Next-gen cars: Silicon Valley bids to become the new Detroit

The Googlemobile, Google's famed self-driving car, has logged some 500,000 miles since 2009. Capturing 1.3 million bits of data per second along with video feeds and radar pulses, the car's computers can "see" the vehicles around it and keep clear of them. Nissan's CEO, Carlos Ghosn, predicted driverless cars will hit showrooms by 2020. The market for smart vehicle systems like lane-departure warnings and collision-avoidance will be around $22 billion by 2020, Ian Riches, director of the global automotive practice at London-based Strategy Analytics, told Forbes.

Meanwhile, Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric carmaker, is riding high. The company reported its first ever quarterly profit this month and saw its stock price shoot upwards of $97 per share—an all-time high. At more than $10 billion, the company's market value is now greater than that of established automakers Fiat and Mitsubishi Motors. And for icing on the cake, Tesla's first made-from-scratch car, the electric Model S sedan, has received a rare near-perfect score from Consumer Reports, according to National Geographic.

In the first three months of this year, Tesla reported $7 million in revenue from development services. Another $68 million, or roughly one in every eight dollars of revenue during the quarter, came from selling credits earned under California's zero emission vehicles (ZEV) program. About $17 million came from sales of "other regulatory credits." The company is preparing to take advantage of its popularity on Wall Street by raising an estimated $648 million by selling a combination of shares and debt-like securities, to be repaid in 2018.

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Big IF campaign to end global hunger

Ekkleisa reports that 45,000 people joined the Big IF anti-hunger rally from 2pm-5pm in London's Hyde Park on Saturday 8 June. Its aim was to press for global action, and it starts ten days of campaigning action targeted at the G8 and other world leaders. There has also been a rally in Belfast, and Big IF actions have been developing across the country. Two million petals were arranged in the shape of the campaign petition in London, to symbolise children dying of hunger every year.

Meanwhile, in a small but helpful boost to the campaign, the the UK has committed an additional £375 million of core funding to help feed the world's poorest children, as part of a £2.7 billion global agreement. Participants at the G8 summit, who signed a Global Nutrition for Growth deal this week, committed their countries and organisations to:

• Improving the nutrition of 500 million pregnant women and young children.
• Reducing by an additional 20 million the number of children under five who are stunted.
• Saving the lives of at least 1.7 million children by preventing stunting, increasing breastfeeding and better treatment of severe and acute malnutrition.
  

'Enough Food For Everyone IF' is a joint coalition of over 200 UK organisations campaigning for action to eliminate the causes of hunger. Its key message is: "There is enough food for everyone, yet one in eight people do not have enough food. This year, world leaders must tackle hunger and save millions of lives."

The age of the solar cell printer has dawned

Inhabitat reports that an incredible new printer at the University of Melbourne has allowed researchers to print solar cells up to the size of an A3 sheet of paper every 2 seconds. Developed in collaboration between the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium (VICOSC), CSIRO, and the University of Melbourne, the solar cell printer makes renewable energy even easier to source. 

The solar cell printer can transform plastic or metal into photovoltaic panels ranging from the size of a fingernail up to an A3 sheet of paper. CSIRO's Dr. Scott Watkins foresees these cells being used on rooftops, glass surfaces, or even personal devices like laptops. In just three years, the researchers behind the printer have been able to increase the output size from just 2 centimeters to 30 centimeters wide.

The printer cost a whopping $200,000, although the University of Melbourne is accepting proposals for manufacturing orders – which will allow small companies to gain access to the device to print out projects (much like a screenprinting business). The printer lays semiconducting inks onto plastic or steel at a rate of one cell every two seconds.  Printed on flexible material, the solar cells are more versatile than silicon solar panels. The team will continue to work on making the printer more affordable so that they can make it available for purchase by other companies.

Urban mining: Glittering pavements and underworld treasure

According to New Scientist, the streets are literally paved with riches. A team at the University of Birmingham has set up a company called Roads to Riches to recover platinum from our catalytic converters that ends up as road dust. The best platinum mines in South Africa have 2-10 ppm of platinum in their ore. Street sweepings have 1 ppm, but are much easier and less expensive to mine. Birmingham University's Angela Murray calculates that £64 million of platinum metals are swept from UK roads every year and dumped. 

