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Category: sustainability

Light reshapes metal-organic framework to harvest airborne water

Chemists at the University of Iowa have created a three-dimensional lattice that captures water from the air and stores it. In a new study appearing in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers describe a millimeter-scale structure made of metal atoms connected by two types of organic molecules. When exposed to ultraviolet light, the material undergoes a chemical reaction that changes its shape, creating cavities throughout the lattice. Those cavities attract water molecules from the air and store them—like a multitude of tiny canteens.

The results, which would need to be tested at larger scales, show promise as a method to help provide drinking water to people and areas with limited access. Water stress or scarcity will affect nearly five billion people—half the world’s projected population—by 2050, according to the United Nations.

“We have found and validated a way to capture and to store water that would require only sunlight,” says Leonard MacGillivray, adjunct professor in the Department of Chemistry and former professor and department chair. “You can transport the crystal lattice and eventually release the water on demand. That’s why it’s such an advance.”

Stanford’s new chip boosts light 100x with surprisingly low energy

Researchers at Stanford have developed a compact optical amplifier that dramatically boosts light signals using very little power. By recycling energy inside a looping resonator, the device achieves strong amplification with minimal noise and wide bandwidth. Its efficiency and small size mean it could run on batteries and be integrated into consumer electronics. This breakthrough could enable faster communications and more powerful optical technologies.

The Hammer of AI: When Every Problem Looks Like a Nail

There is no dataset for grief.

No metric for justice.

No optimizer for legitimacy.

And yet we keep bringing the Hammer of AI to every problem we face. Climate change. Pandemics. Cancer. Energy. War. Political corruption. There is no problem that the omnipresent, all-knowing, all-mighty artificial superintelligence will not eventually crack.

This is a religion. Technology is its faith. Silicon Valley is its Promised Land. Entrepreneurs are its prophets. And we are all believers.

I should know. I used to be one.

In my latest piece on Singularity Weblog, I argue that some problems do bend to computation: fusion, protein folding, the genome. But others do not. They are not computable, only livable. And when we hammer them anyway, things break. Sometimes the thing that breaks is the problem. Sometimes it is us.

Continue reading “The Hammer of AI: When Every Problem Looks Like a Nail” | >

Researchers develop a biodegradable wash that can remove pesticides and keep fruit fresh longer

Many grocery shoppers know the routine: bring fruit and vegetables home, rinse them, dry them and hope they stay fresh long enough to be eaten. But fresh produce is delicate. Grapes shrivel, apple slices brown and berries can spoil quickly.

At the same time, many people worry about what may remain on the surface of fruit they buy, including pesticide residues.

Cleaning and freshness are usually treated as separate problems that require different treatments. Washing feels like a simple act of control. But it’s not quite that simple.

Engineered wood provides solar power even after the sun goes down

While sustainable solar energy can potentially meet our global power needs, it has one major flaw. When sunlight disappears, solar panels stop generating electricity. The problem is that while they do an excellent job of converting light into power, they are not so good at storing the energy they collect.

One solution is to use materials known to capture heat and release it later, such as phase change materials (PCMs). However, these can leak when they melt, struggle to conduct heat quickly, and catch fire easily. So researchers from China decided on a different approach, turning wood into a multifunctional solar-thermal energy storage material, as they detail in a paper published in Advanced Energy Materials.

Reengineering balsa wood The team redesigned the internal structure of balsa wood at multiple scales, from nano to micro, to create a material that absorbs sunlight and stores it as heat for later use. It can also generate electricity when that stored heat is released through a thermoelectric device.

Inspired by the brain, researchers build smarter and more efficient computer hardware

As traditional computer chips reach their physical limits and artificial intelligence demands more energy than ever, University of Missouri researchers are rethinking how computers work by taking cues from the human brain. The timing is critical. Energy use from AI data centers is projected to double by the end of the decade, raising urgent questions about sustainability.

The solution may lie in neuromorphic computing, an approach that reimagines computer hardware to process information more like biological neural networks rather than conventional chips.

“One of the brain’s greatest advantages is its efficiency,” Suchi Guha, a professor of physics in Mizzou’s College of Arts and Science, said. “It performs incredibly complex tasks using about 20 watts of power—roughly the same as an old light bulb. By comparison, today’s computer architecture is extremely energy-intensive.”

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