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Oxylus Energy achieves ‘beautiful balance’ in producing e-fuels for aviation and shipping

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Oxylus Energy strikes “beautiful balance” to make e-fuels for aviation and shipping

Many airlines and shipping firms say they are going to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, but they don’t yet have a transparent path to attain this goal.

Scientifically, divesting these industries of fossil fuels is feasible; economically, it isn’t. Or no less than not yet, the young startup claims. Oxylus Energy believes he holds the important thing to 1 a part of the equation.

The company was spun out of Yale’s chemistry lab last 12 months and is working to perfect the production of so-called green methanol. Currently, most methanol comes from fossil fuels and is used to make petrochemicals, although it might probably even be used as a transportation fuel. Because of this flexibility, green methanol, which is made without fossil fuels, could free many industries from carbon pollution.

“We think this is one of the most versatile chemicals that can really decarbonize the hard-to-reduce sectors of shipping, aviation, and petrochemicals, which currently account for 11% of emissions,” co-founder and COO Harrison Meyer told TechCrunch.

While electric vehicles have entered consumer and heavy trucking, flying and heavy shipping are entirely depending on energy-hungry fossil fuels to make long-distance journeys. Batteries are too heavy, and switching every little thing to green hydrogen would require expensive retrofitting of planes and ships.

Motorsport fans will note that methanol has been used as a racing fuel for many years, and lots of today’s internal combustion engines can burn the substance with minor modifications. Some ocean-going vessels also I made a changeand while a barrel of methanol doesn’t contain as much energy as other marine fuels like diesel, it’s close enough that the industry is seriously considering its use.

Airlines face a rather greater hurdle because they need green methanol refined right into a form that more closely resembles today’s jet fuel, which might drive up the value.

But what2 savings only come when the methanol itself is produced in a low-emission way. That’s where Oxylus comes in.

Green methanol production is pricey today since it is a multi-step process, and each energy-intensive step is carried out using expensive equipment. Just one in every of these steps, the extraction of green hydrogen, accounts for about 16% of the whole cost, in accordance with Lux Research.

Oxylus Energy’s technology bypasses the necessity for green hydrogen by utilizing a cobalt-based catalyst to facilitate the chemical response needed to supply methanol. The catalyst sits inside an electrolyzer, which uses electricity to separate water and carbon dioxide molecules. Once separated, the hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms mix to form methanol (CH3OH) and oxygen (O2). All of this happens at standard room temperature and pressure, which helps keep costs low.

“As is the case in CO2 electrolysis, you’re always fighting to produce hydrogen,” said CTO Conor Rooney. If too many hydrogen atoms mix to form hydrogen molecules (H2), there’s not enough leftover to make methanol. The chemical structure of the Oxylus catalyst helps steer the response in the appropriate direction, allowing methanol to form when hydrogen is released from the water. “You have to have that beautiful balance,” Rooney said.

Methanol produced by Oxylus will be utilized by the chemical industry to supply a spread of common chemicals, including formaldehyde and acetic acid. With some additional processing and refining, it might probably be transformed right into a sustainable aviation fuel.

The startup told TechCrunch exclusively that it recently raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Toyota Ventures and Azolla Ventures with participation from Earth Foundry and Connecticut Innovations. The funding will go toward constructing a production-scale reactor that the corporate hopes will help prove its aggressive pricing goals.

“At the renewable energy prices that are contractable today, we will be at or below cost parity with fossil methanol,” said CEO Perry Bakas. “The fundamental question is, can we build a system in the next few years? That’s really a time and money issue that we’re really focused on.”

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Instagram is taking over Snapchat with a new location sharing feature

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Instagram introduces the power for users to share their locations with friends via DM (direct messages) – company announced on Monday. The feature indicates that the Meta-owned social network desires to challenge services like Apple’s “Find My” and Snapchat’s Snap Map, that are popular ways to ascertain the location of friends and family members in real time.

The launch of this feature is not a complete surprise, as earlier this 12 months it was noted that Instagram was testing a way for users to see their friends’ live locations. It’s price noting that one other Meta messaging app, WhatsApp, has been allowing users to share live locations with others for quite a while.

