There’s a lot of water to work with.
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Category: energy – Page 318
It’s not every day scientists say a new kind of renewable energy could satisfy the majority of our power needs, so when they do, it’s worth leaning in close.
In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have found that energy harvested from the evaporation of water in US lakes and reservoirs could power nearly 70 percent of the nation’s electricity demands, generating a whopping 325 gigawatts of electricity.
Alongside the great strides being made in solar and wind, biophysicist Ozgur Sahin from Columbia University says natural evaporation represents a massive unexplored resource of environmentally clean power generation, just waiting to be tapped.
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Cool Wearable! Actually does something useful & could help reduce energy waste.
Sitting in a stifling subway car or walking Boston’s cold winter streets may soon become more bearable, thanks to a “personal thermostat” wristband being released by MIT spinout Embr Labs.
For a design competition in 2013, four MIT engineering students created a smart wristband, called Wristify, that makes its wearer feel warmer or cooler through its contact with the skin on the wrist. After much fanfare, and a lot of research and development, the wristband will hit the shelves early next year.
The wristband, now called Embr Wave, has a flat aluminum top that includes a colored display users adjust from blue to red, to provide cooling or warming, respectively. The device works because the wrist is one of the most thermally sensitive parts of body. It’s also an area where people are most comfortable putting new wearable technologies.
It’s a bionic leaf that could revolutionize everything we thought we knew about clean energy.
Harvard scientists open the door to an energetic revolution that has allowed them to test successfully a system that converts sunlight into liquid fuel.
In other words, the chemist who gave us the artificial leaf a couple of years ago has GENETICALLY ENGINEERED A BACTERIUM to absorb hydrogen and carbon dioxide converting them into alcohol fuel.
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ARCA Space Corporation has announced its linear aerospike engine is ready to start ground tests as the company moves towards installing the engine in its Demonstrator 3 rocket. Designed to power the world’s first operational Single-Stage-To-Orbit (SSTO) satellite launcher, the engine took only 60 days to complete from when fabrication began.
Over the past 60 years, space launches have become pretty routine. The first stage ignites, the rocket lifts slowly and majestically from the launch pad before picking up speed and vanishing into the blue. Minutes later, the first stage shuts down and separates from the upper stages, which ignite and burn in turn until the payload is delivered into orbit.
This approach was adopted not only because it provides enough fuel to lift the payload while conserving weight, but also because the first-stage engines, which work best at sea level, are very inefficient at higher altitudes or in space, so different engines need to be employed for each stage of flight.
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The grants focus on improving grid resiliency during a cyberattack and speeding recovery.
The Energy Department announced a roughly $33 million investment Tuesday in seven projects aimed at securing the electric grid against cyberattacks, physical attacks and weather disasters.
The projects are designed both to make grid systems more secure against cyberattacks and to improve their ability to withstand a cyberattack, according to a department fact sheet.
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(3Ders.org) The rapid advance of 3D printing technology means that hybrid-material wind turbine blades complete with metal mesh inserts are no longer the stuff of imagination. These energy savers with “sci-fi-level” performance could become reality in as soon as two years. Philip Totaro of Totaro & Associates, “The greatest challenge for wind turbine blade structural and manufacturing engineers is to implement the idealized performance and noise mitigated designs of aerodynamics engineers,” explains Totaro. “Limitations of previous generations of manufacturing technology and the reliance on lower cost materials have limited the type of spar/shear web structures which could be utilized.” But 3D printing could be about to change all that, Totaro says.
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The sun fired off yet another powerful solar flare yesterday (Sept. 10), its seventh in seven days.
The flare, which peaked at 12:06 EDT (1606 GMT), covered North and South America in high-energy light. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) released a statement that warned of strong, high-frequency radio blackouts and navigation-system disruption, potentially lasting up to an hour.
Like the six other flares observed since Sept. 4, this one came from a sunspot known as Active Region (AR) 2673, which is currently turning away from Earth and will soon be out of sight.
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