Lifeboat Foundation

This is Part Three of a five-part series by Ramez Naam, Singularity University Adjunct Faculty, exploring the power of innovation to boost our access to energy, food, water, raw materials, and human population. All are based on his new book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet

In Part One and Two of this series I showed that we have access to a huge amount of potentially available energy and food on the earth, both stemming from the tremendous input of solar energy to the planet. We have very serious energy and food challenges, which cannot be dismissed. But the challenges are not in the form of a hard limit – they’re in the form of a race between innovation and consumption. Victory in this race is certainly not guaranteed. But the most important variable – how quickly we innovate – is one we can affect through our policies. That’s a topic we’ll return to at the end of this series.

A global wave of investment in high-capacity batteries is poised to transform the market for renewable energy in coming years, making it more practical and affordable to store wind and solar power and deploy it when needed.

Government-owned utilities and companies are buying batteries that can be larger than shipping containers. Some like…

To Read the Full Story.

A team of researchers with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Mälardalen University and Tsinghua University has found that all of China’s major cities are now in a position to produce electricity from solar power more cheaply than can be had from the grid. In their paper published in the journal Nature Energy, the group describes how they estimated solar energy costs for all the major Chinese cities, and what they found when they compared them to costs associated with the grid.

In recent years, China has put a significant amount of effort into producing and installing solar technology to the extent that they are now the world’s biggest producer of solar cells, and also the world’s biggest installer of solar panels. Last year, installations in the country accounted for half of all installations worldwide. A lot of that growth has been stimulated by government subsidies, but the Chinese government has made it clear that it wants solar to fly on its own—subsidies are slowly being withdrawn. In this new effort, the researchers wanted to know if China was ready to fly on its own, at least in its major cities.

The researchers started by estimating solar energy system prices and electricity production in all of the major Chinese cities. They then compared what they found with prices from the grid. Next, they estimated solar electricity prices at the grid scale, and compared them to electricity generated strictly from coal. The calculations accounted for estimates of the lifetime of solar systems. They report that they found that all 344 of the major cities they studied were currently in a position to generate electricity at lower costs than the grid supply—without subsidies. They also found that 22 percent of those cities could also produce electricity at a lesser cost than possible with coal.

Buying organic food is among the actions people can take to curb the global decline in insects, according to leading scientists. Urging political action to slash pesticide use on conventional farms is another, say environmentalists.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=h5jBjso6l6I

If 150,000 volt stun guns aren’t enough to deter criminals, law enforcement might want to give Rob Flickenger a buzz.

The IT expert, who also has a bit of a reputation as a DIY mad-scientist, has a shocking new invention: a real-life lightning gun. Built over a period of at least 10 months, the zapper is the end result of combining the aim-and-shoot functionality of an aluminum-encased Nerf gun with the electrical power supplied by an 18V drill battery.

Continue reading “Shocking invention: A Tesla lightning gun” »

The future could be here before we know it. On Monday, Fisker Inc.—the company behind the Tesla Model S-fighting EMotion picture above—announced that it had filed patents for a new type of battery technology that could put electric cars with 500-plus mile ranges and one-minute recharging times on the roads as soon as the year 2024.

While Fisker’s press release was, unsurprisingly, a tad cagey about the details of this potentially paradigm-shattering technology, the company did reveal a few bits about what its new inventions and discoveries could do. Fisker’s new power storage technology, according to the company, would allow it to build solid-state batteries packing far more surface area than existing flat thin-film solid-state electrodes can do, while also allowing for greater conductivity, allowing the batteries to work better in cold weather and charge faster overall. (Low levels of conductivity has been one of the key problems preventing the widespread adoption of solid-state batteries so far, so this could potentially be, as Michael Scott might say, a B.F.D.)

Due to the complexities of bringing the new technology to market, such as developing supply chains for some raw materials and setting up property quality control measures for them, Fisker says the technology isn’t likely to reach cars and trucks until sometime after 2023. Once it does, however, the company claims the batteries—2.5 times more power-dense than their lithium ion equivalents—could lead to electric vehicles capable of recharging in less time than it takes to fill a modern car’s gas tank, then driving more than 500 miles before needing to power up again. Oh, and the carmaker says the batteries would cost about one-third as much as li-ion ones, to boot. (That said, Fisker did mention that there are still plenty of “technical bottlenecks” between where the tech is now and where it needs to be for production use, so don’t get too excited just yet.)

THE reaction synchronous motor in its present form (salient-pole rotor without field coils) is one of the oldest types of electric motors, antedating the i.

https://youtu.be/3lY3XK_Z6UQ

Agricultural Revolution is one of the milestones of today’s civilization. It was driven by technological innovations and inventions thousands of years ago, and it is still a very crucial part of our species’ social construct. Engineers are developing tools and machines to make farmers’ job a lot easier by technologies like automation for sustainable productivity. Here are 7 innovative ways the technology is used for agriculture.

Facebook: http://facebook.com/interestingengineering
Twitter: http://twitter.com/intengineering
Instagram: http://instagram.com/interestingengineering
Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/company/10070590

On Tuesday afternoon, NASA announced 19 new partnerships with 10 US companies to help bring more cutting-edge technologies closer to production use in spaceflight. There were a lot of useful engineering ideas here, such as precision landing systems and robotic plant farms, but perhaps the most intriguing one involved the rocket company SpaceX and two of NASA’s field centers—the Glenn Research Center in Ohio and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

“SpaceX will work with Glenn and Marshall to advance technology needed to transfer propellant in orbit, an important step in the development of the company’s Starship space vehicle,” the NASA news release states. This is a significant announcement for reasons both technical and political.