Unlike Apple and Snapchat, which let you share your location with others indefinitely, Instagram only allows users to achieve this for an hour. Instagram says this feature might be used to coordinate arrival times or find friends in crowded places.

Image credits:Instagram

You can share your location with one person or in a group chat. When you share your location, only people in a specific chat will give you the chance to see where you might be, and your location can’t be shared with other chats. You’ll also see an indicator at the highest of your chat reminding you that you just’re currently sharing your current location.

All lively locations expire after one hour. Given that WhatsApp permits you to share your location with others for as much as eight hours, it’s possible that Instagram’s deadline on location sharing could change in the long run.

According to the corporate, the new feature is available in chosen countries. TechCrunch asked for more details.

On Monday, Instagram also announced that users can now customize their chat names by adding nicknames for themselves or others. The company says this feature might be used to share insider jokes or just shorten long usernames.

You can create a nickname by tapping the chat name at the highest of the conversation after which choosing “Nicknames.” Here you’ll be able to select the username of the person you must assign a nickname to. Nicknames are only visible in your DMs.

Additionally, Instagram is rolling out 17 new sticker packs with over 300 stickers that might be shared in chat.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Raspberry Pi releases the Pico 2W, a $7 wireless-capable microcontroller board

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Get to know Raspberry Pi Pico 2Wa tiny board designed around a microcontroller that permits you to construct large-scale hardware projects. Raspberry Pi once more uses its own, RP2350 well documented microcontroller.

But what’s a microcontroller again? As the name suggests, microcontrollers will let you control other components or electronic devices. Regular Raspberry Pis are general-purpose single-board computers, while microcontrollers are specifically designed to interact with other components.

Microcontrollers are often low-cost, small and really energy efficient. As you may see in the image above, the Pico 2W has dozens of input and output pins (small yellow holes around the board) on its sides that it uses to speak with other components.

Hobbyists normally start creating a microcontroller-based project with a file bread cutting board to avoid soldering. Later they will solder the microcontroller to other parts.

Unlike traditional Raspberry Pi computers, microcontrollers don’t run a full-fledged operating system. Your code runs directly on the chip.

In addition to C and C++, Pico 2 W supports MicroPython, a Python-inspired language for microcontrollers, for programming purposes. The latest board maintains hardware and software compatibility with previous generation boards.

The latest $7 Pico 2W processor features a dual-core, dual-architecture processor running at 150MHz. When developing a microcontroller, you may make a choice from a pair of Arm Cortex-M33 cores and a pair of open-hardware Hazard 3 RISC-V cores.

Arm Cortex-M33 cores are widely utilized in the microcontroller world, but some may prefer RISC-V cores. Everything could be configured in software, so that you do not have to decide on one microcontroller over one other when ordering latest boards.

The Pico 2W has 4MB of onboard flash memory for code storage, while the RP2350 has 520KB of onboard SRAM. I’ll say it again: this just isn’t a computer beast. It’s a microcontroller!

In terms of wireless capabilities, Pico 2W supports Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz 802.11n) and Bluetooth 5.2. It could be nice to get 5 GHz support for versatility, but possibly we are able to achieve that in the next version.

If you do not need wireless features for price or compliance reasons, Raspberry Pi also offers Pico 2 without this feature for $5.

Raspberry Pi products are increasingly utilized by firms involved in industrial and electronics production. When Raspberry Pi became a public company this yr, it reported that the industrial and embedded segment accounted for 72% of its sales.

This might be why you may buy single pieces of Pico 2 boards in addition to spools of 480 pieces. This is what the Pico 2 microcontroller board spool looks like:

Image credits:Raspberry Pi /

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Entrepreneur Marc Lore on ‘founder mode’, bad hiring and why avoiding risk is deadly

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Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold a complete of two corporations for billions of dollars. Now he plans to start out delivering takeaway food Wonder made public in a couple of years, at an ambitious valuation of $40 billion.

We recently spoke in person with Lore in New York about Wonder and its ultimate goal of constructing meal planning easier, but we also touched on Lore’s management philosophy. Below is a part of what he said on the topic, flippantly edited for length and clarity.