In fact, the riches may be even greater, since roadside soils have concentrations may be 100 to 1,000 times greater, according to the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. That's one of the reasons that academics like Helen Parker at the University of York, UK, are experimenting with 'hyper-accumulating' plants grown in soil rich in the platinum metals. Besides roadside plants, they have also found that seaweed can successfully capture gold, coppy, nickel, zinc and platinum group elements.

A team at Linkoping University in Sweden has another lucrative strategy. They estimate that there is between 90,000 and 400,00 tonnes of copper power cables worth $630 million beneath Swedish cities. Using this scrap metal instead of mining the copper would save 360,000 tonnes of CO2. In Japan, the source of riches is industrial waste sludge. In Nagano, these effluent flows have gold concentrations of up to 2.9 kg per tonne, nearly five times greater than conventional gold ores. This has also been a practice in India's major cities for some time, where gold is extracted from waste sludge in the jewellery districts.

Alchemy is possible: New partnership to turn waste into materials

During his plenary presentation at the Sustainable Brands 2013 conference, designer, author and sustainability thought leader William McDonough announced a new partnership between McDonough Innovation and Waste Management, Inc — North America's largest environmental solutions provider and residential recycler. The Sustainable Innovation Collaborative will directly serve producers, manufacturers, retailers and suppliers of packaged goods and products. Advising on product and packaging redesign for recyclability and positive ecological and health impacts will be among the collaborative's goals.

McDonough said: "Designing up from the dumpster is one reason why I am personally very excited to launch the Sustainable Innovation Collaborative with Waste Management. Working together, we will use the tools of design, science and principled business practices in collaboration with manufactures, retailers, distributors, consumers and recyclers of products and packaging to profitably work toward eliminating the very concept of waste. We can link healthy, safe materials and sophisticated logistics, and this allows us to bring a uniquely valuable perspective for continuous innovation and quality improvement with supply-side and demand-side collaborators."

"Over the years, enlightened manufacturers have taken positive and forward-looking steps to lighten their footprint on the environment," said Tom Carpenter — Director, Sustainability Services at Waste Management. "As those efforts have progressed, we now see a growing demand by these same manufacturers to address every link along supply chains that produce residual waste. This collaborative will combine design, recycling and material science expertise to guide these next generation strategies."

Biometrics stop drivers falling asleep at the wheel

The Fatigue Monitoring System (FMS) from Seeing Machines of Canberra, Australia, is designed to prevent accidents caused by tiredness, which account for 70 per cent of those where the driver was to blame. With an infrared camera that can see through sunglasses, and an image-processing computer, the FMS assesses the frequency, duration and speed of the driver's blinking to weigh up inattention and the likelihood of imminent "microsleeps".

An "eyes on road" message booms out if the FMS senses the driver is distracted, but a shrill alarm that's "humanly impossible to sleep through" sounds if a microsleep is predicted, says Seeing Machines' CEO Ken Kroeger. Mine operators are warned of each event wirelessly, so they can redeploy consistently sleepy drivers. In early tests the FMS reduced fatigue events by 72 per cent, Kroeger says. According to New Scientist, the drowsiness detector in the cab has proved so successful that US-based firm Caterpillar is fitting the $10,000 system in all its mining trucks.

Novartis social business expands healthcare access in India

Swiss-based healthcare company Novartis has joined the Business Call to Action (BCtA) with a commitment to further expand their rural healthcare programme in India, which has already reached more than 40 million people. Their the Arogya Parivar ("healthy family") programme aims to empower communities to make better healthcare decisions and expand access to health education and affordable drugs.

Over six years, Arogya Parivar has helped create more than 500 jobs and has built skills and capacity among hundreds of business partners, suppliers, and customers, including healthcare professionals in India. Its impact translates to providing 42 million people with improved access to healthcare across an estimated 33,000 villages. According to the company, 50,000 doctors and pharmacies have also received medical knowledge transfer.