New Florence. New Renaissance.

Matching your car color to your tie

BMW unveiled a car that can change its color because its exterior has a coating of E Ink.

E Ink is the same kind of tech used in Amazon Kindle ebook readers, and can now cover the surface of an entire automobile. The company showed off the car at the tech trade show CES 2022 in Las Vegas.

Venture Beat

 

 

2021 – Color of the Year

One in a series of Best of 2021 posts, this one about Very Peri which Pantone has designated its Color of the Year for 2022

“Displaying a carefree confidence and a daring curiosity that animates our creative spirit, inquisitive and intriguing PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri helps us to embrace this altered landscape of possibilities, opening us up to a new vision as we rewrite our lives. Rekindling gratitude for some of the qualities that blue represents complemented by a new perspective that resonates today, PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri places the future ahead in a new light.”

The race for cobalt

BusinessWeek (sub required) on mining and lab based alternatives to cobalt, a critical metal in making EV batteries

KoBold’s 35 employees come from places like Google, Microsoft Corp., and Slack and tend to be coders who also have doctorates in the physical sciences. Asked why they joined the startup, they mention the satisfaction of speeding the energy transition, of course, but they also mention the opportunity to see if they’re really right about something. KoBold isn’t making software to sell to someone else. It’s staked claims, either solely or in joint ventures, in around 20 areas across Australia, Canada, the Central African Copperbelt, Greenland, and the U.S. In early September it announced an exploration alliance with BHP Group Ltd., the world’s second-largest mining group. Those ventures will either turn up ore or they will not. “What I love about KoBold,” says Jef Caers, a Stanford geophysics professor who is a research partner and shareholder in the company, “is that they will face the consequences of their machine learning.”

Paint to reduce air-conditioning needs

The whitest paint in the world has been created in a lab at Purdue University, a paint so white that it could eventually reduce or even eliminate the need for air conditioning, scientists say.

The idea was to make a paint that would reflect sunlight away from a building, researchers said. Making this paint really reflective, however, also made it really white, according to Purdue University. The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power.

Yahoo News

 

 

The meatless world keeps evolving

Josh Ketrick, cofounder and CEO of cultivated-meat company Eat Just, talks to McKinsey. I had profiled him when the company was called Hampton Creek in my 2016 book on automation, Silicon Collar.

"Our basic research and development work on chicken applies pretty cleanly to beef, pork, and seafood. But it’s really the infrastructure—namely the bioreactors—that is the core unit of operation necessary to make more of it.

Part of the challenge is there’s not a company that we can go to and say, “We would like to get one of your hundred-thousand-liter bioreactors.” They have to be built from scratch. So we can’t just plug in; we have to build it. That takes capital. It takes time.

I would say the second-most-important thing that we need to do to make different kinds of cultivated meat for more people is to continue to improve how we communicate this to consumers.

We shouldn’t take this as a given—that just because we believe this is a better way of making meat safer, healthier, and more sustainable that every consumer is also going to think that. We need to directly address their concerns.

In our research, we’ve seen that there’s a concern about the word “cell,” there’s a concern about the process, there’s a concern about the idea that this might be genetically engineered, and what does that mean for my own health, for the environment? So as a part of our communication process, we need to directly address these issues."

Goodbye, Spark Plugs

Transient Plasma System (TPS) proposes employing a different kind of plasma to initiate combustion in a completely different way. Leveraging recent advances in solid-state high-voltage switching capability, voltage similar to that built up in an old-fashioned coil is summoned in a matter of 10-50 nanoseconds and dispersed not across a discrete gap but rather in streamers and sheets between an electrode and the plug's peripheral housing.

Motor Trend

Redesigning Sugar

Even though the resulting crystal is ninety-nine per cent sugar, the addition of silica has two outsized effects: the bond between the silica and the sugar comes apart in the mouth, exposing a vastly expanded surface area of sucrose to the liquefying powers of saliva; and the sucrose immediately surrounding each silica grain changes form. The atoms in a sucrose molecule are usually stacked in a well-ordered lattice, but when this structure becomes what scientists call “amorphous,” its atoms frozen in random chaos, it dissolves on the tongue much more quickly. Incredo’s exponentially more soluble structure rapidly saturates your taste buds, delivering an intense hit of sweetness. The best analogy is cotton candy: melting sugar into an amorphous state and spinning it into a tangle of fine strands produces a confection that seems much more cloying than chocolate or soda, despite containing a fraction of the sugar.

New Yorker

 

Any color so long as it is black!

One of Henry Ford's famous quotes about the Model T was, "A customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black."

A century later, we have much more choice but black and white cars still dominate. From The Drive

"A lot of things about the 90s get a rose-tinted treatment, but if you think there were more red cars back then, you’re actually right. Reddit user Feemiror posted this illustrative breakdown of car colors by year of production, which paints—literally—the rise of monochrome compared to the relatively flamboyant 90s.

I should note that the data is sourced from Poland, but if you’re hoping for the situation to be any better in the U.S., unfortunately it isn’t. Over 23 percent of cars last year in the US were white and another 23 percent were black, while purple languishes, unloved, as the least popular."

NanoSeptic self-cleaning tech

NanoSeptic technology kills pathogens using a photocatalytic reaction with embedded titanium dioxide nanoparticles. In plain language, it can provide a self-disinfecting surface for high traffic areas by using UV light. The technology uses a septic coating on self-adhesive plastic sheets that self-clean every time they’re touched.

Military Spot

Rapid-aged whiskeys

Distillers have tried and failed to accelerate the aging process since at least the end of Prohibition, when stocks of aged whiskey dried up.

Rapid-aged whiskeys are now popping up in bars and liquor stores and have even started winning awards, fermenting divisions in this famously fusty industry. They’re using sound waves, computer-controlled cycles of pressure and heat, and a host of new technologies to mature whiskey more quickly.

WSJ