Tech for Good

The new age of prosthetics We have already discussed several advanced prosthetic devices helping people with amputations recover their abilities. However, traditional prosthesis wearers' brain behaviors are very different from those without upper limb prosthetics. They must constantly watch their prosthetic arm and have trouble correcting mistakes when they apply too much or little force with their hand. In contrast, Cleveland Clinic researchers have engineered a first-of-its-kind bionic arm that allows wearers to think, behave and function as a person without an amputation. They no longer need to watch their prosthesis, they could find things without looking, and they could more effectively correct their mistakes. Please see details here. #medical #robotics #prosthetics

New life for sawdust One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. That old saying is so true for a US-based startup Forust. Their treasure is sawdust, considered by most companies as waste going to a landfill. In May, the team has launched a tech making 3D-printed objects from upcycled sawdust and other byproducts from the wood industry that look like traditional wood. Forust can create virtually any item, from home goods to intricate architectural detailing. It can also replicate any wood kind, from ash to mahogany, making it a sustainable replacement to traditional wood. Thin layers of sawdust are spread onto the bed of the 3D printer. The company treats the parts from the printer with a non-toxic binder like lignin (a natural polymer found in the cell walls of woody plants) to make the material more durable. The vase-making process takes about two hours and finishes with traditional wood treatments such as sanding, staining, or dyeing. 💡 Article on Fastcompany 🌐 Forust website #robotics #3dprint

☀️ It's Sunday, and it's time for the week summary: 1️⃣ Flying taxi - Airbus has revealed its brand-new flying taxi called the CityAirbus NextGen 2️⃣ 90 seconds - the new lithium-carbon (Li-C) battery tech, which enables a full charge in a similar time to refueling an internal combustion-powered vehicle 3️⃣ The world is doomed? Not so fast. - the company building devices that help children with disabilities regain their ability to walk 4️⃣ Smart Carbon - company creating a future where waste carbon becomes new everyday products, and virgin fossil stays in the ground 5️⃣ Wearables to predict the flu - wearables may detect the flu even before a patient begins to show symptoms Hope you enjoyed any of these. Please share if you feel someone may be interested in joining the channel. Have a safe weekend. You Tech for Good

Flying taxi I am sure everyone has seen the Fifth Element movie. Remember all those taxis casually flying around the cities? Well, it seems that we all have a chance to see something similar in real near-future life. Airbus has just revealed its brand-new flying taxi called the CityAirbus NextGen. NextGen looks like a helicopter, only with a fixed set of wings and a V-shaped tail. It has room for 4 passengers and fully-electric 8-propeller propulsion system. Since it will be flying around areas where people work and live, the vehicle will produce sound levels below 65 dB during flight and 70 dB during landing. The plane can be piloted remotely and will have a range of 80 km (50 mi) at a top speed of 120 kph (75 mph). It is more than fast enough to get you around town since you get to skip over any car traffic. Airbus hopes to build the flight prototype by 2023. So do not be surprised to be flying an Airbus taxi for your trip's final leg before the decade is out. 💡 Airbus press-release #EV #urbantech

☀️ Here is your Sunday's summary of the week: 1️⃣ New height for an autonomous flight - fully autonomous space tourist flight to the Earth's 600 km orbit on SpaceX Crew Dragon 2️⃣ Beach boys - beach cleaning robots meant to tackle the sand garbage problem 3️⃣ View from above - small autonomous wind-powered robots attached to weather balloons to provide geospatial intelligence data 4️⃣ Backup power for work and play - wildly successful battery devices to back up your home energy 5️⃣ To Mars and back - carbon catalyzed reactor to produce rocket fuel for Mars travels I wish you a safe weekend and hope to see you around next week. Your Tech for Good

To Mars and back Assistant professor Jingjie Wu and his students at the University of Cincinnati used a carbon catalyst in a reactor to convert carbon dioxide into methane. Known as the "Sabatier reaction," it is a process the International Space Station uses to scrub the CO2 from the air the astronauts breathe and produce rocket fuel to keep the station in high orbit. But Wu is thinking much bigger. The Martian atmosphere is made almost entirely of CO2. Astronauts could save half the fuel for a return trip home by making it on the red planet. It is a gas station pumping in CO2 and producing methane for a rocket. Apart from Mars colonization, the method also combats climate change by reducing greenhouse emissions in a commercially viable way: - install the reactors in CO2-generating power plants; - pair with renewable energy. That way, instead of emissions and throwing away excess green energy from solar and wind, we can store them in chemicals for future use. 💡 Article on UC News #recycle #space

Backup power for work and play More consumers are thinking about backing up their energy needs amid power outages due to natural disasters such as abnormal colds, hurricanes, and droughts. That is especially true for California, recently shutting down the Edward Hyatt hydroelectric power plant due to climate-induced drought. The plant generated power for around 500,000 homes. Californian startup EcoFlow reinvents how we access energy. Their wildly successful battery backup devices, Delta Pro and Delta mini have raised over $12 million during recent Kickstarter campaigns. DELTA Pro can back up an entire home from several hours to even days; the mini is for less stressful applications like home light backup and working and playing outdoors where power is less accessible. A few tech details, prices, and pictures are here. #battery #gadgets #startups

