A collaboration between Reed College, the University of Illinois and Portland State University this past spring resulted in an assessment of the benefits of ecoroofs. They found that they are worth the cost for urban residents. Putting gardens on the tops of buildings or homes, they found, more than made up for installation costs in energy savings, preventing sewer overruns and providing an increase in pollinators.
And a team of engineers at the University of New South Wales designed a new engine system based on retrofitting diesel engines to run on 90% hydrogen. Led by Professor Shawn Kook, the group spent 18 months working on the design and building a working model. Testing showed that it reduced CO2 emissions over a standard diesel engine by over 85% and that the design could be used to retrofit existing trucks.
Also, a team at Dartmouth College built an AI application that could read conversations on Reddit and report back about the mental state of the people engaging in such conversations. Testing showed the application was capable, under some scenarios, of detecting mental health disorders. The team presented their paper describing their app and their work with it at this year's International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology.
A team of engineers at the University of Delaware announced last winter that they had designed and built a fuel cell that could remove 99% of the carbon dioxide in an ambient air sample. Describing their work as game-changing, the group suggests their milk-jug-sized device could be used to remove CO2 from manufacturing applications and also in closed space scenarios, such as spacecraft or submarines.
A combined team of researchers from the University of Florida, the University of Michigan and the University of Electro-Communications, in Japan, found that directed hand-held lasers could be used by criminals to attack autonomous vehicles. Such attacks, they found, could result in lidar systems becoming blind to pedestrians and confused by the movements of other vehicles around them.
A combined team from National Renewable Energy Laboratory and MIT designed and built a new heat engine with no moving parts that was as efficient as a steam turbine. The engine converted heat to electricity at approximately 40% efficiency and was created in the form of a thermophotovoltaic cell, similar to a solar panel's photovoltaic cells.
A team at Rowland Institute at Harvard University, working with a pair of colleagues from Stanford University developed a new kind of 3D printing. Instead of creating objects by laying down layers from above, their new printer adds layers from all sides at the same time. It does so through the use of a laser focused through a lens onto a gelatinous resin that sets when exposed to blue light.
Last spring, a team at Aston University announced that AI traffic light systems could soon make traffic jams a distant memory. They developed a system that reads data from live traffic cameras at multiple sites, analyzes the imagery and then devises the best approach to timing traffic lights to prevent traffic from backing up. And because it is based on reinforcement learning, it improves over time.
Nissan announced last spring that it was working with NASA and the University of California, San Diego, to develop a new type of battery for electric vehicles—one that would be both lighter and safer than those currently in use. In their announcement, Nissan described such batteries as "game-changing," and would involve swapping out lithium-ion for other materials that would make them solid-state, and safe enough, they noted, for use in pacemakers.
And a team at the University of California, Irvine, discovered that music could be used to trigger a deadly pathogen release from a negative-pressure room used for biological research. They noted that someone familiar with how pressure controls are used for such rooms could embed a tone in a song playing on a smartphone that would change how the pressure-control fans operate in the room, and thus affect air flow, potentially blowing air out instead of keeping it in.
A combined team from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Pennsylvania State University, developed a material that could be wrapped around a hot pipe to convert its waste heat into electricity. The material exhibited a 150% higher power density than other state-of-the-art units. A larger version was able to maintain a 115% power density advantage.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge developed a supercapacitor device that can remove CO2 from the air during its charge cycle and then disburse it into a container for capture during its discharge cycle. The device, envisioned and built by Trevor Binford, Grace Mapstone, Israel Temprano and Alexander Forse, resembles a rechargeable battery and is approximately the size of a coin.
During an interview with AFP, Jens Husemann, an entrepreneur running an energy conversion business, described a problem involving solar panels being disconnected from the grid during strong daylight hours, when they are producing the most power. This occurs when the grid becomes overwhelmed.
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