🦑 Generating electricity from squids, producing green steel, powering 15,000 homes with the most powerful underwater tide-riding turbines

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A new study has discovered that squids may be experts in solar power. Turns out that their dazzling ability to change colors to blend in with their surroundings could help generate electricity.

Researchers have known that pigment-filled chromatophores in their skin were somehow involved in this magical ability, but scientists haven’t understood how exactly they did it until now.

 A team based at Northeastern University created a solar cell to investigate whether the pigment granules inside the chromatophores of the longfin inshore squid could help convert light into electricity. Dive deeper into this Must-Read.

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MUST-READ

🦑 Squids’ color-changing pigments could pave way for efficient solar power generation

Lead researcher Taehwan Kim, working with a US team at Northeastern, found that squid pigments placed into a photovoltaic cell transferred a charge when exposed to sunlight. The more granules they included, the higher the photocurrent response.

Researchers deduced that the pieces of the chromatophore are actually converting the light from the sun-simulated light to the voltage, which can complete the circuit and then be harvested, potentially, for a power supply in the animal.

After all, squid use energy to alter their entire body’s appearance underwater, where only low levels of light can penetrate.

🏗️ Electric-powered US plant produces first ton of green steel, oxygen as by product

Steel is one of the major contributors to anthropogenic carbon emissions, responsible for up to nine percent of total carbon released into the atmosphere. MIT developed a new technology to eliminate the problem.

They reached a major milestone in producing a novel industrial reactor that produces steel using only electricity. They identified that using coal-based fuel “coke” in a blast furnace created carbon dioxide.

Their alternative approach molten oxide electrolysis (MOE) loads iron ore with another ingredient into the reactor. Instead of blasting these ingredients in a furnace, electricity is run through the mixture to increase its temperature to nearly 2,900 Fahrenheit.

🔌 World’s most powerful underwater tide-riding turbines to power 15,000 homes annually

One of the most powerful underwater tide-riding turbine projects has secured funding from the European Union’s Innovation Fund.

NH1 project by tidal energy developer Normandie Hydroliennes in France was granted €31.3 million to fast-track one of France’s first commercial tidal energy pilots, boosting marine renewables.

As climate change remains the greatest global challenge of this generation, Europe and France have set ambitious 2030 mandates aimed at accelerating the ecological and energy transition while significantly cutting carbon emissions.

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