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TED Talks Daily is supported by Northwestern Mutual. Just like all of us, Northwestern Mutual financial professionals love a good talk. They'll take the time to ask better questions to get to know you and your unique goals. They'll help you find any financial blind spots you might have and uncover opportunities that others may miss. Then they'll partner with you to build a personalized financial plan designed to help you reach your short and long term financial goals. It's a better way to money. Learn more@nm.com the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company Milwaukee, Wisconsin if you've built a.
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Business or a career, you know there's no substitute for knowing how to do things right. Especially when the market's unpredictable. That's why Dante cleaves is glad McDonald's invests heavily in education. I came in with experience. What McDonald's taught me was how to run a restaurant and run a business. Real operational death, leadership development, tech training and support that never stops. Learn how the right training can raise your game@McDonald's.com franchise this information is not an offer of a franchise. An offering is made by Prospectus only.
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This show is brought to you by Dell introducing your new Dell PC. Powered by the Intel Core Ultra processor, it helps you handle a lot even when your holiday to do list gets to be a lot because it's built with all day battery plus powerful AI features that help you do it all with ease. From editing images to drafting emails to summarizing large documents to multitasking so you can organize your holiday shopping and make custom holiday decor and search for great holiday deals and respond to holiday requests and customer questions and customers requesting custom things and plan the perfect holiday dinner for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians and Uncle Mike's carnivore diet. Luckily you can get a PC that helps you do it all faster so you can get it all done. That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Get yours today@dell.com holiday terms and conditions apply. See dell.com for details. You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host Elise Hu. It's clear there are so many mind blowing ideas and solutions already out there for tackling climate change. So how do we scale up the solutions for climate tech innovator Xu Hao? It's a lot about how we make these solutions profitable. In his talk he explains that we already have the Science to turn for example, captured CO2 into plastic or Even jet fuel. But we need more infrastructure to scale up to accelerate climate action. Across the globe.
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Humans have been using alcohol for thousands of years. But when did we understand it soberly? It wasn't until the 1700s that scientists first discovered the formula of alcohol, C2H5. Oh, that. Alcohol finally got its professional LinkedIn profile called Ethanol and started working as an important chemical. Advances in engineering and business have since enabled large scale production of ethanol. And today it is a $114 billion industry. We use it in cosmetics, in fashion, in medicine, in food, and obviously beverages. And it's even more relevant today as fuel and raw material for some of the low carbon industries. So why am I telling you about alcohol? Because it is a good example of how science, engineering and business work together to change the world. But it actually took ethanol more than 200 years to do so. We simply couldn't wait that long. To tackle our climate challenge, we urgently need to speed up and scale up low carbon solutions. So, my name is Xuhao and I lead Tencent's climate change initiatives. We are a major Chinese tech company with products in social media, with video games and cloud services. And we also care about climate change. It's not just limited to data center efficiency or sourcing of renewable energy. As important as that is, my colleagues and I have been working to explore how we could contribute to the acceleration of low carbon technology innovations. That's why we launched CarbonX program. And three years in, we are actually more optimistic than ever. Why? Because we felt the right answer is not so complicated. We already have lots of innovation in science, in engineering and business. And the secret to further accelerate the process is also simple. Just do them all at once. Let me further explain. First, most of the scientific discoveries needed to decarbonize our economy has already been made. Really? Today, we generate electricity from solar and wind. We store energy using chemistry or physics. We turn carbon dioxide into all kinds of chemicals. And nuclear fusion is also on the Horizon. All right, 100 years already saved. Let me give you a specific example. CRISPR is a genetic scissor that well known in the pharmaceutical industry. They use it to edit genetic code to find cures for diseases and new drugs. But it can be applied to carbon too. Take gas Jim, a Chinese startup, they actually apply CRISPR to a certain bacteria called clostridium so that