Very cool look.

Originally shared by designboom

created by lazzarini, it successfully combines a retro aesthetic with futuristic technology to create a vision of what a future with flying automobiles may be.

https://www.designboom.com/technology/lazzarini-hover-coupe-12-23-2017/?utm_content=buffer602ea&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Some good info in this article on Tudor-era trading. Mostly coastal, as it turns out.

Originally shared by Tam McD

https://theconversation.com/what-the-16th-century-shipwreck-found-on-the-kent-coast-can-tell-us-about-trade-in-tudor-england-100392

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

SF becomes fact: sprayable sensors. “Using tiny 2-D materials, researchers have built microscopic chemical sensors that can be sprayed in an aerosol mist. Spritzes of such minuscule electronic chips, described online July 23 in Nature Nanotechnology, could one day help monitor environmental pollution or diagnose diseases.

Each sensor comprises a polymer chip about 1 micrometer thick and 100 micrometers across (about as wide as a human hair) overlaid with a circuit made with atomically thin semiconducting materials (SN Online: 2/13/18). This superflat circuit includes a photodiode, which converts ambient light into electric current, and a chemical detector. This chemical detector is composed of a 2-D material that conducts electric current more easily if the material binds with a specific chemical in its environment.

[…]

Right now, researchers can determine whether their sensors have come in contact with certain particles only after the fact — by collecting the chips and hooking them up to electrodes. These electrodes test how easily electric current flows through a chip’s chemical detector, which reveals whether it touched a particular chemical after it was sprayed. But future sensors could emit light signals when in contact with target particles, says study coauthor Michael Strano, a chemical engineer at MIT.”

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-kind-spray-loaded-microscopic-electronic-sensors

I’m watching these developments with interest, since I’m increasingly tending to choose not to eat meat for various reasons.

Originally shared by Linda Teppler (S0rceress0)

https://www.foodandwine.com/news/beyond-meat-innovation-center?utm_campaign=foodandwine&utm_medium=social&xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_fw&utm_source=twitter.com

https://www.foodandwine.com/news/beyond-meat-innovation-center?utm_campaign=foodandwine&utm_medium=social&xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_fw&utm_source=twitter.com

Via a private share.

I am a New Zealander married to an American, living in New Zealand. By complete and total coincidence, my brother-in-law (my wife’s sister’s husband) is a New Zealander married to an American, living in the US. There’s a family story about how he claimed, while they were playing the game Therapy, to be the most emotionally stable person in the family – pretty much because his standard of “emotionally stable” was based on New Zealand, not California.

What emotional expression is within acceptable ranges, how it’s expressed, how it’s evaluated, under what circumstances it can be expressed, what it’s considered reasonable to expect out of life – all of these things are highly culture-dependent. So what happens when multinational corporations (mostly, though not entirely, based in the US) start creating emotional management applications that are used around the world?

https://aeon.co/essays/can-emotion-regulating-tech-translate-across-cultures

In contrast to the hype you’ll see elsewhere.

Originally shared by Esther Schindler

Is Vertical Farming the Future of Your Salad? https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agriculture-hydroponic-greens

https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agriculture-hydroponic-greens

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/