Dear all,
Lots on critical raw materials again this month with the usual papers focused on the problems (Race for Lithium becoming a question of national security in TRT World, EV supply chains becoming critical in the US - Rice University - and in Europe - Green Car Congress) as well as (this is just great!) more and more papers highlighting possible solutions: Government financing such as Canada 3.8B$ budget - Green Car Congress, recovery and recycling techniques and programmes - Mining.com and Daily Mail, substitution for cobalt and rare earth - UPI and Mining.com - and very interesting perspectives offered by manganese - IEEE Spectrum.
Now on the scientific front with progress on performance and cost of solar technologies at Chalmers and at University of Toronto, more affordable hydrogen power thanks to nickel cells at Cornell, recycled plastics used for carbon capture at RICE, solar nanowire-nanotube for easy access to clean drinking water at EPFL, a new heat engine with no moving parts at MIT, engineered crystals for energy efficient computing at Berkeley and, last but not least, a column in Nature discussing the crucial topic of data sharing in the scientific community.
Regarding sustainability we selected 4 initiatives: some progress made at a meeting of government officials from around the globe on biodiversity in Geneva, a new Ukraine-accelerated renewables plan for Germany, a project of solar/batteries hybrid grids presented in The Conversation and TechXplore describing the switching of Tokyu railways to renewable energy only as from April 1st.
Also 23 of our Start Up alumni were in the news this month : two impressive funding rounds (Bcomp - Switzerland, Brimstone - USA), further research funding (Citrine - USA) as well as one major Scale Up project (Carbios - France), new or strengthening partnerships (BComp - Switzerland with Mercedes, Carbios - France with Solvay, FREDsense - Canada with Ginkgo Bioworks, Kebotix - USA with the University of Toronto, Twelve - USA with Shopify's Sustainability Fund, UbiQD - USA with SMW International, UBQ Materials - Israel with Teknor Apex), a few awards (Aerosint - Belgium, CompPair - France, Safi Organics - Kenya), encouraging development (Cyclopure - USA, Zeta Energy - USA) and some interesting press coverage as usual (Applied Nanolayers - Netherlands, EH Group - Switzerland, Fluence Analytics - USA, PolySpectra - USA, Rein4ced - Netherlands, Woodoo - France). Worth mentioning as well that Imagine Intelligent Materials - Australia has been acquired by Ionic Industries, and Mosaic Materials - USA by Baker Hughes.