these little guys can actually feed on carbon dioxide and produce butanol. So why does butanol matter? Because together with our old friend ethanol, as well as butanol, we actually get ethylene Glycol, polyethylene, polypropylene, butylacetate, dibutylphosphatelate, tributyl citrate, and many more. A bit lost, right? These are. The chemicals are actually used in paint, clothes, toys, water bottles, furniture, and the list goes on and on and on. Essential to everyday life, but all made out of fossil fuel. Today, with claustridium, we could potentially make all of them using carbon dioxide instead. It's really great science. So it's not the science holding us up. What about engineering? Very important, but unglamorous. Well, engineering requires lots of innovation too, because we have to replicate a success in the laboratory test tubes and scale up it in a much, much bigger way, from grams to kilograms to tens to millions of tons. Eventually a big factory. To do that, engineers often face two challenges. First, how to build a factory faster and cheaper. And then how to operate it effectively. Let's say we want to build a plant that produce 20,000 tons of clean chemicals using carbon dioxide. Do we build one big reactor or a few smaller ones? This is where the process engineers come in. How much pressure is needed in these reactors? What are the flow rates needed for the gases or the liquids so that they are balanced and the production are most effective? How much land such a facility will occupy? How does it integrate with the existing factory? And probably most importantly, how can we build such a plant faster and cheaper? Well, all of these considerations determines the fans, pumps, compressors, reactors, and all the other parts we will use. And whether we could use off the shelf, standardized equipment, because otherwise, if we have to design novel parts, it will be much more expensive and often takes much longer. So it's almost like pick up pieces of Lego blocks. To build a beautiful model of your own design, both creativity and discipline are needed at the same time. Then it comes operational efficiency. Feynman Dynamics is another startup. They actually combine carbon dioxide and green hydrogen to make green hydrocarbons and produce sustainable aviation fuel or saf, that could potentially clean up our flights. So the key is actually a catalyst that can efficiently convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide. The engineering challenge here is how to manufacture such a high quality catalyst at much bigger volume. The process is almost like make a fruit smoothie. You need to blend fruits just right to get a delicious drink. But when you try to make much bigger batches, sometimes the blender got too hot or the fruit doesn't mix well. That will jeopardize the taste of our drink. To tackle this challenge, engineers at Feynman Dynamic actually designed, actually borrowed practice from from pharmaceutical chemistry, they designed a special high speed mixer that passes the chemicals at really high velocity in a tube and then circulates back the finished product back to the main reactor to make high quality catalysts. It's almost like you pre blend avocados and apples first and then put them back into the big blender to get the ultimate drink. So this rather small engineering staffs actually enabled Feynman Dynamics to produce their catalyst at industrial scale. So today SAF is still more than five times more expensive than conventional jet fuel. But with lots of innovation like this, and also the production at scale, I believe SAF can beat jet fuel in cost within 10 years time. So the engineers are hard at work. But what about business? Because business is all about price, cost, market and profitability. And in order to reduce carbon emission in the scale of gigatons, startups must turn their science and engineering innovation into profitable ventures. But we got plenty of good news here too. Some of the technologies are approaching the moment where they cost the same or even less than the fossil fuel alternative, sometimes without a carbon price. Yuan Chu is a startup that makes calcium carbonate out of carbon dioxide. Calcium carbonates may also sound unfamiliar, but these white powders are actually in our everyday life. From paper to toothpaste, to washing powders to car tires. By using leftover calcium from biomass or the steel making industry, Yuan Chu can actually produce high quality calcium carbonate cheaper than the conventional method which is digging limestone out of the ground and burning lots of fossil fuel to make it great Green discount, right? Then sometimes business is all about the size of the eventual market. Moguang is another startup that actually developed this really groundbreaking new material called radioactive cooling. So this material not only reflects 93% of sun radiation back, it could achieve additional cooling by radiate the heat back to to outer space, leveraging certain wavelength cooling window. Guess what requires cooling? Melting glaciers. And that's why we launched a pilot project with Moguang in Dagu Glacier, one of the endangered glaciers near Tibetan Plateau. Over the past three years, the melting has slowed down by as much as 