Joe Burns

"Seaweed" is the common name for countless species of marine plants and algae that grow in the ocean as well as in rivers, lakes, and other water bodies. Not only are the fixed and free-floating seaweeds essential to numerous marine creatures, both as food and as habitat, they also provide many benefits to humans.

Seaweed is known to contain vitamins, minerals, fiber and protein, and has been used for culinary and medical purposes for at least 1,500 years. The Japanese mixture of raw fish, sticky rice, and other ingredients in a seaweed is called nori, also called a sushi roll. Many seaweeds contain anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial agents. Their medicinal effects have been studied for thousands of years with the ancient Romans using them to treat wounds, burns, and rashes. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the ancient Egyptians may have used them as a treatment for breast cancer.

Certain seaweeds do possess powerful cancer-fighting agents that researchers hope will eventually prove effective in the treatment of malignant tumors and leukemia in people. While dietary soy was long credited for the low rate of cancer in Japan, this indicator of robust health is now attributed to dietary seaweed.

Seaweed is also a rich source of protein and can contain up to 47% on a dry-weight basis. However, it is challenging to extract proteins from the raw biomass, due to resilient cell-wall complexes in the plant-life. Rises in demand for vegan and vegetarian protein alternatives to meat and dairy have begun to drive innovation into seaweed as a protein source, with researchers finding high protein content in macroalgae.

An advantage of using macroalgae as a protein source is the potential reduction of burden on the environment, with macroalgal cultivation not using terrestrial lands and not encroaching onto traditional farming techniques.

The FDA also recently announced the approval of a prescription tongue muscle stimulation device which claims to reduce mild obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and snoring. The solution, approved for people 18 and older, is different from past therapeutic devices because it functions while the patient is awake, working over time to prevent tongues from obstructing airways later during sleep.

A neck collar is also in development to provide an alternative sleep apnea solution, using negative pressure therapy in a device worn around the neck during sleep to reduce side effects of sleep apnea. The device provides gentle suction to prevent patient's soft tissue from resting on airways during sleep, keeping breath moving normally.

DIT offers IT and marketing services for the German housing industry. The company's core product is its Tenant app for housing companies and property managers. The company also advises clients on the introduction and marketing of new digital technologies.

DIT's Tenant app allows tenants to take photos of damage, select damage locations, categorize, describe and specify repair dates.

The app gives direct feedback from the tenant to repairmen, craftsmen and caretakers to complete claims handling, and a rating system is implemented based on stars with free stars for feedback. Immediate feedback and evaluation of craftsmen performance and feedback enables property managers to assess quality and scope of work.

The app also allows messaging between contact persons for all concerns, with links to individual query channels that can be integrated into ERP systems such as telephone, email and chat. Queries are automatically recorded and displayed to clerks with tickets so tenants can suggest dates and accept or cancel appointments.

Concern creation can also be automated, with tenants providing required information after notifications appear in the message center. Digital signatures allow tenants to sign for all concerns in-app, with two-factor authentication via email or SMS forwarding to ERP systems in image format upon request.

The app also allows tenants to settle operating cost statements, see all previous bills and see consumption with smart metering, digital consumption and additional optional categories.

Energy can be stored in several ways, such as batteries or ultracapacitors. Alternatively, energy can be converted into a gas such as biogas, biomethane or hydrogen and stored as a fuel rather than as electricity.

There are numerous applications for energy storage technologies, including providing support services to the electricity grid, or to an individual consumer “behind-the-meter”. Energy storage technology may be deployed as stand-alone systems or with power generation as part of a hybrid or micro-grid scheme.

"E-fuels” can be utilized in high-efficiency decentralized reciprocating gas engine plants to produce both electricity and heat, at point of use, in order to save money and decarbonize utility supplies.

Energy resilience has become an essential consideration when evaluating power supply. Unexpected events such as extreme weather incidents, technical failures or even pandemics can put their toll on the power network.

Due to growing concerns about fossil fuels' environmental impacts and the capacity and resilience of energy grids around the world, engineers and policymakers are increasingly turning their attention to energy storage solutions. Energy storage can help address the intermittency of solar and wind power, and in many cases can respond rapidly to large fluctuations in demand. This makes the grid more responsive and reduces the need to build backup power plants.

The effectiveness of an energy storage facility is determined by how quickly it can react to changes in demand, the rate of energy lost in the storage process, its overall energy storage capacity, and how quickly it can be recharged.

