Watch Elon Musk announce Tesla Energy in the best tech keynote I've ever seen

I've watched a lot of handsomely paid CEOs get on stages for keynote presentations over the past decade, and none were as good as the one I saw Elon Musk give Thursday night in California as he introduced Tesla's new battery system. I'm sure many people will disagree — I mean, how can you compete with Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone in 2007 — but ultimately Jobs was selling a better smartphone. Musk is selling a better future.

I'm not saying Musk is going to succeed, or that you should go buy Tesla's battery. There are lots of ways to save the world and cut down on fossil fuels, and Tesla's plan isn't the first. I'm just happy to see a presentation that was genuinely exciting and inspiring — a sales pitch for a tech product that's honest, and not treated like the second-coming of Jesus. It's really obvious why so many tech reporters become jaded. Too many tech visionaries pretend like every footprint they leave is going to radically change everything and make the world a better place to live in. We get it. You made a slightly thinner phone from last year's model. You made an app that sends the word "Yo" to someone. Enjoy it while it lasts.

DUDE'S SELLING A BATTERY AND HE STILL MANAGED TO BE INSPIRING

Here's what I loved about Musk's presentation. 

• First of all, it was short, clocking in at about 20 minutes. Musk didn't waste anybody's time. He used that time to present a problem of critical importance (eliminating humanity's use of fossil fuels), explained how it can be addressed, and offered a plausible solution in the form of a new product — one that's priced within reach of a lot of people and available to order. Amazingly, all of those things are actually pretty rare to see in one show. Tesla's presentation was inspiring, and Musk wasn't selling some fancy sci-fi trinket that has the benefit of Star Trek nostalgia. Dude was selling a battery.
• But aside from all the technical details I enjoyed, what I liked most was Musk's humble tenor. His ambitions often seem scattershot and sometimes ridiculous, and he probably spends too much time worrying about killer AI, but tonight he seemed confident and focused. Most importantly, he spoke to the audience with a frank tone that didn't feel manipulative or canned. There were no overdone theatrics here, just an honest conversation about how a new product might solve a major problem. The humility and ambition don't just seem to be a show; Tesla has already opened some of its patents to competitors, and announced tonight that it would even open its Gigafactory plans to others.

Take notes, suits of Silicon Valley. This is how you do it right.

ORIGINAL: The Verge

By T.C. Sottek

on May 1, 2015 01:51 am

ORIGINAL: TeslaEnergy.com

Energy Storage for a Sustainable Home

Powerwall is a home battery that charges using electricity generated from solar panels, or when utility rates are low, and powers your home in the evening. It also fortifies your home against power outages by providing a backup electricity supply. Automated, compact and simple to install, Powerwall offers independence from the utility grid and the security of an emergency backup.

MORNING DEMAND    PEAKSOLAR      EVENING DEMAND

Solar Powered Day and Night

The average home uses more electricity in the morning and evening than during the day when solar energy is plentiful. Without a home battery, excess solar energy is often sold to the power company and purchased back in the evening. This mismatch adds demand on power plants and increases carbon emissions. Powerwall bridges this gap between renewable energy supply and demand by making your home’s solar energy available to you when you need it.

Avoid Paying Peak RatesPower companies often charge a higher price for electricity during peak evening hours than overnight when demand is low. Powerwall can reduce your power bill by storing electricity when rates are low and powering your home when rates are high.

Energy SecurityPowerwall automatically switches to battery power in the event of an electric company outage, bringing peace of mind to those who live in areas prone to storms or unreliable utility grids.

Beautifully Functional

Current generation home batteries are bulky, expensive to install and expensive to maintain. In contrast, Powerwall’s lithium ion battery inherits Tesla’s proven automotive battery technology to power your home safely and economically. Completely automated, it installs easily and requires no maintenance.

Capacity

Powerwall comes in 10 kWh weekly cycle and 7 kWh daily cycle models. Both are guaranteed for ten years and are sufficient to power most homes during peak evening hours. Multiple batteries may be installed together for homes with greater energy need, up to 90 kWh total for the 10 kWh battery and 63 kWh total for the 7 kWh battery.

Multiple batteries may be installed together.

Specs

• Technology
  Wall mounted, rechargeable lithium ion battery with liquid thermal control.
• Models10 kWh $3,500
  For backup applications
  7 kWh $3,000
  For daily cycle applications
• Warranty
  10 years
• Efficiency
  92% round-trip DC efficiency
• Power
  2.0 kW continuous, 3.3 kW peak
• Voltage
  350 – 450 volts
• Current
  5.8 amp nominal, 8.6 amp peak output

• Compatibility
  Single phase and three phase utility grid compatible.
• Operating Temperature
  -4°F to 110°F / -20°C to 43°C
• Enclosure
  Rated for indoor and outdoor installation.
• Installation
  Requires installation by a trained electrician. DC-AC inverter not included.
• Weight
  220 lbs / 100 kg
• Dimensions
  51.2" x 33.9" x 7.1"
  1300 mm x 860 mm x 180 mm
• Certification
  NRTL listed to UL standards

How much electricity does my home use?
Common household electricity consumption.

