Solar Lamps, Electric Taxiing Plane Systems and More Sustainable Energy and Transportation Solutions

Editor’s note: This is part five of our look at various aspects of the Sustainia100. Here are parts one, two, three, four and six.
Some of the transportation selections of the Sustainia100 show how traditionally oil-based modes can become cleaner, while others make green traveling all the more appealing.
In 16 countries, 8D Technologies provides a smartphone app that streamlines your biking route and checks for station availability. Meanwhile, a solution from First African Bicycle Information Organization, also known as FABIO, shows how biking can mean the difference between life and death in Uganda.
Sustainia’s research team reviewed more than 900 projects in transportation, energy and eight other sectors before selecting the 10-category list of 100. The Sustainia100 Advisory Board consists of 21 sector experts from 11 international research organizations.
Transportation
- Proterra: Rapidly charging electric buses for public transport
- 8D Technologies: Bike-sharing app connects users worldwide
- Maersk Container Industry: Refrigerated shipping cuts energy consumption
- BlaBlaCar: Ridesharing for people-powered transportation
- Transrail Sweden and Trafikverket: IT system for fuel-efficient railways
- LATAM Airlines Group and Honeywell: Second-generation biofuel for commercial flights
- ChargePoint: Large-scale EV charging with real-time availability
- Bhopal Municipal Corp.: Less congestion with bus rapid transit system
- Honeywell and Safran: Electric taxiing system for planes
- FABIO: Bicycling for better health in low-income communities
Energy
- Hydrogenics Corp.: Bridging renewable energy and natural gas dystems
- Gram Power: Smart microgrids for renewable energy access
- Energy Development Corp.: Harnessing geothermal energy while preserving forests
- Aquion Energy: Saltwater batteries to store the sun’s energy
- Government of El Hierro, Endesa and the Canary Islands Technological Institute: Autonomous energy system for remote islands
- Opower: Saving energy through data and cloud software
- SunLife: Solar lamps to replace kerosene lighting
- Abengoa: Solar plant with molten salt thermal energy storage
- Ambri: Liquid metal batteries for renewable energy storage
- Bjarne Schläger Design and Alfred Priess: Self-sufficient solar street lighting
Sweden's reindeer have a problem. In winter, they feed on lichens buried beneath the snow. But the climate crisis is making this difficult. Warmer temperatures mean moisture sometimes falls as rain instead of snow. When the air refreezes, a layer of ice forms between the reindeer and their meal, forcing them to wander further in search of ideal conditions. And sometimes, this means crossing busy roads.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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In many schools, the study of climate change is limited to the science. But at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, students in one class also learn how to take climate action.