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Brilliant Planet plans cheap, gigaton-scale carbon capture using algae | New Atlas (01:08)

Direct air carbon capture is currently far too costly – but this London company, Brilliant Planet, says it can do it at enormous scale for a tenth the price, using engineered algal blooms in ponds located near desert coastlinesGoals to de-acidify the ocean as well.

Direct air capture will need to be part of the decarbonizing equation, and it'll need to be massively scalable, energy efficient and much, much cheaper than today's technology.

The idea is to corral and harness the carbon-gobbling power of algae, replicating and maintaining the conditions that cause algal blooms in large, low-density outdoor ponds full of seawater.Algae is an inherently more efficient biological machine for carbon capture than trees or plants

Its entire surface area is dedicated to photosynthesis and it doesn't waste resources creating trunks, roots or branches

Another bonus is that it grows and proliferates extremely fast under the right conditions.

Simplified process:

Account for most of the energy this system requires

A location is chosen, on flat desert land near a coast, 

A team of bio-prospectors starts filtering through samples of thousands of local strains of algae, selecting the ones that best fits the location. 

Thus, there are no introduced species, and the algae is already well adapted to the local climate and conditions.

They set up a series of pumps, with which to bring seawater into a series of containers and ponds. 

In these right conditions they would monitor, they can grow a lot of algae. It also can deacidify the seawater.

CEO Adam Taylorm said: “For every unit of water that passes through the system we de-acidify the equivalent of 5.1 units back to pre-industrial pH levels."

Taylor says the company's already identified a "short list" of about half a million square kilometers of suitably flat coastal desert land. Potential for about two gigatons – two billion tons – of carbon capture

In other words, it could cancel out more than 5.5 percent of humanity's annual global CO2 emissions, offsetting about half the total emissions of today's road transport sector. 

The company has tested its approach successfully in Oman, South Africa. Now they plan on moving to a large area, roughly 74 acres, in 2023.

Musk's Starlink Internet Is Now Available in 32 Countries | CNET (07:14)

SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service has now rolled out to 32 countries, the company said Thursday. The hardware can ship "immediately" to areas where the service is available.

Starlink is available in much of the US, Europe and New Zealand, in addition to chunks of Canada, Australia and South America. Many of the remaining countries and areas show availability coming in 2023.

After a few years of launches, the company has amassed a constellation of more than 2,000 low Earth orbit satellites to provide satellite internet around the globe.

 

Plants Have Been Grown in Lunar Soil For The First Time Ever | Good News Network (09:29)

Food has been grown in soil collected from the moon for the first time, paving the way for human migration across the solar system.It is a first step towards producing food and oxygen on the moon, or during space missions.

This all relates to NASA’s Artemis program which will lay the foundation for a sustained colony on the lunar surface.Using the moon to validate deep space systems and operations—before embarking on a manned voyage to Mars.

Co-author Professor Rob Ferl, talked about the future missions and growing food in the lunar soil:“For future, longer space missions, we may use the moon as a hub or launching pad. It makes sense that we would want to use the soil that’s already there to grow plants … So, what happens when you grow plants in lunar soil, something that is totally outside of a plant’s evolutionary experience? What would plants do in a lunar greenhouse? Could we have lunar farmers?”

This University of Flori

Starlink's new Portability feature brings internet to vanlifers - The Verge (01:02)

Starlink’s internet-from-SpaceX service has gone mobile with a new Portability feature.It costs an additional $25 each month, on top of monthly subscriptions that already start at $110 after a one-time hit of $599 to purchase the Starlink kit.

Starlink subscribers can now take their “dishy” anywhere on their home continent that provides active internet coverage. That opens up connectivity to remote places that will likely never be covered by 5G 

Starlink doesn’t support use while driving yet, but the company says it’s actively working on a solution for moving vehicles. Musk has previously tweeted about working on a power-efficient solution that can plug into a car’s 12V cigarette lighter and still maintain connectivity.

Starlink reportedly draws between 60-70W, an improvement on the 80-100W draw from just a year ago.

Starlink is offering Portability on a “best effort basis,” the company says, with users at their registered service addresses receiving priority for network resources.

