The future of aviation? A completely solar-powered plane is trying fly around the world. http://voc.tv/14JQHoo
The future of aviation? A completely solar-powered plane is trying fly around the world. http://voc.tv/14JQHoo
The Roll-Array is easily towable by a standard 4×4 vehicle such as a Land Rover. When connected to the back of the car, the flexible solar panels are pulled out of a spool and create ground cover in a matter of minutes. On their website, Renovagen claims the panels will be able generate up to 100kWp – 10 times more power than other transportable solar panels on the market today.
Not only is this new technology installed quickly, but the fuel cost savings during transportation is noteworthy. The tightly wound solar spools can be carried by the 4×4 vehicle attached to a small air pallet trailer in tow, which eliminates the need for large diesel generators.
Government’s other big NextGen Program “Advanced Research Projects Agency-EnergyAdvanced Research Projects Agency-Energy” (ARPA) is funding a personal climate change solution with robots, foot coolers, etc. There is one fact; US Government does love their acronyms.
Why heat or cool a whole building when you could heat or cool individual people instead?
Two big problems have been vexing environmental scientists for decades: How to store solar energy for later use, and what to do with CO2 that’s been captured and sequestered from coal plants? Scientists from General Electric (GE) could solve both those problems at once by using CO2 as a giant “battery” to hold excess energy. The idea is to use solar power from mirrors to heat salt with a concentrated mirror array like the one at the Ivanpah solar plant in California. Meanwhile, CO2 stored underground from, say, a coal plant is cooled to a solid dry ice state using excess grid power.
When extra electricity is needed at peak times, especially after the sun goes down, the heated salt can be tapped to warm up the solid CO2 to a “supercritical” state between a gas and solid. It’s then funneled into purpose built turbines (from GE, naturally) which can rapidly generate power. The final “sunrotor” design (a prototype is shown below) would be able to generate enough energy to power 100,000 homes, according to GE.
Q-Dots windows to power homes and other buildings.
Researchers at the Los Alamos National Lab may have found a way to take quantum dots and put them in your ordinary windows to turn them into solar collectors.
Photovoltaic cells may be cheaper and more efficient than ever, but you still need to find a place to put them.
Looking to solve these space constraints, Los Alamos partnered with the University of Milano in Italy to see if they could turn windows into electric generators.
As nanocrystals roughly one-billionth of a meter across, — that is as small as 10 atoms wide — quantum dots can absorb light at one wavelength, convert it and re-emit it at another wavelength.
So the dots would absorb sunlight and convert it to a wavelength best suited for the photovoltaic cells, then be guided to the solar cells installed at its edges to electricity.
The University of Milan is responsible for the new industrial method that embeds the dots in a transparent material.
VideoDisclaimer: The author of this article, Jason Belzer, is a member of rLoop and serves as the non-profit’s legal counsel. When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk proposed the Hyperloop — a futuristic transportation system capable of propelling passengers to supersonic speeds — back in 2013, it is unlikely that even he could have imagined that just a few years later his vision would be tantalizing close to reality. Yet ironically, Musk, who has helped build companies like Tesla Motors and SpaceX that are on the leading edge of technological innovation, will not receive the credit if the Hyperloop indeed becomes a reality. Instead, that honor will be bestowed upon on a small group of teams now working feverishly to construct a prototype that will be tested this summer at SpaceX headquarters in California.
Imagine tackling one of the most complex engineering projects in the history of the human race, requiring countless hours of collaboration and experimentation by some of the world’s most talented engineers, and never actually meeting the people you are working with in a physical setting. You might think it’s impossible, or you might be a member of rLoop — the only non student team to reach the final stage of the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition.
Researchers from the University of Alexandria have developed a cheaper, simpler and potentially cleaner way to turn seawater into drinking water than conventional methods.
This could have a huge impact on rural areas of the Middle East and North Africa, where access to clean water is a pressing issue if social stability and economic development is to improve.
Right now, desalinating seawater is the only viable way to provide water to growing populations, and large desalination plants are now a fact of life in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries.
Posted in biotech/medical, food, health, sustainability
Bad news if you use RoundUp.
Local councils across Australia that use the weed killer glyphosate on nature-strips and playgrounds are being warned that the chemical probably causes cancer.
An updated World Health Organisation (WHO) warning for the herbicide, often trade marked as Roundup, is also routinely used in household gardens and farms.
The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) recently upgraded its assessment of glyphosate from “possibly” to “probably carcinogenic to humans”, though the level of risk is the same as the IARC’s findings on red meat.