Energy storage systems can be deployed in parallel with other technologies as a hybrid power plant or as part of a micro-grid. These modern, flexible solutions can combine the benefits of ultra-fast battery response with the longevity of a gas engine, whilst also balancing with renewable power generation for complete site optimization.

Biomass is renewable organic material that comes from plants and animals. Biomass was the largest source of total annual U.S. energy consumption until the mid-1800s. Biomass continues to be an important fuel in many countries, especially for cooking and heating in developing countries.

The use of biomass fuels for transportation and for electricity generation is increasing in many developed countries as a means of avoiding carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use. In 2020, biomass provided nearly 5 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) and about 5% of total primary energy use in the United States.

Biomass sources for energy include:

• Wood and wood processing wastes: firewood, wood pellets, and wood chips, lumber and furniture mill sawdust and waste, and black liquor from pulp and paper mills, etc.
• Agricultural crops and waste materials: corn, soybeans, sugar cane, switchgrass, woody plants, and algae, and crop and food processing residues, etc.
• Biogenic materials in municipal solid waste: paper, cotton, and wool products, and food, yard, and wood wastes, etc.
• Animal manure and human sewage

Biomass is converted to energy through various processes, including:

• Direct combustion (burning) to produce heat
• Thermochemical conversion to produce solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels
• Chemical conversion to produce liquid fuels
• Biological conversion to produce liquid and gaseous fuels
• Direct combustion is the most common method for converting biomass to useful energy. All biomass can be burned directly for heating buildings and water, for industrial process heat, and for generating electricity in steam turbines.

Thermochemical conversion of biomass includes pyrolysis and gasification. Both are thermal decomposition processes in which biomass feedstock materials are heated in closed, pressurized vessels called gasifiers at high temperatures. They mainly differ in the process temperatures and amount of oxygen present during the conversion process.

Pyrolysis includes heating organic materials to 800–900oF (400–500 oC) in the near complete absence of free oxygen. Biomass pyrolysis produces fuels such as charcoal, bio-oil, renewable diesel, methane, and hydrogen.

Hydrotreating is used to process bio-oil (produced by fast pyrolysis) with hydrogen under elevated temperatures and pressures in the presence of a catalyst to produce renewable diesel, renewable gasoline, and renewable jet fuel.

Gasification entails heating organic materials to 1,400–1700oF (800–900oC) with injections of controlled amounts of free oxygen and/or steam into the vessel to produce a carbon monoxide and hydrogen rich gas called synthesis gas or syngas. Syngas can be used as a fuel for diesel engines, for heating, and for generating electricity in gas turbines.

Syngas can also be treated to separate the hydrogen from the gas, and the hydrogen can be burned or used in fuel cells. The syngas can be further processed to produce liquid fuels using the Fischer–Tropsch process.

Geothermal technology harnesses the Earth’s heat, which maintains a near-constant temperature. Farther below the surface, the temperature increases at an average rate of approximately 1°F for every 70 feet in depth, with tectonic and volcanic activity bringing higher temperatures and pockets of superheated water and steam much closer to the surface.

Geothermal energy is considered a renewable resource. Ground source heat pumps and direct use geothermal technologies serve heating and cooling applications, while deep and enhanced geothermal technologies generally take advantage of a much deeper, higher temperature geothermal resource to generate electricity.

A ground source heat pump takes advantage of the naturally occurring difference between the above-ground air temperature and the subsurface soil temperature to move heat in support of end uses such as space heating, space cooling (air conditioning), and even water heating.

A ground source or geoexchange system consists of a heat pump connected to a series of buried pipes. One can install the pipes either in horizontal trenches just below the ground surface or in vertical boreholes that go several hundred feet below ground. The heat pump circulates a heat-conveying fluid, sometimes water, through the pipes to move heat from point to point.

If the ground temperature is warmer than ambient air temperature, the heat pump can move heat from the ground to the building. The heat pump can also operate in reverse, moving heat from the ambient air in a building into the ground, in effect cooling the building.

Ground source heat pumps require a small amount of electricity to drive the heating/cooling process. For every unit of electricity used in operating the system, the heat pump can deliver as much as five times the energy from the ground, resulting in a net energy benefit. Geothermal heat pump users should be aware that in the absence of using renewable generated electricity to drive the heating/cooling process (e.g., modes) that geothermal heat pump systems may not be fully fossil-fuel free (e.g., renewable-based).

