The WSJ describes how captured CO2 will yield useful daily products including vodka
Air Company, a Brooklyn-based startup, uses photosynthesis-inspired technology to create vodka distilled from CO2-derived products. It first creates hydrogen from water using a process known as electrolysis, before feeding it into a reactor alongside CO2 captured from ethanol plants in the Northeast, the company says. The gases then go over a catalyst, says Stafford Sheehan, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer. The resulting mixture of ethanol and water is distilled into vodka, Dr. Sheehan says. The company estimates that producing one liter of vodka takes a pound of CO2 out of the air.
Acetone and isopropanol have a combined market value of over $10 billion (£7.4 billion). They are widely used as industrial solvents and to make plastics, including acrylic glass and polypropylene. However, they depend on fossil fuel-derived hydrocarbons, resulting in significant carbon emissions during their production.
Michael Jewett’s lab at Northwestern University in Illinois, US, working with LanzaTech, a carbon-capture company based in the same state, used synthetic biology to develop the first sustainable and scalable carbon-negative approach for producing acetone and isopropanol.
The venue for Super Bowl 56 is SoFi Stadium which opened last year in Inglewood, CA, close to LAX airport.
The design firm, HKS explains the design principles behind the $5 billion arena.
“SoFi Stadium’s architecture is informed by extensive research into Southern California’s industry, architecture, lifestyle, climate, geography, and landscape, combining to create an authentic Southern California expression and experience. The sweeping coastline and the beauty and strength of the Pacific Ocean contribute to the clean and dramatic curves of the stadium’s unmistakable architecture that reflects the region’s indoor-outdoor lifestyle. The stadium’s translucent roof, seating bowl, concourses and landscape were sculpted and designed to create the feel of an outdoor venue while providing the flexibility of a traditional domed stadium.
The FAA’s height restrictions, one of the project’s initial design challenges, became one of the most prominent features within the overall project: the seating bowl sits 100-feet below the existing grade – about two to three times the depth of other similar multiuse venues. To create a memorable procession experience for patrons navigating their way down to their seats and concourses, HKS demurred from the typical series of elevators, escalators, stairs and ramps, and created an indoor/outdoor meandering series of paths that guide fans through visually rich landscaped environments replete with amenities along the way.
The open-air SoFi Stadium is the first indoor-outdoor stadium to be constructed and the NFL’s largest at 3.1 million square feet (288,500 square meters). Situated under one monumental roof canopy, three state-of-the-art venues – the 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium, the 2.5-acre covered outdoor American Airlines Plaza and a 6,000-seat performance venue – can simultaneously host different events.
The stadium’s single layer ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) roof provides a guarantee, rain or shine, for the multitude of events hosted by SoFi, all while maintaining connectivity to the outdoors and flooding the venue with natural light. The ETFE film features a 65% frit pattern that shelters guests from direct sun and reduces solar gain into the venue. The roof also features a series of operable panels distributed around the perimeter of the ETFE that can open and close, depending on the climatic conditions to promote airflow in the stadium and a comfortable environment for fans.”
Here is a tour of many of the tech and other features
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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."
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.
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.
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