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Archive for the ‘energy’ category: Page 166

Feb 25, 2022

AT&T begins testing and deployment of discreet 5G radios on city street lamp posts

Posted by in categories: energy, internet

These smaller 5G antenna setups are coming to more cities.


AT&T is expanding tests of small cell 5G radios that can discreetly hide on top of city street light posts without extra power or boxes. The technology was developed in partnership with Ericsson and Ubicquia.

Feb 25, 2022

CircuitMess’ Chatter Is a Build-It-Yourself Arduino-Compatible Encrypted LoRa Messaging Gadget

Posted by in categories: encryption, energy

These Arduino-compatible handheld kits transmit chat messages and GIFs over long ranges, encrypted for privacy.


The material could replace rare metals and lead to more economical production of carbon-neutral fuels.

Feb 25, 2022

A new catalyst to optimize the oxygen production from water

Posted by in categories: energy, materials

The material could replace rare metals and lead to more economical production of carbon-neutral fuels.

Feb 24, 2022

Humanity is not even a Type 1 civilization. What would a Type 3 be capable of?

Posted by in category: energy

The Kardashev scale ranks civilizations from Type 1 to Type 3 based on energy harvesting. Humanity isn’t even at Type 1, yet.

Feb 23, 2022

Coin Cell Eliminator Does More Than Save Batteries

Posted by in categories: electronics, energy

Coin cells are useful things that allow us to run small electronic devices off a tiny power source. However, they don’t have a lot of capacity, and they can run out pretty quickly if you’re hitting them hard when developing a project. Thankfully, [bobricius] has just the tool to help.

The device is simple – it’s a PCB sized just so to fit into a slot for a CR2016 or CR2032 coin cell. The standard board fits a CR2016 slot thanks to the thickness of the PCB, and a shim PCB can be used to allow the device to be used in a CR2032-sized slot instead.

It’s powered via a Micro USB connector, and has a small regulator on board to step down the 5 V supply to the requisite 3 V expected from a typical coin cell. [bobricius] also gave the device a neat additional feature – a pair of pads for easy attachment of multimeter current probes. Simply open the jumper on the board, hook up a pair of leads, and it’s easy to measure the current being drawn from the ersatz coin cell.

Feb 22, 2022

NanoWire Tech Could Usher In a New Age of Supercomputing

Posted by in categories: economics, energy, government, nanotechnology, physics, supercomputing

Building a better supercomputer is something many tech companies, research outfits, and government agencies have been trying to do over the decades. There’s one physical constraint they’ve been unable to avoid, though: conducting electricity for supercomputing is expensive.

Not in an economic sense—although, yes, in an economic sense, too—but in terms of energy. The more electricity you conduct, the more resistance you create (electricians and physics majors, forgive me), which means more wasted energy in the form of heat and vibration. And you can’t let things get too hot, so you have to expend more energy to cool down your circuits.

Feb 22, 2022

Two More Energy Companies Go Under As Crisis Worsens

Posted by in category: energy

Whoop Energy and XCel Power have ceased trading – affecting around 550 customers.

Consumers from both energy firms will be designated a new supplier by market regulator Ofgem – through its supplier of last resort process.

Whoop Energy (Whoop) provides gas and electricity to 262 customers, including 50 households (domestic consumers).

Feb 22, 2022

Large content platforms want to contribute to the cost of European digital infrastructure

Posted by in category: energy

New applications in energy, defense and telecommunications could receive a boost after a team from The University of Texas at Austin created a new type of “nanocrystal gel”—a gel composed of tiny nanocrystals each 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair that are linked together into an organized network.

Feb 21, 2022

Ethiopia starts generating power at Nile mega-dam

Posted by in category: energy

Feb 21, 2022

Versatile ‘nanocrystal gel’ could enable advances in energy, defense and telecommunications

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy

New applications in energy, defense and telecommunications could receive a boost after a team from The University of Texas at Austin created a new type of “nanocrystal gel”—a gel composed of tiny nanocrystals each 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair that are linked together into an organized network.

The crux of the team’s discovery is that this is easily tunable. That is, it can be switched between two different states by changing the temperature. This means the material can work as an , absorbing different frequencies of light depending on whether it’s in a gelled state or not. So, it could be used, for example, on the outside of buildings to control heating or cooling dynamically. This type of optical filter also has applications for defense, particularly for thermal camouflage.

The gels can be customized for these wide-ranging applications because both the nanocrystals and the molecular linkers that connect them into networks are designer components. Nanocrystals can be chemically tuned to be useful for routing communications through fiber optic networks or keep the temperature of space craft steady on remote planetary bodies. Linkers can be designed to cause gels to switch based on ambient temperature or detection of environmental toxins.