Meet the new EPA boss, same as the old boss (more or less).
Source: CNET
You’ll no longer be able to post written reviews as of July 30, and then in mid-August existing written reviews will be removed.
Source: CNET
Sources point to the overabundance of add-in graphics cards as to why you’re not already seeing Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 11 Series on store shelves. Nvidia is holding back because there is simply no room for next-gen cards.
The post Cryptocurrency may be why you still don’t have Nvidia GTX 11 Series graphics appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Sure, there are plenty of power banks out there that can charge your iPhone. The ability to charge up via Lightning cable, on the other hand, is a pretty rare thing — and from the looks of it, the Boost Charge Power Bank is the first to do so with Apple’s blessing.
Belkin’s new portable charger sports a Lightning port in between two standard USBs, so it can be charged up with the same cable you use for your iPhone/iPad. As someone who’s had some issues with Apple’s proprietary cables in the past, it’s something of mixed bag — though as someone who also just came back from a weeklong trip with a carryon bag full of cables, there’s something to be said for only having to pack one.
(I also recently discovered the hard way that Chinese airports will throw out battery packs exceeding a certain size, but that’s a different discussion.)
The battery pack sports a 10,000mAh battery — which is nearly four times the size of what you get on the iPhone X/8 Plus. At $60, however, it ain’t cheap. As a quick pop over to Amazon demonstrates, you can get a lot more battery for a lot less. If Apple MFI certification and cable consolidation mean something to you, however, this is probably your best bet.
It’s up for pre-order now from Belkin’s site.
Source: TechCrunch
El país debe automatizar sus industrias para poder competir a nivel internacional y solucionar sus problemas de corrupción. Por su parte, la inteligencia artificial puede aprovechar a diversidad de dialectos, vestimentas y culturas de la india para superar sus limitaciones
Source: MIT
El abogado Gary Reback, famoso por su lucha contra los monopolios tecnológicos, critica la inacción política y legal que ha permitido que los gigantes del sector no tengan competencia, y cree que Europa es la única capaz de cambiar la situación
Source: MIT
Lawmaker who pushed changes that critics said gutted the original bill agrees to reinstate sweeping prohibitions on broadband providers.
Source: Wired
Uber and Lyft appear to be pursuing a crowdsourced bus startup called Skedaddle, the latest indication that the ride-hailing companies want to build businesses that cover every mode of transit from last-mile solutions like scooters and bikes to inter-city travel in cars and high-capacity vehicles for longer distances.
Uber has been in discussions to acquire Skedaddle for more than a month, an unnamed source familiar with the talks told TechCrunch. Skedaddle was also in talks with Lyft more recently, another source confirmed.
Skedaddle declined to comment. Uber declined comment.
Lyft is not in discussions to acquire Skedaddle, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Skedaddle launched in 2015 to help people find a low-cost and easy way to travel to out-of-town events like music festivals. Think of it as rideshare, but to another town, not to the bar down the street. Skedaddle developed an app that lets individuals crowdsource private bus rides. Once there’s demand for a ride to a destination — a music festival or say, to a trailhead at a popular hiking spot — the bus is booked. The bus then picks up the confirmed riders within the origin city.
The company, which is based in Boston and New York, has largely stuck to the East Coast. But it’s recently expanded thanks in part to the Women’s March on Washington held in March 2017.
Skedaddle received media attention earlier this year when the company said it transported more than 11,000 individuals to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., from places as far away as Kansas.
Uber and Lyft have both been making moves in recent months toward a multi-modal ecosystem, a jargon term that basically means having a market share in various forms of transportation. A long-distance rideshare product that could be used as commuter transit or to events is a missing piece for both companies.
In April, Uber acquired JUMP bikes for a sum that came close $200 million. Just days later, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced a deal with instant car-booking service Getaround to launch a product called UberRENT and a partnership with Masabi, a mobile ticketing platform for public transit that works with 30 transportation agencies worldwide, including Los Angeles’ Metrolink. Uber also has applied for a permit to deploy electric scooters in San Francisco.
Khosrowshahi recently appointed Rachel Holt as head of New Modalities, a position that will put her in charge of bringing on additional mobility services such as scooters, car rentals and bikes.
Meanwhile, Lyft closed its own big deal. Last week, the company closed on $600 million in fresh funding and acquired Motivate, the oldest and largest electric bike-share company in North America, for undisclosed terms.