 

Rocket Lab launched and recovered a rocket mid-air in a world first | Interesting Engineering (05:31)

Rocket Lab, a private aerospace firm, launched a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from Launch Complex 1A on Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand, at roughly 6:48 PM EDTPayload of 34 picosatellites and cubesats into orbit

Less than 30 minutes after launch, the rocket's first stage was actually caught mid-air by a flying helicopter.They captured the rocket's drogue chute line.

A few seconds after recovering the rocket, the helicopter pilot opted to release the rocket — which plummeted into the deep blue ocean, where it was picked up by a ship 

From a tweet from Reuters' Joey Roulette: “Rocket Lab's Murielle Baker says the helicopter pilots [decided] to drop the rocket booster in the ocean after noticing "different load characteristics" than what they experienced during previous testing”

Murielle Baker is Rocket Labs' Senior Communications Adviser

This is real, it's happening. A flying helicopter successfully caught a first-stage booster rocket, in mid-air.

This may not have been a full recovery and reuse of the rocket, but Rocket Lab has just taken us a major step closer to comparatively cheap ways of recycling used booster engines.

 

Lithium-ion recycler Li-Cycle lands $200 million to power future EVs | TechCrunch (09:54)

Metals and fossil fuels behemoth Glencore is pumping $200 million into battery recycler Li-Cycle as part of a larger, symbiotic supply deal inked by the two firms.

The Swiss materials giant, Glencore, will ship burnt-out batteries and scraps to Li-Cycle, which will recover the high-demand metals so they can be reused in electric vehicle batteries and other applications.

Li-Cycle’s Process:Shred spent batteries and use a water-based system, known as hydrometallurgical processing, to begin to break down the batteries.

Hydrometallurgy involve the use of aqueous solutions for the recovery of metals from ores, concentrates, and recycled or residual materials

In Li-Cycle’s own hubs, they separate black mass into a variety of materials, including those that can be used to make new lithium-ion batteries.

In this partnership, Glencore will be providing Li-Cycle with black mass for processing as well as manufacturing scrap. Securing a supply of scrap could be advantageous for the startup since it is easier to recycle than whole batteries.

Why is Glencore doing this?Glencore has been advancing efforts to boost recycling of the batteries that power electric vehicles, including its  plans to build a U.K. plant as part of a deal to help Britishvolt Ltd. develop Britain’s first large-scale EV battery plant.

Electric automakers, mining companies and chemical suppliers are racing to control more supplies of materials that are key to transitioning the world to cleaner energy sources.Car manufacturers and industry analysts expect recycled batteries to play a vit

News

From seawater to drinking water, with the push of a button | TechXPlore (01:04)

MIT researchers have developed a portable desalination unit, weighing less than 10 kilograms, that can remove particles and salts to generate drinking water.Suitcase-sized device

Requires less power to operate than a cell phone charger 

Can be powered by a small, portable solar panel, which can be purchased online for around $50. 

Generates drinking water that exceeds World Health Organization quality standards.

Runs with the push of one button.

Unlike other portable desalination units that require water to pass through filters, this device utilizes electrical power to remove particles from drinking water. Eliminating the need for replacement filters

Relies on a technique called ion concentration polarization (ICP)

Rather than filtering water, the ICP process applies an electrical field to membranes placed above and below a channel of water. The membranes repel positively or negatively charged particles—including salt molecules, bacteria, and viruses—as they flow past.

The process removes both dissolved and suspended solids, allowing clean water to pass through the channel. 

Once the salinity level and the number of particles decrease to specific thresholds, the device notifies the user that the water is drinkable.

This filterless process enables the unit to be deployed in remote and severely resource-limited areas, such as communities on small islands or aboard seafaring cargo ships.Their prototype generates drinking water at a rate of 0.3 liters per hour, and requires only 20 watts of power per liter.

 

Researchers develop a paper-thin loudspeaker | MIT News (06:21)

MIT engineers have developed a paper-thin loudspeaker that can turn any surface into an active audio source.Produces sound with minimal distortion while using a fraction of the energy required by a traditional loudspeaker. 

Weighing about as much as a dime and can generate high-quality sound no matter what surface the film is bonded to.

