How do renewable energy technologies compete with one another? This is what a recent study published in Communications Sustainability hopes to address as a | Earth And The Environment
Category: sustainability – Page 10
The Hammer of AI: When Every Problem Looks Like a Nail
There is no dataset for grief.
No metric for justice.
No optimizer for legitimacy.
And yet we keep bringing the Hammer of AI to every problem we face. Climate change. Pandemics. Cancer. Energy. War. Political corruption. There is no problem that the omnipresent, all-knowing, all-mighty artificial superintelligence will not eventually crack.
This is a religion. Technology is its faith. Silicon Valley is its Promised Land. Entrepreneurs are its prophets. And we are all believers.
I should know. I used to be one.
In my latest piece on Singularity Weblog, I argue that some problems do bend to computation: fusion, protein folding, the genome. But others do not. They are not computable, only livable. And when we hammer them anyway, things break. Sometimes the thing that breaks is the problem. Sometimes it is us.
Researchers develop a biodegradable wash that can remove pesticides and keep fruit fresh longer
Many grocery shoppers know the routine: bring fruit and vegetables home, rinse them, dry them and hope they stay fresh long enough to be eaten. But fresh produce is delicate. Grapes shrivel, apple slices brown and berries can spoil quickly.
At the same time, many people worry about what may remain on the surface of fruit they buy, including pesticide residues.
Cleaning and freshness are usually treated as separate problems that require different treatments. Washing feels like a simple act of control. But it’s not quite that simple.
Fungi homes — and more ways biology could sustain life beyond Earth
What if the tools for sustainable space exploration could be found in cellular life on Earth? A NASA astrobiologist explains
Engineered wood provides solar power even after the sun goes down
While sustainable solar energy can potentially meet our global power needs, it has one major flaw. When sunlight disappears, solar panels stop generating electricity. The problem is that while they do an excellent job of converting light into power, they are not so good at storing the energy they collect.
One solution is to use materials known to capture heat and release it later, such as phase change materials (PCMs). However, these can leak when they melt, struggle to conduct heat quickly, and catch fire easily. So researchers from China decided on a different approach, turning wood into a multifunctional solar-thermal energy storage material, as they detail in a paper published in Advanced Energy Materials.
Reengineering balsa wood The team redesigned the internal structure of balsa wood at multiple scales, from nano to micro, to create a material that absorbs sunlight and stores it as heat for later use. It can also generate electricity when that stored heat is released through a thermoelectric device.
Inspired by the brain, researchers build smarter and more efficient computer hardware
As traditional computer chips reach their physical limits and artificial intelligence demands more energy than ever, University of Missouri researchers are rethinking how computers work by taking cues from the human brain. The timing is critical. Energy use from AI data centers is projected to double by the end of the decade, raising urgent questions about sustainability.
The solution may lie in neuromorphic computing, an approach that reimagines computer hardware to process information more like biological neural networks rather than conventional chips.
“One of the brain’s greatest advantages is its efficiency,” Suchi Guha, a professor of physics in Mizzou’s College of Arts and Science, said. “It performs incredibly complex tasks using about 20 watts of power—roughly the same as an old light bulb. By comparison, today’s computer architecture is extremely energy-intensive.”
Harmless viruses trap Salmonella on flexible polymer in portable microfluidic sensor
Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have developed a solid polymer coated with harmless viruses to detect the bacteria Salmonella enterica (S. enterica), an advance that could lead to new ways of finding contamination in the food supply. The work is published in the journal ACS Applied Bio Materials.
The group, led by Yuxiang “Shawn” Liu, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, reports that the technology can rapidly capture and visualize foodborne bacterial contaminants in tiny fluid samples. With no need for incubation or complicated equipment in research centers, the technology has the potential to be used as a rapid biosensor in field applications and in areas with few resources.
“We have a solid surface that can be used anywhere in the food supply chain, from farm to fridge, to detect foodborne bacteria with minimum human intervention,” Liu says.
SpaceX files for $55 billion semiconductor fab in rural Texas for Musk’s Terafab — total chipmaking fab investment could reach $119 billion
SpaceX has filed a property tax abatement application in Grimes County, Texas, for a semiconductor fab that would cost $55 billion in its initial phases and up to $119 billion if all planned expansions are completed.
The filing, posted on the county government’s website ahead of a public hearing scheduled for June 3, describes the project as a “multi-phase, next-generation, vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing and advanced computing fabrication facility” to be built at the Gibbons Creek Reservoir site, roughly 90 miles northeast of Austin.
The capital figures in this filing far exceed what was disclosed when Elon Musk announced Terafab in March, where the project carried a $20 billion price tag. Musk later confirmed during Tesla’s earnings call that SpaceX would handle high-volume chip manufacturing while Tesla operates a smaller R&D pilot line at its Austin campus. The Grimes County filing appears to be SpaceX’s first formal step toward securing a site for that production facility.
