#3,235 – The Department of Government Efficiency

Naming two people to be the co-heads of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency doesn’t seem very efficient now does it? Is this a joke? It might be. The Department of Government Efficiency or D.O.G.E. will be co-led by Elon Musk a long-time proponent of the Doge coin meme currency.

How does Musk even have time for this? The other day he announced that he’s a top ten ranked player in the world in Diablo IV. That’s on top of tweeting every five minutes while running or being heavily involved with X, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Starlink, Grok, and the Boring Company among other things.

Now he’s getting involved in politics at levels never seen before single-handedly funding the Trump campaign (spending $150 million), promoting him on X (mostly by spreading misinformation), advising him and becoming a part of the government (if not actively serving as President by proxy), and even developing an app to know the results of the election up to four hours before they were official (possibly through Starlink).

Forget about how he has time for this. How is any of this even legal? How can he even hold a government office without stepping down from his companies when they have government contracts. That’s a massive conflict of interest. As is promoting his own personal agenda on a social media platform that he originally claimed would be free of bias. Not to mention promising to go after people who share views he doesn’t like. So much for being a free speech absolutist.

There have been reports that Trump or his team have already started to tire of his antics after just one week. But there are also reports and rumors that things could be getting much worse. With Musk threatening to fund the political opponents of anyone who doesn’t fall in line with Trump’s agenda. This whole time we’ve been worried about Trump and what would happen under a second Trump presidency. But perhaps its Musk that we need to be the most worried about. The richest man in the world, with control over the world’s public town square, now influencing the government of the United States of America. No one has ever had this much money, this much power, this much influence before and I fear that it’s only going to be getting worse as his ego runs wild.

The only saving grace is that common sense may be the one thing Musk and Trump are lacking. Incompetence getting in the way of their ambition. Just look at Trump’s recent cabinet picks. We’ve got a guy with a brain worm who eats animals in charge of public health, a Fox News host as the Secretary of Defense, and Matt Gaetz, a known pedophile who should be in jail, as the Attorney General.

We even got the Tiger King asking from prison to be in put in charge of the Wildlife Department. The entire cabinet is literally filled with the exact worst person for the job. If the Grinch were real, he’d be in charge of Christmas. That’s the level of absurdity we’ve reached. How can The Onion compete when real news headlines sound made up? No wonder they bought InfoWars. That was the last joke they could make. At this point reality has officially surpassed parody. The truth stranger than fiction.

To be clear the Department of Government Efficiency is not the greatest idea ever. Not even close. I just needed a headline that Musk wouldn’t ban from X so that I don’t get exiled to Blue Sky like Stephen King. But perhaps that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. It would actually be fitting. Since we’re basically living in a Stephen King horror story now.

What can be done about it? Not much. The democratic party is on the ropes. The tech world has sold out to Trump and the far right so that their crypto investments and AI projects will take off. Others are either falling into line or being threatened into compliance. Some of the cabinet picks aren’t even being required to go through FBI background checks since they know they wouldn’t even pass them.

Corruption has officially seeped into the highest levels of government. Infecting every institution, every branch of government. At least those that survive. After all, Trump could soon get rid of the Department of Education while Musk might eliminate dozens of other departments and agencies in his grasp at efficiency.

This one-two punch of Dumb and Dumber poised to do irreparable harm to Americ and the institution of democracy while the country idly watches by. Hoping things will magically get better on their own while watching a train wreck. Kind of like watching the Paul Tyson fight last night while the Netflix stream constantly buffers. A frustrating experience that we all simply endure against our better judgment even though the entire thing is fixed to begin with. The outcome long since decided.

If it was up to me, I would make one change going forward to hopefully fix this debacle of a transition. Have the presidential candidates announce their cabinet picks during their campaigns. When you are voting for a candidate, you should know exactly what you’re voting for. Know what the entire cabinet would look like. If people saw how terrible these Trump picks were, perhaps they would have voted differently.

Or better yet make it so that cabinet positions aren’t even at the discretion of the President elect. These are massively important positions that dictate policy in a broad spectrum of areas from education and public health to the justice department and foreign affairs. Make people earn these spots. Have people get elected to the posts. Or at least have to apply, go through a thorough vetting and interview process, with a diverse committee selecting the best candidate. After all, what’s the point of having three branches of government and a separation of power with checks and balances if we don’t actually check anything and let one person become too powerful.