The new loudspeaker simplifies the speaker design by using a thin film of a shaped piezoelectric material that moves when voltage is applied over it, which moves the air above it and generates sound.

Most thin-film loudspeakers are designed to be freestanding because the film must bend freely to produce sound. If the thin speaker needs to be bound to a surface that would impede the sound generation process.

To overcome this problem , their design relies on tiny domes on a thin layer of piezoelectric material which each vibrate individually. 

The researchers pioneered a deceptively simple fabrication technique, which requires only three basic steps and can be scaled up to produce ultrathin loudspeakers.

Lead author Jinchi Han talks on the process:“This is a very simple, straightforward process. It would allow us to produce these loudspeakers in a high-throughput fashion if we integrate it with a roll-to-roll process in the future. That means it could be fabricated in large amounts, like wallpaper to cover walls, cars, or aircraft interiors”

They tested their thin-film loudspeaker by mounting it to a wall 30 centimeters from a microphone to measure the sound pressure level, recorded in decibels. When 25 volts of electricity were passed through the device at 1 kilohertz, the speaker produced high-quality sound at conversational levels of 66 decibels. 

At 10 kilohertz, the sound pressure level increased to 86 decibels, about the same volume level as city traffic.

Another cool feature of this thin speaker is it can be used effectively for ultrasound applications, like imaging.Because the tiny domes are vibrating, rather than the entire film, the loudspeaker has a high enough resonance frequency for ultrasound imaging 

Could use it to detect where a human is standing in a room, just like bats do using echolocation, and then shape the sound waves to follow the person as they move.

This device has many possible applications:Provide ac

News:

US Navy wirelessly beamed 1.6kW of power using microwaves | Interesting Engineering (01:22)

New miniature heart could help speed heart disease cures | MedicalXPress (10:08)

Ultra-light liquid hydrogen tanks promise to make jet fuel obsolete | New Atlas (16:20)

Old skins cells reprogrammed to regain youthful function  | Science Daily (23:15)

Tesla is testing in-car Wi-Fi hotspot connectivity with several major internet providers | Electrek (27:01)

News:

Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy | MIT News (01:28)

Engineered bacteria could help protect “good” gut microbes from antibiotics | Big Think (07:01)

Wireless camera tool could make intubation safer and easier | Futurity  (12:40)

A massive ”space cannon” can shoot payloads into space at hypersonic speeds  | Interesting Engineering (16:31) 

A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine | MIT News  (22:54)

NEWS

 

Stanford engineers invent a solar panel that generates electricity at night | Interesting Engineer (01:08)

 

Rocket Lab prepares its chopper to catch a returning booster in midair | New Atlas (07:28)

Looking Through Mojo Vision's Newest AR Contact Lens |  IEEE Spectrum (12:17)

Simple delivery method enhances a promising cancer treatment | MedicalXPress (20:11) 

Israeli bee tech startup Beewise pulls in $80m investment for robotic beehives | Times of Israel (27:19)

News:

Scientists Say New Treatment Lets Alopecia Patients Regrow Hair | Futurism (01:14)

Scientists at Yale announced this week that a common arthritis medication (baricitinib) appears to help alopecia patients regrow their hair. a potential treatment for a widespread autoimmune condition.

Baricitinib is used to reduce pain, stiffness, and swelling in adults with rheumatoid arthritis after other treatments have failed. Helps slow the progression of bone and joint damage.

It is a Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitor 

Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors are a group of medications that inhibit activity and response of one or more of the Janus kinase enzymes (JAK1, JAK2, JAK3, and TYK2). These enzymes normally promote inflammation and autoimmunity.

Alopecia is a common autoimmune disorder that causes hair loss Affects people of all ages, although it most commonly appears in adolescence or early adulthood. 

Affects 1 in every 500 to 1,000 people in the United States.

There is currently no FDA-approved treatment for the disease.

Dr. Brett King, lead author on the study told Yale news:“This is so exciting, because the data clearly show how effective baricitinib is … These large, controlled trials tell us that we can alleviate some of the suffering from this awful disease.”