• 
  Flat Screen TV0.1 kWh /hr
• 
  Lights Per Room0.1 kWh /hr
• 
  Laptop0.05 kWh /hr
• 
  Refrigerator4.8 kWh /day
• 
  Clothes Washer2.3 kWh each use

A DNA hard drive has been built that can store data for 1 MILLION years

Image: Philipp Stössel/ETH Zurich

Scientists have found a way to preserve the world's data for millions of years, by storing it on a tiny strand of DNA preserved in glass.

When you think of humanity’s legacy, the most powerful message for us to leave behind for future civilisations would surely be our billions of terabytes of data. But right now the hard drives and discs that we use to store all this information are frustratingly vulnerable, and unlikely to survive more than a couple of hundred years.

Fortunately scientists have built a DNA time capsule that's capable of safely preserving all of our data for more than a million years. And we’re kind of freaking out over how huge the implications are.

Researchers already knew that DNA was ideal for data storage. In theory, just 1 gram of DNA is capable of holding 455 exabytes, which is the equivalent of one billion gigabytes, and more than enough space to store all of Google, Facebook and pretty much everyone else's data.

Storing information on DNA is also surprisingly simple - researchers just need to program the A and C base pairs of DNA as a binary '0', and the T and G as a '1'. But the researchers, led by Robert Grass from ETH Zürich in Switzerland, wanted to find out just how long this data would last.

DNA can definitely be durable - in 2013 scientists managed to sequence genetic code from 700,000-year-old horse bones - but it has to be preserved in pretty specific conditions, otherwise it can change and break down as it's exposed to the environment. So Glass's team decided to try to replicate a fossil, to see if it would help them create a long-lasting DNA hard drive.

"Similar to these bones, we wanted to protect the information-bearing DNA with a synthetic 'fossil' shell," explained Grass in a press release.

In order to do that, the team encoded Switzerland’s Federal Charter of 1921 and The Methods of Mechanical Theorems by Archimedes onto a DNA strand - a total of 83 kilobytes of data. They then encapsulated the DNA into tiny glass spheres, which were around 150 nanometres in diameter.

The researchers compared these glass spheres against other packaging methods by exposing them to temperatures of between 60 and 70 degrees Celsius - conditions that replicated the chemical degradation that would usually occur over hundreds of years, all crammed into a few destructive weeks.

They found that even after this sped-up degradation process, the DNA inside the glass spheres could easily be extracted using a fluoride solution, and the data on it could still be read. In fact, these glass casings seem to work much like fossilised bones.

Based on their results, which have been published in Angewandte Chemie, the team predicts that data stored on DNA could survive over a million years if it was stored in temperatures below -18 degrees Celsius, for example, in a facility like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is also known as the ‘Doomsday Vault’. They say it could last 2,000 years if stored somewhere less secure at 10 degrees Celsius - a similar average temperature to central Europe.

The tricky part of this whole process is that the data stored in DNA needs to be read properly in order for future civilisations to be able to access it. And despite advances in sequencing technology, errors still arise from DNA sequencing.

The team overcame this by embedding a method for correcting any errors within the glass spheres, based on the Reed-Solomon Codes, which help researchers transmit data over long distances. Basically, additional information is attached to the actual data, to help people read it on the other end.

This worked so well that even after the test DNA had been kept in scorching and degrading conditions for a month, the team could still read Switzerland’s Federal Charter and Archimedes’ wise words at the end of the study.

The other major problem, which is not so easy to overcome, is the fact that storing information on DNA is still extremely expensive - it cost around US$1,500 just to encode the 83 kilobytes of data used in this study. Hopefully this cost will go down as we get better at writing information onto DNA. Researchers out there are already storing books onto DNA, and the band OK Go are also writing their new album into genetic information.

The question is, what would Grass store, now that he’s developed this mind-blowing time capsule? The documents in Unesco’s Memory of the World Programme, and… Wikipedia, he says.

“Many entries are described in detail, others less so. This probably provides a good overview of what our society knows, what occupies it and to what extent,” said Grass in the release.

It’s ridiculously cool to think that even if we do wipe ourselves off the face of the Earth, our civilisation might still live on for millennia to come in the form of Wikipedia pages and Facebook updates.

We really are (almost) infinite.

Source: New Scientist


ORIGINAL: Science Alert

FIONA MACDONALD 

17 FEB 2015

Scientists use microbes to make 'clean' methane

ORIGINAL: Science Daily

ScienceDaily (July 27, 2012) — Microbes that convert electricity into methane gas could become an important source of renewable energy, according to scientists from Stanford and Pennsylvania State universities. 

Researchers at both campuses are raising colonies of microorganisms, called methanogens, which have the remarkable ability to turn electrical energy into pure methane -- the key ingredient in natural gas. The scientists' goal is to create large microbial factories that will transform clean electricity from solar, wind or nuclear power into renewable methane fuel and other valuable chemical compounds for industry.

