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During the middle ages, the concept of the perpetual motion machine would develop. The first law, known as the Law of Conservation of Energy, would prohibit the existence of a perpetual motion machine, by preventing the creation or destruction of energy within an isolated system.
As the poet Dylan Thomas once explained, it is “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
Organic photochemistry brings life to Earth, allowing plants to “eat” sunlight. Using this power of light to make new molecules in the lab instead of the leaf, from fuel to pharmaceuticals, is one of the grand challenges of photochemical research.
What is old is new again. Sometimes gaining new insight requires a return to old tools, with a modern twist. Now, a collaborative team from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Princeton University has resurrected a century-old microwave technique to reveal a surprising feature of well-established light-driven chemistry.
Boron as rocket fuel has been a tough nut to crack.
Rocket scientists in China are working to develop a boron-powered supersonic missile that can fly like a commercial airliner and then swim in the water to act as a torpedo, South China Morning Post.
IStock/AlexLMX
Continue reading “Boron-powered Chinese missile will work in the air and underwater” »
Move over, Elon Musk and Richard Branson: A Canadian company wants to join the fight for better high-speed train travel.
Toronto-based TransPod recently unveiled plans for a “FluxJet,” a fully-electric transportation system that’s “a hybrid between an aircraft and a train.” The project, currently in the conceptual stage, would involve 82-foot-long, magnetically levitated trains that would carry passengers at roughly 621 miles per hour.
The country’s space agency aims to overtake NASA with its ongoing Chang’e lunar program and future crewed missions to Mars.
China announced its plans to launch three new uncrewed missions to the Moon after the discovery of a new lunar mineral that could be harvested as an energy source in the future, a report from Bloomberg.
Continue reading “China plans 3 moon missions to investigate a potential new source of energy” »
These companies operate in strategically important areas such as semiconductors, manufacturing, energy, and minerals.
The Chinese government has selected 8,997 little-known industrial enterprises that will enjoy preferential treatment from central and provincial governments as the country prepares to supersede the technological prowess of the U.S., South China Morning Post.
Rawf8/iStock.
Most of the world’s greatest wind power resources are offshore – often a long way offshore, where the water’s so deep that it’s impractical to build typical fan-on-a-stick wind turbines with bases sunk deep into the sea floor. Floating wind, at this stage, is so vastly expensive to build, deploy and maintain that it ends up costing two to three times as much per kilowatt-hour of energy as fixed-bottom offshore installations.
There’s a huge opportunity here for technological advancement, and companies like Norway’s World Wide Wind are proposing some pretty radical ideas in the space. A lot of the energy cost comes down to the size, weight and materials involved in the structure of the turbine, along with the logistical issues and specialized equipment needed to build, install and maintain the things.
Continue reading “T-Omega re-thinks floating offshore wind turbines for huge cost savings” »
One of the biggest contributions in the near future could come from smaller, more compact reactors. Several microreactor designs are currently under development in the United States that will be smaller in size, more flexible to operate and versatile enough to provide energy to end users for a variety of services ranging from electricity production to water purification.
A group of University of Texas at Dallas researchers and their colleagues have made significant improvements to energy-harvesting yarns they invented called twistrons, which are made from carbon nanotubes and produce electricity when repeatedly stretched.
The researchers describe the improved twistrons and some potential applications of the technology in an article published in the July 7 print issue of Advanced Materials.
In a proof-of-principle experiment, Zhong Wang, Ph.D., lead author of the article and a research associate in the Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute at UT Dallas, sewed the new twistron yarns into a glove. As someone wearing the glove formed different letters and phrases in American Sign Language, the hand gestures generated electricity.
Circa 2017 I think with a light into matter laser we could create water but this idea could be a first step.
Lasers are one of the iconic breakthroughs of 20th century science. They produce coherent photons in tight beams of specific energy. They can transmit data, detect molecules, and burn through metal. The photons they produce also have significant momentum.
And that raises an interesting question. Is it possible to transfer this momentum to generate matter rays such as a liquid flow? Not until now.
Continue reading “Engineers Turn a Laser Beam into a Stream of Liquid” »
