Show Notes 2 August 2024
Story 1: US to test Japan’s unique wind turbines that generate power even at 7 mph
Source: Interesting Engineering Story by Mrigakshi Dixit
See also: HCDA Partners to bring groundbreaking new clean energy technology to Kaka’ako (kanoawinds.com)
See also: https://kanoawinds.com/
- The Hawaii Community Development Authority has joined forces with Kanoa Winds Inc., a clean energy company, to bring innovative wind turbine technology from Japan to Hawaii.
- This project aims to assess the stability of vertical wind turbine technology for the Hawaiian Islands.
- Here’s the problem – Hawaii relies heavily on fossil fuels for electricity.
- One solution to be tested for Hawaii comes from Japan – For more than 15 years, Japan has used wind turbines featuring vertical coaxial contra-rotating twin blades. This technology offers several benefits over conventional horizontal turbines.
- Vertical coaxial contra-rotating twin blades wind turbines have a unique design with two counter-rotating blades. It uses both lift and drag to rotate two levels of turbine blades bidirectionally, producing strong torque.
- Furthermore, vertical coaxial contra-rotating twin blades wind turbines are small and quiet making them appropriate for highly crowded locations.
- This design approach enables the wind turbine to churn out power even with gentle breezes as low as 7 miles per hour and keep going all the way up to strong gusts of up to 134 miles per hour – making them adaptable to a wider range of wind conditions.
- The project is still in its early stages. A small-scale vertical coaxial contra-rotating twin blades unit is expected to be installed near the Hawaii Technology Development Corporation Entrepreneur Sandbox for testing. This testing phase will evaluate the turbine‘s performance, including power output, stability, and environmental effects.
- Notably, the test unit will be shorter than a streetlight, at around 23 feet tall.
- This 0.5-kilowatt test model is expected to generate 10 to 25 kilowatt hours of power each day. In comparison, a typical Oahu island home uses roughly 17 kilowatt hours per day on average.
Story 2: Crazy new AI can read your mind to recreate what you’re looking at
Source: BGR.com Story by Joshua Hawkins
See also: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.04.596589v1
- Based on new research conducted by a team of scientists at the Radboud University in the Netherlands, their new AI might just be able to recreate [visually] the things you’re thinking about–and with startling accuracy.
- The mind-reading AI doesn’t read your mind in real time. Instead, it looks at recordings of your brain activity and then uses the markers there to recreate images of what it believes you were looking at.
- According to the researchers, the results they saw were greatly improved when the AI learned which parts of the brain it needed to pay attention to.
- To test the AI, the researchers first used a functional MRI to record the brain activity of three people, who were shown a series of photographs.
- They then fed these recordings to the mind-reading AI to see how closely it could recreate the images that the people had been shown.
- In this particular research, the results were mind-blowingly accurate.
- That’s likely something to do with the algorithms that AI systems used to create the images in the first place.
- The researchers have made their findings available here.
Story 3: Why scientists think they may finally have found a way to recycle clothes
Source: The Washington Post Story by Nicolas Rivero
Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/07/05/fast-fashion-clothing-waste-recycling/
See also: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado6827
- The world now throws out 92 million tons of clothes a year and only about an eighth of it gets recycled. The rest winds up in landfills or incinerators where it pollutes the air and water.
- Most of the clothes that are recycled get “downcycled,” meaning they’re shredded into a less valuable material that’s used for things like padding or insulation. Less than 1 percent of all garments get turned into a new piece of clothing.
- Here’s the challenge – A critical step [for recycling clothing], will be figuring out how to handle blended fabrics that combine different materials, mainly cotton and polyester, into one piece of cloth. Once the fibers are blended together, it’s hard to separate one material from the other so that each can be recycled separately.
- Researchers at the University of Delaware are proposing a new recycling technique that breaks down blended fabrics using chemicals and microwaves.
- The researchers say the process takes 15 minutes and can dissolve any blend of cotton, polyester, nylon and spandex into molecules that can be used to make new fabrics or products like dyes and tires.
- Optional Geek Out Details from the Researcher’s paper
- Here, we demonstrate the chemical conversion of postconsumer mixed textile waste using microwave-assisted glycolysis over a ZnO catalyst followed by solvent dissolution.
- This approach electrifies the process heat while allowing rapid depolymerization of polyester and spandex to their monomers in 15 minutes. A simple solvent dissolution enables the separation of cotton and nylon.
- We assess the quality of all components through extensive material characterization, discuss their potential for sustainable recycling, and provide a techno-economic analysis of the economic feasibility of the process.