Source: TechCrunch
Hackers can use a FLIR infrared camera to steal your password. By examining heat traces left behind on the keys, hackers can infer your password. Unsurprisingly, those with acrylic nails are virtually immune to this type of attack.
The post Your body heat can help attackers steal your password in new attack appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Although Silicon Valley seems to have largely forgotten about cleantech after failures in solar, wind and batteries, there are still major strides being made across new and exciting renewable technologies. However, because these companies can take a decade or more to come to market — a timeline that is anathema to Sand Hill venture capital — media coverage has died down significantly over the last few years. So what’s going on?
It turns out… a lot.
In particular, there are significant developments across the waste-to-fuel and waste-to-product industries, in the form of thermal (pyrolysis, hydrothermal, gasification) and non-thermal technologies.
The driver for this is somewhat simple: The human population is creating more waste every year and there are fewer options for disposal. Incentives around building a “circular economy,” where renewable products are created from that waste, are growing and making more financial sense.
Basically, companies are learning how to turn trash into cash.
Today, entrepreneurs are approaching the space head-on, and there are dozens of cutting-edge companies coming to market and breaking through with major projects and customers. Companies in the space can be divided between the developers like Fulcrum BioEnergy, Red Rock Biofuels, RES Polyflow and Envia, and the technology providers, such as TCG, TRI, Velocys and many others.
These companies are targeting a variety of waste types, including household garbage (plastics and organics), as well as agricultural waste (like wood) and livestock waste (like manure). Waste is then converted into various products, including synthetic crude oil, natural gas, electricity, refined products (from diesel to high-value waxes) and specialty chemicals.
In short, we’re seeing some major tailwinds for bioproduct companies as we near 2020. Here’s why.
As population and urban density grow and environmental concerns mount, there are fewer places to store waste. Just recently, China — which recycles nearly half of the globe’s waste — banned the import of certain plastics, as well as 23 other waste products, leading to overflowing landfills in many countries, including Australia and Great Britain. Landfill permitting is becoming more stringent, while countries can no longer just ship their trash somewhere else to be dealt with. Gate or tipping fees (the cost of disposing waste at a landfill) are also increasing.
So, with more pressure on these systems around the world, waste disposal has increased in value, making waste-to-product facilities and technologies more economically attractive to developers.
The human population is creating more waste every year and there are fewer options for disposal.
These projects have become even more financially sound when paired with government incentives for cleaner fuels and lower emissions. These often come in the form of renewable credits and fuel standards, such as the EPA’s Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) and the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard Program (LCFS). In many cases, these credits are a significant portion of revenues, and similar government-market support can be seen in Europe and Asia.
RINs, in particular, were enacted about 10 years ago, initially for corn ethanol projects. In the last few years, however, the advanced biofuels RINs requirements have started to come in to force and generate a new market. For companies that can sell their product in California and take advantage of the LCFS, these policies, in tandem, can support more than 50 percent of the revenues of some plants, making them economically possible. The effects of these mechanisms are hard to overstate.
What’s most surprising, though, is that the science behind many of these companies and technologies is not actually new. In fact, some of the science was developed in the early 20th century in Germany, primarily used to convert coal into oil during World War II to overcome small domestic oil reserves. Later, in the 1970s, the idea of peak oil and price shocks around OPEC’s formation pushed major oil producers, like Exxon, to look for alternatives, refining and advancing these processes and creating fuels and products (once again primarily from coal).
However, oil producers focused on massive-scale projects because the goal was to supplant a portion of oil production. So they were looking at $5-10 billion facilities, which were not feasible for waste-to-fuel and waste-to-product processes. Trying to feed such huge facilities with sufficient waste day in, day out would be a logistical impossibility. Moreover, once cheap oil returned, there was no longer an economic rationale for alternative fuels, and much of the technology was shelved.
Today, rather than building $10 billion refineries, developers like Fulcrum BioEnergy or Red Rock Biofuels are looking at $100 million to $500 million in capital expenditure projects — still large sums for a startup. They are taking these systems initially developed for coal processing and using them for all kinds of waste, from household trash to wood to manure. These are smaller-scale systems that fit more specific needs for specific customers and geographies. However, this shift toward smaller scale has presented a new set of engineering challenges that many companies are just now beginning to overcome.