This is not the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,234 – Climate Week: Insulating the Doomsday Glacier

It sounds like the plot of a movie starring Bruce Willis. A daring Hailmary plan costing billions of dollars as a last-ditch effort to save humanity against all odds. And while the degree of difficulty may not be up there with mining an asteroid the circumstances are just as dire. Do nothing and our coastlines will soon look vastly different. Thousands of lives lost. Millions displaced. Billions in economic damage.

Futurism explains:

“The Thwaites ‘Doomsday’ glacier is melting. At about the size of Florida, the ice shelf in Western Antarctica contains so much water that it will cause sea levels to rise by two feet on its own if it were to collapse.

Fearing that current efforts to slow global warming won’t be enough, geoengineers led by John Moore, a glaciologist at the University of Lapland in Finland, have proposed a grandiose and perhaps desperate plan to prevent the Thwaites from melting: surrounding the glacier with enormous, 62-mile-long curtains to keep out the warm water.

The research is still in its early stages, but it’s already clear that such a proposal would be a monumental undertaking, costing a staggering $50 billion, Moore estimates.

‘It sounds like a hell of a lot,’ Moore told Business Insider. ‘But compare the risk-risk: the cost of sea-level protection around the world, just coastal defenses, is expected to be about $50 billion per year per meter of sea level rise.'”

I’ve always been a big proponent of geoengineering schemes. If hurricanes are becoming more prevalent, we should cool down the waters that fuel them. If glaciers are melting, we should freeze them in place. If conditions are too dry, we should seed the clouds and make it rain. If we have the foresight to know that a problem is right around the corner and have the technological means to prevent it from happening it would be a complete dereliction of duty to not take action. Societal malpractice on a grand scale.

$50 billion is a lot of money though, and it’s easy for me to say to spend it when it’s not my money. There’s also no guarantee that this plan would work. It could even make things worse. But at this point we don’t have much of a choice. We’ve reached the crazy, plot of a Bruce Willis movie, stage of Climate Change.

Should we try to prevent the doomsday glacier from melting?

#3,233 – Climate Week: Chalk Coated Clothing

A new coating could be applied to clothes to help us stay cool even as the temperatures around us rise.

CNN explains:

“Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a flexible, chalk-based coating which can be added to fabrics. During tests in scorching summer heat, they found it reduced the temperature underneath clothes by up to 8 degrees Fahrenheit compared to the air, and by up to 15 degrees compared to untreated fabrics.

This innovation is one of a number of efforts to turn people’s clothes into a tool against extreme heat, which is intensifying as humans continue to burn planet-heating fossil fuels. Heat is the deadliest type of extreme weather, causing heat exhaustion and even heat stroke, a potentially fatal illness where the body loses the ability to cool itself down.

The UMass researchers say they wanted to develop a way to cool fabric using an environmentally benign material. Inspired by traditional limestone-based plasters used to cool homes in hot climates, they coated fabric tiles with particles of calcium carbonate – the main component in limestone and chalk.

The coating was able to both reflect the sun’s energy back into the atmosphere, as well as allow the wearer’s natural body heat to escape, according to their new study, currently being peer-reviewed, which was presented to the American Chemical Society this month.

‘We start with your cotton T-shirt… and we just apply this coating on either one or both faces of the fabric,’ Trisha L. Andrew, a chemist and materials scientist at UMass, told CNN. ‘The coating is entirely surface level. It does not penetrate or change the cotton fibers,’ she added.

The coating can be applied to nearly any commercially available fabric and can also be put through the washing machine, the scientists say.

‘Without any power input, we’re able to reduce how hot a person feels, which could be a valuable resource where people are struggling to stay cool in extremely hot environments,’ Evan Patamia, a graduate student at UMass who worked on the innovation, said in a statement.

Cooling fabrics are not a new invention, but past designs have often involved rigid structures, complex manufacturing processes and electrical components, according to a 2023 scientific review of cooling fabric research, making them uncomfortable to wear and expensive.”