"Most of today's methane is derived from natural gas, a fossil fuel," said Alfred Spormann, a professor of chemical engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. "And many important organic molecules used in industry are made from petroleum. Our microbial approach would eliminate the need for using these fossil resources."

While methane itself is a formidable greenhouse gas, 20 times more potent than CO2, the microbial methane would be safely captured and stored, thus minimizing leakage into the atmosphere, Spormann said.

"The whole microbial process is carbon neutral," he explained. "All of the CO2 released during combustion is derived from the atmosphere, and all of the electrical energy comes from renewables or nuclear power, which are also CO2-free."

Methane-producing microbes, he added, could help solve one of the biggest challenges for large-scale renewable energy: What to do with surplus electricity generated by photovoltaic power stations and wind farms.

"Right now there is no good way to store electricity," Spormann said. "However, we know that some methanogens can produce methane directly from an electrical current. In other words, they metabolize electrical energy into chemical energy in the form of methane, which can be stored. Understanding how this metabolic process works is the focus of our research. If we can engineer methanogens to produce methane at scale, it will be a game changer."

'Green' methane

Burning natural gas accelerates global warming by releasing carbon dioxide that's been trapped underground for millennia. The Stanford and Penn State team is taking a "greener" approach to methane production. Instead of drilling rigs and pumps, the scientists envision large bioreactors filled with methanogens -- single-cell organisms that resemble bacteria but belong to a genetically distinct group of microbes called archaea.

By human standards, a methanogen's lifestyle is extreme. It cannot grow in the presence of oxygen. Instead, it regularly dines on atmospheric carbon dioxide and electrons borrowed from hydrogen gas. The byproduct of this microbial meal is pure methane, which methanogens excrete into the atmosphere.

The researchers plan to use this methane to fuel airplanes, ships and vehicles. In the ideal scenario, cultures of methanogens would be fed a constant supply of electrons generated from emissions-free power sources, such as solar cells, wind turbines and nuclear reactors. The microbes would use these clean electrons to metabolize carbon dioxide into methane, which can then be stockpiled and distributed via existing natural gas facilities and pipelines when needed.

When the microbial methane is burnt as fuel, carbon dioxide would be recycled back into the atmosphere where it originated from -- unlike conventional natural gas combustion, which contributes to global warming.

"Microbial methane is much more ecofriendly than ethanol and other biofuels," Spormann said. "Corn ethanol, for example, requires acres of cropland, as well as fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and fermentation. Methanogens are much more efficient, because they metabolize methane in just a few quick steps."

Microbial communities

For this new technology to become commercially viable, a number of fundamental challenges must be addressed.

"While conceptually simple, there are significant hurdles to overcome before electricity-to-methane technology can be deployed at a large scale," said Bruce Logan, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State. "That's because the underlying science of how these organisms convert electrons into chemical energy is poorly understood."

In 2009, Logan's lab was the first to demonstrate that a methanogen strain known as Methanobacterium palustre could convert an electrical current directly into methane. For the experiment, Logan and his Penn State colleagues built a reverse battery with positive and negative electrodes placed in a beaker of nutrient-enriched water.

The researchers spread a biofilm mixture of M. palustre and other microbial species onto the cathode. When an electrical current was applied, the M. palustre began churning out methane gas.

"The microbes were about 80 percent efficient in converting electricity to methane," Logan said.

The rate of methane production remained high as long as the mixed microbial community was intact. But when a previously isolated strain of pure M. palustre was placed on the cathode alone, the rate plummeted, suggesting that methanogens separated from other microbial species are less efficient than those living in a natural community.

"Microbial communities are complex," Spormann added. "For example, oxygen-consuming bacteria can help stabilize the community by preventing the build-up of oxygen gas, which methanogens cannot tolerate. Other microbes compete with methanogens for electrons. We want to identify the composition of different communities and see how they evolve together over time."

Microbial zoo

To accomplish that goal, Spormann has been feeding electricity to laboratory cultures consisting of mixed strains of archaea and bacteria. This microbial zoo includes bacterial species that compete with methanogens for carbon dioxide, which the bacteria use to make acetate -- an important ingredient in vinegar, textiles and a variety of industrial chemicals.

"There might be organisms that are perfect for making acetate or methane but haven't been identified yet," Spormann said. "We need to tap into the unknown, novel organisms that are out there."

At Penn State, Logan's lab is designing and testing advanced cathode technologies that will encourage the growth of methanogens and maximize methane production. The Penn State team is also studying new materials for electrodes, including a carbon-mesh fabric that could eliminate the need for platinum and other precious metal catalysts.

"Many of these materials have only been studied in bacterial systems but not in communities with methanogens or other archaea," Logan said. "Our ultimate goal is to create a cost-effective system that reliably and robustly produces methane from clean electrical energy. It's high-risk, high-reward research, but new approaches are needed for energy storage and for making useful organic molecules without fossil fuels."

The Stanford-Penn State research effort is funded by a three-year grant from the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford.