This week we will discover a new, cheaper and quicker method for extracting drinking water out of seawater. We also look at some more robotic agricultural equipment, a couple of new batteries and movie sound effects that are completely generated by AI.
Making Seawater drinkable using Sunlight
Many countries have spent billions of dollars building expensive desalination plants in order to solve their water shortages. Those plants may soon be redundant. A new method of sourcing drinking water using metal-organic frameworks (MOF’s) has just been published by researchers at Monash University in Melbourne.
MOF’s are porous materials with very high surface areas. They are made up from crystalline materials with the largest surface area of any known material. The material is able to trap the impurities and salt from seawater and dirty water. When the material is placed in water, it pulls the ions out of the liquid and holds them on its’ surface.
In one study dissolved solids were reduced from 2,233 parts per million (ppm) to less than 500ppm. The WHO threshold for safe drinking water is 600ppm. This process takes about 30 minutes. Once the water has been cleaned the MOF is placed in sunlight for 4 minutes after which, it is clean for another use. Each kilogram of MOF can remove impurities from 139.5 liters of water at a time.
The MOF system can be integrated into current desalination systems. Given the energy efficiency and likely economic viability of the MOF system it is probable that there will also be applications in agriculture. Any desert near seawater may be able to be irrigated easily and economically. The system will also work well on islands without fresh water and in areas where the only water available is brackish.
Batteries
We have talked about multiple types of batteries in the past. Yet more contenders for the battery of the future have been released.
Red Bricks
The strangest new battery that I have come across is the red brick. Yes the humble house brick. Bricks are one of the world’s most abundant and cheapest building materials. Researchers from Washington University in St Louis have converted house bricks into batteries that can hold a charge.
By coating the bricks with a polymer containing intrusive nanofibers the brick is able to conduct and store electrical current. Bricks are red due to the presence of Hematite. When Hematite infused red clay is fired into bricks, it is uniquely fixed and microporous. A controlled chemical reaction allows nanofibres in the polymer to snake into the brick. The resulting brick becomes an ion sponge that acts as a super capacitor for very little additional cost.
A brick wall constructed using these bricks is able to hold 161 watts per square meter. Compare that to Tesla’s PowerWall (110 kilograms and roughly 4 feet * 2.5 feet and 6 inches thick) which holds about 8 times the charge for slightly less than a square meter of surface area. A PowerWall however, costs approximately US$10,000 to buy and install (and it is not a real wall so you still need to build the wall). Brick walls that hold charge will be much cheaper than the current home battery solutions.
Potassium-ion Batteries
In July we talked about new Sodium-ion batteries. Recently researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York described a breakthrough in Potassium-ion batteries.
They key to a Potassium-ion battery is making the positive and negative terminals out of Potassium (Lithium-ion batteries use a Lithium terminal and a graphite terminal). This solution however suffers from the dendrites (short sharp metal projections that can short the battery and result in a fire hazard) that all metal batteries suffer from. The team has developed a way to burn these dendrites off. The terminal is heated in a controlled way that will burn off the dendrites. Potassium is far more amenable than Lithium for this process.
There is still potential for self heating batteries to go wrong. A lot more work to do for this to become a commercial solution is needed however Potassium is vastly more abundant than Lithium and thus much cheaper. Potential applications range from Consumer Electronics to grid scale storage for renewable power. Zinc is another cheap metal that has shown some promise in battery development. In the future it may be a combination of Sodium, Potassium and Zinc batteries that take over Lithium’s battery crown.
Agribots
We have previously looked at a range of robotic harvesting devices. This is an area of intense research and new robotic solutions are constantly being developed.
The Field Scanalyzer
This massive machine, about the size of a football field, is a robotic phenotyping platform for crop monitoring. Phenotyping is using the observable physical properties of an organism to determine if the crop is what is supposed to be growing or if it is a weed or a bug.
The robot sends about 10 terabytes of data per day for analysis by an AI. The sensors used include high-resolution visible, chlorophyll fluorescence and thermal infrared cameras, hyperspectral imagers and dual 3D laser scanners.
Built on rails the system is 20 meters tall, almost 30 meters wide and over 350 meters long.
Root-AI
Root-AI is a robotic harvesting system for indoor farms. A 3D vision system determines if the fruit is ripe for picking. Specialized grippers can then reach into tangled vines and pick the single piece of ripe fruit. The bots’ sensors are able to “see” in 3D to plan the right path for the grippers to minimize damage to the vines.
Indoor farming represents a massive increase in operational efficiency for some crops. Modern Greenhouses use digitally controlled light, nutrients and atmosphere in addition to reclaimed water which results in up to 20 times the amount of crop per acre using 90% less water than traditional methods.
AI generated Sound Effects
We have spoken about the explosion in AI generated video and writing. Both are very much still in development however they are improving at an amazing rate. The latest frontier in AI generated content is Sound Effects.
Sound brings an extra dimension to films and other video content. Skilled Sound Effects Professionals (known as Foley Artists, named after Jack Foley one of the earliest sound effects artists) add sound effects and music scores to bring the vision to life. Now AI is starting to encroach on their territory.
AI analyses movement in video frames and creates artificial sounds to match the scene. Two machine learning models are used. The first extracts image features, such as color and motion, to determine the appropriate sound effect. The second model analyzes the temporal relationship of an object in separate frames. Using relational reasoning the model then compares different frames across time, thus the model anticipates what action is taking place in the video. The final step is sound being synthesized to match the activity of motion predicted.
The developers have created sound for 1,000 short movie clips capturing a number of common actions. A recent study of one output from the AI showed that the majority of humans (73% in the study) believed that the sounds were real and a majority (66%) picked the artificial clip as real when compared to a real clip. The program works best where timing doesn’t need an exact match with the action. For example the system doesn’t perfectly match the sound with a horse trotting and random actions not related to the rest of the video are difficult to match.
Adding sound effects to a movie is a long and laborious process. In addition to being time consuming, it is expensive. Yet another way that AI is slowly changing the way that we produce content. It won’t be long before we are adding movie quality sound to our Instagram Stories.
Paying it Forward
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