Greenhouse Mending

  For rocket fuel, one unit of increased specific impulse (Isp) equals roughly a 1% increase in payload that can reach low Earth orbit.   That was achieved with Syntin, a high-performance propellant developed by the Soviet space program.   Syntin achieved a 3% increase in impulse equivalent to 200 kg in payload.   However, organic synthesis of Syntin and polycyclopropanated (POP) compounds is challenging, costly, and involves toxic and hazardous intermediates derived from petroleum.   This made them too costly for commercial viability.   Nevertheless, the performance of Syntin demonstrated that incorporation of multiple CP rings into hydrocarbon fuels can yield high energy density. In fact, recent work on catalytic cyclopropanation of bioderived terpenes has led to excellent candidates for high-performance jet fuel blend stocks or specialized rocket propellant.   In particular, there are three-carbon triangles that have greater energy than In t...

  You don’t need to pull down the shades with a new type of window called electrodynamic windows or electrochromic windows.   A slight electric current can change the glass from fully transparent to nontransparent.   That means that a picture window might keep light outside on a hot day, especially if none of the occupants were home during the day.   Conversely, the window could be made transparent for letting heat radiate out if the outdoors cooled enough at night … or simply to get a view.   The windows would work the opposite way to allow winter sunlight to warm the inside via transparent windows. These windows could reduce energy requirements for heating and cooling by about 10%.   That's more than $19 billion less in utility bills.   As such, they could be a major addition to the effects of increased insulation and installation of photovoltaic panels.   However, they are now considered “premium glass,” meaning that they are at the high ...

Avacadoes are a tasty fruit that are popular in salads, in dips (guacamole), on toast, on pizzas and in many other recipes. However, they require a warm climate with lots of water. Thus, they are unpopular with enviroes and expensive for people in cooler climates.  Thus, it was only natural that a researcher in Great Britain would develop an ersatz avocado that would be easier on the environment and easier on the British pocket book. Just as Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat, and other vegetarian-serving entrepreneurs developed plant-based foods that looked and tasted like meat, a British inventor developed a product quite similar to an avocado—the ecovada. Arina Shokouhi combined a mixture of locally produced broad beans, hazel nuts, apples, and rapeseed (canola) oil* to make the ecovado, an artificial fruit that mimics the taste and feel of the pale green, creamy flesh of the avacodo. It is even packaged in a fake avocado skin fashioned from wax.  This is where I disagree ...

Climate Jui-Jitsu The Jui-Jitsu school of martial arts has many techniques; however, Jui-Jitsu is most noted for its throws and trips achieved by yielding. When an opponent pushes forward, the Jui-Jitsu fighter yields to the direction of the attack and then turns the resulting momentum with a trip or a throw. The stronger the thrust of the opponent, the harder the fall for that opponent. A similar philosophy might be applied even more so to an attack of excessive (at least to us) global warming. Seriously hotter temperatures would open new physical ways to respond, and clearly visible major changes would cause people to more readily support radical countermeasures. In the last century and a half, the world has only seen increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about a third (0.03 to 0.04 of one-percent) and slight warming of about 1 degree Celsius. These two changes have actually increased crop yields. More carbon dioxide increases the photosynthetic efficiency of ...

A week ago, I had just finished my first day of Craig Duswalt’s Rock Your Life Conference in Frisco, Texas. (You can just call it Dallas if you’re not local.) Besides being a conference for entrepreneurs, the event had a strong motivational bent.  One of the first speakers was actor Glenn Morshower from 24, Transformers, Ozark, and other productions. But that day, he had his philosopher’s hat on. He gave us a new word, pronoia. Pronoia is a state of mind that is the opposite of paranoia. Whereas a person suffering from paranoia feels that persons or entities are conspiring against them, a person experiencing pronoia feels that the world around them conspires to do them good. Morshower declared that, indeed, the Universe does conspire to give us good and give it abundantly. He cautioned that we consider carefully what we ask for because the Universe is most likely going to give it to us.  That’s all true. A species small than the apex predators — “Lions and tigers and...

  For the more distant future, University of California – Riverside researchers have found a way to bypass the sunlight for photosynthesis and synthesize food with chemical processing—chemosynthesis.   This science-fictionish concept is still only a distant and far-future possibility, but it has tremendous possibilities.  The technology uses a two-step process.   First, an electrocatalytic process converts carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), electricity, and water (H 2 O) into acetate (vinegar attached to some anion).   Food-producing organisms (plants or fungi) then consume acetate to grow without the need for light. Even better this chemosynthesis process might be 18 times the conversion efficiency of the 1% in photosynthesis. The researchers involved were able to pursue the potential food production because they developed a more efficient process for electrocatylyzing acetate from water and carbon dioxide.   When the non-light chemical bio-energy input can be d...