80%. But. But the project itself is actually not a business. Guess what? It is any surface that requires cooling. So that's your mobile phone, glass wall of a building, or data centers. So the great news is not only Moguang covered glacier with this material, they already integrated many of their material into hundreds of thousands of mobile phones and sports cameras. And expanding to other products very quickly. So there is truly huge market potential. All right, so the science is here. The engineers are hard at work and the business model are scaling up. So our final question is can we further accelerate? Of course we can, simply by bringing together scientists, industry experts and and the business people in the same room. So they start to thinking about all the tough questions from the very beginning at the same time. So the scientists will probably ask how much gigajoule of energy is required to capture one ton of carbon dioxide. The industry expert will ask how does your technology help me decarbonize my industry and how does it fit into my factory? And the investor will probably ask what's your plan to grow your business by 100 times in the next five years and to go public. This is almost exactly what happened at Carbonx program. Let's just say this productive dialogue, heated debate, sometimes really disagreement can be challenging, but it really help speed up the process because it got everybody to thinking about everything at the same time, not waiting 200 years like alcohol now. Remember Gastrin and those cute Claustridium? We recently launched a clean chemical consortium that brings consumer brands, big chemical companies and startups like Gasgene or Yuan Chu to try to make everything out of carbon dioxide. That's also working on science, engineering and business all at once. So by now hopefully you guys understand why I felt we should every reason to be really optimistic because we already have plenty of scientific discovery, engineering, innovation and business models so that we should be inspired to imagine a world with net zero and cleanliness future most likely much better than what AI can generate for us today. Therefore, I'm definitely drunk on the possibility of a better and cleaner future. Cheers everyone. Thank you.
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That was Xu Hao speaking at TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more@ted.com curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Songmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balarazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your fe. Thanks for listening.
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Start your transformation journey@ey.com transformation.
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You know we love recommending new movies for you guys to watch and I'm obsessed with Regretting you. It's based on the best selling book Regretting youg introducing audiences to Morgan Grant, played by Allison Williams. We love her and girls and her daughter Clara who's played by McKenna Grace as they explore what's left behind after a devastating accident reveals a shocking betrayal and forces them to confront family secrets, redefine love and rediscover each other. Regretting you is a story of growth, resilience and self discovery in the aftermath of tragedy. It also stars Dave Franco and Mason Thames with Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald and it's in theaters this October. It has an all star cast. Big Based on the book written by number one New York Times best selling author Colleen Hoover and director Josh Boone is no stranger to bringing these books to life. He's the guy behind the Fault in Our Stars. It's the perfect film to share with your best friend, your mom, your grandma, your high school niece. It's filled with love, tears and laughter, balancing comedy with romance and drama. But you know what sounds right up our alley. It'll be available in the US October 24, 2025 to watch on the big screen it at a theater near you.
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We live in a culture obsessed with dieting, weight loss and exercise, and that can make eating disorder behaviors easy to miss. But the reality is eating disorders are serious mental illnesses that take a major toll on your health and your life. But recovery is possible. Eating disorders are more common than you might think. Chances are you know someone who is struggling with one, or maybe you're struggling yourself. If you're concerned about an eating disorder in yourself or a loved one, I want to introduce you to eqip. Equip is a fully virtual evidence based eating disorder treatment program that helps patients achieve lasting recovery at home. Every EQIP patient is matched with a multidisciplinary care team that includes a therapist, dietitian, medical provider and mentors. And you get a personalized treatment plan that's tailored to your unique goals and challenges. Equip treats patients of all ages and all eating disorder diagnoses. It's covered by insurance and there's no wait list. If you think that you or a loved one could be struggling with an eating disorder, don't wait to get help. Visit Equip Health to learn more. That's Equip Health.