I’ve written in the past about other attempts to help keep us cool such as Japan’s Kuchofuku. But this innovation seems like a real breakthrough as it could reduce temperatures under our clothing by a whopping 8 degrees, while being machine washable, and able to be applied to anything without affecting the actual fabrics. If we can apply it to our existing clothes instead of needing to go out and buy whole new wardrobes, then this innovation could be a real game-changer.

Is chalk coated clothing the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,232 – Climate Week: Solar Spheres

It’s no secret that solar panels are still a work in progress. The best ones today are still only about 22% efficient leaving a lot of potential energy on the table. If solar power is going to fully replace fossil fuels, we’re going to have make them a lot better. Possibly even put them in space to capture sunlight more directly. Or do away with them all together in favor of something better and far more futuristic. Such as a plasma energy system in the form of tiny spheres that can be combined in interesting ways to power a variety of things.

The Cool Down explains:

“Solar panels may be replaced by light-catching spheres if innovation company WAVJA’s ingenious contraptions fulfill their potential.

That’s because the business, which has operations in New York City, says its experts have created tiny globes — from a little more than an inch to nearly 4 inches in size — that can harness both sunlight and artificial light to make electricity, according to the manufacturer.

Called a Photon Energy System, the tech uses ‘multiple layers of cutting-edge materials in specialized spheres,’ according to Executive President Shereen Chen, who outlined a list of performance metrics in a video. Each one has a specification that’s multiple times better than traditional panels.

The spheres, which resemble tiny Death Stars (or, perhaps for a more niche Star Wars reference, normal-sized training remotes), are 30 times smaller than solar panels, with 7.5 times the output. Astoundingly, she said they are more than 200 times more efficient.

‘It revolutionizes how we harness sunlight,’ Chen said.

In the clip, four spheres are shown sitting atop a square-shaped device, possibly a part of the system that converts light to electricity. Typically, there’s no external battery connection involved. Chen said the invention is a ‘separate battery system.’

For the example scenario, the spheres are shown powering a battery. Chen later notes that the power pack can be connected to the system ‘in various ways compared to solar panels.’

Throughout the video, LED lights are used to energize the setup, which in turn charges tablets and phones. The vision gets fairly futuristic from there. Renderings shared by Chen show concept big rigs and flying machines powered by groups of spheres, all providing a 24-hour electricity supply regardless of the weather conditions.

One concept closer to reality is a vehicle being tested to run on a package of 20 spheres, per Chen. The tour of the future wrapped up with a rendering of a community powered by a bank of spheres. If the tech can in fact provide the power as advertised, it will be an amazing feat. The third generation is said to be 60 times more powerful than a similar-sized solar panel, per the clip.”

I don’t think solar panels will be going away anytime soon. After all, the flat panel design is conductive to being placed on rooftops and other flat surfaces. But these spheres could open up a whole new set of design possibilities and lead to some exciting new technologies. Enabling us to use solar power in new ways.

Is a Solar Sphere the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,231 – Climate Week: Savor the Taste of CO₂ Butter

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard the slogan. “I can’t believe it’s not butter!” Well, get ready to start saying something less catchy but more impressive: “I can’t believe they just made butter from carbon dioxide!”

That’s right. We can now make butter from that pesky driver of Climate Change, and it tastes just like the real thing.

The Smithsonian explains:

“Humans have been craving fatty foods for some four million years—a desire that could explain why most consumers continue to prefer animal products to vegan alternatives, putting high expectations on the flavor of plant-based foods. Now, though, a California-based startup called Savor has created an animal-free butter from carbon dioxide that it claims tastes just like the dairy version.

The secret ingredient is the same one that makes humans crave cheeseburgers and bacon: fat. But Savor’s team doesn’t need livestock to create this component. Instead, it uses a thermochemical process that pulls carbon dioxide from the air and combines it with hydrogen and oxygen to create fat synthetically.

This fat is then turned into butter by adding water, an emulsifier, beta-carotene for color and rosemary oil for flavor. In the end, ‘it tastes like butter,’ Kathleen Alexander, Savor’s chief technology officer, says.”

So far, most of the time when you hear claims that something lab made, or plant based, tastes like the real thing you can tell, that, in fact, it doesn’t. But, if this actually does taste like butter, then perhaps, we could enhance the flavor of our food and help the environment at the same time.