View from above Today's topic is geospatial intelligence (GEOINT). This tech uses imagery to survey and assess human activity and physical geography anywhere on Earth. The use cases may include monitoring hard-to-reach, remote areas for deforestation and crop yields. The government may track and improve the city and suburb development, monitor critical infrastructure. With such imagery, we can assess the impact of flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. The list may go on. Most of the GEOINT startups use satellites to collect data. That requires delivery by the rocket and operation by highly trained engineers, which is costly. Headquartered in Brooklyn and Barcelona, NearSpace Labs offers a more efficient solution. They use small autonomous wind-powered robots attached to weather balloons. The Swifty device can reach altitudes between 60,000 and 85,000 feet (18-26 km) and capture 400-1,000 square kilometers of imagery per flight. Details are here. #robotics #geospatial

Beach boys Imagine yourself on your favorite beach. You are lying on the sand under the sun, relaxing and feeling the fullness of life. Your hands take the sand and slowly pour it. Then, suddenly you realize you have picked up a cigarette butt (a piece of plastic, a bottle cap - you name it). Sounds familiar? A partnership by two companies, Poralu Marine and 4ocean, has got your back. Their beach cleaning robot BeBot is meant to tackle the sand garbage problem. The device is powered by the sun, digging and sifting sand to a depth of 10 cm. Its grid traps waste of more than one square centimeter. BeBot is not yet autonomous - an operator remotely controls at up to 300 meters. But it is still helpful. It is fully electric, takes on the hard everyday handwork made by volunteers, and can clean as many as three thousand square meters of the beach in just an hour. The team is currently testing BeBot on the Florida coast and plan to send another device to work in Hawaii soon. 💡 Source 🌐 Website #robotics

​New height for an autonomous flight Yesterday, the flight of four space tourists ended. They have spent three days in Earth's 600km orbit, making a complete spin around the planet every hour and a half. The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule landed in the Atlantic. Then the team flew on a helicopter to Florida. The flight was fully autonomous because there were no professional astronauts on board, only untrained passengers. And everything went quite smoothly. SpaceX representatives admitted that during the trip, there were only two minor issues. The waste management system fan has failed. Here we can only empathize - the first flight into space, it seems, turned out to be smelly. Imagine three days in a closed room with three other strangers, where the toilet ventilation broke down. And you cannot open the window to ventilate. Oh, how embarrassing. SpaceX team said they resolved the issue thanks to some Plan B. And the passengers were "healthy and happy." The second problem was related to the temperature sensor in one of the engines. But it was a backup one, so they just turned it off. Temperature speaking, the capsule used parachutes for landing (more precisely, for splashdown). The outer shell warmed up to 3,500°F (1927°C), but inside, the temperature did not exceed 85°F (29°C). SpaceX has already sold the next five flights to space tourists. So, we can say that autonomous transport has taken a new, rather impressive, height. 💡 Article on CNN #space #robotics #AI

☀️ Here is your Sunday's week summary: 1️⃣ The world’s largest carbon capture plant (do we need it?) - Icelandic carbon dioxide capture and storage plant, however, with a small efficiency 2️⃣ Back to basics: carbon dioxide and climate change - the basics of the planet's carbon dioxide balance, climate change, and why all that is even important 3️⃣ Women only scooter - Indian electric scooter company ready to disrupt the industry with its women-only production facility 4️⃣ Saving plastic from a landfill - converting hard-to-recycle plastic waste into concrete additive 5️⃣ Plant trees ten times faster than human - Canadian startup with a drone and AI technology to help plant 1 billion trees Guys, please let me know in the comments which other technologies would you like to be featured on the channel. Have a nice and safe weekend Your Tech for Good

Plant trees ten times faster than human Every year the planet loses 13 billion trees due to deforestation, wildfires, and other reasons - and regains less than half of that. Timber companies became very good at cutting trees: they use all-terrain vehicles, AI, and even autonomous logging trucks. When it comes to planting trees, buying large, we still use shovels. Canadian startup Flash Forest is on a mission to give back the Earth its lungs by planting 1 billion trees by 2028. And on their way, they are backed by the latest technology. The company uses drones, aerial mapping technology, automation, and ecological science to plant trees at a rate that has not been possible. Their drones work as fast as ten people, planting 10000 to 20000 trees a day. The company aims to bring the cost down to 50 cents per tree, or around a fourth of the cost of some other tree restoration efforts. Tech details are here. #startups #AI #robotics #reforestation

