Lifeboat Foundation

Basically this special bacterium Ideonella sakaiensis could solve the plastic crisis in the oceans by eating the plastic.

Plastic polymer PET degrading enzymes are of great interest for achieving sustainable plastics recycling. Here, the authors present the crystal structures of the plastic degrading bacterial enzymes PETase, MHETase in its apo-form and MHETase bound to a non-hydrolyzable substrate analog.

Tesla shared some new photos of the Tesla Semi on its website recently. Deliveries of Tesla’s all-electric Class 8 truck are expected to start sometime this year. It is also expected to be made with Tesla’s 4,680 cells. Earlier this month, Elon Musk said that Tesla’s 500-mile range Semi Truck will start shipping this year. He added that the Cybertruck would start shipping next year.

Today on Twitter, members of the Tesla community found new photos of the Semi that Tesla quietly uploaded to its website. @Tesla_Adri pointed out that Tesla added some new Tesla Semi press photos and that almost every image is new.

Tesla reworked the Tesla Semi Press Photos. Pretty much every image is new pic.twitter.com/ab67GH65j1

Tesla’s Technoking Elon Musk is scheduled to speak at the ONS 2022 Conference along with a few world leaders and energy company CEOs.

In 2021, scientists published a feasibility study about erecting solar panels over canals, and it’s about to become a reality.

Israel is experimenting with desalinating sea water to replenish a freshwater lake. If it works, it could offer a solution to many other countries where lakes are drying up.

Plants use light waves from only a portion of the spectrum for photosynthesis—the remainder can be recovered and used to generate solar power. That’s the idea behind the solar modules developed by EPFL startup Voltiris. Following encouraging preliminary results, a new pilot installation was recently installed in Graubünden.

In Switzerland, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other light-and heat-intensive vegetables requires building a greenhouse—but operating one consumes a huge amount of power. Farmers have to carefully balance crop yields and economics with environmental concerns. “It costs more than CHF 1.5 million a year to heat a 5-hectare greenhouse,” says Nicolas Weber, the CEO of Voltiris. “And a greenhouse of that size emits roughly the same amount of CO₂ per year as 2,000 people.”

The Swiss federation of fruit & vegetable growers, which cultivate several thousand hectares across the country, has set a target of eliminating all fossil-fuel-based energy from its farming processes by 2040. The system developed by Voltiris can go a long way towards reaching that goal. Its technology is based on the fact that plants don’t use all of the waves contained in sunlight; the remaining ones can be concentrated onto photovoltaic (PV) cells to generate solar power. Voltiris’ system is lightweight and designed to track the sun’s movement across the sky, and boasts daily yields on par with conventional solar panels. The first vegetables grown under Voltiris’ system were harvested this summer through pilot tests carried out at two greenhouses, in the cantons of Valais and Graubünden.

The planet is 1.27 times the diameter of Jupiter but has only 28% of its mass. It orbits just 0.0486 AU (7.3 million km) from its star, taking only 4.1 days to complete one “year” and resulting in a temperature of 900°C (1,600°F).

The parent star WASP-39 is of spectral class G – the same type as our own Sun – and just slightly smaller than the Sun. The system is 698 light years from Earth in the Virgo constellation.

Previous observations from telescopes including Hubble and Spitzer revealed the presence of water vapour, sodium, and potassium in the planet’s atmosphere. Last month, it became the first exoplanet to be studied by the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and this week NASA released the data from those observations. Webb’s unmatched infrared sensitivity has now confirmed the presence of carbon dioxide on this planet as well.

EU today — news, views, & analysis from across the EU & beyond.

Engineers at MIT have developed a new battery design using common materials – aluminum, sulfur and salt. Not only is the battery low-cost, but it’s resistant to fire and failures, and can be charged very fast, which could make it useful for powering a home or charging electric vehicles.

Lithium-ion batteries have dominated the field for the last few decades, thanks to their reliability and high energy density. However, lithium is becoming scarcer and more expensive, and the cells can be hazardous, exploding or bursting into flames if damaged or improperly used. Cheaper, safer alternatives are needed, especially as the world transitions towards renewable energy and electric vehicles.

So the MIT team set out to design a new type of battery out of readily available, inexpensive materials. After a search and some trial and error, they settled on aluminum for one electrode and sulfur for the other, topped off with an electrolyte of molten chloro-aluminate salt. Not only are all of these ingredients cheap and common, but they’re not flammable, so there’s no risk of fire or explosion.