Direct use geothermal systems use groundwater that is heated by natural geological processes below the Earth’s surface. This water can be as hot as 200°F or more. Bodies of hot groundwater can be found in many areas with volcanic or tectonic activity.

The water from direct geothermal systems is hot enough for many applications, including large-scale pool heating; space heating, cooling, and on-demand hot water for buildings of most sizes; district heating (i.e., heat for multiple buildings in a city); heating roads and sidewalks to melt snow; and some industrial and agricultural processes.

Direct use takes advantage of hot water that may be just a few feet below the surface, and usually less than a mile deep. The shallow depth means that capital costs are relatively small compared with deeper geothermal systems, but this technology is limited to regions with natural sources of hot groundwater at or near the surface.

Deep geothermal systems use steam from far below the Earth’s surface for applications that require temperatures of several hundred degrees Fahrenheit. These systems typically inject water into the ground through one well and bring water or steam to the surface through another.

Other variations can capture steam directly from underground (“dry steam”). Unlike ground source heat pumps or direct use geothermal systems, deep geothermal projects can involve drilling a mile or more below the Earth’s surface. At these depths, high pressure keeps the water in a liquid state even at temperatures of several hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

Deep geothermal sources provide efficient, clean heat for industrial processes and some large-scale commercial and agricultural uses. In addition, steam can be used to spin a turbine and generate electricity. Although geothermal steam requires no fuel and low operational costs, the initial capital costs, which include drilling test wells and production wells, can be financially challenging.

Steam resources that are economical to tap into are currently limited to regions with high geothermal activity, but research is underway to develop enhanced geothermal systems with much deeper wells that take advantage of the Earth’s natural temperature gradient and can potentially be constructed anywhere. Enhanced systems can use hydraulic fracturing techniques to engineer subsurface reservoirs that allow water to be pumped into and through otherwise dry or impermeable rock.

Flowing water creates energy that can be captured and turned into electricity. This is called hydroelectric power or hydropower. The most common type of hydroelectric power plant uses a dam on a river to store water in a reservoir. Water released from the reservoir flows through a turbine, spinning it, which in turn activates a generator to produce electricity.

Hydroelectric power doesn’t always require a large dam, however, with some hydroelectric power plants using only a small canal to channel river water through a turbine.

Another type of hydroelectric power plant is called a pumped storage plant. This type of hydropower can store power, and send electricity from a power grid into electric generators. The generators then spin the turbines backward, which causes the turbines to pump water from a river or lower reservoir to an upper reservoir, where the power is stored.

In order to use the power, water is released from the upper reservoir back down into the river or lower reservoir. This spins the turbines forward, activating the generators to produce electricity.

The Logz.io platform uses open source, cloud-native Prometheus integrations to monitor metric storage and analytics. The metrics are centralized on the platform, allowing use of AWS, Google Cloud, Cisco Meraki and other integrations to customize and monitor data visualizations using PromQL. Grafana dashboards can also be bulk imported.

Logz.io is an Israel-based company that provides log management and analysis services through a cloud service and machine learning platform. The company was founded in 2014 by Tomer Levy and Asaf Yigal, two former employees at Check Point, and has headquarters in Tel Aviv and Boston.

Logz.io provides an intelligent and scalable machine data analytics platform built on ELK and Grafana. The platform is designed for monitoring modern applications, combining cloud-native scalability with crowdsourced artificial intelligence to help engineers identify critical issues before they occur and empower them to monitor, troubleshoot and secure mission-critical applications using one unified platform.

Logz.io platform includes log management, infrastructure monitoring, cloud SIEM and distributed tracing.

Logz.io's log management service is powered by Kibana and handles scaling, sharding, and index management for maintaining data pipelines. The correlated logs funnel metrics from associated logs and traces to assist troubleshooting, and allow customers to move older logs to cost effective storagestorage tiers using Logz.io Smart Tiering.

The system uses Lucene and KQL log searching syntax, which utilize Kibana in a premade dashboard to enable quick searching and cluster pattern detection. The system also has real-time alert capabilities with Slack, Opsgenie, PagerDuty and email integrations and uses machine learning to cross reference logs with StackOverflow and GitHub forum logs.

