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Category: energy – Page 345

Pressure is on DARPA by US Military to speed up on completing the soft Exosuit.

The clothing-like Soft Exosuit has been described as a “Wearable Robot” by the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) that’s commissioning universities and research institutions to advance this military technology. The DARPA Soft Exosuit is part of the agency’s Warrior Web program.

A prototype Soft Exosuit had a series of webbing straps around the lower half of the body with a low-power microprocessor and a network of flexible strain sensors. These electronics act as the “brain” and “nervous system” of the Soft Exosuit. They continuously monitor data signals, including suit tension, wearer position (walking, running, crouched) and more.

In 2014, DARPA awarded $2.9 million to The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University to further develop its Soft Exosuit, other versions of which might eventually help persons (military and civilian) with limited mobility.

Continue reading “DARPA Speeds-up Work on ‘Soft Exosuit’ that will Strengthen US Soldiers” | >

Improving energy efficiencies — nice.

The remarkable properties researchers at the Australian National University (ARC Centre of Excellence CUDOS) and the University of California Berkeley have discovered in a new nano-metamaterial could lead to highly efficient thermophotovoltaic cells. The new artificial material glows in an unusual way when headed.

As shown in the image, the metamaterial comprises 20 stacked alternating layers of 30-nm-thick gold and 45-nm-thick magnesium fluoride dielectric, perforated with 260 × 530 nm holes that are arranged into a 750 × 750 nm square lattice.

Thermophotovoltaics typically use a heated object as a source of radiation that is then converted to electricity by a photovoltaic cell. The caveat is that heated object emits light in all directions and over a broad spectral region, which reduces the efficiency of the light-to-electricity conversion. However, “The demonstrated metamaterial emits thermal radiation predominantly in particular directions and [within] a particular spectral region, which could make the conversion more efficient,” says Dr Sergey Kruk at the Nonlinear Physics Centre in the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.

Continue reading “Magnetic Hyperbolic Optical Metamaterial Could Advance Thermophotovoltaics” | >

Excellent read about future Commerce in Space — could we see an Amazon or a HomeDepot in space?

In space there are no service stations to pull into and get replacement parts for your satellite. Nor is there a towing service if a satellite is in the wrong orbit, a construction contractor to help you build structures, or a “Space Depot” for those who wish to “do-it-themselves” on orbit. In other words, we still operate within a first-generation space industrial enterprise, i.e. all commerce is on Earth, and we only focus on bits (data) coming from monolithic things that go up (i.e., satellites), which eventually die or just come down with no chance of repair or reuse.

Today the commercial space industry focuses exclusively on applications that support launching science, exploration, military, or established earth-bound data communication or delivery services, focusing data to/from space. The lack of technology to support or “markets” to enter has resulted in nebulous, unconsolidated and without-a-critical-mass investment in space-based infrastructure, industrialization, space resources (survey and process maturation) and global utility creation and delivery applications in space. However, all that may finally be changing.

Space applications that are not solely data driven are becoming real. Asteroid mining, fuel depots and commercial space stations are all being actively pursued by companies around the world, as examples of different types of revenue-generating endeavors outside of data-driven end use. These missions and their spacecraft will require greater upkeep, maintenance, repair, and consumable restoration. Consequently, “services” are now being talked about and pursued, executed from one space platform to another. The most talked-about “service” event is providing either consumables (fuel) or failure remediation to satellites on orbit, referred to as “servicing”. However, a handful of companies are seeking to break the shackles that today’s satellites are stuck with at launch, and go well beyond “servicing” into modifying and even constructing new space platforms, on orbit.

Continue reading “From data to service: the transition to “space-to-space” commerce” | >

China’s state-owned Shenhua Group Corp. has just signed a memorandum of understanding with Santa Monica based SolarReserve, partnering to bring 1,000 MW of clean energy into China.

Green is going global. More and more countries are getting in on the green energy bandwagon, shifting their energy dependencies from fossil fuel burning to renewable energy. And the biggest recipient of this? Solar.

Countries are increasingly depending on the Sun to provide for their energy needs. And this means the building of bigger and better solar farms.

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Interesting method in controlling energy sources and efficiencies via Quantum legos.

The chrome-plated bricks can conduct electricity, integrate active parts such as LED lights, motor blocks, and even sound, light and proximity sensors. The conductive bricks feature flexible side-arms that ensure electrical connection between two adjacent blocks, and the whole assemblies are powered by a Bluetooth-controlled 9V battery block. The built-in Bluetooth controller lets users change the current’s direction and voltage levels via a mobile application.

That means the Brixo bricks can not only be triggered by sound, light and touch, but also controlled by any Bluetooth connected device, taking the good old Lego bricks further into the IoT world (the Danish company has its entries in the cloud via its Mindstorms Lego series and the augmented reality-capable Nexo Knights toys.

The company is promising open 3D building instructions, an online library of models and hacks to its followers, encouraging a community of Brixo enthusiasts to share their models.

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Nice

Rice University photonics researchers have unveiled a new nanoparticle amplifier that can generate infrared light and boost the output of one light by capturing and converting energy from a second light.

The innovation, the latest from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP), is described online in a paper in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters (“Toward Surface Plasmon-Enhanced Optical Parametric Amplification (SPOPA) with Engineered Nanoparticles: A Nanoscale Tunable Infrared Source”). The device functions much like a laser, but while lasers have a fixed output frequency, the output from Rice’s nanoscale “optical parametric amplifier” (OPA) can be tuned over a range of frequencies that includes a portion of the infrared spectrum.

Light-Amplifying Nanoparticle

Continue reading “Photonics researchers create first nanoscale ‘optical parametric amplifier’” | >

Left hemisphere of J. Piłsudski’s brain, lateral view.

A new study has found that a faster metabolism is the main reason that humans were able to evolve bigger brains than other closely related apes. Humans burned 635 more calories per day than gorillas, and a whopping 820 more calories per day than the orangutans in the study.

Although the study findings seem promising, more research on the issue is required since the research was performed only on adults.

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Scientists have sustained human embryos in a petri dish for 13 days, shattering the previous record of nine days. The breakthrough will allow researchers to study early fetal development in unprecedented detail, and brings us one step closer to viable “artificial wombs.” But it’s adding fuel to an already heated ethical debate.

Two separate papers published this week, one in Nature and one in Nature Cell Biology, have reported culturing human embryos for nearly two weeks, going well beyond previous efforts. There’s no reason to believe that the embryos couldn’t have survived beyond the two-week mark, but the experiment had to be halted to adhere to the internationally agreed 14-day limit on human embryo research.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-to-build-an-artificial-womb-476464703

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