Can we deploy a constellation of solar power generating satellites to energize the entire planet? It is feasible.
In this second part of a two-part series, we look at a constellation of solar satellites as an alternative to geosynchronous power arrays.
A research group from Politecnico di Milano has developed a new computing circuit that can execute advanced operations, typical of neural networks for artificial intelligence, in one single operation.
The circuit performance in terms of speed and energy consumption paves the way for a new generation of artificial intelligence computing accelerators that are more energy efficient and more sustainable on a global scale. The study has been recently published in the prestigious Science Advances.
Recognizing a face or an object, or correctly interpreting a word or a musical tune are operations that are today possible on the most common electronic gadgets, such as smartphones and tablets, thanks to artificial intelligence. For this to happen, complicated neural networks needs to be appropriately trained, which is so energetically demanding that, according to some studies, the carbon footprint that derives from the training of a complex neural network can equal the emission of 5 cars throughout their whole life cycle.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is considering a visit to Indonesia to explore investment opportunities in the resource-rich Southeast Asia country.
The chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX met with Indonesian President Joko Widodo at the rocket manufacturer’s site in Boca Chica, Texas, on Saturday, during which Widodo extended an invite. “Hopefully in November, thank you for the invitation,” Musk said, according to a statement released by Widodo’s office.
A “forever battery” is much smaller and more energy-dense than lithium-ion. They’ll change the world and unlock a trillion-dollar revolution.
In this week’s episode, Aaron and I discuss what could be the “holy grail” of energy: the solid-state — or forever battery. Obviously, lithium-ion cells are the status quo of today. And they power pretty much everything, like your smartphone, laptop and electric vehicle.
Continue reading “Forever Battery: QuantumScape’s Holy Grail of Energy” »
Scientists have proposed a solar energy-driven photocatalytic method to split water. This method uses iridium as a metal catalyst and is believed to be capable of producing green and clean hydrogen fuel on a large scale.
Today a state-of-the-art solar panel on Earth can convert between 20 to 30% of the energy it collects from sunlight into electricity. At night solar panels here contribute nothing. But in space with nothing to block the Sun, that same Earth-based solar panel becomes thirteen times more efficient. And that is enough of an incentive to consider solar power from space.
The Chinese and UK models are massive arrays located in geosynchronous orbit while continuously beaming energy to receiving stations here on Earth.
The US model is different using a constellation of solar power generating satellites. These would be in relatively low orbits and interconnected to form a mesh network. The total network would generate continuous energy beaming it to the surface even when a portion of it gets blocked when the satellites enter the night side of the planet.
According to The Guardian, there’s a team of researchers in northern Greece who have spent the last few years experimenting with ways to harvest metal though agriculture:
In a remote, beautiful field, high in the Pindus mountains in Epirus, they are experimenting with a trio of shrubs known to scientists as “hyperaccumulators”: plants which have evolved the capacity to thrive in naturally metal-rich soils that are toxic to most other kinds of life. They do this by drawing the metal out of the ground and storing it in their leaves and stems, where it can be harvested like any other crop. As well as providing a source for rare metals – in this case nickel, although hyperaccumulators have been found for zinc, aluminium, cadmium and many other metals, including gold – these plants actively benefit the earth by remediating the soil, making it suitable for growing other crops, and by sequestering carbon in their roots. One day, they might supplant more destructive and polluting forms of mining.
Imagine, finding a way to pull minerals out of the Earth … without violent colonization and destructive mining practices. Maybe us lowly humans could learn a thing or two from the flowers!
NVIDIA has published the source code of its Linux kernel modules for the R515 driver, allowing developers to provide greater integration, stability, and security for Linux distributions.
The source code has been published to NVIDIA’s GitHub repository under a dual licensing model that combines the GPL and MIT licenses, making the modules legally re-distributable.
The products supported by these drivers include all models built on the Turing and Ampere architecture, released after 2018, including the GeForce 30 and GeForce 20 series, the GTX 1,650 and 1,660, and data center-grade A series, Tesla, and Quadro RTX.
The Verge TS isn’t just a proper hubless, electric motorbike. It also comes with an insane 1,000 Nm of torque. property= description.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) and Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin (MPZPM) in Erlangen present a large step forward in the characterization of nanoparticles. They used a special microscopy method based on interfereometry to outperform existing instruments. One possible application of this technique may be to identify illnesses.
Nanoparticles are everywhere. They are in our body as protein aggregates, lipid vesicles, or viruses. They are in our drinking water in the form of impurities. They are in the air we breath as pollutants. At the same time, many drugs are based on the delivery of nanoparticles, including the vaccines we have recently been given. Keeping with the pandemics, quick tests used for the detection the SARS-Cov-2 are based on nanoparticles too. The red line, which we monitor day by day, contains myriads of gold nanoparticles coated with antibodies against proteins that report infection.
Technically, one calls something a nanoparticle when its size (diameter) is smaller than one micrometer. Objects of the order of one micrometer can still be measured in a normal microscope, but particles that are much smaller, say smaller than 0.2 micrometers, become exceedingly difficult to measure or characterize. Interestingly, this is also the size range of viruses, which can become as small as 0.02 micrometers.
