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Category: energy – Page 349

Germany isn’t content with relying on financial incentives to usher in an era of pollution-free cars. The country’s Bundesrat (federal council) has passed a resolution calling for a ban on new internal combustion engine cars by 2030. From then on, you’d have to buy a zero-emissions vehicle, whether it’s electric or running on a hydrogen fuel cell. This isn’t legally binding, but the Bundesrat is asking the European Commission to implement the ban across the European Union… and when German regulations tend to shape EU policy, there’s a chance that might happen.

The council also wants the European Commission to review its taxation policies and their effect on the “stimulation of emission-free mobility.” Just what that means isn’t clear. It could involve stronger tax incentives for buying zero-emissions cars, but it could also involve eliminating tax breaks for diesel cars in EU states. Automakers are already worried that tougher emission standards could kill diesels — remove the low cost of ownership and it’d only hasten their demise.

Not that the public would necessarily be worried. Forbes notes that registrations of diesels, still mainstays of the European car market, dropped sharply in numerous EU countries in August. There’s a real possibility that Volkswagen’s emission cheating scandal is having a delayed effect on diesel sales. Combine that with larger zero-emissions incentives and the proposed combustion engine ban, and it might not take much for Europeans to go with electric or hydrogen the next time they go car shopping.

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Just last month, physicists made the best case yet for why time crystals — hypothetical structures that have movement without energy — could technically exist as physical objects.

And now, four years after they were first proposed, scientists have managed to add a fourth dimension — the movement of time — to a crystal for the first time, giving it the ability to act as a kind of perpetual ‘time-keeper’.

First proposed by Nobel-Prize winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek back in 2012, time crystals are hypothetical structures that appear to have movement even at their lowest energy state, known as a ground state.

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D-Wave 2000-qubit processor (credit: D-Wave Systems)

D-Wave Systems announced Tuesday (Sept. 28, 2016) a new 2000-qubit processor, doubling the number of qubits over the previous-generation D-Wave 2X system. The new system will enable larger problems to be solved and performance improvements of up to 1000 times.

D-Wave’s quantum system runs a quantum-annealing algorithm to find the lowest points in a virtual energy landscape representing a computational problem to be solved. The lowest points in the landscape correspond to optimal or near-optimal solutions to the problem. The increase in qubit count enables larger and more difficult problems to be solved, and the ability to tune the rate of annealing of individual qubits will enhance application performance.

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A NASA-funded study has solved a longstanding mystery over the origin of X-rays that permeate space in our Solar System, but in doing so, it’s also discovered an entire group of high-energy X-rays that can’t be explained.

The research comes from a new analysis of data recorded by NASA’s DXL rocket mission, which took flight in 2012 to settle the question of what creates these low-energy X-ray emissions – called the diffuse soft X-ray background – in our corner of the galaxy.

At the time, there were two central hypotheses. X-ray emissions were known to come from solar wind, but scientists also thought they might originate from what’s called the Local Hot Bubble – a theorised region of hot gas that envelops our Solar System. But which was correct?

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Realistic hover cars coming to future near you.

The quest to know the mysterious recipe for high-temperature superconductivity, which could enable revolutionary advances in technologies that make or use electricity, just took a big leap forward thanks to new research by an international team of experimental and theoretical physicists.

The research paper appears in the journal Science on Sept. 16, 2016. The research is focused on revealing the mysterious ingredients required for high-temperature superconductivity — the ability of a material’s electrons to pair up and travel without friction at relatively high temperatures, enabling them to lose no energy — to be super efficient — while conducting electricity.

The research team’s achievements are an important step in recent efforts to improve today’s superconducting materials, which have superconducting powers only if they are cooled below a critical temperature, hundreds of degrees below the freezing point of water — temperatures at which helium is a liquid — making them impractical for use in most electronic devices.

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According to the Kardashev scale, a Type III civilization is a society that has managed to harness (and control) the energy output of a galaxy. Here’s what that means.

To measure the level of a civilization’s advancement, the Kardashev scale focuses on the amount of energy that a civilization is able to harness. Obviously, the amount of power available to a civilization is linked to how widespread the civilization is (you can’t harness the power of a star if you are confined to your home planet, and you certainly can’t harness the power of a galaxy if you can’t even get out of your solar system).

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Nice method for refrig.; now imagine it in autos/ various forms of transportation, buildings, appliances, etc.

NEW YORK, NY – 9/20/2016 (PRESS RELEASE JET) — Haier, a global leader in consumer electronics and appliances has launched a new compressor-free solid-state refrigeration technology. Haier created this new technology through integrating Silicon Valley resources, Haier Group R&D, Haier America R&D, Liquid King, Xi’an Jiaotong University, South China University of Technology and other resources. The new technology breaks the technological bottlenecks of compressor-based refrigeration appliance that have been used in the industry for a century.

How does it work?

The compressor, one of the most important parts of any refrigeration appliance, has been evolving for 40 years and Haier is proud to introduce this new technology, which combines the concept of variable displacement with an oil-free solution. The technology has tremendous potential with regards to superior energy efficiency levels and innovative appliance design. Haier offers a lifetime warranty on the oil-free refrigeration compressor of its high-end refrigerators, a reassurance of their long durability and high performance.

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