Category: Breakthrough Thinking

Each year, the world loses about 10 million hectares of forest – an area about the size of Iceland – because of deforestation. At that rate, some scientists predict the world’s forests could disappear in 100 to 200 years.

In an effort to provide an environmentally friendly and low-waste alternative to deforestation, researchers at Massachusetts of Technology (MIT) have pioneered a tunable technique to generate wood-like plant material in the lab. This could let someone ‘grow’ a wooden product like a table without needing to cut down trees, process lumber, etc.

The researchers have now demonstrated that, by adjusting certain chemicals used during the growth process, they can precisely control the physical and mechanical properties of the resulting plant material, such as its stiffness and density. They have also shown that, using 3D bioprinting techniques, they can grow plant material in shapes, sizes and forms that are not found in nature and that can’t be easily produced using traditional agricultural methods. They report their work in a paper in Materials Today.

“The idea is that you can grow these plant materials in exactly the shape that you need, so you don’t need to do any subtractive manufacturing after the fact, which reduces the amount of energy and waste,” says lead author Ashley Beckwith, a recent PhD graduate at MIT. “There is a lot of potential to expand this and grow three-dimensional structures.”

Continue reading… “Lab-produced wood doesn’t grow on trees”

Lonestar Data Holdings to launch RISC-V servers to the Moon.

By Anton Shilov

Modern datacenters consume loads of power, require extremely complex cooling, and are physically vulnerable to natural disasters and military conflicts. Datacenters 10 years from now will get even more complex, power hungry, and hot. There are several radical ways to solve power and cooling problems, but one startup plans to solve the problem by putting data centers on the Moon, and it already has two spaceflights booked to place equipment on the moon. The end goal is to have a network of servers on the moon that’s fed by a nuclear reactor. 

As it turns out, Lonestar Data Holdings plans to establish a network of data centers on the Moon, reports DataCenterKnowledge. In fact, the company has already contracted with Intuitive Machines for its first two missions to the lunar surface and to build its first proof-of-concept data services payload, thus building the first data center on the Moon. The actual RISC-V-based machines will be built by Skycorp.  

“Data is the greatest currency created by the human race,” said Chris Stott, Founder of Lonestar. “We are dependent upon it for nearly everything we do and it is too important to us as a species to store in Earth’s ever more fragile biosphere. Earth’s largest satellite, our Moon, represents the ideal place to safely store our future.” 

There are numerous challenges with installing a data center on the lunar surface. Of course, the expenses associated with delivering the servers to the Moon are one of them, but powering the servers and connecting them to the Internet are two other challenges. 

Continue reading… “Startup Plans Nuclear-Powered Data Centers on the Moon”