The race for viable tobacco based jet fuel is now smoking hot! In fact Boeing's Project Solaris, and Virginia company Tyton Bioenergy are each so close to lift off with their fuel products that we may be flying leafy green tobacco powered flights within months.

Boeing launched their Project Solaris in December 2014. The tobacco used has no nicotine and is grown for its seeds which are rich in oil used to make the bio jet fuel. It's a hybrid tobacco that currently grows on 50 hectares of land in Limpopo province, in the northeast of South Africa. Some two to three tonnes of crude oil can be pressed from its seeds per hectare per year. Solaris has been bred to have leaves much smaller than the flappy ones of a normal tobacco plant, and to have oily seeds. The scientists believe it can overcome the notorious troubles that arose around first-generation biofuels such as sugar cane and maize, accused of competing with food production. Good news is it's not toxic so it can be rotated with food crops! Over the lifecycle of the fuel, it will lead to a cut of 75 % in carbon emissions compared with its fossil fuel counterparts.

While Boeing's project has focused on South African tobacco, Danville, Virginia's Tyton Bioenergy has been working with 15 foot high plants local to Virgnia. According to Tyton “This proprietary energy tobacco can produce up to three times the amount of ethanol per acre as corn and three times the oil per acre as soy.” They have a patent for a method extracting the oil quickly with no waste. The non fossil jet fuel era has begun!

Guess this is one way to still get tobacco on a non smoking flight.

Photo courtesy of Tyton Bioenergy.

Photo by Bob Adams from Amanzimtoti, South Africa, CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons

What does man's carbon footprint into the atmosphere and the cement/concrete sidewalk beneath your feet have in common? A lot it seems, and a team of Researchers at UCLA have a plan to capture carbon from power plant smokestacks and use it to create a new building material -- CO2NCRETE -- that would be fabricated using 3D printers!

The production of ostensibly innocent cement, when mixed with water forms the binding agent in concrete, is also one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions!? In fact, about 5 percent of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions comes from concrete.

An even larger source of carbon dioxide emissions is flue gas emitted from smokestacks at power plants around the world. Carbon emissions from those plants are the largest source of harmful global greenhouse gas in the world.

The UCLA team has been working on the unique CO2NCRETE solution and may help eliminate these sources of greenhouse gases. Their plan is to create a closed-loop process which captures the carbon from cement and power plants and then fabricate the new building material using 3D printers.

"What this technology does is take something that we have viewed as a nuisance -- carbon dioxide that's emitted from smokestacks -- and turn it into something valuable," said J.R. DeShazo, professor of public policy at the UCLA.

"This project could be a game-changer for climate policy," DeShazo said. "The technology tackles global climate change, which is one of the biggest challenges that society faces now and will face over the next century."

This isn't the first attempt to capture carbon emissions from power plants. It's been done before, but the challenge has been what to do with the carbon dioxide once it's captured.

"We hope to not only capture more gas, but we're going to take that gas and, instead of storing it, which is the current approach, we're going to try to use it to create a new kind of building material that will replace cement."

"The approach we are proposing is you look at carbon dioxide as a resource -- a resource you can reutilize. While cement production results in carbon dioxide, just as the production of coal or the production of natural gas does, if we can reutilize CO2 to make a building material which would be a new kind of cement, that's an opportunity."

The researchers are excited about the possibility of reducing greenhouse gas in the U.S., especially in regions where coal-fired power plants are abundant. "But even more so is the promise to reduce the emissions in China and India," DeShazo said. "China is currently the largest greenhouse gas producer in the world, and India will soon be number two, surpassing us."

So far the new construction material has been produced only at a lab scale, using 3-D printers to shape it into tiny cones. "We have proof of concept that we can do this, but we need to increase the volume of material and then pilot it commercially."

"We can demonstrate a process where we take lime and combine it with carbon dioxide to produce a cement-like material. We're not just trying to develop a building material. We're trying to develop a process solution, an integrated technology which goes right from CO2 to a finished product."

The global economic impact of the technology is huge. Power plants that turn the smokestack flue gas into a resource their countries can use, to build up their cities, extend their road systems. "It takes what was a problem and turns it into a benefit in products and services that are going to be very much needed in all countries especially China and India." Game changer sounds like an understatement!

Remember your mom telling you to make sure you chewed your food throughly? It's seems that mother did know best since it turns out that chewing can do much more then power your metabolism. Drs Aidin Delnavaz and Jeremie Voix, mechanical engineers at the Ecole de Technologie Superieure in Canada have discovered that the energy harnessed from chewing can be used to vastly increase available energy needed for cochlear implants and could power some small devices to boot! Chewing can produce about 580 joules of energy in a day and utilizing that energy brings some exciting possibilities.

Through their work on auditory technology (powered ear-muffs and cochlear implants) they discovered that the chin strap used to attach experimental earmuffs were actually harvesting energy as their subjects quickly moved their jaws as in chewing motions! "we realized that when you're moving your jaw, the chin is really moving the furthest, and if you are wearing some safety gear the chin strap could harvest a lot of energy."
They decided to try and harvest energy from the chewing chin, using what is called the "piezoelectric effect": when certain materials are pressed or stretched ("piezo" comes from the Greek word for squeeze), they acquire an electrical charge.
By making a strap from commercially available piezoelectric material, then attaching it to earmuffs and fitting it snugly around Dr Delnavaz's chin, they built a prototype. When he chewed gum for 60 seconds, they measured up to 18 microwatts of generated power!
This might not sound like much but "We multiplied the power output by adding more "piezoelectric fibre composite layers to the chin strap," The strap is comfortable. Dr Delnavaz wore the prototype version "for many hours" for testing and never felt chewing or talking were restricted. The vision is mostly for situations where people are already wearing a chin strap, and could plug in a small but essential gadget.
It can greatly benefit military soldiers wearing head protection and communicating using earpieces. Voix says"I cycle to work every day, I wear my helmet... Why not have my bluetooth dongle recharged by that strap?" Pass the Double Bubble!

Stamping your feet when there's no Wi-Fi access around? Professor Harald Hass wants to show you the light and free you from that Wi-Fi hunt with Li-Fi!

LiFi is the use of the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit information at very high speeds. (100 times faster then Wi-Fi.) While Wi-Fi uses traditional radio frequency (RF) signals to transmit data. Sound good so far?

The term Li-Fi was coined by Professor Haas, who teaches at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, claims to be the inventor of Li-Fi. He is one pioneer using the term Li-Fi and refers to light based communications technology that delivers a high-speed, bidirectional networked, mobile communications in a similar manner manner to our tried, but not always true, Wi-Fi.
Professor Hass has been working on Ali-fi for years and introduced the concept in a Ted Global talk in 2011 before starting PureLife to help promote the technology.
Hass had a little competition though in laying claim to the title of Li-Fi inventor. A group of Chinese scientists at Shanghai's Fudan University also see themselves as inventors of the technology.
The actual general term visible light communication (VLC), dates back to the 1880s, and includes any use of the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit information. The D-Light project at Edinburgh's Institute for Digital Communications was funded from January 2010 to January 2012.

Li-fi is 100 times cheaper then Wi-Fi as well as 100 times cheaper so as far as we're concern regardless of who invented it bring on the light and connect us up!