Soljacic and his collaborators had demonstrated a new way of coaxing magnetic fields into transferring power over a distance of several meters without dispersing as electromagnetic waves. The demonstration ushered in a technology that might eventually become as pervasive as the gadgets it could power. Laptops, cell phones, iPods, and digital cameras might someday recharge without power cords. With the proliferation of wireless electronics, perhaps it was just a matter of time before power transmission would go wireless, too.
pretty good layman’s introduction to the recent MIT induction breakthrough
solar-heated water from the summer months will be stored 65 meters underground in “60K m3 of crystalline rock and can then be pumped back up to heat homes in winter.”
a tool that helps you find what software is using the most power. By fixing (or closing) these applications or processes, you can immediately see the power savings in the tool.
a range of tools for post-apocalyptic gourmands to allow us to cope with food and energy scarcity while preserving pleasure and dignity in our daily lives.
From the car-obsessed cities of the 20th to the cities of the 21th century. One is being built in China now
These new megacities could evolve into sprawling, polluting megaslums. Or they could define a new species of world city. Unlike New York or London, they are blank slates — less affluent, perhaps, but also free from legacy designs and technologies tailored to the world of the 19th and 20th centuries. That is a huge advantage. It took Boston 20 years and more than $14B just to reroute a freeway underground. New York can hardly install a second network of water pipes. Most of Los Angeles is too spread out for fast public transit or combined heat and power plants. And because these cities are so isolated from agricultural land, most of the food that locals eat gets shipped 100s of km. “Shanghai today is making 90% of the mistakes that American cities made” — spreading out, building up single-family homes, replacing naturally mixed-use neighborhoods with isolated zones for living, shopping, and working, and connecting it all with car travel. But fixing these problems is still possible. Dongtan breaks ground later this year on a plot about the size of Manhattan on Chongming Island.
2012-07-03: CO2-negative cities. It is well-understood that per-capita resource usage is lower in urban areas than in rural ones, and the first CO2-neutral cities are coming online. Covering vertical surfaces with plants would allow for CO2-negative cities. 2012-07-05: The first eco city, Dongtan, is so eco-friendly it doesn’t even exist.
Dongtan was a planned development described as an eco-city on the island of Chongming in Shanghai, China. Design began in 2005, and by 2010 the development had stalled. The project has been described as a failure.
Global design firm WATG periodically rolls out speculative GIFs demonstrating how famous urban stretches can be realistically green-ified
2021-11-12: Not sure why it took so long for this to get a bit more traction, but here’s a proposal:
Urban Sequoia achieves substantially more significant CO2 reductions than has been achieved by applying these techniques separately. These strategies can be applied to buildings of all sizes and types. For cities, SOM’s prototype design is a high-rise building that can sequester 1000 tons of CO2 per year, equivalent to 48k trees. The design incorporates nature-based solutions and materials that use far less CO2 than conventional options and absorb CO2 over time. Materials like bio-brick, hempcrete, timber, and biocrete reduce the CO2 impact of construction by 50% compared to concrete and steel. A progressive approach could reduce construction emissions by 95%.
Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) has unveiled a project dubbed “the world’s first farmscraper,” to be built in Shenzhen, China. The 218-meter-high, 51-story Jian Mu Tower will contain a large-scale farm system with the ability to produce crops to feed 40k people per year, as well as offices, a supermarket, and a food court. The scheme’s façade consists of a 10k-square-meter vertical hydroponic farm extending the entire height of the building, estimated to produce 270k kilograms of food per year. The Jian Mu Tower seeks to “establish a self-sustained food supply chain” where the cultivation, harvest, sale, and consumption of food takes place under 1 roof.
Route optimization software can save substantial fuel for trucks and airplanes.
Many look to alternative fuels and hybrid-electric vehicles. But information technology has an important role to play in making existing vehicles more efficient, particularly when it comes to aggregating small gains across large fleets. Take something as simple as reducing left-hand turns. For US drivers, this means less time idling in the middle of the road waiting for oncoming traffic to pass. Collectively, Roadnet clients save an estimated 205m liters of fuel a year and can cut 85k trucks and cars out of their logistics systems.
2013-07-26: What Was a Truck Driver? The US commercial truck fleet has 253m trucks, and employs 5.7m truck drivers. Within 20 years, that should go down to 0 drivers. 2014-05-30: Software truck convoys. This kind of mundane driverless car will be on the road very soon, already saves 10% fuel and can save up to 20% if the distance is further reduced.
Across China, 7.2m trucks and 16m drivers are responsible for intercity transportation of goods. This industry is worth $300b, and drivers account for 40% of the costs. Some long-distance trips across China require 3 drivers to complete. The truck freight industry in the US is even bigger, valued at $700b.
Amazon is building an app that matches truck drivers with shippers, a new service that would deepen its presence in the $800B trucking industry. The app is designed to make it easier for truck drivers to find shippers that need goods moved. It would also eliminate the need for a third-party broker, which typically charges a commission of ~15% for doing the middleman work.
In 2022, that figure is 3m truck tractors on the road. From there, we can estimate the average yearly net transactions per truck at $340k per year. Multiply the 2 numbers together, and we get $1.04t!
Trucking is a potpourri of different services and needs. There’s drayage: the process of moving containers from docks to warehouses. There’s reefer (refrigerated truck): the truck trailer is temperature controlled. There’s hazmat: transport of hazardous materials. Flatbed, dry van, tankers, partials, hotshots, box trucks, and more.
Russia plans to build the world’s longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65b project to supply the US with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia. The project would take 15 years to complete. A 6000-kilometer transport corridor from Siberia into the US will feed into the tunnel, which at 100 km will be more than 2x as long as the underwater section of the Channel Tunnel.
CRTs and other monitors that use “additive” colors (that is, systems that make white by shining all colors at maximum brightness) use more power to display some colors than others. Mark Ontkush has developed a low-wattage color-palette for use in web-applications that are used on these displays
What can you use it for? Any application that is displayed on a device that uses CRT, Plasma, or OLED technology. Any device where white costs money – handheld units, web sites, TV. Enjoy.
“The refining of pure silicon, although a very abundant mineral, is energy-hungry and very expensive. And whereas silicon cells need direct sunlight to operate efficiently, these cells will work efficiently in low diffuse light conditions. The expected cost is 10% of the price of a silicon-based solar panel, making them more attractive and accessible to home-owners.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 