For the study, the researchers conducted two large, randomized trials involving a total of 1,200 people. For 36 weeks, participants were given a daily dose of either 4 milligrams of baricitinib, 2 milligrams of baricitinib, or a placebo.

One-third of the patients who received the larger dose grew hair back.

The researchers stated that baricitinib thwarts the disease by disrupting the communication of immune cells involved in harming hair follicles. 

Hopefully this medication will be proven to be safe & effective and approved by regulators.

 

Waymo says fully driverless rides are coming to San Francisco | The Verge (06:47)

Waymo plans to start offering rides in its fully autonomous vehicles — without human safety drivers behind the wheel — in San Francisco. 

They join a waitlist and, once approved, sign non-disclosure agreements to get access to the company’s early technology.

As of right now it is only available to employees but will soon grow to include members of the company’s “Trusted Tester” program.

The Trusted Tester program is for customers interested in using Waymo’s robotaxis. 

The vehicles will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Waymo says.

Additionally, Waymo is making moves in Arizona.Growing to include downtown Phoenix after operating exclusively in the exurban towns of Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, and Tempe for nearly five years.

Waymo has been running fully driverless rides without a safety driver in those towns outside of Phoenix for more than a year now. 

They must be confident they have enough data to move forward with autonomous taxis.Last year, the company logged the most miles driven autonomously of all the companies permitted to test in the state: 2.3 million miles, a huge increase over 2020, when it had about 629,000 miles driven, and even the pre-pandemic year of 2019, with 1.45 million.

The expansion of Waymo’s service area in Phoenix and the imminent launch of driverless rides in San Francisco signal the company’s sense of confidence that its vehicles can operate safely and efficiently in more dense, urban environments. 

 

Quantum technology could make charging electric cars as fast as pumping gas | Phys.org (12:10)

For a long time, batteries had far lower energy density than those offered by hydrocarbons, which resulted in very low ranges of early electric vehicles.Improvements in battery technologies eventually allowed the drive ranges of electric cars to be within acceptable levels

However, despite the vast improvements in battery technology, today's consumers of electric vehicles face another difficulty: slow battery charging speed.Takes about 10 hours to fully recharge at home

Even the fastest superchargers require up

News

Elon Musk floats idea for new social media platform  | Twitchy (01:45)

Elon Musk, you know the dude by now, posted a Twitter poll this past Friday (March 25th) asking the question: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”With the caveat that “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.”

With over 2 million votes 70% of people responded with “No.”

After the poll concluded the next day he responded with, “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.  What should be done? … Is a new platform needed?”

This has led to plenty of speculation that Elon could be contemplating building his own platform, while others just want him to purchase Twitter and fix it.What is the best route? Not sure, Twitter has the user base already there, but there is a lot of built in “rot” so to speak. 

Then to further cement the idea he is considering building a new platform, a twitter user @PPathole asked: “Would you consider building a new social media platform? … One that would consist of an open source algorithm, one where free speech and adhering to free speech is given top priority, one where propaganda is very minimal. I think that kind of a platform is needed.”

Elon simply responded with: “Am giving serious thought to this”

Just to throw it out there that some people were thinking of name ideas for Elon’s new social media platform and here is my favorite from @RealSteveAyer:MySpaceX

AI algorithm accurately predicts risk of heart attack within 5 years | New Atlas (08:47)

A new AI tool developed by researchers from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center can accurately measure plaque deposits in coronary arteries and predict a patient’s risk of suffering a heart attack within five years.

A scan known as computed tomography angiography (CTA) is one of the best tools doctors currently have at their disposal to evaluate heart disease patients.By imaging plaque deposits within coronary arteries

Damini Dey, senior author on the study, talks on the speed improvement with utilizing this new automated AI tool:“Coronary plaque is often not measured because there is not a fully automated way to do it … When it is measured, it takes an expert at least 25 to 30 minutes, but now we can use this program to quantify plaque from CTA images in five to six seconds."

Creating the tool:

Two Categories: high and low risk.

First, trained the algorithm to recognize plaque deposits using a dataset of CTA images from 921 patients.

Validated the results with the “human expert readers.”

