Technology

Ammonia is produced on a massive scale around the world. Over 250 million tons of it were manufactured in 2023. Eighty percent of it is used as fertilizer, but ammonia is also used for the production of plastics, fibers, explosives, nitric acid, and for the manufacture of dyes and pharmaceuticals.

The air contains water. We call it humidity. Even in the desert, there is water in the air. Scientists have been working on ways to squeeze water out of the air to produce clean drinking water. They have developed a number of sorbent materials that harvest water from the air. The process is called atmospheric water harvesting, or AWH.

Concrete is the most abundant manufactured material in the world. It is primarily composed of water, cement, and aggregate (sand and gravel.) Cement manufacturing is responsible for about 8% of the world’s total CO2 emissions, primarily a result of the chemical reaction of heating limestone and the combustion of fossil fuels used to provide the heat.

The Trump administration broadly opposes renewable energy. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill gutted green energy subsidies and the administration has been systematically cutting back on clean energy programs including essentially bringing American offshore wind energy development to a halt. Their overall policy position is that climate change is not a serious problem and that fossil fuels are the way to go.

The Snowy 2.0 Pumped Storage Power Station – simply known as Snowy 2.0 – is a giant power generation project in Australia that is designed to supply 2.2 gigawatts of capacity and 350,000 megawatt-hours of large-scale energy storage to the national electricity market. The massive storage capacity will enable the introduction of more wind and solar generation by acting like a giant battery.

Storing energy in batteries is an increasingly important aspect of the modern world. Electric cars and giant battery banks for electric utilities require high-capacity batteries. The majority of these batteries are lithium-ion batteries that come in a number of different varieties based on the other elements used to make them.

Most of us make frequent use of GPS technology to find our way around in our cars. There are increasing numbers of self-driving cars, and they are even more dependent on GPS technology in order to know where they are located. We tend to take for granted that the position shown by the GPS system is correct, but that isn’t always the case.

The Best of Our Knowledge explores topics on learning, education, and research.Can you imagine early humans over 2 million years ago using tools, maybe not, but guess what they did!Technology has been a major part in our evolution as humans and stone tools were some of the beginnings of what we recognize as modern technology.We will explore a discovery of stone tools found in Kenya’s Turkana Basin to learn more about early technology and humans.

The Merrimack Station, located in Bow, New Hampshire, officially ceased operations on September 12th. It was the last coal-fired power plant in New England.

On October 2nd, the Trump Administration announced the termination of 321 awards, claiming to achieve $7.5 billion in savings from clean energy projects. In reality, many of these awards were already past their end date and the money had already been spent. However, the cuts still amount to nearly $5 billion.