Is butter made from CO2 the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,230 – Climate Week: Dubai’s Green Spine

In addition to a second sphere and a replica of the Moon Dubai could soon be home to the world’s greenest highway known as the Green Spine.

Vogue explains:

“A new superlative is joining Dubai‘s impressive landscape, as developers URB and Epic Lab announce plans for an ambitious megaproject. Dubbed the Dubai Green Spine, the project seeks to transform the city’s Sheikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Road also known as E311 into the ‘world’s greenest highway’. The 64-kilometer-long highway will act as a sustainable corridor, with its plans including an extensive solar-powered tram system, which aims to connect Dubai’s major neighborhoods from Muhaisnah to Dubai Industrial City. The non-motorized form of transport will also help further Dubai’s clean energy initiatives.

In line with Dubai’s 2040 Urban Master Plan, the Green Spine will also incorporate biodiversity with over a million trees. Other features of the extensive green spaces are set to include native flora, pedestrian and cycling tracks, energy-efficient buildings, and agriculture initiatives like vertical farms. Together with the solar-powered trams, the project will work towards the goal of significantly lower CO2 emissions.

According to Baharash Bagherian, CEO of URB, ‘The Dubai Green Spine isn’t just about transit; it’s about transforming how cities function, making them more livable and human-centric.’ He adds, ‘This initiative exemplifies how integrated, thoughtful urban planning can drastically improve city life, turning everyday environments into vibrant ecosystems that nurture both people and the planet.'”

This area of the world is increasingly facing extreme temperatures due to Climate Change so hopefully this project can help improve the local conditions or at least provide a template for what other cities should be doing.

Is Dubai’s Green Spine the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,229 – Climate Week: Neoplants

The Future of Plants has arrived. Thanks to Neoplants we now have genetially modified houseplants that improve the air quality in our homes achieving results that would currently take an army of 20 plants to do.

As they put it on their website:

“Neo Px is a plant supercharged with billions of proprietary air-purifying bacteria that we call the Power Drops. It’s a natural way to remove some of the most harmful indoor air pollutants, up to 30 times better than any houseplant.”

Adds TechCrunch:

“Going beyond the efficacy of common houseplants, Neo P1 addresses the critical problem of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that pose health risks within our homes and offices. Developed using synthetic biology, this high-tech houseplant outpaces its unmodified counterparts, namely Epipremnum aureum — or ‘devil’s vine’ as it’s ominously called among friends — significantly air-scrubbing qualities for substances such as formaldehyde and toluene, commonly found VOCs in homes.”

We spent a lot of times indoors during COVID. A trend that has continued as remote work proved that it was here to stay. In the future as we battle rising temperatures, 100-year storms, worsening air quality from forest fires and additional pandemics we’re likely to spend even more time indoors. Making it even more imperative that we have innovations like Neoplants to help us breathe easily.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep these plants alive better than the bamboo plants I currently have. My quality of life could depend on it.

Is a Neoplant the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,228 – Climate Week: Electrified Beaches

On top of everything else we have to worry about from rising temperatures to rising sea levels there’s another potential issue that Climate Change is causing: the erosion of our beaches. In fact, half of them could soon be gone. But there may be something we can do about it: electrify them!

Popular Mechanics explains:

“Scientists have a shocking idea regarding how to protect the world’s beaches from coastal erosion. As sea levels rise, wind patterns change, and storms intensify, the places where land meets the sea are some of the hardest hit ecosystems—which is why some estimates say that half the world’s beaches could disappear by 2100. To combat this unrelenting coastal wear and tear, scientists at Northwestern theorize that applying mild voltages to these ecosystems could strengthen coastlines for generations. The results of this study were published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

Current ideas about protecting coastlines involve building large infrastructure or injecting material into the subsurface, both of which are enormously disruptive to the surrounding environments (not to mention expensive). Northwestern Engineering’s Alessandro Rotta Loria, lead author of the study, decided to instead work with the materials—specifically, ions and dissolved minerals—that coastal habitats provided.