Luckily, developers today are using their experience building and financing similar facilities in the ethanol market and applying it to these new waste-to-fuel projects. High oil prices and ethanol subsidies in the late 2000s led to a resurgence of interest in renewable energies, and the last decade has seen engineering techniques applied to waste-to-fuel for the first time, such as small-scale, temperature-regulated Fischer-Tropsch, small-scale gasification and supercritical water pyrolysis. These big investments into engineering, as well as logistics, have been instrumental in bringing together technologists, developers and customers.
For these new projects and technologies to be successful, developers need to secure a reliable source of waste to feed the facility, as well as “offtake partners” — customers who commit to purchase the fuel or product before they can finance and build a large facility. Increasingly, companies are stepping up to the plate. The necessity and value of environmental and carbon credits, as well as growing concerns around sustainability, are pushing corporations to become more involved.
Partnerships have made securing sufficient feedstock possible. This includes waste disposal companies like Waste Management that want to preserve landfill space and reduce methane emissions, forestry companies looking for new forms of lumber byproducts and livestock companies looking to dispose of manure.
Companies are learning how to turn trash into cash.
In addition, some companies are becoming investors or buyers of the end product. For example, airlines (United, Cathay, JetBlue, Southwest, Qantas, British Airlines, Canada Air) are investing in and buying biofuels because of international policy requirements. Grocers (Whole Foods, Tyson) and food and beverage companies (Coca-Cola) are also looking for sustainable waste disposal, packaging and reduction of their environmental footprint.
These projects are highly susceptible to market changes, so company commitments to longer-term agreements for purchasing products like fuel — particularly ones that include price-floors in exchange for decreased upfront cost — can help bridge price gaps and mitigate project risk for lenders. Luckily, we’re seeing more of this happen.
It’s not all rosy, though. The most challenging aspect of scaling up these bioproduct operations are the significant capital requirements and funding. The process toward economic feasibility has not been an easy one, and unfortunately is littered with stories of failure — but these are high-risk ventures, and failures, are how the market navigates new technologies and learns from mistakes.
Indeed, we’ve seen a few green shoots over the last few years that have served as a boon for companies looking to hit scale.
Tax-exempt bonds and government funding have served as an alternative to traditional loans from risk-averse banks. Solid-waste processing facilities are allowed under the IRS rules for tax-exempt private activity bonds that can be issued by states. This financial mechanism isn’t new, but the use of it by renewable energy developers has helped project financials by lowering the interest rate on the debt that the project has to pay. However, the pot for tax-exempt bonds is also limited by state and federal governments, so developers have to fight to be given an allocation with other projects, which has limited availability of this kind of financing.
In addition, guaranteed performance of these facilities has been a significant weakness in the field. One response to this has been the creation of insurance and warranty products that guarantee reliability of new facilities, thereby reducing the risk for lenders, leading to better financing terms from banks and bond investors, and increasing customer adoption.
Lastly, nearly all of waste-to-product companies today rely on credits to make their projects financially sound. In many cases these are a significant portion of revenue. As mentioned above, RINs and LCFS have been key drivers for domestic projects.
However, not all sectors are treated the same way by these support systems. One of the major drivers in wind, solar and fuel cells has been investment tax credits, which do not apply to waste facilities. Moreover, oversupply of RINs is possible, which could lead to a market price collapse. Of course, the market is also susceptible to political squabbles. So far, the RINs market has survived the EPA transition under Scott Pruitt — they are prized by the farm lobby after all — and it seems increasingly likely the market will remain in place. In fact, the EPA just released its proposed 2019 biofuel requirements and continues to increase the number of available RINs beyond prior levels.
Support and demand for these technologies and processes are accelerating as stakeholders from across the marketplace align to bring these projects to life. Moreover, because of the local and regional nature of these projects, it is unlikely for global forces to derail progress, like China aggressively entering the market and undercutting prices as they did with solar a decade ago.
However, a number of factors still pose a threat, including volatility within the market for renewable credits, as well as government support structures, or risks around commercial and technological viability that scare financiers away from backing these new projects. Only the most robust projects that address a variety of risks and shore up their commercial and technological viability will succeed over the long-term.
Overall, though, given renewed corporate interest in biofuels, new sources of financing and new feedstock and regional focuses, we may soon see a quiet boom in renewable biofuels and products.
Source: TechCrunch