"To Survive, I Had To Grow A Skin As Thick As A Cast-iron Pot And This Is Now Almost Impenetrable. I

Fly to Mars without leaving home!

A couple people asked me about this little clip from my “Why Do We Go To Space” video (<- requisite plug for my YouTube show). What you’re seeing on my iPhone screen there is a 360-degree panorama of the Martian surface as captured by the Curiosity rover.

You can view it here. It works great on your computer, but the real magic is when you view it on your phone or tablet.

Congratulations. You’re a space traveler!

A new online platform to promote women’s economic empowerment is here! UN Women and the Government of Canada recently launched an online platform, the Global Knowledge Gateway for Women’s Economic Empowerment, which aims to re-vitalize women’s economic empowerment by building connections, and providing users with tools and resources necessary to be empowered. Get the link to this exciting new initiative here: www.empowerwomen.org

Could Europe Be Powered by African Solar Energy?

For a long time, people looking for big fixes to climate change have been talking about building huge solar installations in North Africa, which gets a lot more sun than most of the places where solar power is big — Germany, for example. But now, it looks as if someone finally is doing it.

Next month in Ouarzazate, Morocco, the first portion of what eventually will be the world’s biggest concentrated solar power plant – called Noor I – is set to go online, according to the Guardian, a British newspaper.

Eventually, when the entire $10 billion complex, which is being financed with assistance from the World Bank and European Union, is completed in 2020, it will generate 580 megawatts of electricity, enough to provide a big portion of Morocco’s energy needs while still leaving plenty of juice for export. The complex could prevent 700,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being spewed into the atmosphere each year.

The plant uses an ingenious technology for getting the most out of sunlight. A huge array of 500,000 crescent-shaped mirrors focus sunlight and transmit it to a single point on a tower. (The mirrors actually have tiny computers in them, which adjust the angle throughout the day to gather the most energy.)

The plant could turn Morocco, which depends upon fossil fuel imports to fill 94 percent of its energy needs, into a major producer of electricity for export. Find out how by clicking here.

Best known as the digital ledger at the core of bitcoin, blockchain is “a great way for making and preserving truths.” Just as blockchain tracks the movement of bitcoins, it could be used as an open way to follow any other good or product, bringing “concrete trustable facts to the retail environment”, she said. For example, Provenance is working on a blockchain project to track fish, noting when and where and how the animal is caught, checking its status with certifiers (such as whether it qualifies as organic) and tracking it as it changes hands, so that data can be shown to the final buyer. That could help brands prove to their customers that products are as promised, helping build trust.

WIRED Retail 2015: Blockchain could track your fish supper from boat to plate (Wired UK)

Energy conversion: Speeding up material discovery

Algorithm take months, not years, to find material for improved energy conversion

In even the most fuel-efficient cars, about 60 percent of the total energy of gasoline is lost through heat in the exhaust pipe and radiator. To combat this, researchers are developing new thermoelectic materials that can convert heat into electricity. These semiconducting materials could recirculate electricity back into the vehicle and improve fuel efficiency by up to 5 percent.

The challenge is, current thermoelectric materials for waste heat recovery are very expensive and time consuming to develop. One of the state of the art materials, made from a combination of hafnium and zirconium (elements most commonly used in nuclear reactors), took 15 years from its initial discovery to optimized performance.

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed an algorithm that can discover and optimize these materials in a matter of months, relying on solving quantum mechanical equations, without any experimental input.

“These thermoelectric systems are very complicated,” said Boris Kozinsky, a recently appointed Associate Professor of Computational Materials Science at SEAS and senior author of the paper. “Semiconducting materials need to have very specific properties to work in this system, including high electrical conductivity, high thermopower, and low thermal conductivity, so that all that heat gets converted into electricity. Our goal was to find a new material that satisfies all the important properties for thermoelectric conversion while at the same time being stable and cheap.”

Read more.

Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models

Steve Knisely was an intern at Exxon Research and Engineering in the summer of 1979 when a vice president asked him to analyze how global warming might affect fuel use. "I think this guy was looking for validation that the greenhouse effect should spur some investment in alternative energy that's not bad for the environment," Knisely, now 58 and a partner in a management consulting company, recalled in a recent interview. Knisely projected that unless fossil fuel use was constrained, there would be "noticeable temperature changes" and 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air by 2010, up from about 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution. The summer intern's predictions turned out to be very close to the mark.

This is the third in a series of articles published by InsideClimate News disclosing that ExxonMobil was conducting an extensive internal research project internally to analyze the effect of carbon emissions on atmospheric CO2, global warming and climate change. It’s clear from the material described and presented in the article that ExxonMobil, within its science group and at the highest management levels, was aware of the risk of climate change from carbon emissions. Notwithstanding that knowledge, ExxonMobil decided to protect its business model and go down the denial path.

What’s amazing is how accurate the ExxonMobil scientists were in their projections of the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and the effect those levels of concentration would have on global warming.

Here’s an example of an internal memorandum. An explanation of this memo, including more on its contents, the context in which it was written and delivered and the identities of the author and addressee, are included in the article.

A timeline of ExxonMobil’s research and external outreach efforts on the climate change issue. If the text is too tiny or blurred, a better copy, which you can enlarge, is included in the article.

Computer Model to Help Manage Hydropower in Kenya

The Moon Parka - A jacket made of synthetic spider silk

Remember the Japanese biomaterials company Spiber? In 2013, they presented a cocktail dress made of Qmonos (from the Japanese word kumonosu meaning ‘spider web’), their present 11-year-10-design-iterations-and-656-gene-synthesis synthetic version of stronger than steel and more flexible than nylon lightweight spider silk.

Snip from geek.com:

The end result of all that research is a method for producing artificial spider silk through a fermentation process using bioengineered microorganisms to produce the silk proteins. A real spider can only produce so much silk, but an engineered cell that does nothing but spit out silk proteins can be used to scale production up quickly.

Now they presented in collaboration with The North Face a new prototype called The Moon Parka, which is currently touring North Face stores across Japan. It’s intended to show that practical applications of spider silk are possible (cost is now 1/53,000 of what it was in 2008). Spiber aims to deliver the final product next year. Presumably only in Japan. But fingers crossed for a worldwide rollout at reasonable prices.

Watch their promo-launch video below:

[North Face x Spiber] [Spiber] [picture by North Face]

This came across my desk this morning in the course of philanthropic research, and it’s a fascinating portrait primarily of the head of a charitable organization that serves his own community (the blind and visually impaired) but also a mixed-message reconstruction of a man who mysteriously bequeathed $125M – fifteen times the charity’s operating budget – to an organization that never knew his name. 

(A more-or-less transcript of the podcast is also available below the player.)