Despite this historic feat achieved by the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), challenges persist.
The mission team established immediate communication with the lander post-landing, but concerns arose as the solar cell struggled to generate electricity.
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) decided to switch off the Moon lander almost three hours after the historic landing.
The global market for cultured meat, currently valued at $2.3 billion, is predicted to experience major growth in the years ahead.
Aleph Farms, an Israeli food technology company founded in 2017, has been granted regulatory approval for ‘Aleph Cuts’, the world’s first cultivated beef steaks to go on commercial sale.
Many electric vehicles are powered by batteries that contain cobalt — a metal that carries high financial, environmental, and social costs.
MIT researchers have now designed a battery material that could offer a more sustainable way to power electric cars. The new lithium-ion battery includes a cathode based on organic materials, instead of cobalt or nickel (another metal often used in lithium-ion batteries).
In a new study, the researchers showed that this material, which could be produced at much lower cost than cobalt-containing batteries, can conduct electricity at similar rates as cobalt batteries. The new battery also has comparable storage capacity and can be charged up faster than cobalt batteries, the researchers report.
A stable, reactive, and cost-effective ruthenium catalyst for sustainable hydrogen production through proton exchange membrane water electrolysis.
Sustainable electrolysis for green hydrogen production is challenging, primarily due to the absence of efficient, low-cost, and stable catalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction in acidic solutions. A team of researchers has now developed a ruthenium catalyst by doping it with zinc, resulting in enhanced stability and reactivity compared to its commercial version. The proposed strategy can revolutionize hydrogen production by paving the way for next generation electrocatalysts that contribute to clean energy technologies.
Electrolysis and Catalyst Challenges.
Amid controversy, industry goes all in on plastics pyrolysis.
Chemical companies are fully backing this plastic waste recycling process. To prove their detractors wrong, they will need to make it work.
But in the past few years, a climate change hero technology has made its way into electric vehicles, one that has improved—but not solved—their cold weather issues: heat pumps. Heat pumps transfer heat from outside the car to help keep passengers warm, and so avoid sucking too much power away from the battery. And yes, heat pumps can still bring warm air into the car even if it’s freezing outside, albeit with mixed success. As counterintuitive as it sounds, there is still a good amount of heat that can be drawn from air that’s, say, 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
Today, heat pumps come in many, but not all, new electric vehicles. Teslas have come with a proprietary heat pump tech since 2021. Jaguar’s I-Pace has one built in, as does BMW’s latest i-series cars, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5, Audi’s newest e-Tron, and Kia’s new electrified flagship, the EV9.
“Any electric vehicle that comes out right now and doesn’t have a heat pump is a dinosaur already,” says John Kelly, an automotive technology professor and instructor focusing on hybrid and electric vehicle technology at Weber State University.
TOKYO (AP) — Japan became the fifth country in history to reach the moon when one of its spacecrafts without astronauts successfully made a soft landing on the lunar surface early Saturday.
However, space officials said they need more time to analyze whether the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, achieved its mission priority of making a pinpoint landing. They also said the craft’s solar panel had failed to generate power, which could shorten its activity on the moon.
Space officials believe the SLIM’s small rovers were launched as planned and that data was being transmitted back to Earth, said Hitoshi Kuninaka, head of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, a unit of Japan’s space agency.
Posted in innovation, sustainability
Scientists are looking for new ways to recycle plastic in an endless loop, so it never becomes waste. Now, revolutionary technology is advancing the movement.
Using AI and cloud computing, Microsoft was able to identify promising new battery materials for the Department of Energy (DoE) — in a fraction of the time it would usually take.
The challenge: Batteries are an essential part of the clean energy future. We need them to power electric vehicles and to store energy from solar and wind.
Currently, lithium-ion batteries are our best option for both of these uses, but they aren’t ideal. Because lithium is relatively scarce, it’s also expensive, and the metal is often unethically mined using child labor and environmentally destructive processes.
The OpenDAC project is a collaborative research project between Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) at Meta and Georgia Tech, aimed at significantly reducing the cost of Direct Air Capture (DAC).
Direct Air Capture (DAC) involves directly capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and has been widely recognized as a crucial tool in combating climate change. Despite its potential, the broad implementation of DAC has been impeded by high capture costs. Central to overcoming this hurdle is the discovery of novel sorbents — materials that pull carbon dioxide from the air. Discovering new sorbents holds the key to reducing capture costs and scaling DAC to meaningfully impact global carbon emissions.
The DAC space is growing rapidly with many companies entering the space. To engage the broader research community as well as the budding DAC industry, we have released the OpenDAC 2023 (ODAC23) dataset to train ML models. ODAC23 contains nearly 40M DFT calculations from 170K DFT relaxations involving Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) with carbon dioxide and water adsorbates. We have also released baseline ML models trained on this dataset.
