Lifeboat Foundation

The disposal of tires represents a significant burden on the environment, so companies like Marangoni developed methods to recycle and reuse old tires. Watch how retreading machines make old tires usable again.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: When your tire wears out, you take it to a shop where it’s tossed out for a new one. The discarded tire is typically recycled — ground up and chemically broken down to use as a building material in streets or parks. Some companies hope to recycle differently. For years, companies like Marangoni have been saving tire casings, replacing the old tread (the rubber that touches the ground) with new tread in a process called “retreading.” These tires are not only easier to make — they typically take 20% of the energy of creating a new tire — they perform well too, standing up to the same tests that one-use tires are subjected to.

Japanese company PowerX has unveiled the detailed design of the first-ever “Battery Tanker” at the Bariship International Maritime Exhibition held in Imabari City, Ehime Prefecture, Japan.

For over a century, oil tankers have been a familiar sight on international shipping routes, delivering vital energy sources to power our civilisation. But as the world shifts away from fossil fuels, they could soon be joined by new and futuristic-looking vessels bringing cleaner forms of energy.

Metals are typically used as active materials for negative electrodes in batteries. Recently, redox-active organic molecules, such as quinone-and amine-based molecules, have been used as negative electrodes in rechargeable metal–air batteries with oxygen-reducing positive electrodes. Here, protons and hydroxide ions participate in the redox reactions. Such batteries exhibit high performance, close to the maximum capacity that is theoretically possible.

Furthermore, using redox-active organic molecules in rechargeable air batteries overcomes problems associated with metals, including the formation of structures called ‘dendrites,’ which impact battery performance, and have negative environmental impact. However, these batteries use liquid electrolytes—just like metal-based batteries—which pose major safety concerns like high electrical resistance, leaching effects, and flammability.

Now, in a recent study published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a group of Japanese researchers have developed an all-solid-state rechargeable air battery (SSAB) and investigated its capacity and durability. The study was led by Professor Kenji Miyatake from Waseda University and the University of Yamanashi, and co-authored by Professor Kenichi Oyaizu from Waseda University.

Unlock the power of synthetic data in AI innovation. Discover its benefits in privacy, scalability, and diversity for advanced machine learning models.

What is atompunk? Learn more about this sci-fi sub-genre, and some recommended books here!

One California-based startup, Varda Space Industries, is betting that big business will lie in relatively unassuming satellites that will spend days or months in Earth’s orbit quietly carrying out pharmaceutical development. Its research, company officials hope, could lead to better, more effective drugs — and hefty profits.

“It’s not as sexy a human-interest story as tourism when it comes to commercialization of the cosmos,” said Will Bruey, Varda’s CEO and cofounder. “But the bet that we’re making at Varda is that manufacturing is actually the next big industry that gets commercialized.”

Varda is expected to launch its first test mission Monday aboard a SpaceX rocket. A window for take-off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California begins at 2:19 p.m. PT.

Scientists find patterns in how disease-related genes switch on in the brain.

A group of physicists at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, has found via experimentation that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox still holds even when scaled up. Paolo Colciaghi, Yifan Li, Philipp Treutlein and Tilman Zibold describe their experiment in Physical Review X.

In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen published a paper outlining a thought experiment that suggested that quantum mechanics did not give a complete description of reality. They argued for the existence of “elements of reality” that were not part of quantum theory—and then went further by speculating that it should be possible to come up with a new theory that would contain such hidden variables.

Their experiment has since come to be known as the EPR paradox because of the contradictions it reveals, such as one particle in a system influencing other particles due to entanglement, and also that it can become possible to know more about the particles in a given system than should be allowed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.