Meet the “Yangtze River Three Gorges 1”, an electric cruise ship, announced in December, that is poised to become the world’s largest of its kind (among EVs).
According to the brief info, it will be launched in July and enter service in November of 2021, on popular tourist routes: the Two Dams and One Gorge, the Yichang Yangtze River Night Cruise, and the Three Gorges Shiplift.
Not only will the size and passenger capacity be the highest, but also the battery capacity — roughly 7.5 MWh (an equivalent of 75–100 long-range electric cars). The LFP-type batteries (over 10000 cells) will be supplied by CATL.
Review: Meat Planet (2019) by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
In the words of the book’s author, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (2019) is “not an attempt at prediction but rather a study of cultured meat as a special case of speculation on the future of food, and as a lens through which to view the predictions we make about how technology changes the world.” While not serving as some crystal ball to tell us the future of food, Wurgaft’s book certainly does serve as a kind of lens.
Our very appetites are questioned quite a bit in the book. Wondering about the ever-changing history of food, the author asks, “Will it be an effort to reproduce the industrial meat forms we know, albeit on a novel, and more ethical and sustainable, foundation?” Questioning why hamburgers are automatically the default goal, he points out cultured meat advocates should carefully consider “the question of which human appetite for meat, in historical terms, they wish to satisfy.”
Wurgaft’s question of “which human appetite” – past, present, or future – is an excellent one. If we use his book as a lens to observe other emerging technologies, the question extends well beyond our choices of food. It could even have direct implications for such endeavours as radical life extension. Will we, if we extend our lifetimes, be satisfactory to future people? We already know the kind of clash that persists between different generations, and the blame we often place on previous generations for current social ills, without there also being a group of people who simply refuse to die. We should be wary of basing our future on the present – of attempting to preserve present tastes as somehow immutable and deserving immortality. This may be a problem such futurists as Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near (2005) need to respond to.
The future is someone else’s problem. Tomorrow is just another day.
This is all well and good to think, but if we want to live a long, healthy life, then we ALL need to work to make tomorrow a better day…
Or we could just let Mad Max, Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, Animal Farm, etc., come to pass…anr then we can all moan about it as we are living in a nightmare…
Does it have to be that way?
I will look at where we are today and what we need to change as we seek to design a better life and a better world, so together, we can build a better future.
The potential foray into “personal air mobility” was announced as part of Cadillac’s portfolio of luxury and EV vehicles. It included an autonomous shuttle and an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, or more commonly known as a flying car or air taxi.
Michael Simcoe, vice president of GM global design, said each concept reflected “the needs and wants of the passengers at a particular moment in time and GM’s vision of the future of transportation.”
“This is a special moment for General Motors as we reimagine the future of personal transportation for the next five years and beyond,” Simcoe said.
All the clean technologies that we need to combat climate change – whether that’s wind turbines, solar panels or batteries, they’re all really, really mineral intensive.
Cornwall, 1864. A hot spring is discovered nearly 450m (1485ft) below ground in the Wheal Clifford, a copper mine just outside the mining town of Redruth. Glass bottles are immersed to their necks in its bubbling waters, carefully sealed and sent off for testing. The result is the discovery of so great a quantity of lithium – eight or 10 times as much per gallon as had been found in any hot spring previously analysed – that scientists suspect “it may prove of great commercial value”.
But 19th-Century England had little need for the element, and this 50C (122F) lithium-rich water continued steaming away in the dark for more than 150 years.
Fast forward to autumn 2020, and a site nearby the Wheal Clifford in Cornwall has been confirmed as having some of the world’s highest grades of lithium in geothermal waters. The commercial use for lithium in the 21st Century could not be clearer. It is found not only inside smart phones and laptops, but is now vital to the clean energy transition, for the batteries that power electric vehicles and store energy so renewable power can be released steadily and reliably.
Capturing energy from the Sun with solar panels is only half the story – that energy needs to be stored somewhere for later use. In the case of flow batteries, storage is relegated to vats of liquid. Now, an international team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists has created a new version of these solar flow batteries that’s efficient and long-lasting.
To make the new device, the team combined several existing technologies. It’s a silicon/perovskite tandem solar cell, paired with a redox flow battery, which the team says will allow people to harvest and store renewable energy in one device. Not only is it efficient, but it should be inexpensive and simple enough to scale up for home use.
The energy-harvesting part of the equation combines the long-time industry-leading material – silicon – with a promising young upstart called perovskite. These tandem solar cells have proved better than either material alone, since the two materials capture different wavelengths of light.
Anyone who has followed the career of Elon Musk knows that he formulated a set of goals many years ago, and has worked tirelessly and methodically to reach those goals, a process that he knew would take years or decades. Even casual observers are familiar with Tesla’s Master Plan, a three-part strategy to bring a mid-priced EV to the mass market.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are used in many applications to gather intelligence without risking human lives. These aircraft, however, have limited flight time because of their reconnaissance payload requirements coupled with their limited scale. A microwave-powered flight vehicle would be able to perform a reconnaissance mission continuously.
Using beamed microwave energy from a remote source on the ground, the airplane gathers energy using onboard antennas. A rectifying antenna, or rectenna, harvests power and rectifies it into a form usable by an onboard electric motor that drives the propeller, providing thrust. Using a rectenna array affixed to the underside of the aircraft, the power needed to maintain flight can be remotely transmitted.
The idea of a fuel-less flight vehicle, or an aircraft that does not carry its own fuel, has been pursued in few different forms over the past decades. There are many different approaches for how to power these vehicles; however, the common theme is that power must be transmitted from a source remote to the aircraft. Some of the possibilities for power transmission include solar power, the heating of air underneath the aircraft to cause thrust, and using antennas to convert microwave radiation into electrical power.
