I hadn’t heard about this before. Ammonia has a lot of potential, it seems.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

“SYDNEY, BRISBANE, AND MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA—The ancient, arid landscapes of Australia are fertile ground for new growth, says Douglas MacFarlane, a chemist at Monash University in suburban Melbourne: vast forests of windmills and solar panels. More sunlight per square meter strikes the country than just about any other, and powerful winds buffet its south and west coasts. All told, Australia boasts a renewable energy potential of 25,000 gigawatts, one of the highest in the world and about four times the planet’s installed electricity production capacity. Yet with a small population and few ways to store or export the energy, its renewable bounty is largely untapped.

That’s where MacFarlane comes in. For the past 4 years, he has been working on a fuel cell that can convert renewable electricity into a carbon-free fuel: ammonia. Fuel cells typically use the energy stored in chemical bonds to make electricity; MacFarlane’s operates in reverse. In his third-floor laboratory, he shows off one of the devices, about the size of a hockey puck and clad in stainless steel. Two plastic tubes on its backside feed it nitrogen gas and water, and a power cord supplies electricity. Through a third tube on its front, it silently exhales gaseous ammonia, all without the heat, pressure, and carbon emissions normally needed to make the chemical. “This is breathing nitrogen in and breathing ammonia out,” MacFarlane says, beaming like a proud father.

Companies around the world already produce $60 billion worth of ammonia every year, primarily as fertilizer, and MacFarlane’s gizmo may allow them to make it more efficiently and cleanly. But he has ambitions to do much more than help farmers. By converting renewable electricity into an energy-rich gas that can easily be cooled and squeezed into a liquid fuel, MacFarlane’s fuel cell effectively bottles sunshine and wind, turning them into a commodity that can be shipped anywhere in the world and converted back into electricity or hydrogen gas to power fuel cell vehicles. The gas bubbling out of the fuel cell is colorless, but environmentally, MacFarlane says, ammonia is as green as can be. “Liquid ammonia is liquid energy,” he says. “It’s the sustainable technology we need.””

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fuel-made-sun-air-and-water-could-power-globe-without-carbon

So in the 80s, cyberpunk writers imagined a world in which giant corporations were in charge of an increasingly technological and dystopian world. Some would say they were proved correct.

These days, solarpunk writers are imagining a world of sustainability. Could giant tech corporations be key to that vision as well?

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Big Tech Should Take the Lead on Climate Change—Here’s Why https://suhub.co/2ui8isc

Biohacking is set to get a lot faster and easier.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

New DNA Synthesis Method Could Soon Build a Genome in a Day https://suhub.co/2NGdLSH

If you want to take your solarpunk in a more biotech direction.

Originally shared by Greg Batmarx

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have developed a new kind of solar cell that can convert sunlight into electricity, but instead of using electronics like most solar cells, this particular invention relies on bacteria.

Many bacteria are already capable of turning sunlight into energy using photosynthesis. This is thanks to a chemical that the bacteria produce, although the specific chemical varies based on the species of bacteria. Some groups of researchers in the past have attempted to isolate these chemicals and use them inside solar cells, but the process of isolating them is difficult and tends to destroy the photosynthetic chemicals.

The University of British Columbia researchers instead left the chemicals inside the bacteria, and used those bacteria themselves to generate electricity. The researchers bred E. coli bacteria to grow large amounts of the photosynthetic chemicals and then covered those bacteria with semiconducting materials to produce electricity.

This new method allowed the researchers to gain a big advantage over other bacteria-based solar cells, nearly doubling the amount of electricity collected. That’s still not quite enough to compete with traditional solar panels, but this new bacteria-powered solar cell does have other advantages as well.

In particular, the photosynthetic chemicals used by the E. coli in the solar cell work just as well in low light as in bright, direct sunlight, meaning they can still generate plenty of electricity on cloudy days. In addition, these solar cells are made without the expensive materials and complicated manufacturing required for conventional solar panels, which mean these should be cleaner and cheaper to produce.

Bacteria-powered solar panels are still a long way from the market, and the researchers are hoping to improve their design to keep the bacteria alive longer.

But perhaps someday, we’ll use bacteria-generated electricity to run all our homes and cities.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a22075233/solar-cell-bacteria-cloudy/

I thought from the headline that they were selling virtual real estate, but no. It’s their offices that are virtual.

My wife’s cousin experienced something similar with a course he’s taking where everyone attends lectures in a virtual space. It took him a while to figure out how to get his avatar to sit down.

Snow Crash might finally be upon us.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Inside a $1 Billion Real Estate Company Operating Entirely in VR https://suhub.co/2ueHf17

What I’m coming to understand more and more is that a lot more people will do the right thing if it’s also the easy thing that clearly benefits them.

Originally shared by Steve S

Until Elon Musk’s Tesla automobiles, electric vehicles were for people who cared more about the environment than having a performant car. What Musk did completely right is that he turned electrics into something those with money to spare would want to drive, even if they didn’t care about the environment. He made them a luxury item and used those big bucks to produce cheaper cars that regular people could afford, like the Tesla 3’s now rolling out of his production lines.

I say all this in the context of “clean meat”, which is muscle grown in vats instead of cut out of the corpses of farm animals. If the new meat tastes better than the old, early adopters will pay extra for it, and that will finance competition and economies of scale to drive prices down. The end goal would be for faceless meat to become much cheaper than the whole-animal kind, driving the latter effectively out of business.

This is plausible because growing meat is inherently more efficient than farming it. As Churchill predicted back in 1932, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium”. The article explains that “clean meat production could also result in 78% to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions, use 7% to 45% less energy, 99% less land, and 82% to 96% less water than traditional methods”.

Essentially, you’re just growing the part you want to eat, not the bones or other supporting organs. You don’t have a GI tract, so you don’t have methane production, either. And, fundamentally, it avoids all of the cruelty inherent in raising animals for meat.

It’s economically, ecologically, and morally right.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/01/health/clean-in-vitro-meat-food/index.html

Story fodder. What happens when it’s increasingly hard to talk directly to a human being? What happens when bot-to-bot communication is the predominant traffic?

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Bot vs. Bot: Will the Internet Soon Be a Place Without Humans? https://suhub.co/2KCmzec