Story 4: Maglev titanium heart now whirs inside the chest of a live patient
Source: New Atlas Story by Michael Franco
Link: https://newatlas.com/medical/maglev-titanium-heart-bivacor/
See also: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06174103
- For the first time [late last month], a fully mechanical heart made by BiVACOR, which uses the same [magnetically levitated] technology as high-speed rail lines, has been implanted inside a human being. The feat marks a major step in keeping people alive as they wait for heart transplants.
- The team that made this possible includes:
- The Texas Heart Institute,
- BiVACOR, a clinical-stage medical device company,
- Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center,
- and Baylor College of Medicine
- Together the team announced on July 25 that they had successfully performed the first-in-human implantation of the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart as part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Early Feasibility Study on July 9, 2024.
- BiVACOR’s TAH is a titanium-constructed biventricular rotary blood pump with a single moving part that utilizes a magnetically levitated rotor that pumps the blood and replaces both ventricles of a failing heart.
- BiVACOR, which has been working on the device since 2013, says that the advantage of using a magnetically levitated rotor to drive the device’s blood-circulating function is that there is no friction, which can be such a damaging force to machinery that scientists are looking at ways to reduce its effects.
- The roughly fist-sized TAH uses a small rechargeable external controller to keep it whirring along and it is able to push through blood at the rate of 12 liters per minute, which is enough, BiVACOR says, to allow an adult male to engage in exercise.
- The company also points out that other artificial hearts rely on flexible polymer diaphragms to pump blood, but such components can wear out. With just one part suspended in space through magnetism – and no valves – BiVACOR’s heart could technically last longer.
Honorable Mentions:
Story: Startup develops method to safely recycle 99% of used solar panels: ‘A small mine of precious elements’
Source: The Cool Down Story by Robert English
- As solar energy becomes more popular worldwide as a more affordable and cleaner source of energy, problems arise, such as how to recycle broken and outdated panels. Luckily, an Italian startup has developed a way to safely recover up to 99% of panel components, according to Interesting Engineering.
- Venice-based 9Tech’s efficient method not only recovers 99% of the components, but it also does so without releasing any harmful byproduct.
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Story: Cooling fabric blocks heat from pavement and buildings in hot cities
Source: NewScientist.com Story by James Dinneen
- Future city dwellers could beat the heat with clothes made of a new fabric that keeps them cool.
- The textile, made of a plastic material and silver nanowires, is designed to stay cool in urban settings by taking advantage of a principle known as radiative cooling – the natural process by which objects radiate heat into space.
- The material selectively emits infrared radiation within the narrow band of wavelengths that can escape Earth’s atmosphere. At the same time, it blocks the sun’s radiation and infrared radiation emitted by surrounding structures.
- Po-Chun Hsu at the University of Chicago in Illinois and his team designed this material to “try to block more than half of [the radiation] from the buildings and the ground”, he says.
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Story: Using copper to convert CO₂ to methane could be game changer in mitigating climate change
Source: Phys.org Story by Rowan Hollinger
- Carbon in the atmosphere is a major driver of climate change. Now researchers from McGill University have designed a new catalyst for converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane—a cleaner source of energy—using tiny bits of copper called nanoclusters.
- While the traditional method of producing methane from fossil fuels introduces more CO2 into the atmosphere, the new process, electrocatalysis, does not.
- “On sunny days you can use solar power, or when it’s a windy day you can use that wind to produce renewable electricity, but as soon as you produce that electricity you need to use it,” says Mahdi Salehi, Ph.D. candidate at the Electrocatalysis Lab at McGill University. “But in our case, we can use that renewable but intermittent electricity to store the energy in chemicals like methane.”
- By using copper nanoclusters, says Salehi, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can be transformed into methane and once the methane is used, any carbon dioxide released can be captured and “recycled” back into methane.
- This would create a closed “carbon loop” that does not emit new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The research, published recently in the journal Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy, was enabled by the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask).
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Story: Solar power generated enough heat to power a steel furnace
Source: LiveScience.com Story by Prudence Wade
Link: https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/solar-power-generated-enough-heat-to-power-a-steel-furnace#
- A new proof-of-concept device trapped solar radiation and used it to heat an object to a blistering 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius), raising hopes that steel furnaces could be powered by solar energy.
- Scientists have used solar power to heat an object to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius) — hot enough to power a steel furnace. The proof-of-concept study, published May 15 in the journal Device, demonstrates how solar energy could replace fossil fuels in high-temperature manufacturing processes, such as smelting steel.