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Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google NewsThe EV battery supply chain is fraught with pitfalls, one of them being the environmental cost of nickel mining. Nevertheless, solutions are emerging, and one of them has just emerged from stealth mode in the form of a new US phytomining startup called Metalplant. Wait, what is phytomining?US DOE Pursues Phytomining For Sustainable EV Battery Supply ChainPhytomining refers to the practice of harvesting plants for their metal content. It is not a particularly new idea, but its application to the EV battery supply chain is a new twist.The US Department of Energy, for one, has spotted an opportunity. Last month the agency’s high-risk, high-reward ARPA-E funding office announced a new $10 million funding pot aimed at developing a homegrown, plant-based EV battery supply chain here in the US, beginning with nickel.Other metals may be targeted eventually, but if phytomining ever becomes a standard feature in the EV battery supply chain, nickel is the low-hanging fruit.“Among the critical materials named in the DOE Critical Materials Assessment (CMA), nickel serves as an ideal target to validate the viability of phytomining in the U.S

SilverLining announces the launch of MCB Program field research to improve understanding of the influence of aerosols on clouds and climateALAMEDA, Calif. , April 3, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) Program , an open collaboration of atmospheric scientists and other experts to study how clouds respond to particles — also called aerosols — in the atmosphere, initiated new climate studies and launched the Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement (CAARE) facility at the USS Hornet Sea, Air & Space Museum, a Smithsonian Affiliate located in Alameda, California.The MCB Program's intent is to serve as a model for open, public-interest research & field studies of clouds & aerosols. Post this Jessica Medrado, MCB's engineering lead at the Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement (CAARE) facility. The spraying machine designed for the MCB Program at the Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement (CAARE) facility.This research aims to further our understanding of how interactions between aerosols and clouds impact our climate system, and to investigate the feasibility and potential impacts of reducing climate warming by intentionally increasing the reflection of sunlight from marine clouds. An overarching goal of the research is to provide open, objective scientific information to help improve society's ability to understand the climate system and to address near-term climate risks.Led by the University of Washington , the MCB Program is a collaboration of over 40 interdisciplinary experts from the UW, SRI , Pacific Northwest National Laboratory , University of Victoria , SilverLining , and other institutions to study these topics and engage openly on the research and its findings.Aerosol particles in the atmosphere from both natural sources (such as dust, biological emissions and sea spray) and human activities (such as combustion engines and fossil fuel power plants) mix into low clouds causing a cooling effect on the Earth's climate, offsetting between 10% and 40% of global warming from greenhouse gases. Air quality-related declines in these aerosols may cause even more climate warming

AI might be the “it thing” of the moment. But that doesn’t mean it’s getting easier to deploy.According to 2023 S&P Global survey, about half of companies with at least one AI project in production are still at the pilot or proof-of-concept stages. The reasons for the slow ramp-ups vary, but the commonly cited ones are challenges around data management, security and compute resources.Of businesses responding to the S&P poll, around half said they aren’t ready to implement AI — and won’t be for five years or more.Fortunately, there’s an increasing number of products from startups and Big Tech vendors alike that aim to tackle these AI deployment roadblocks. (See Google’s ML Hub, Kore.ai and Viso to name a few.) One of the newer entrants is Pienso, a platform that lets users build and deploy models without having to write code.Birago Jones and Karthik Dinakar founded Pienso in 2016 based on their research at MIT (they’re alumni). The two met a few years back at MIT’s Media Lab as graduate students.“We teamed up for a class project to build a tool that would help social media platforms moderate and flag bullying content,” Jones, who serves as Pienso’s CEO, told TechCrunch in an interview. “There was just one problem: while the model itself worked the way it was supposed to, it wasn’t trained on the right data, so it wasn’t able to identify harmful content that used teenage slang.”Jones and Dinakar eventually realized that the solution was to have subject-matter experts — in this case, teenagers — help train the model