Utilizing a plaque amount threshold, they trained the algorithm to place separate images based on risk of having a heart attack within five years of CTA imaging:

The new study is an exciting demonstration of the possible future of medicine. A future where AI tools can swiftly analyze diagnostic imaging to deliver immediate risk reports to patients. It is early days for the technology. Larger studies will be required to better train the algorithms on diverse patient populations and figure out how they could make the tech accessible & cheap.

Exxon Mobil has a pilot project for using excess gas to mine Bitcoin | Interesting Engineering (14:50)

What do you do with excess natural gas if you are one of the world's biggest providers of energy sources?Exxon Mobil has come up with an inventive solution.

It's taking the excess natural gas that would otherwise be burned off from North Dakota oil wells and using it to power cryptocurrency mining operations.Bitcoin Mining: the process of creating new bitcoin by solving puzzles. 

The first bitcoin miner to solve the puzzle is rewarded with bitcoin.

The mining process also confirms transactions on the cryptocurrency's network and makes them trustworthy. 

According to anonymous sources, the oil giant has started a pilot project in cooperation with

News

Disney's "Holobricks" could stack up for larger holograms | New Atlas (01:03)

Scientists at Cambridge and Disney Research may be closer to making holograms “less disappointing.”They’ve created new “holobricks” that can stack and tile together to produce large 3D images that can be viewed from multiple angles.

Holograms are three-dimensional virtual images that appear to exist within the real world instead of on a screen. Produced in multiple ways:Reflective Screens

Projections onto fog

Then you have the classic “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion. Started in the 1860sA brightly lit figure out of the audience's sight below the stage is reflected in a pane of glass placed between the performer and the audience. To the audience, it appears as if the ghost is on stage.

Old ways are low in resolution, while the new system, from Cambridge and Disney, is designed to boost the picture quality with scalable, modular holographic blocks, or holobricks as the team calls them.Each holobrick is made up of a spatial light modulator, a scanner, and coarse integrated optics.

The system combines three images of the same object from slightly different angles, which creates a sense of depth.Then light is then sent through a series of lenses that separates the images, so that when it appears on the 2D display on the surface of the holobrick, but from different angles.

Has a resolution of 1024 x 768, a 40-degree field of view and at a cinematic frame rate of 24 frames per second.

Essentially, that means that as you walk around the screen, your view of the virtual object or scene changes with you.Additionally it is modular, allowing the size of the holograms to be increased.

There is still more work to do, but the researchers say that the holobricks could open up possibilities like holographic video walls or interactive kiosks.

 

Obesity alters molecular architecture of liver cells; repairing structure reverses metabolic disease | Harvard News (06:23)

According to Harvard researchers, cells use their molecular architecture to regulate their metabolic functions, and repairing diseased cells’ architecture to a healthier state can also repair metabolism.This could have implications on reversing obesity, and reversing the damage it causes to the body. 

Gökhan Hotamışlıgi, a Harvard public health professor, mentions the regulatory mechanism they discovered:“The fundamental regulatory mechanism that we discovered can be used to evaluate the susceptibility—or resistance—of individuals to a disease state like obesity, and determine what steps, such as diet, nutrients, or fasting, will reduce, eliminate, or exacerbate these states. We can imagine a whole new array of therapeutic strategies targeting molecular architecture, similar to the restoration of an ailing building or preventing its deterioration.”

The study compared liver samples from healthy, lean mice with samples from obese mice with fatty liver disease. 

Using machine learning & AI, along with high-resolution imaging the researchers  generated three-dimensional reconstructions of specialized structures, called organelles, inside cells. Organelles are the components of the cell. 

Then compared the architecture/structure of the organelles between the lean & obese mice.

​​The images produced from this research are the most detailed visualization to date of subcellular structures while the cells are still intact in their tissue environment.

Through these analyses, the team determined that obesity leads to dramatic alterations in subcellular molecular architecture, particularly in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), an organelle involved in the creation and shaping of proteins and lipids.

The team then partially restored the ER’s structure using technologies that can repair molecules and proteins that can reshape cellular membranes to see what would happen.

“The outcome was really striking—when structure is repaired, so is the cell’s metabolism,” said Ana Paula Arruda, co-lead on the resear