Lifeboat Foundation

“DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” Bill Gates wrote this in 1995, long before synthetic biology – a scientific discipline focused on reading, writing, and editing DNA – was being harnessed to program living cells. Today, the cost to order a custom DNA sequence has fallen faster than Moore’s law; perhaps that’s why the Microsoft founder is turning a significant part of his attention, and wallet, towards this exciting field.

Bill Gates is not the only tech founder billionaire that sees a parallel between bits and biology, either. Many other tech founders – the same people that made their money programming 1s and 0s – are now investing in biotech founders poised to make their own fortunes by programming A’s, T’s, G’s and C’s.

The industry has raised more than $12.3B in the last 10 years and last year, 98 synthetic biology companies collectively raised $3.8 billion, compared to just under $400 million total invested less than a decade ago. Synthetic biology companies are disrupting nearly every industry, from agriculture to medicine to cell-based meats. Engineered microorganisms are even being used to produce more sustainable fabrics and manufacture biofuels from recycled carbon emissions.

The Moon’s subsurface is the key to its longterm development and sustainability, says NASA scientist.

A view of the Apollo 11 lunar module “Eagle” as it returned from the surface of the moon to dock … [+] with the command module “Columbia”. A smooth mare area is visible on the Moon below and a half-illuminated Earth hangs over the horizon. Command module pilot Michael Collins took this picture.

Imagine waking up every morning in a house that is just as alive as you are. With synthetic biology, your future home could be a living, breathing marvel of nature and biotechnology. Yes, it’s a bold ambition. But this kind of visionary thinking could be the key to achieving sustainability for modern cities.

Our current homes and cities are severely outdated. Dr. Rachel Armstrong, a synthetic biologist and experimental architect, says, “All our current buildings have something in common: they’re built using Victorian technologies.” Traditional design, manufacturing, and construction processes demand huge amounts of energy and resources, but the resulting buildings give nothing back. To make our future sustainable, we need dynamic structures that give as much as they take. We need to build with nature, not against it.

In nature, everything is connected. For the world’s tallest trees—the California redwoods— their lives depend on their connection to each other as well as on a host of symbiotic organisms. Winds and rain batter the California coast, so redwoods weave their roots together for stability, creating networks that can stretch hundreds of miles. The rains also leach nutrients from the soil. But fungi fill the shortage by breaking down dead organic matter into food for the living. A secondary network of mycelia—the root-like structures of the fungi—entwine with the tree roots to transport nutrients, water, and chemical communications throughout the forest. What if our future cities functioned like these symbiotic networks? What if our future homes were alive?

Organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells, a third-generation solar cell technology that can convert solar energy into electricity, have been found to be more efficient than silicon cells under low light intensity indoor LED illumination. These cells have also shown great potential for powering low consumption, off-the grid electronics in indoor environments.

Despite their huge potential, the power conversion efficiency of OPV cells is currently limited by substantial losses in their open-circuit voltage. In addition, past studies suggest that when used for indoor illumination their absorption spectrum is far from optimal.

In a quest to overcome these limitations, a team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China and Linköping University in Sweden have recently designed a non-fullerene acceptor for that could enable high-performance organic photovoltaic cells for indoor applications. This new acceptor, presented in a paper published in Nature Energy, can be blended with a polymer donor to obtain a photoactive layer with an absorption spectrum that matches that of indoor light sources.

Thanks to solar-powered propulsion and household (meaning no generators are required to run the lights, air conditioning, etc.), and with electric propulsion when needed, the 56-foot catamaran has unlimited range, no noise or fumes, minimal vibration and is virtually maintenance-free. It’s smooth and serene cruising at its best where both the environment and owner’s enjoyment come first. And operation costs are kept to a minimum, too.

The ultimate way of building up space structures would be to use material sourced there, rather than launched from Earth. Once processed into finished composite material, the resin holds the carbon fibres together as a solid rather than a fabric. The beams can be used to construct more complex structures, antennae, or space station trusses. Image credit: All About Space/Adrian Mann.

The International Space Station is the largest structure in space so far. It has been painstakingly assembled from 32 launches over 19 years, and still only supports six crew in a little-under-a-thousand cubic metres of pressurised space. It’s a long way from the giant rotating space stations some expected by 2001. The problem is that the rigid aluminium modules all have to be launched individually, and assembled in space. Bigelow Aerospace will significantly improve on this with their inflatable modules that can be launched as a compressed bundle; but a British company has developed a system that could transform space flight, by building structures directly in space.

Magna Parva from Leicester are a space engineering consultancy, founded in 2005 by Andy Bowyer and Miles Ashcroft. Their team have worked on a range of space hardware, from methods to keep Martian solar panels clear of dust, to ultrasonic propellant sensors, to spacecraft windows. But their latest project is capable of 3D printing complete structures in space, using a process called pultrusion. Raw carbon fibres and epoxy resin are combined in a robotic tool to create carbon composite beams of unlimited length – like a spider creating a web much larger than itself. Building structures in space has a range of compounding virtues, it is more compact than even inflatables, as only bulk fibre and resin need to be launched. Any assembled hardware that has to go through a rocket launch has to be made much stronger than needed in space to survive the launch, printed structures can be designed solely for their in space application, using less material still.

Being able to accurately forecast how much solar energy reaches the surface of the Earth is key to guiding decisions for running solar power plants.

While day-ahead forecasts have become more accurate in recent years, the solar community lacks a unified verification procedure, and assessing how one forecast compares to another is difficult. New work in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy looks to provide a standard of reference to the field.

Researcher Dazhi Yang proposed an improved way to assess day-ahead solar forecasting. The proposed method combines two popular reference methods for weather forecasting, namely persistence and climatology. Using a weighted linear combination of both methods, his approach provides a new way to gauge the skill of a forecaster.

• The floating power unit Akademik Lomonosov has arrived at the port of its permanent location in Pevek, Chukotka, in Russia’s Far East, where it is being docked to start operations by the end of this year.
• Once commissioned, it will become the world’s first operational nuclear power plant based on small modular reactors (SMRs) technology and a ‘working prototype’ for reliable source of low-carbon energy supply in remote areas.

“It’s maybe one small step for sustainable development in the Arctic, but it’s a giant leap for the decarbonisation of remote off-grid areas, and a watershed in the development of small modular nuclear power plants in the world,” said Rosatom CEO, Alexey Likhachev.

Director General of the World Nuclear Association, Agneta Rising, commented: “To meet the nuclear industry’s Harmony goal of supplying at least 25% of the world’s electricity by 2050 we will need to bring the benefits of nuclear energy to more people in a wider range of locations.

Solar power is on the rise. You can see the evidence on rooftops and in the desert, where utility-scale solar plants are popping up. The picture is not all rosy, but if the recent past is any indication, solar power is going to help lead the transition to a carbon-free future, and it might do it faster than we all expected.

Elon Musk and Tesla promised solar roof tiles in 2016, but the industry might not need an upgrade as its grown significantly with the solar panels currently available. You can see the evidence both on individual rooftops and in the utility-scale solar plants increasingly popping up in deserts across the country. In the United States, of all about 30% of the new power capacity added to the grid in 2018 was from solar.

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