Buying organic food is among the actions people can take to curb the global decline in insects, according to leading scientists. Urging political action to slash pesticide use on conventional farms is another, say environmentalists.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=h5jBjso6l6I
If 150,000 volt stun guns aren’t enough to deter criminals, law enforcement might want to give Rob Flickenger a buzz.
The IT expert, who also has a bit of a reputation as a DIY mad-scientist, has a shocking new invention: a real-life lightning gun. Built over a period of at least 10 months, the zapper is the end result of combining the aim-and-shoot functionality of an aluminum-encased Nerf gun with the electrical power supplied by an 18V drill battery.
Continue reading “Shocking invention: A Tesla lightning gun” »
The future could be here before we know it. On Monday, Fisker Inc.—the company behind the Tesla Model S-fighting EMotion picture above—announced that it had filed patents for a new type of battery technology that could put electric cars with 500-plus mile ranges and one-minute recharging times on the roads as soon as the year 2024.
While Fisker’s press release was, unsurprisingly, a tad cagey about the details of this potentially paradigm-shattering technology, the company did reveal a few bits about what its new inventions and discoveries could do. Fisker’s new power storage technology, according to the company, would allow it to build solid-state batteries packing far more surface area than existing flat thin-film solid-state electrodes can do, while also allowing for greater conductivity, allowing the batteries to work better in cold weather and charge faster overall. (Low levels of conductivity has been one of the key problems preventing the widespread adoption of solid-state batteries so far, so this could potentially be, as Michael Scott might say, a B.F.D.)
Due to the complexities of bringing the new technology to market, such as developing supply chains for some raw materials and setting up property quality control measures for them, Fisker says the technology isn’t likely to reach cars and trucks until sometime after 2023. Once it does, however, the company claims the batteries—2.5 times more power-dense than their lithium ion equivalents—could lead to electric vehicles capable of recharging in less time than it takes to fill a modern car’s gas tank, then driving more than 500 miles before needing to power up again. Oh, and the carmaker says the batteries would cost about one-third as much as li-ion ones, to boot. (That said, Fisker did mention that there are still plenty of “technical bottlenecks” between where the tech is now and where it needs to be for production use, so don’t get too excited just yet.)
THE reaction synchronous motor in its present form (salient-pole rotor without field coils) is one of the oldest types of electric motors, antedating the i.
Agricultural Revolution is one of the milestones of today’s civilization. It was driven by technological innovations and inventions thousands of years ago, and it is still a very crucial part of our species’ social construct. Engineers are developing tools and machines to make farmers’ job a lot easier by technologies like automation for sustainable productivity. Here are 7 innovative ways the technology is used for agriculture.
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On Tuesday afternoon, NASA announced 19 new partnerships with 10 US companies to help bring more cutting-edge technologies closer to production use in spaceflight. There were a lot of useful engineering ideas here, such as precision landing systems and robotic plant farms, but perhaps the most intriguing one involved the rocket company SpaceX and two of NASA’s field centers—the Glenn Research Center in Ohio and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
“SpaceX will work with Glenn and Marshall to advance technology needed to transfer propellant in orbit, an important step in the development of the company’s Starship space vehicle,” the NASA news release states. This is a significant announcement for reasons both technical and political.
The next time you shop for cherry tomatoes at Whole Foods or another retailer, you may end up buying some grown in an indoor, controlled environment outfitted with the latest robotic technology. Ohio will get the first fully automated indoor farm in the United States. 80 Acres Farms plans to build one in Hamilton, a suburb of Cincinnati, by the end of the year. The farm will have grow centers for greens, such as herbs and kale, and will supply produce to multiple retailers and distributors.
80 Acres Farms plans to construct the fully automated indoor farm in three phases. When it finishes, the farm will be 150,000 square feet of controlled environmental agriculture (CEA). Mike Zelkind, cofounder and chief executive officer of 80 Acres Farms, explains that the company uses “renewable energy, very little water and no pesticides.” The Hamilton farm will produce leafy greens, microgreens, kale and herbs for retailers such as Whole Foods Markets, Jungle Jims, Dorothy Lane Markets, U.S. Foods and others.
Jez Turner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
To tackle this environmental catastrophe, U.S. companies and researchers are developing AI-assisted robotic technology that can work with humans in processing plants and improve quality control. The goal is to have robots do a better job at sorting garbage and reduce the contamination and health hazards human workers face in recycling plants every day. Sorting trash is a dirty and dangerous job. Recycling workers are more than twice as likely as other workers to be injured on the job, according to a report at the University of Illinois School of Public Health. The profession also has high fatality rates.
The U.S. is facing a recycling crisis that is burying cities and towns in tens of millions of tons of garbage a day. The problem began last year when China, the world’s largest recyclable processor, stopped accepting most American scrap plastic and cardboard due to contamination problems, and a glut of plastics overwhelming its own processing facilities. Historically, China recycled the bulk of U.S. waste.
Contamination in the U.S. is high since recyclables are often dumped into one bin instead of multi-streamed or separated from the source. Now China has strict standards for recycling materials it will accept, requiring contamination levels in a plastic bale, for example, contain one-tenth of 1%.
Mechanical engineers have discovered a way to produce more electricity from heat than thought possible by creating a silicon chip, also known as a ‘device,’ that converts more thermal radiation into electricity. This could lead to devices such as laptop computers and cellphones with much longer battery life and solar panels that are much more efficient at converting radiant heat to energy.