Lore on the so-called founder modewhere founders and CEOs actively engage not only with their direct reports, but in addition with “skip level” employees to make sure that small challenges don’t grow to be big ones (Brian Chesky works this fashion, as does Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, amongst others):

Yes, I didn’t just like the founding mode because I operate in a different way. I focus very much on the concepts of vision, capital and people. We meet weekly with the leadership team and spend two hours every week on the core elements of vision, strategy, organizational structure, capital plan, our performance management systems, compensation systems, behaviors and values ​​- akin to: things you’re thinking that are already set.

You think, “Oh, yeah, we’ve done certain behaviors before. We have already established the values. We dealt with performance management. We have our strategy.” But as you grow and develop quickly, it’s amazing how much it evolves over time, and you must sustain with it… and just speak about it and speak about it.

When everyone is fully aligned and you have got really good people, you simply allow them to do it; I do not have to get entangled in any respect. So I won’t go into the small print of what people do, so long as they know the nuances of the strategy and vision. When you connect that together with your team and they achieve that with their very own team, everyone is moving in the correct direction.

What Lore thinks about hiring the correct people:

I actually, really care about hiring rock stars. That is, one and all (I hire). I used to think you could possibly interview someone and inside an hour resolve whether or not they were a rock star. I actually thought so, and I believe other people think so too.

It’s not possible. I’ve employed hundreds of individuals. You cannot tell in an hour-long interview whether someone is a rock star, and it’s normal to get honeyed. Someone talks about a great game, sounds good, says the correct things, has the correct experience, and then it doesn’t work out and you wonder why.

I began going back to resumes and attempting to draw correlations, and I discovered that there was a definite pattern that superstar resumes had that distinguished them from non-superstar resumes. This doesn’t suggest that somebody who doesn’t have a superstar resume cannot be a superstar. I miss these people, it’s okay. But after I see someone with a superstar resume, they’re almost all the time a superstar. When I interview them, I already know that I would like to rent them, and it’s more about ensuring that I’m not missing anything from a behavioral, cultural, or values ​​standpoint – we would like it to be compatible.

However, your resume must show a demonstrable level of success in each position you have got worked in. This means multiple promotions. This means staying with the corporate long enough to advance, and leaving and moving from one company to a different is a giant step. Superstars don’t move sideways. They don’t move from a great company to a bad one because bad corporations must pay more to draw people, so sometimes they shake loose individuals who should not that good, who just need to go for the cash.

But you discover someone who’s (at the highest) 5% and you take a look at their CV and it’s like: boom, boom, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, and then a giant jump… promotion, promotion, big jump . When I get a resume that shows a visual level of success, I take it and pay them what they need. It’s very essential for me to get this superstar there. And you are constructing an organization of superstars.

You have to have a correct performance management system in place in order that they know exactly what they should do to get to the following level. Because superstars are very motivated. They need to know what they should do to get to the following level, especially Generation Z. They need to know and get promoted every six months.

Finally, Lore talks about his belief that taking more risks is the solution to secure a startup’s future, even when this approach could seem counterintuitive to many:

People all the time underestimate the risk of the establishment and overestimate the risk of introducing change. I see it over and all over again.

If you have got a life-threatening disease and the doctor says, “You have six months to live,” at that time you may go on a trial drug or anything, even when it’s extremely dangerous (it should look good). Basically, you are trying to take a risk to avoid inevitable death.

If you are super healthy and every thing’s going great and someone says, “Take this experimental drug; it can make you live longer” (many individuals will say), “You know what? It’s too dangerous. I’m really healthy. I don’t desire to die from this drug.”

However, startups are very different from large corporations. When you’re employed at a big company like Walmart (whose US e-commerce business Lore tracked selling is certainly one of his corporations), it’s about incremental improvement. There is no incentive to take risks.

As a startup founder, you’ll likely die. Every day that you just live and do that startup, there is a risk that you’re going to die. The probability is 80% and only a 20% likelihood it should actually work. So you have got to take this into consideration when making decisions. You must search for opportunities to take risks to cut back your risk of death. The establishment is the worst thing you may do. Doing nothing is the most important risk you may take.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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