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Greetings!
Greetings, This week, our favorite less-biased news
source The
Week magazine reports
that, excluding the Los Angeles fires, the ten most expensive natural
disasters in the US have occurred just in the past decade, while at
least three billionaires are expected to become trillionaires in
the next decade coming up. This brings us to my new climate book,
which I will talk about next time. However, these two opposing
factoids above remind me of a very recent UK captivating and
disturbing docudrama, just released to the US on Prime video, “2073”
which warranted a full-page review in New
Scientist. We highly recommend
it.
Story #1 is quite ambitious, involving perovskite
solar cells (PSC), for “Japan aims to develop PSC sections
generating 20 gigawatts of electricity equivalent to 20 nuclear
reactors by fiscal 2040.” Lightweight and bendable, PSCs
can be integrated with urban environments easily. They can be
installed on walls of buildings and windows, on car roofs, and on
streetlights, allowing these surfaces to be utilized for energy
harvesting.
Story $2 includes a good diagram showing a double
stage osmosis process, where boron is removed in the second stage
inexpensively. Large desalination
plants—such as San Diego's Claude
"Bud" Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant—could save millions
of dollars in a year, according to the source, Techexplore.com, and
published this month in Nature: “A highly selective and
energy efficient approach to boron removal overcomes the Achilles
heel of seawater desalination,” Nature Water (2025). DOI:
10.1038/s44221-024-00362-y.
Story #3 describes a new type of rechargeable battery
using an inert aluminum fluoride added to an Al-ion battery. “The
solid-state Al-ion battery also had an exceptionally long life,
lasting 10,000 charge-discharge cycles while losing less than 1% of
its original capacity.” Published by the American Chemical
Society: ACS Central Science (2024). DOI:
10.1021/acscentsci.4c01615.
Story #4 is credited to the University of Nebraska
which developed a new renewable energy vegetable oil rich in
triacylglycerols (TAG) that can be used for sustainable aviation and
diesel fuel. They engineered high-biomass grasses like sorghum to
produce oil. “These grasses are highly efficient at photosynthesis,
produce large amounts of biomass, can grow in tough climates…
and provide about 1.4 times more oil per hectare than soybeans,
making this a promising new feedstock for renewable fuels.” See
their Research Report: Development
of vegetative oil sorghum: From lab-to-field.
Story #5 has a fascinating development based the
structure of a Venus flower basket sponge. The design mimics nature
forming a synthetic version of the skeleton so that the new filter
can grab 97% of an oil spill even in turbulent waters. Researchers
from Harbin Institute of
Technology in China have come up with a
new approach to oil cleanup using a vortex-anchored filter
(VAF). When the Trump administration intends to overturn the
ban on offshore drilling, even off of Florida’s coast, we certainly
need such an insurance policy for the inevitable accident waiting to
happen. The research is published in Nature Communications.
Sincerely,
Thomas Valone, PhD,
Editor
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