💡 Warp News #277
🐦 Solar farms benefit bird life more than agricultural land. ⚡ Wind power is big in Texas – expected to double during 2025. 💉 A pacemaker so tiny it can be injected with a syringe.
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🔋 More important than low electricity prices
What three years ago was an exciting idea for keeping electricity prices down—and eventually achieving a society with an abundance of clean energy—has become something even more important.
Forgive me for being a bit grand here, but I genuinely believe a key to Europe's future is beginning to take shape in Lund.
The idea is to borrow the logic of how the internet is constructed and apply it to create a new type of electricity grid: a network made up of many small, interconnected grids, each with their own energy sources and storage—much like how the internet consists of interconnected nodes. Excess electricity is stored and can be shared between these micro-networks.
This approach can lower electricity prices, but even more crucially right now, such a grid would become extraordinarily resilient. Of course, Europe needs lower energy prices to ease the financial strain on families and support businesses with ambitions to grow. But in the current dangerous geopolitical climate, what we most urgently need is a grid capable of withstanding attacks.
A network composed of many small segments is far harder to disable than one relying on just a few large, central points. Even under significant attacks, there would still be local capacity to generate at least some electricity.
That's why what’s happening in Lund right now is so important. Last Saturday marked the inauguration of the first prototype. The Energy Society was theory. Now, it's real.
Mathias Sundin
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
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🔋 Part 2: Towards the energy society – the world's first EnergyNet is launched & Broadband Jesus is resurrected
Broadband Jesus waited until one week after Easter to resurrect. Now as Electricity Jesus.
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
⚡ Wind power is big in Texas – expected to double during 2025
Together with solar power, wind power accounted for a record share of 29.8 percent of total electricity production in Texas during 2024. Texas is the largest wind power producer in the USA.
🧠 New technology enables almost real-time speech from brain signals
The technology can help people with severe paralysis communicate in a more natural way. The system works with different types of brain interfaces and can generate sound within 1 second after the person attempts to speak.
🦿 New robot model can handle unfamiliar objects with natural language
Figure robots equipped with Helix can pick up almost any small household object by following natural language commands. Helix can successfully handle thousands of new items in cluttered environments without any prior demonstrations or custom programming.
🐦 Solar farms benefit bird life more than agricultural land
Well-managed solar parks have been shown to host more bird species and individuals per hectare than surrounding farmland. Solar parks that maintain a mix of habitats, uncut grass, and preserved hedges had almost three times more birds compared to nearby farmland.
🧬 New AI tool can predict protein form and function in minutes instead of years
Evo 2 has been trained on nearly 9 trillion nucleotides from about 15,000 eukaryotes (plants and animals) as well as prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea). The tool can generate new genetic sequences that may be useful in biomedicine and biotechnological applications.
💉 A pacemaker so tiny it can be injected with a syringe
The new pacemaker dissolves itself in the body when no longer needed, eliminating the need for additional operations. The technology is particularly suitable for newborn babies with congenital heart defects, who often only need temporary pacing after heart surgeries.
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