With all the loss of lives and financial destruction that the coronavirus has brought us, it’s hard to look at silver linings from this crisis, but there’s one that’s becoming obvious: cleaner air.
It might not last for long, but it’s giving us a glimpse at what we could experience if the world was to rapidly transition to electric transportation.
With shelter-in-place and stay-at-home orders all over the world, passenger car traffic has been way down and people have been burning way less petrol.
Carbon nanotube forests improve the stretchable supercapacitor’s performanceDuke University
The supercapacitors still functioned well when stretched to eight times their original size.
Imagine a new type of supercapacitor that can be repeatedly stretched to eight times its original size, yet still retaining its full functionality. Only after 10,000 cycles of charging and recharging does it start to lose a little percentage of its energy performance.
Researchers from Duke University and Michigan State University (MSU) have done just that. The team sees their novel supercapacitor as part of a power-independent, stretchable, flexible electronic system that could be used in wearable electronics or biomedical devices.
Smooth-walled wire traps high energy phonons, low energy phonons carry heat.
Tiny wires may boost heat flow.
Getting rid of heat is one of the central challenges with modern technology. It doesn’t matter whether the technology is a high-end server CPU or some pathetically anemic processor in a no-brand set-top box—someone has had to think about thermal management. One of the central issues in thermal management is thermal resistance, a material’s tendency to limit the flow of heat. The thicker a material, the larger the temperature gradient required to achieve the same amount of cooling because the thermal resistance increases with thickness.
Except when it doesn’t. If the heat is carried by ballistic phonons, thermal resistance stays constant.
Wireless charging for electric vehicles is today’s most cutting-edge technology. Why? It is the most efficient, futuristic, scalable–in short–awesome alternative we have to gasoline. While tech giants such as Uber are placing their bets on autonomous cars, major key players such as Jaguar Land Rover are mass-producing electric cars. What’s more, Fordis releasing fully-electric SUV and other market players are on the verge of joining the trend.
The more electric cars roam around the city, the more will be the demand for wireless charging. The global wireless electric vehicle charging market is expected to reach $1.48 billion by 2025, growing at a colossal CAGR of 21.8% from 2018 to 2025.This rapid growth is due to rise in sales of electric vehicles and increase in demand for energy-efficient sources as an alternative fuel.
VW says EV owners will be able to charge when production exceeds demand and sell power back to the grid during peak electricity usage.
The chief strategist at Volkswagen says vehicle-to-grid technology will open up new business opportunities for the automaker.
Cars that support the technology can store excess power and sell it back to the electrical grid in times of need.
The Nissan Leaf already supports this technology, but the feature also needs to be supported by the charger.
Volkswagen’s transition to electrification continues to yield business opportunities, according to its chief strategist, Michael Jost. In addition to vehicle sales, it has the growing Electrify America charging network, and now it looks like the company is planning to use the batteries in the cars it sells to help power the electrical grid.
Toomen’s high-density hybrid power capacitors offer the density of lithium batteries, but with much greater charge and discharge rates, a massive range of safe operating temperatures, enormous lifespans and no danger of explosion
Hybrid “power capacitors” that can store as much energy as lithium batteries, but with much higher charge/discharge rates, a huge range of safe operating temperatures, super-long lifespans and no risk of explosion are already in production, says a small Belgian company that’s been testing them and selling them for some time.
Chinese family-owned company Shenzhen Toomen New Energy is tough to find, at least on the English-language internet, but Belgian electronic engineer Eric Verhulst bumped into Toomen representatives on a tiny stand at the Hannover Messe expo in Germany back in 2018, while looking for next-gen battery solutions for an electric mobility startup he was running.
The Toomen team made a hell of a claim, saying they’d managed to manufacture powerful supercapacitors with the energy density of lithium batteries. “Of course, that’s an unbelievable claim,” Verhulst told us. “It’s a factor of 20 better than what, for example, Maxwell had at the time. So I took my time, went over there, looked at their tests, did some tests myself, and I got convinced this is real. So at the end of 2018, we made an agreement to become their exclusive partner.”
If you’ve ever seen a jet blaze through the sky leaving a perfect line of smoke behind it, you’ve probably wondered why that smoke holds its shape so perfectly for so long, but doesn’t hold true on land when a motorbike or car zooms down the road. Air movement anywhere above the troposphere (the lowest region of our atmosphere) is extremely negligible. Jets, which fly in the stratosphere, leave behind that trail of smoke because the air there doesn’t move to disrupt the smoke trails. This also means that there’s immense amounts of friction when a jet travels at high speeds, cutting through the motionless air particles. Designer Michal Bonikowski believes that friction could actually be a source of clean energy that a plane could harness to reduce its carbon footprint.
It’s been touted as the builder’s “most spacious model to date.”
After making a major splash in the marine world earlier this year, Silent Yachts is doubling down—or tripling, perhaps—on its groundbreaking solar-powered catamaran. The Austrian-based builder has just unveiled a brand-new tri-deck version of its flagship Silent 80 series.
Touted as the marque’s “most spacious model to date,” the triple-decker boasts an epic panoramic air-conditioned saloon on the flybridge—a feature which sets it apart from its predecessor. The layout can be arranged with either a sweeping skylounge on the top deck or an expansive 295-square-foot fly deck—whatever the owner desires.
“We thought we can make another step forward with the new model,” Silent Yachts founder and chief executive Michael Köhler said. “The additional sky lounge is a very convenient space and helps stretch out the period of using the boat. The extra space on top extends social areas onboard, while offering new opportunities in terms of layout.”
Investors are still waiting for next-generation biotech to deliver on its enormous promise and potential, but just one of these Holy Grails would make the wait worth it.
Biotechnology has come a long way since 1978, when Herbert Boyer successfully demonstrated that human insulin could be produced from bacteria engineered with recombinant DNA. The breakthrough technology pushed a little-known company called Genentech into the spotlight and forever changed the world. Genentech was acquired by Roche for $46.8 billion in 2009. The American bioeconomy — biotech crops, biochemicals, and biologic drugs — generated an estimated $324 billion of gross domestic product in 2012. And millions of people worldwide today rely on insulin and other biologic drugs daily.
You could argue that recombinant DNA was the first Holy Grail technology delivered by the field. Several more have followed. In fact, we’ve recently been treated to the development and ongoing commercialization of the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR — a true game-changer for the biotech ecosystem. Headache-inducing legal entanglements aside, CRISPR promises to help synthetic biology deliver on its enormous potential and could even be an integral tool needed to produce several other world-changing Holy Grails. Some are closer to reality than investors may think.
The demonstration represents a new-generation of micro-reactors.
An innovative nuclear plant that runs on lower waste fuel hopes to be online by 2022-2025.
The plant’s creator, Oklo, joins startups around the world working to innovate safer, smaller nuclear power plants.
But experts suggest that Oklo’s timeline is unrealistic with years of nuclear approval process ahead.
An experimental nuclear reactor in Idaho could be the first of its kind in the United States: a commercial reactor providing power using fuel that reduces nuclear waste. The small power plant could power about 1,000 homes and can run almost autonomously for 20 years.
Graphic image of a thin film of protein nanowires generating electricity from atmospheric humidity. (Ella Maru Studios)
Soon having to replace batteries or spend time recharging your phone could be a thing of the past. Scientists in Amherst are developing a new technology that will use the moisture from the air to create a charge.
The device is still in early stages having only been made public on Monday on the UMass website. It uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air and could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and the future of medicine.
In layman’s terms; “We are literally making electricity out of thin air,” said the laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao. “The Air-gen generates clean energy 24/7.”