‘My aim was to develop an approach capable of changing the status quo in coastal protection…and could cement marine substrates without using actual cement,’ Rotta Loria said in a press statement. ‘By applying a mild electric stimulation to marine soils, we systematically and mechanistically proved that it is possible to cement them by turning naturally dissolved minerals in seawater into solid mineral binders—a natural cement.’

The idea actually comes from shell-dwelling animals like mollusks that convert ions and dissolved minerals in the water into calcium carbonate, which is then used to build their shells. Of course, the energy in an animal’s metabolism kickstarts this process, so to create a similar reaction across the entire ecosystem, you would need to apply a mild current of just 2 to 3 volts and some materials will convert into calcium carbonate. Crank things up to 4 volts and ​​magnesium hydroxide and hydromagnesite are the ultimate outcome—both are common materials found in stones. These substances form a kind of glue that binds sand particles together, making the coast more resilient to weathering effects.”

I grew up going to the beach often. In my opinion there’s no better way to spend a Sunday morning than having a bagel in one hand and the New York Daily News sports section in the other with warm sand under your feet and soothing waves crashing all around you as an afternoon Yankees game is about to start.

It’s a feeling that’s shared by millions of people around the world who take to beaches to work on their tans, play in the sand, and swim in the ocean. It’s a cliche that people on dating apps say that they enjoy long walks on the beach but there’s something to it. Looking for seashells while avoiding getting wet from the approaching waves. So, it makes me sad that we could one day lose our beaches to erosion. Hopefully, electrifying them helps prevent that.

Are Electrified Beaches the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,227 – Climate Week: 3-D Printed Concrete

We still marvel at the fact that ancient Roman concrete was able to last for thousands of years. Despite being more technologically advanced than our friends from the time of Ceasar and Gladiators we’re still amateurs when it comes to making concrete. With the downside that all this concrete is bad for emissions. But we may have a solution on the way. A new form of 3-D printed concrete that’s 30% better for the environment. And we have a good friend graphene to thank.

BGR explains:

“The hunt for more sustainable concrete to replace the climate change driving force of Portland cement has hit a massive leap in progression. This progression comes in the form of a new type of 3D-printed concrete that is much stronger and more durable than regular concrete. Additionally, the creation of this concrete comes with much lower carbon emissions, which will help in our bid to lower global temperatures.

Attempting to make stronger concrete that could be printed using a 3D printer was a big focus of a study conducted by researchers at the University of Virginia. The group wanted to find a way to not only make something that was better for the environment, but that could also maintain strength and flexibility when used in 3D construction.

The trick they discovered was to create a new type of 3D-printed concrete by mixing limestone and calcined clay cement (LC2) with graphene. One key part of the research was seeing just how effective this new concrete could be at helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Some of the researchers involved ran a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and found that the concrete has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 31 percent when compared to some other non-traditional concrete mixtures—possibly even more if they were to compare it to Portland cement, which is the standard for construction in the world.”

Take that Romans!

Is a new 3-D printed concrete the Greatest Idea Ever?

#3,226 – Climate Week: Chicken Fat Energy Storage

I eat a lot of chicken. Homemade breaded chicken cutlets. Chicken Teriyaki from Japanese restaurants and chicken with broccoli from Chinese food restaurants. Supermarket Rotisserie chickens. Wings while watching football. KFC. Chicken skewers. Greek chicken. You name it, I’ve had it. I love chicken so much I even moved from New York to Arizona to get closer to Raisin’ Cane’s.

So, it should come as no surprise that I love this next idea: using chicken fat for energy storage.

Interesting Engineering explains:

“In recent times, a quest to develop green energy sources has increased the demand for energy storage devices.

However, certain materials used in these devices can be costly and pose environmental concerns. Creating energy storage solutions from commonly discarded items could solve these issues.

To that extent, researchers at Yeungnam University in South Korea have devised a technique to convert chicken fat into carbon-based electrodes for supercapacitors, which store energy and power LEDs.

The team claims their method, given how easy and smart it is to create new carbon-based materials from waste chicken fat oil, can be ‘considered a potential advantage for commercial energy storage devices and may open the door to producing inexpensive, industrially revolutionizing energy storage devices.'”

Thank you beloved chickens!

Is chicken fat energy storage the Greatest Idea Ever?