Tesla’s much-hyped home battery, which is known as the “Powerwall” finally went on sale.
Category: energy – Page 375
Coal miners mine coal; diamond miners mine diamonds; gold miners mine gold; space miners (will) mine space—and anything in it that has precious metals or compounds that can be whisked into rocket fuel. But, just like the first three kinds of “resource extraction,” the celestial kind will face more than a few philosophical, financial, and regulatory complications.
A tiny chip that uses radio waves to make its energy has been developed by Dutch researchers.
Researchers continue to refine the process for producing laser-induced graphene that promises big changes in energy storage.
How can a person see around a blind corner? One answer is to develop X-ray vision. A more mundane approach is to use a mirror. But if neither are an option, a group of scientists led by Genevieve Gariepy have developed a state-of-the-art detector which, with some clever data processing techniques, can turn walls and floors into a “virtual mirror”, giving the power to locate and track moving objects out of direct line of sight.
The shiny surface of a mirror works by reflecting scattered light from an object at a well-defined angle towards your eye. Because light scattered from different points on the object is reflected at the same angle, your eye sees a clear image of the object. In contrast, a non-reflective surface scatters light randomly in all directions, and creates no clear image.
However, as the researchers at Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh recognised, there is a way to tease out information on the object even from apparently random scattered light. Their method, published in Nature Photonics, relies on laser range-finding technology, which measures the distance to an object based on the time it takes a pulse of light to travel to the object, scatter, and travel back to a detector.
Would you exercise for an hour every day if the workout powered your home for twenty-four hours?
People often complain about the high costs of energy and the fact that they “never have time to workout.” This invention certainly solves both conundrums.
And, most importantly, this free power invention has the potential to lift the 1.3 billion people who presently live without electricity out of poverty.
Ubiquitous sodium could replace rare lithium in rechargeable batteries, French researchers show. And it could make batteries A LOT cheaper.
Will sodium replace lithium as the material of choice for rechargeable batteries?
For some time now, graphene has been the wonder material that scientists have been most excited about using: as it develops, it promises to transform everything from night-vision goggles to energy storage. Now researchers across the globe think they’ve come up with a material to rival it: diamond nanothread.
The clues are in the name. This potentially revolutionary, next-generation material is partly made from diamond and is incredibly thin as well as incredibly strong. Technically speaking, we’re looking at a type of carbon (like graphene) taking the form of a one-dimensional diamond crystal that’s topped with hydrogen. To create the material, benzene molecules were stacked together and pressurised.
It’s too early to say how diamond nanothread could be used — right now scientists are still at the research and simulation stage — but one of the appeals of a material like this is its versatility. And a team of scientists working at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia has been looking into the properties of diamond nanothread and think it might be more versatile and robust than originally believed.