​Saving plastic from a landfill Today we have another recycling company in focus. CRDC Global is an Ireland-based company with a mission to create value from the world's hard-to-recycle plastic waste by converting it into RESIN8, an additive improving concrete used in construction. The tech process takes all types of waste plastic. The mixed and often dirty plastic is shredded and sorted based on density. Then the shredded plastic is processed to kill pathogens and odors. The mixture is melted during a heated extrusion stage to get a polymer. Then the RESIN8 is granulated into the size, shape, and gradation required by standard concrete mix designs. RESIN8 tests have demonstrated concrete's compression strength, flexibility, fire resistance, thermal resistance, and acoustic properties increase. CRDC has recently partnered with a not-for-profit Alliance to End Plastic Waste. That will help scale up the two production facilities in Costa Rica and the US to process up to 24000 metric tons of plastic waste annually. I want to see more innovative solutions like that. They benefit society by ending plastic waste in the environment and advancing a circular economy. 🎬 Longer 3-minute video about the company 🌐 CRDC website #recycle

Update on the previous post Electrek has just reported that Ola's S1 and S1 Pro electric scooters are off to a massive start after the first day of sales. CEO Bhavish Aggarwal claims that the company is selling two electric scooters every second. The company reported 80000 sales in the first 12 hours. To put that into perspective, that matches the quarterly sales rate of electric scooter industry leader NIU. I would be happy to hear the impressions from those living in India when you see the scooters on the streets. #EV

Women only scooter India is the largest two-wheeler market globally, with around 15 million units sold annually. With gas motorbikes still heavily outselling electric alternatives, Ola Electric could help rewrite the transportation landscape in India within a short time. Ola scooters are built locally in India inside of a massive scooter megafactory with an initial annual capacity of 2 million units and planned expansion to 10 million. Ola's CEO, Bhawish Aggarwal, has recently revealed a principal change in the company's electric scooter rollout. The scooters will be built entirely by women. India has a dramatically lower female employment rate compared to many of its neighbors and certainly compared to the West. Some estimates show that women in India make up just 15% of labor participation. So the initiative could have a special significance to the country. Details on that move and why the tech side of the scooters may be disruptive for the whole industry are here. #EV

Back to basics: carbon dioxide and climate change Yesterday's post about the Orca carbon dioxide capturing facility has raised a lot of comments and questions. I decided to write about the basics of the planet's carbon dioxide balance, climate change, and why all this is even important. I tried to be brief to cover the concept, though it was not easy. Please follow this link to read the post. I hope now you understand why we are talking so much about renewable energy and EVs. #basics

The world’s largest carbon capture plant (do we need it?) Icelandic carbon capture company, Climeworks, has officially launched Orca, the world’s largest air capture and storage plant that permanently removes CO₂ from the air. The technology provides for mixing the air-captured CO₂ with water and pumping it deep underground. There, a natural mineralization process that takes less than two years will trap carbon dioxide in stones. Orca runs entirely on renewable energy from geothermal power plant. For now, Orca can capture 4000 tons of CO₂ per year - the equivalent of only 800 cars emissions. And that is where I am skeptical about the efficiency. With last year's global emissions totaling 31.5 billion tons, this tech looks like marketing at best. At worse, that is just a waste of money. According to Climeworks, the plant will eventually expand to megaton removal capacity by the second part of this decade. Which still does not look convincing. 💡 Article on Smart-Energy #recycle

☀️ It's Sunday, and here is the summary of this week's posts: 1️⃣ It's All About Function - functional prosthetic devices that change the lives of finger and partial-hand amputees 2️⃣ Mighty Buildings - a construction company claiming that it can 3D-print a studio apartment in just 24 hours 3️⃣ Between bicycle and motorbike - BMW Motorrad concept combining a motorcycle and a high-speed bicycle 4️⃣ Battery Ship - Japan's autonomous battery ships to transfer offshore wind electricity 5️⃣ Double the ocean wave power - a wave energy converter that is twice as efficient as any similar technologies developed to date This week we are welcoming more than 400 new community members. Guys, I am very glad to have you here. We also continue to share meaningful opinions in our chat @tfg_safechat - you can join the chat if you are interested in the post discussions. I wish you a safe weekend and see you next week. Your Tech for Good

Double the ocean wave power While wind and solar dominate the renewable market, they are available only 20-30% of the time. Wave energy is available 90% of the time on average, and the potential power contained in offshore waves is immense. RMIT University research team has created a wave energy converter that is twice as efficient at harvesting power as any similar technologies developed to date. This technology could be the foundation for a thriving new renewable energy industry delivering massive environmental and economic benefits. Details on the tech are here. #wave #tidal #invention

Battery Ship To reach its goal of 38% generation from renewables by 2030, Japan needs a massive boost to offshore wind capacity. Problem: deep coastal waters surround Japan, making it hard to build offshore wind farms that sink turbine foundations into the seafloor. You could build floating wind farms, but they still require an undersea power cable. That is expensive, impacts the environment, and natural disasters may damage it. Solution: Japanese company PowerX to build autonomous battery ships to transfer offshore wind electricity. Then, the wind farm can be located in the most cost-efficient place and transfer electricity anywhere in the country. Running up to 300 km on electricity, the Power Transfer Vessel will have a suite of sonar, lidar, AIS, radar, weather sensors, and autonomous navigation software and sensing equipment. The first ship planned for 2025 will carry 100 batteries and 200MWh of power – 22,000 Japanese households single-day consumption. 💡 Article on Renew Economy #robotics #wind