see-more-portfolios – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Why Would Walmart Make Continuous 53-Foot-Long Carbon Fiber Panels? For Their Supertruck Prototype

Everyone loves to bash corporations, but few talk about how much good they can do in this world. Their immense fortunes and longevity means they can undertake radical, expensive experiments that smaller outfits simply couldn’t sustain. A good case in point is Walmart and their Advanced Vehicle Experience concept truck . Built earlier this year as a testbed for their fleet efficiency program, it features a 53-foot trailer whose roof and sidewalls are made from single-piece 53-foot-long panels of carbon fiber. This confers a weight savings of some 4, 000 pounds, meaning it can carry an extra 4, 000 in cargo to burn the same amount of fuel, or carry the same weight of cargo as before and save a tremendous amount of fuel. Creating carbon fiber panels of that length is fiendishly expensive, and a company would have to ship a lot of cargo indeed before they’d make their money back on fuel costs. In other words, you’d need a Walmart to do something like this. With 6, 000 trucks crawling our continent and logging millions of miles, the overall, long-term impact would be substantial. (more…)

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Why Would Walmart Make Continuous 53-Foot-Long Carbon Fiber Panels? For Their Supertruck Prototype

A Great Product Idea Undone by Human Factors: The NoMix Toilet

When it comes to recycling, pee and poo oughtn’t mix. We think of them as the same thing—human waste—but in fact they are not mixed within the body and shouldn’t be mixed afterwards, though we often do so out of convenience and the design of modern toilets. The reason they shouldn’t mix is because urine is rich in nitrogen and phosphorous while feces are carbonaceous. Separated, these can be valuable resources, but combined they become a useless sludge that needs to undergo laborious and energy-intensive processing before anything can be reclaimed. And we are literally flushing resources down the toilet. As an article in the farmer’s information website A Growing Culture points out, it would be better if we could easily extract nitrogen and phosphorous from separated urine rather than taking it out of the Earth: Modern agriculture gets the nitrogen it needs from ammonia-producing plants that utilize fossil fuels such as natural gas, LPG or petroleum naphtha as a source of hydrogen. This energy-intensive process dumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it consumes a finite hydrocarbon resource, and it is not sustainable. Modern agriculture gets the phosphorous it needs from phosphorous-bearing rocks. But these reserves are rapidly dwindling and increasingly contaminated with pollutants such as cadmium. In as little as 25 years apatite reserves may no longer be economically exploitable and massive world-wide starvation is predicted to follow. If we are serious about achieving sustainability in this regard, our first, and perhaps most important duty, lies in not mixing urine with feces. Enter the NoMix toilet, developed in Sweden in the 1990s. The NoMix’s bowl is designed in such a way that the urine is collected in the front, the feces in the back, and both are whisked away through separate plumbing, with the latter being disposed of in the conventional manner and the former recycled. While that raises new infrastructural challenges, the concept was interesting enough for EAWAG, a Swiss aquatic research institute, to intensively explore the NoMix’s feasibility in research trials. Running from 2000 to 2006, that project was called Novaquatis , and during their seven years of testing, Eawag shrewdly realized that “An innovation for private bathrooms can only be widely implemented if it is accepted by the public”: For this reason, all Swiss NoMix pilot projects were accompanied by sociological studies. 1750 people were surveyed – and their attitudes towards urine source separation are highly favourable. Despite a number of deficiencies, the NoMix toilet is well accepted, especially in public buildings. Things looked even better by 2010, when CNET reported that “Of the 2, 700 people surveyed in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark, 80 percent say they support the idea behind the technology, and between 75 and 85 percent report that the design, hygiene, smell, and seat comfort of the NoMix toilets equal that of conventional ones.” (more…)

Wrap Your Head Around This One: Potentially Immortal Bacteria That Eat Electricity and Could Become Living Batteries

One of the stranger (and little known) facts of nature is that our living cells are electric, or can carry electricity. Every thought, feeling and movement we have comes from an electric spark. And we find this in complicated beings like us, as well as in the most basic forms of bacteria. But there is something that bacteria can do that no other living thing on Earth can: Consume pure electricity for their own energy. Sounds Frankensteinian but it’s real. Scientists have been luring all sorts of bacteria deep in rocks and mud with electric juice. And they’ve found that these creatures are eating and then excreting electrons. Now this isn’t all that crazy, considering that, as I mentioned, we are made of electric pulses. And this process is fueled by food (specifically ATP, the molecule that provides storage for energy.) Electrons can and are taken from every food we eat, and they are carried by molecules throughout our bodies—this is a necessary process for life. The difference and extraordinary thing about bacteria is that they don’t need the “food” middleman. They consume pure electricity! Just like our (non-living) laptop plugged into the wall. (Think of this next time we consider how far removed we think we are from robotic devices.) But what are the practical implications for innovative designers? Scientists have been able to grow all kinds of what they are calling “electricity breathers” in areas where you might not find other life forms. Researchers are saying this opens up a previously unknown biosphere. A biosphere of very useful, self-powered helpers. (more…)

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Wrap Your Head Around This One: Potentially Immortal Bacteria That Eat Electricity and Could Become Living Batteries

Superhydrophobia: Breakthroughs in Next-Level Waterproofing

Water might be good for our bodies, but it’s terrible for our stuff. Our smartphones, the walls in our home, the precious documents we’re carrying—water can ruin all of it. So when a material is created that can repel water so perfectly that whatever it covers essentially never gets wet, we take notice. This kind of material is called superhydrophobic. That means that water droplets remain in their spherical shape, sit on top of the material, and then roll off of it like pearls from a necklace. The droplets never really touch the material in the first place. Check out the photo below. The angle between the bottom of the droplet sphere and the surface will be more than 120 degrees. If it were 180 degrees the droplet would not touch the surface. There have been many variations of superhydrophobic materials and most involve embedding structures within the material that prevent the water from coming into contact. For instance in a recent study researchers from Brigham Young University used material that either had microscopic long ridges or posts (see photos below) that prevented the droplet from penetrating through the fibers. (more…)

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Superhydrophobia: Breakthroughs in Next-Level Waterproofing

Google’s Self-Driving Car Just Got Slightly More Real

They could have done worse : as of yesterday afternoon, the Google Self-Driving Car Project has made a concerted push into the public eye with the unveiling of a pod-like prototype vehicle and a few new videos about what they’ve been up to lately. It’s a stripped-down electric two-seater—no steering wheel or pedals to speak of—that tops out at 25mph and is strictly intended for demonstration and pilot purposes, as seen in the video below: This is not by any means a production vehicle—they’re making “about a hundred” of them for now—so I’ll leave it to our dear readers to provide feedback on the styling (it’s on our discussion boards as of 8:26am this morning). All I can say is, open those doors up and I dare you not to picture a cutesy cartoon koala. An early rendering of the prototype Some talking points, regarding how they are presenting the self-driving car and what they’ve disclosed about the project in the videos they’ve released thus far (embedded below): (more…)

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Google’s Self-Driving Car Just Got Slightly More Real