions for crops due to climate change. Improving access to food and improving the sustainability of food crops in impoverished areas are the key goals of this study and the RIPE project.
Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency, or RIPE, is an international research project that aims to increase global food production by improving photosynthetic efficiency in food crops for smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa.
