A Merry-Go-Round That Turns The Power Of Play Into Electricity - Vlad Vilenski posted in Green, Electricity

ADB Finances Renewable Energy Transmission System in India

Ifixit repair kits: everything you need to fix everything

Ifixit produce open repair guides for everything imaginable, in a variety of languages, and help sustain a global community of independent repairers who divert electronics from e-waste dumps and keep poor and marginalized people connected to their work, school and families.

The Ifixit repair kits are thoughtful, high-specification, low-cost toolkits designed to work on all modern gadgets, as well as traditional ones (for example, Ifixit manufacture their own drivers for Apple’s bizarre “pentalobe” screws, which Apple had instructed its Genius Bar staff to quietly swap in during routine repairs).

The big daddy of Ifixit kits is the $130 128-bit Universal Bit Kit, which comes in a handsome wooden case and is covered by Ifixit’s lifetime warranty.

But Ifixit makes smaller, more specialized kits, including theSmartphone Repair Kit, priced at $25, specifically aimed at the budgets of enterprising high-school students who want to start their own smartphone repair businesses, using Ifixit’s manuals.

http://boingboing.net/2015/12/02/ifixit-repair-kits-everything.html

Setting up any business is a challenge but in Ethiopia those range from daily operating headaches such as on-off internet to even more fundamental business challenges

“The internet goes out a couple of times a week — when that happens, there is not much we can do but rely on phone lines to take orders,” said Feleg Tsegaye, manager of Deliver Addis.

But he also believes the Horn of Africa nation — the second most populous on the continent — offers enormous opportunities.

Tsegaye was born and brought up in the US but moved to Ethiopia, the homeland of his parents, hoping to tap into a still largely untapped but swiftly growing market he believes is one of the most promising on the continent.

“The IT sector is still in its infancy — typically in these markets there is a way to transfer money very quickly and very easily, but here that doesn’t exist quite yet,” he added.

“Once you have a way for entrepreneurs to make money through technology, I think you are going to see that change very quickly.”

With a growth rate of nearly 10 per cent a year over the past decade, according to the World Bank, Ethiopia has attracted entrepreneurs eager to take their cut of a market with over 94 million potential consumers.

The Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa now has three “start-up incubators”, some supported by foreign investors, to help Ethiopian entrepreneurs launch their own business.

The Moon Parka - A jacket made of synthetic spider silk

Remember the Japanese biomaterials company Spiber? In 2013, they presented a cocktail dress made of Qmonos (from the Japanese word kumonosu meaning ‘spider web’), their present 11-year-10-design-iterations-and-656-gene-synthesis synthetic version of stronger than steel and more flexible than nylon lightweight spider silk.

Snip from geek.com:

The end result of all that research is a method for producing artificial spider silk through a fermentation process using bioengineered microorganisms to produce the silk proteins. A real spider can only produce so much silk, but an engineered cell that does nothing but spit out silk proteins can be used to scale production up quickly.

Now they presented in collaboration with The North Face a new prototype called The Moon Parka, which is currently touring North Face stores across Japan. It’s intended to show that practical applications of spider silk are possible (cost is now 1/53,000 of what it was in 2008). Spiber aims to deliver the final product next year. Presumably only in Japan. But fingers crossed for a worldwide rollout at reasonable prices.

Watch their promo-launch video below:

[North Face x Spiber] [Spiber] [picture by North Face]

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a key building block for next-generation devices. It takes features from diamonds, one of the toughest materials in the world, and combines them with features of silicon, our ubiquitous semiconductor technology in electronics to make a very new kind of material for power electronics. SiC can more efficiently handle higher voltage and three times the amount of energy compared to silicon chips, allowing us to run everything from locomotives to planes and wind farms faster and more efficiently.

Breathtaking Images of Underwater Life Captured by Freediving Photographers Alex Voyer and Alex Roubaud

‘I Came By Boat’ Campaign Highlights The Critical Skills Migrants Are Contributing

They’re doctors, dentists and students.

Cities as a Lab: Designing the Innovation Economy demonstrates how design can foster innovative approaches to the changing needs of American cities. The world is increasingly urbanizing and cities and their wider metropolitan areas are asserting themselves as a fundamental unit of the global economy. Cities can thrive by building transformational places that incubate creativity and adapt to future challenges and opportunities. Cities as a Lab explores the design and policy choices now creating the great places of the future: urban design interventions, visionary planning efforts, and public-private partnerships. The fabric of the city, with its people, buildings, commerce, and transportation networks, promotes relationship formation, business creation, and game-changing ideas.

Iceland to Help Develop Geothermal Energy in Ethiopia

Could Europe Be Powered by African Solar Energy?

For a long time, people looking for big fixes to climate change have been talking about building huge solar installations in North Africa, which gets a lot more sun than most of the places where solar power is big — Germany, for example. But now, it looks as if someone finally is doing it.

Next month in Ouarzazate, Morocco, the first portion of what eventually will be the world’s biggest concentrated solar power plant – called Noor I – is set to go online, according to the Guardian, a British newspaper.

Eventually, when the entire $10 billion complex, which is being financed with assistance from the World Bank and European Union, is completed in 2020, it will generate 580 megawatts of electricity, enough to provide a big portion of Morocco’s energy needs while still leaving plenty of juice for export. The complex could prevent 700,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being spewed into the atmosphere each year.

The plant uses an ingenious technology for getting the most out of sunlight. A huge array of 500,000 crescent-shaped mirrors focus sunlight and transmit it to a single point on a tower. (The mirrors actually have tiny computers in them, which adjust the angle throughout the day to gather the most energy.)

The plant could turn Morocco, which depends upon fossil fuel imports to fill 94 percent of its energy needs, into a major producer of electricity for export. Find out how by clicking here.