Category: Articles

A Norwegian company is developing an innovative wind energy concept called the “Windcatcher,” an offshore floating facility. Instead of using a few giant turbines, the Windcatcher will comprise hundreds of small turbines packed together. This visionary project is spearheaded by Wind Catching Systems (WCS).

The Windcatcher has reached a significant milestone by receiving certification from DNV, a leading global classification agency. This certification confirms the technical feasibility of the design, allowing the project to advance to the next stage.

The Windcatcher concept involves a floating offshore wind farm that uses multiple small 1MW turbines instead of traditional large turbines. These innovative turbines can capture 2.5 times more energy per square meter of wind flow compared to standard three-blade turbine designs. The unique design, resembling a “floating wall of wind,” aims to double energy output.

The company plans for the Windcatcher to generate 40MW of power in the future. In the long term, WCS aims to add units with a capacity of up to 126 MW.

The Windcatcher is designed to withstand the harsh conditions of the open sea. It is a modular system that can be scaled up or down based on energy needs. Each unit connects to a central substation, which transmits the electricity to the grid.

This is a very interesting concept. One of the issues surrounding wind turbines is there tendency to kill large amounts of birds. Hopefully these are big enough for flocks of birds to recognize that they need to go around it.

In the dark depths of Earth’s ocean floors, a spontaneous chemical reaction is quietly producing oxygen, without the need for life. This discovery challenges the long-standing belief that photosynthesizing organisms are necessary to create the oxygen we breathe.

Biogeochemist Andrew Sweetman from the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) and his team stumbled upon this finding while measuring seafloor oxygen levels to assess the impact of deep-sea mining.

In the Pacific Ocean, black, rounded rocks are scattered across the seafloor at depths of over 4,000 meters (13,000 feet). Surprisingly, the scientists observed increasing oxygen levels in these areas.

“When we first got this data, we thought the sensors were faulty, because every study ever done in the deep sea has only seen oxygen being consumed rather than produced. We would come home and recalibrate the sensors but over the course of 10 years, these strange oxygen readings kept showing up,” explains Sweetman.

Sweetman and the team decided to test it using a different type of sensor and were amazed when it came back with the same results.

To explore the mystery, the researchers collected some of these nodule rocks in the lab to see if they were the source of this ‘dark oxygen’ production.

These nodules are natural deposits of rare-earth metals like cobalt, manganese, and nickel, mixed in a polymetallic blend. These exact metals are used in batteries, and it turns out the rocks may be acting similarly on the ocean floor.

The researchers found that single polymetallic nodules produced voltages of up to 0.95 V. When clustered together, they can easily reach the 1.5 V required to split oxygen from water in an electrolysis reaction.

“It appears that we discovered a natural ‘geobattery,'” says Northwestern University chemist Franz Geiger. “These geobatteries are the basis for a possible explanation of the ocean’s dark oxygen production.”

While there is still much to investigate, such as the scale of oxygen production by these nodules, this discovery offers a potential explanation for the persistence of ocean ‘dead zones’ long after deep-sea mining has ceased.

In 2016 and 2017, marine biologists discovered that sites mined in the 1980s still lacked even bacteria, while unmined regions flourished. The persistence of these ‘dead zones’ remains unknown, but this new discovery could be the reason for the dead zones in what would otherwise be such high faunal diversity areas.

Additionally, the discovery of ‘dark oxygen’ production raises new questions about the origins of oxygen-breathing life on Earth, which had previously been attributed to ancient microbial cyanobacteria.

“We now know that there is oxygen produced in the deep sea, where there is no light,” said Sweetman. “I think we, therefore, need to revisit questions like: Where could aerobic life have begun?”

This research was published in Nature Geoscience.

Scientists have developed a cost-effective method to recycle certain electronic waste using whey protein. This approach allows for easy gold recovery from circuit boards, costing 50 times less than the value of the recovered gold—figures that appeal to large-scale businesses. Traditional e-waste recycling methods can’t match these savings, making this method potentially scalable.

Professor Raffaele Mezzenga from ETH Zurich discovered that whey protein, a byproduct of dairy manufacturing, can create sponges that attract ionized gold. Electronic waste contains valuable metals like copper, cobalt, and gold, used extensively in electronics for their conductive properties.

Mohammad Peydayesh, Mezzenga’s colleague, first denatured whey proteins under acidic conditions and high temperatures, forming protein nanofibrils in a gel. After drying the gel, they created a sponge from these fibrils. To extract gold, they soaked 20 salvaged motherboards in an acid bath until the metals dissolved into ionized compounds. The sponge then attracted these ions, and a heat treatment aggregated the gold into 22-carat flakes for easy removal.

They extracted 450 milligrams of gold, worth about $38.70 at current market value, though the nuggets contained around 9% copper. Further smelting could purify the gold, reducing its weight slightly.

The true financial value lies in the bottom line—50 times the cost of energy and materials. The scientists plan to market this technology quickly and explore if other food waste byproducts can be used to make the protein fibril sponge.

E-waste is a growing global problem, requiring energy-intensive machinery for recycling. The benefits of recycling these materials include preventing long-term landfill waste, the loss of the precious metals to said landfills, and reducing the demand for new mining operations.