On Friday evening as the sun descended over the old Hollywood set of “Desperate Housewives,” Elon Musk took to a stage and fired up his presentation about climate change. It was a strange scene, with hundreds of people crowded into the middle of a subtly artificial suburban neighborhood.
It wasn’t until about a minute into the speech that Musk casually let the crowd in on Tesla’s big secret. “The interesting thing is that the houses you see around you are all solar houses,” Musk said. “Did you notice?”
The answer, in short, was no. Like everyone else, I knew we were there to see Musk’s new “solar roof,” whatever that was supposed to mean. But try as I could as we walked in, I didn’t see anything that looked like it could carry an electric current. If anything, the slate and Spanish clay roofs looked a bit too nice for a television set. This is the future of solar, Musk proclaimed. “You’ll want to call your neighbors over and say ‘check out the sweet roof.’ It’s not a phrase you hear often.”
The roof tiles are actually made of textured glass. From most viewing angles, they look just like ordinary shingles, but they allow light to pass through from above onto a standard flat solar cell…
Read the rest of the article by Tom Randall in Bloomberg.
A physicist in Fermilab, Arden Warner, has somehow managed to come up with a brilliant solution, one that does not involve chemical agents. The method is so simple and non-destructive way of collecting oil spills and uses abundant and naturally occurring earth minerals – Magnetite.
Though oil is non-magnetic, adding powdered magnets, they were able to get them attracted in clumps as magnets adhered to the sticky mess. In turn, the magnetites carried the oil, cleaning the spill in a way that was so simple and yet so effective.
ByFusion is a 100% modular technology platform that converts all types of waste plastic into a new building material called RePlast.
Plastic waste has become one of the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st Century. Globally, we produce over 300 million tons of plastic every year and recycle only 8%.
In the US alone roughly 28 million tons of plastic is sent to landfills every year at the staggering cost of over $1.5 billion dollars annually.
We envision a future where communities can put their plastic waste to work – building infrastructure, housing, and municipal projects. Imagine using all of the plastic waste we see littering our roadways, parks, neighborhoods and oceans to rebuild our communities without long processing times, labor-intensive overhead, or toxic output. Now we can. With ByFusion, the future is now.
This information comes from the website of ByFusion.
Award-winning LifeStraw technology was originally introduced in 2005 as an emergency response tool to filter water contaminated following natural disasters.
The LifeStraw team is committed to redefining the safe drinking water space through technology innovation and product quality and design. In doing so, our work is driving sustainable access to safe drinking water by engaging governments, donors, and individual consumers to understand the problem and become an active part of the solution.
How does the LifeStraw work?
The LifeStraw uses hollow fibre micro filtration to mechanically remove contaminants down to 0.2 microns. Imagine really small tubes with even smaller pores that trap contaminants, but allow water to flow through. You can stick the LifeStraw directly into a river, lake, stream or other open, fresh water source and drink water directly from the straw! This means that dirty water goes into the LifeStraw, microorganisms are physically removed and safe drinking water comes out.
All LifeStraw products do not use chemicals, do not require pumping and do not require any energy input (like batteries).
This information comes from the website of LifeStraw.
WaterSeer™ will create water self-sufficiency, and will be a transformative force for good throughout the world.
It is hard to imagine a day without an abundance of clean, safe water. We drink our fill, shower and bathe daily, water our lawns, wash our clothes and dishes knowing that clean, safe water is an unquestioned condition of our lives. Yet, throughout the world today, one in three people do not have the daily minimum, 7.1 cups of water needed to survive. Worldwide, a child dies every 90 seconds for lack of clean drinking water, nearly 1000 a day. Daily nearly 10,000 people die from dehydration and waterborne disease.
WaterSeer™ eliminates this chronic and tragic burden by providing access to clean, safe drinking water, right where people live, by extracting water directly from the air.
WaterSeer™ condenses pure water from the air without power or chemicals. It is green, sustainable, simple, low-maintenance, easily deployed and scalable for any community. VICI-Labs worked with UC Berkeley and the National Peace Corps Association to develop a device that yields up to 37 liters of pure water a day! A WaterSeer™ Orchard will provide enough clean water for an entire community.
This information comes from the website of WaterSeer.
Nikola Motor Company Announces U.S. and Canadian Class 8 Trucks Will Be Hydrogen Fuel Cell Powered and 100% Emission Free.
Nikola is announcing that the electric drivetrain used in the U.S. and Canadian markets will be powered by a custom-built hydrogen-electric 800V fuel cell. Nikola’s hydrogen class 8 trucks will be more powerful than any other production diesel truck on the road and have a range of over 1,200 miles between fill-ups. It will achieve nearly 20 MPG with zero emissions under full load, surpassing all the government mandates set forth for the next 10 years , including the EPA’s recently announced Phase 2 GHG standards.
“The desire to be 100% emission free in the U.S. and Canada is a critical piece of our long-term engineering and environmental efforts, not just in vehicle energy consumption, but also in how energy is produced. Nikola will produce hydrogen via zero emission solar farms built by Nikola Motor Company. These solar farms will produce over 100 megawatts each and will use electrolysis to create hydrogen from water. Even our manufacturing facilities will be run off of zero emission hydrogen energy,” said Trevor Milton, CEO, Nikola Motor Company.
“Nikola plans to have a nationwide network (USA) of over 50 hydrogen stations for customers to begin fueling by 2020. This will make Nikola Motor Company the first company in the world to be 100% emission-free from energy production to transportation to consumption. Say goodbye to the days of dirty diesels and after treatment in the heavy duty class 8 market,” added Milton.
This information comes from Nikola Motor Company press release August 30, 2016.
AskNature is the world’s most comprehensive catalog of nature’s solutions to human design challenges. This curated online library features free information on more than 1,800 (and growing!) natural phenomena and hundreds of bio-inspired applications.
Think of AskNature as your home habitat. Whether you’re a designer, architect, engineer, or chemist looking for life-friendly solutions to a design challenge or a biologist who wants to share what you know about an amazing organism, AskNature is where biology and design cross-pollinate, so bio-inspired breakthroughs can be born.
BIOMIMICRY
Biomimicry is an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies—new ways of living—that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul.
The core idea is that nature has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. After billions of years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.
This information comes from the website of AskNature.
TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks.
TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. Meanwhile, independently run TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world.
Our Mission: Spread ideas
TED is a global community, welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world. We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world. On TED.com, we’re building a clearinghouse of free knowledge from the world’s most inspired thinkers — and a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other, both online and at TED and TEDx events around the world, all year long.
In fact, everything we do — from our Conferences to our TED Talks to the projects sparked by the TED Prize, from the global TEDx community to the TED-Ed lesson series — is driven by this goal: How can we best spread great ideas?
TED is owned by a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation. Our agenda is to make great ideas accessible and spark conversation.
