Innovation

Bill Gates On Vehicles

Bill Gates published a blog post about his thoughts on the future of transport, in particularly vehicle transport. Electric vehicles are great for short haul, provided the efficiency of battery weight to range is improved. He sees the future of long-haul transport in biofuels, that can take CO2 from the atmosphere and combine with water to create hydrogen without any waste. These biofuels power vehicles and extract CO2 from the air, a win win!

Lockpicking With Sound

Researchers at the National Unviersity of Singapore have developed a system called SpiKey that can predict 10 possible options of a key design just by recording the sound of a key in a lock. Of the 586,584 possible key combinations for a 6-pin lock, SpiKey can be used on approx. 56% of them to generate candidate key options that will open the lock.

NeRF

Neural Radiance Fields For Unconstrained Photo Collections (NeRF) is a neural network project from researchers at Google that can take in a set of pictures of a place from the internet and automatically generate a representation of the scene that can be explored in 3D. The lighting and environmental effects of the scene can also be manipulated at a realistic level.

Power Bricks

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a method to turn mason bricks into batteries. By soaking the bricks in a PEDOT conductive polymer, the bricks become capable of storing and conducting energy. One brick can be charged to 3 Volts in 10 seconds and then power a LED light for 10 minutes!

Rock Dust CO2 Absorption

A nation by nation assessment published in Nature shows that adding crushed rock (finely crushed basalt) to farmland could absorb up to two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air per year. The technique is called enhanced rock weathering and by-products of iron and stell manufacturing, and construction, could be processed to produce the rock dust needed.  (H/T to Jenn for sharing this.)

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