The global demand for wood could grow by 54% between 2010 and 2050, according to a study by the World Resources Institute.
While some building materials like steel get consistently recycled back into the supply chain, wood does not.
Cambium looks to build the supply chain that keeps wood from being wasted by connecting those with already-been-used wood to the businesses and folks that need it.
“We’re building a better value chain where you can use local material, you can use salvaged material, and all of that is connected through our technology,” Christensen said.
And we do that in a really efficient and cost competitive way.”Demand for more sustainable wood has been growing in recent years, Christensen said, but before Cambium there wasn’t a good system to find the recycled wood.
Sila, Group14, Envoix, and Amprius are all trying to commercialize their silicon anode technology, hoping to cash in on consumers’ desire for ever more EV range.
Ionobell, a seed stage startup, is hoping to be at the top of that list, claiming its silicon material will be cheaper than the established competition.
Both established companies impregnate porous graphite structures with silicon; Sila also adds a coating to the particles.
Ionobell’s silicon supply comes from a waste material, Neivert said, which helps keep costs down.
Like other battery materials companies, Ionobell faces a challenging road ahead.
“And the product was electricity.”He was comparing this — turning raw material into something else that have value — to the notion of data centers, which are purely money pits.
“There’s a new Industrial Revolution happening in these [server] rooms: I call them AI factories,” Huang said.
“The raw material that goes in is data and electricity.
It’s very valuable.”The distinction makes a lot of sense in a world where Nvidia benefits tremendously if it can persuade companies to think of data centers and AI tools in a different way.
“The last time, data centers went into your company’s cost centers and capital expenditure.
Orbital Materials — founded by Jonathan Godwin, who previously was involved with DeepMind’s material research efforts — is creating an AI-powered platform that can be used to discover materials ranging from batteries to carbon dioxide-capturing cells.
Godwin says he was inspired to found Orbital Materials by seeing how the techniques underpinning AI systems like AlphaFold, DeepMind’s AI that can predict a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence, could be applied to the materials sciences.
“[Yet] demand for new advanced materials … is growing hugely as our economies become electrified and de-carbonized.”Orbital Materials isn’t the first to apply AI to materials R&D.
Osmium AI, led by an ex-Googler and backed by Y Combinator, enables industrial customers to predict the physical properties of new materials, then refine and optimize those new materials leveraging AI.
But what sets Orbital Materials apart is its proprietary AI model for materials science, Godwin claims.
Unlike nearly every other lithium-ion battery chemistry, TAQ is an organic compound — not the free-range hippie type, but the kind made primarily of carbon.
Researchers have been investigating organic materials as cathodes, the negatively charged part of the cell, because they could store more energy at lower cost.
TAQ, short for bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone, is composed of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen arranged in a row of three neighboring hexagons.
The structure is similar to that of graphite, which is almost universally used today as an anode material (the positive terminal).
Lamborghini, which previously used a supercapacitor developed in Dincă’s lab in its Sian model, has licensed the patent on the material.
If you’re someone who loves an internet hype cycle, good news: There’s a new group of scientists who claim to have discovered a near-room-temperature superconductor.
(It should be noted that most of these people do not appear to be scientists let alone condensed-matter physicists.)
The one that grabbed the most headlines — LK-99 — dominated the internet for a few weeks over the summer before succumbing to the scientific method.
Another one, detailed in a paper co-authored by Ranga Dias and others, made a splash in March only to be subject to a retraction in September.
This new material picks up where LK-99 left off, which isn’t really an auspicious starting point.
As the SEC’s new data breach disclosure rules take effect, here’s what you need to know The controversial regulation represents a major shake-up for U.S. organizationsStarting from today, December 18, publicly-owned companies operating in the U.S. must comply with a new set of rules requiring them to disclose “material” cyber incidents within 96 hours.
In an 8-K filing, breached organizations must describe the incident’s nature, scope, timing, and material impact, including financial and operational.
In addition to the SEC’s new data breach disclosure rules, the regulator has also added a new line item called Item 106 to the Regulation S-K that will be included on a company’s annual Form 10-K filing.
In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Sullivan said he welcomed the SEC’s data breach reporting rules, saying: “We can nitpick the details as much as we want, but this is the right way to do it,” he said.
Until now, many organizations have taken months to report a breach and only did so after they had completed their investigation.
