Dear all,
Building critical materials supply chains is creating tensions as well as new opportunities: further developing green aluminium has a cost (Reuters), US discussed ‘creative ways’ to help Mongolia export rare earths (Reuters), Greenland’s independence would mean some changes for the Arctic (Council for Foreign Relations), China’s rare earth export controls could impact Japan (The Diplomat) and EU has various strategic options for ensuring critical raw materials security (Allianz Trade), and there are innovative ways to eco-friendly extract critical rare earths elements (Penn. State University).
Now on the scientific front with a wide range of innovations such as bioplastics easier to compost at Michigan State University, nonlinear circuit using graphene to harvest clean power at Arkansas University, machine learning to optimize battery lifetime at Stanford, game-changing thin-film solid-state electrolyte at UC San Diego, energy-storing supercapacitors using cement and carbon black at MIT, advanced magnesium-based hydrogen storage materials on Phys.org and progress report about fusion on IEEE Spectrum.
As to sustainability, we selected 6 initiatives: Solar to power Rio Tinto's Canadian mine, using methane and recycling CO2 into energy at UCF, using Machine learning to predict future crop water needs in real-time at CSIRO, Wind-to-Hydrogen Tech going to Sea, turning agricultural waste into valuable raw materials and developing advanced fast charge protocols to suppress plating and shorten the constant voltage regime of graphite electrodes at UCL.
Additionally, 10 of our Start-Up alumni were in the news this month: with one great news as our WMF Start Up Grand Prix (Mitrachem, USA) just raised 60M$, a strategic partnership (UBIQD - USA with First Solar), another successful funding round (GRAPHENEMG - Australia), an award (C-QUESTER - USA) and a lot of exciting press articles as usual (BRIMSTONE ENERGY - USA, BCOMP - Switzerland, GRAPHENEMG - Australia, PEROVSKIA SOLAR - Switzerland, POLYSTYVERT - Canada, SYLVATEX - USA, WOODOO - France, ZETA ENERGY - USA).
