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Jun 8, 2019

Can We Harvest Lightning For The Power Grid?

Posted by in category: climatology

By New Scientist, An Energy Realities Partner

Nobody has all the answers to the world’s energy questions, so New Scientist has teamed up with Statoil to search for solutions from New Scientist’s audience.

The question posed was: How much energy is in a lightning bolt? Is it enough, and are there places where lightning strikes often enough, to think about flying kites to transfer that energy to the grid?

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Jun 8, 2019

Toyota pulls forward electrification plan, eyes solid-state battery next year

Posted by in categories: energy, transportation

TOKYO — Toyota is ramping up electric vehicle deployment plans, pulling forward its goal of selling 5.5 million electrified vehicles by five years and aiming to develop a solid-state battery by next summer as it races to meet a “sudden surge” of EV popularization.

Toyota now aims to sell some 5.5 million traditional gasoline-electric hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles by 2025. Nearly 1 million of them could be pure EVs.

Executive Vice President Shigeki Terashi, Toyota’s r&d chief, outlined the new roadmap in a June 7 briefing about the company’s EV plans. In December 2017, the company had said it wanted to sell that many electrified vehicles by 2030, five years later than the revised outlook.

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Jun 8, 2019

Halo Drive: Lasers and Black Holes Could Launch Spaceships to Near Light Speed

Posted by in categories: alien life, futurism

Future spaceships could use black holes as powerful launch pads to explore the stars.

A new study envisions firing laser beams that would curve around a black hole and come back with added energy to help propel a spacecraft to near the speed of light. Astronomers could look for signs that alien civilizations are using such a “halo drive,” as the study dubs it, by seeing if pairs of black holes are merging more often than expected.

Study author David Kipping, an astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York, came up with the idea of the halo drive through what he calls “the gamer’s mindset.”

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Jun 8, 2019

Priority to US09/443,527

Posted by in categories: computing, physics

A gravitational wave generating device comprising an energizing means such as magnetrons, which act upon energizable elements such as film bulk acoustic resonators or FBARs. A computer that controls the magnetrons’ phase. A gravitational wave generation device that exhibits directivity and forms a gravitational-wave beam. The utilization of a medium in which the gravitational wave speed is reduced in order to effect refraction of the gravitational wave and be a gravitational wave lens. A gravitational wave generator device that can be directed in order to propel an object by its momentum or by changing the gravitational field nearby the object to urge it in a preferred direction and be a propulsion means.

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Jun 8, 2019

How Magnetic Field Architecture Can Levitate Buildings

Posted by in category: transportation

Learn how Arx Pax and Hendo’s magnetic field architecture can levitate not only hoverboards, but also small houses and large buildings.

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Jun 8, 2019

This ‘Universe in a Box’ Has Enough Astronomical Data to Fill 30,000 Wikipedias

Posted by in categories: computing, space

Adding to the largest astronomical data set ever assembled online, the Pan-STARRS telescope has posted 1.6 petabytes of data.

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Jun 8, 2019

Synopsis: Scanning Earth’s Interior with Neutrinos

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, materials

Future neutrino experiments may provide tomographic scans of Earth’s interior by viewing solar neutrinos that pass through our planet’s layers.

The Sun showers Earth with neutrinos, but this “glow” doesn’t dim when the Sun goes down. At night, solar neutrinos penetrate Earth, impinging detectors from below. Like x rays in a medical scanner, these planet-traversing neutrinos might offer information about the material they pass through. New theoretical calculations show that future experiments, such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), could characterize the different layers inside Earth with neutrino-based tomography.

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Jun 8, 2019

Researchers discover meat-eating plant in Ontario, Canada

Posted by in category: food

Call it the “Little Bog of Horrors.” In what is believed to be a first for North America, biologists at the University of Guelph have discovered that meat-eating pitcher plants in Ontario’s Algonquin Park wetlands consume not just bugs but also young salamanders.

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Jun 8, 2019

“Sun in a box” would store renewable energy for the grid

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

Design for system that provides solar- or wind-generated power on demand should be cheaper than other leading options.

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Jun 8, 2019

Undersea Robots Are Helping Save the Great Barrier Reef

Posted by in categories: drones, robotics/AI

The drone is adapted from a robot that killed off coral’s predators.

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