Dear all,
Focus this month on a new initiative of the Paris Peace Forum together with WMF to promote governance around critical minerals needed for the energy transition. And also a variety of measures/projects to develop future critical materials security by creating new supply chains (Rare Earth/Quartz), by recovering critical materials from wastes (Norway/Sintef), by regulating Chinese minerals investments overseas (Canada/Dentons) and by developing further “friend shoring” (Australia and Vietnam/The Diplomat, EU and Kazakhstan/Eurasianet).
Further on the scientific front with a wide range of innovations starting with a breakthrough technique to monitor chemistry evolution of Na-Li ion batteries (Nature Energy) and also a process to produce new solar panels from solar panel wastes at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (TechXplore), an inexpensive catalyst to turn ammonia into hydrogen (Rice University), integrated electronic-photonic chip for faster and energy efficient data communication at Caltech/Southampton (The Engineer), new solid ceramic electrolytes at MIT (AZO Materials), polymers designed to improve their electrical conductivity (Stanford Engineering), magnets using Bismuth Manganese alloys instead of rare earth (AMES Laboratory) and packaging paper wastes transformed into carbon anodes at NTU (TechXplore).
Regarding sustainability initiatives we have chosen to highlight how Aluminium MOFs can be cheap, stable and simple to use in capturing CO2 according to NIST, how to refurbish, upcycle and green old buildings in Bloomberg, how to use magnets to remove micro plastics from water at RMIT, how quantum can be used to develop transparent coatings that can block heat and save energy at Universite Notre Dame and how Anglo American optimizes desalinated water supply to their Los Bronces copper plant in Chile. Worth mentioning as well is a new global alliance of 60+ companies whose goal is to decarbonize the electronics supply chain.
Also 27 of our Start Up alumni were in the news this month with some fundings (Kebotix - USA, Lakril Technologies - USA), some partnerships announced or ongoing (Aerosint - Belgium with Fraunhofer IGCV, Citrine Informatics - USA with Morrow Batteries), a few awards (Bcomp - Switzerland, Fluence Analytics - USA, Perovskia Solar - Switzerland), founders or CEOs' interviews (CompPair - Switzerland, Genes'Ink - France, Lixo - France, Sakowin - France, Sylvatex - USA, UBQ Materials - Israel) and many interesting press articles as usual (BeFC - France, C12 - France, Carbios - France, ColdPad - France, Cuberg - USA, Cyclopure - USA, FREDsense Technologies - USA, Graphene MG - Australia, Nitricity - USA, Sepion - USA, Spin-Ion - France, Tiamat Energy - France, Twelve - USA, UbiQD - USA).
