Lifeboat Foundation

Tesla will cut pay for all of its salaried employees and will furlough hourly workers until May 4, when it intends to resume production of electric cars, according to an internal e-mail that multiple employees shared with CNBC. The pay reductions are expected to be in place until the end of the second quarter.

Health orders, implemented to curb the spread of COVID-19, forced Elon Musk’s electric car company to wind down production at its main vehicle assembly plant in Fremont, California.

The new pay cuts follow Tesla’s first-quarter vehicle production and deliveries report, which pleased investors — the company said it delivered approximately 88,400 vehicles and produced 103,000 in Q1. Tesla has yet to withdraw guidance it gave investors for 2020, saying it should “comfortably exceed” 500,000 vehicle deliveries for the year.

The world generates over six million tons of coffee grounds, according to the International Coffee Organization. The journal Agriculture and Food Chemistry reported in 2012 that over half of spent coffee grounds end up in landfills. Cellulose nanofibers are the building blocks for plastic resins that can be made into biodegradable plastic products.

The YNU team, led by Izuru Kawamura, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Engineering Science, set out to build upon previous research into extracting cellulose nanofibers from coffee grounds. They published their findings on April 1 in the journal Cellulose.

“Our ultimate goal is to establish a sustainable recycling system with our cellulose nanofibers in the coffee industry,” Kawamura said. “Now, more and more restaurants and cafés have been banned from using single-use straws. Following that movement, we aim to make a transparent disposable coffee cup and straw with an additive comprising cellulose nanofibers from spent coffee grounds.”

If we want more renewable energy, our grids will have to manage themselves. A small experiment in Colorado is lighting the way.

http://wef.ch/1MaNk4I

We have the technology to potentially add a 47th chromosome, to compound as it were, a new human entity. The implications are enormously consequential.

C.S. Lewis warned about our final mastery over nature, and the inevitable drift into a future world where knowledge about the old world completely vanishes, where what once was, irretrievably transforms into something else:

Continue reading “The 47th State Panacea or Perversion” »

Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers have developed a robot that plays Jenga using technology they say could be used to assemble consumer products or separate recycling.

Scientists in Australia think hardy agave plants could be the next big biofuel source. In addition, the bioethanol produced from the plants could help fill unprecedented global demand for hand sanitizer.

The President says we are at war with the coronavirus. It’s a war we should fight to win.

The economy is in the tank, and anywhere from thousands to more than a million American lives are in jeopardy. Most analyses of options and trade-offs assume that both the pandemic and the economic setback must play out over a period of many months for the pandemic and even longer for economic recovery. However, as the economists would say, there is a dominant option, one that simultaneously limits fatalities and gets the economy cranking again in a sustainable way.

That choice begins with a forceful, focused campaign to eradicate Covid-19 in the United States. The aim is not to flatten the curve; the goal is to crush the curve. China did this in Wuhan. We can do it across this country in 10 weeks.

Solar power on electric cars has yet to become a common feature, but Tesla is about to change that — starting with the Cybertruck electric pickup.

We’ve discussed solar roofs on electric vehicles before, most recently with the one on the latest Prius Prime, but the recurring problem is that they rarely generate enough power to be worth it.

Continue reading “Tesla’s next killer app: solar power on its electric cars — starting with Cybertruck” »