The Logz.io platform uses open source, cloud-native Prometheus integrations to monitor metric storage and analytics. The metrics are centralized on the platform, allowing use of AWS, Google Cloud, Cisco Meraki and other integrations to customize and monitor data visualizations using PromQL. Grafana dashboards can also be bulk imported.

Logz.io's Cloud SIEM capabilities allow threat detection and investigation on an open source ELK stack, enabling threat feeds with over 300 security rules, and Kibana analytics monitoring tools.

Logz.io uses a distributed tracing method based on open source code Jaeger to provide a fully managed, integrated log and metric analysis for CNCF. The technology allows users to trace through flows with Cloud Native Computing Foundation capabilities enabled in Jaeger and Kibana integration. The software offers one-click logging to view relevant tracing and root-cause analysis of latency and performance issues.

The trace and call sequence allows users to find any service endpoint, auto-discover on the service map and visualize dependency graphs.

Logz.io is an Israel-based company that provides log management and analysis services through a cloud service and machine learning platform. The company was founded in 2014 by Tomer Levy and Asaf Yigal, two former employees at Check Point, and has headquarters in Tel Aviv and Boston.

The best locations for generating wind power are sometimes remote ones, with offshore wind power also offering large potential for the future.

The best locations for generating wind power are sometimes remote ones, with offshore wind power also offering large potential for the future.A U.S. Departent of Energy research survey in April 2021 states that wind turbines will be two to three times larger by 2013, with a median of 5.5MW for land-based turbines and 17MW for offshore turbines. This is expected to drive cost decreases between 35% and 50% by 2050 for both locations.

Wind-turbine capacity has increased over time. In 1985, typical turbines had a rated capacity of 0.05 megawatts (MW) and a rotor diameter of 15 meters. Today’s, newbut current wind power projects have turbine capacities of about 2 MW onshore and 3–53 to 5 MW offshore.

Commercially available wind turbines have reached 8 MW8MW capacity, with rotor diameters of up to 164 metres. The average capacity of wind turbines increased from 1.6 MW in 2009 to 2 MW in 2014.

The majority of wind energy technology uses wind to produce electricity, using the kinetic energy created by air in motion. This is transformed into electrical energy using wind turbines or wind energy conversion systems. Wind first hits a turbine’s blades, causing them to rotate and turn the turbine connected to them, changing the kinetic energy to rotational energy by moving a shaft which is connected to a generator. This produces electrical energy through electromagnetism.

The amount of power that can be harvested from wind depends on the size of the turbine and the length of its blades. The output is proportional to the dimensions of the rotor and to the cube of the wind speed. When wind speed doubles, wind power potential theoretically increases by a factor of eight.

Wind power is one of the fastest-growing renewable energy technologies, with increased worldwide use, in part due to falling costs. Global installed wind-generation capacity onshore and offshore has increased by a factor of almost 75 in the past two decades, jumping from 7.5 gigawatts (GW) in 1997 to approximately 564 GW by 2018. Production of wind electricity doubled between 2009 and 2013, and in 2016 wind energy accounted for 16% of the renewable electricity generated.

The best locations for generating wind power are sometimes remote ones, with offshore wind power also offering large potential for the future.

Wind-turbine capacity has increased over time. In 1985, typical turbines had a rated capacity of 0.05 megawatts (MW) and a rotor diameter of 15 meters. Today’s new wind power projects have turbine capacities of about 2 MW onshore and 3–5 MW offshore.

Commercially available wind turbines have reached 8 MW capacity, with rotor diameters of up to 164 metres. The average capacity of wind turbines increased from 1.6 MW in 2009 to 2 MW in 2014.

Ocean energy technology

Biomass energy technology

The movement of the ocean's waves, tides, and currents carries energy that can be harnessed and converted into electricity to power homes, buildings, and cities.

This movement occurs naturally when waves crash against coastlines and tidal currents ebb and flow. The energy available in this moving water is called kinetic energy, and it can be used to generate electricity.

A buoy can harness energy from the vertical rise and fall of ocean waves, as well as the back-and-forth and side-to-side movements, while currents and tides can generate electricity by spinning a turbine. Devices use to capture hydrokinetic power must be able to withstand turbulent and harsh conditions and be designed to preserve the integrity of the marine environment.

With oceans covering 75% of the planet and many water resources located near the most populated areas, ocean energy has great potential as a plentiful renewable resource.