The main type of battery that is used at the moment, which looks like it's here to stay, is lithium iron batteries. Some of those metals pose environmental hazards in the way that they are ind and some of those metals are mined in conditions that have raised concern. The technology to recycle these lethiumion batteries already exists. But the challenge will be to make it efficient enough so that extracting the metals from the spent batteries will be as cheap, or cheaper, than taking it from the earth.
A team is creating bespoke words for scientific terms in African languages, and the sustainability of the electric car boom.
00:46 Creating new words for scientific terms
Many words that are common to science have never been written in some African languages, or speakers struggle to agree what the right term is. Now a new project aims to change that, by translating 180 research papers into six languages spoken by millions of people across the continent of Africa.
As electric cars become more ubiquitous, manufacturers will have to up the production of batteries needed to power them. But that begs the question - can they be mass produced in a sustainable way?
We discuss some highlights from the Nature Briefing. This time, how a tusk-based ‘chemical GPS’ revealed details of a mammoth’s enormous journeys , and why the Perseverance rover’s first efforts to collect a Mars rock sample didn’t go according to plan.