Lifeboat Foundation

You’ve probably seen them, perhaps on long roadtrips: wind turbines with enormous, hypnotic rolling blades, harnessing the clean power of wind for conversion into electric energy. What you may not know is that for the explosion in the number of wind turbines in use as we embrace cleaner sources of energy, these wind farms are quite possibly not as productive as they could be.

“We’ve been designing turbines for use by themselves, but we almost never use them by themselves anymore,” said UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz, whose specialty lies in fluid mechanics. Historically, he said, wind turbines were used individually or in small groups, but as the world moves toward greener energy technologies, they are now found in groups of hundreds or thousands.

The problem with these large installations is that each machine, which has been designed to extract as much energy as possible from oncoming wind, may not “play well” with the others, Luzzatto-Fegiz explained. Depending on how the turbines are situated relative to each other and to the prevailing wind, those not directly in the path of the wind could be left to extract energy from significantly depleted airflow.

Continue reading “Mechanical engineers develop ways to improve windfarm productivity” »

Quantum computing technology is slated to revolutionize our ability to manipulate and analyze data, fundamentally changing the way that countless industries from cybersecurity and telecommunications to pharmaceutical development and transportation logistics will operate in the future. Even the US Senate is getting in on the action.

Leon Lederman, the former head of the Fermi National Accelerator Lab and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1988, died at a nursing home in Idaho on October 3rd. He was 96.

Lederman will perhaps best be remembered for coining the phrase “the God particle,” referring to the Higgs boson, which was theorized for decades before it was finally observed in 2012.

U.S. immigration official Matthew Allen said his division can find criminals using cryptocurrencies when they convert from fiat.

Get ready for the next generation of wifi technology: Wi-fi 6 (for so it is named) is going to be appearing on devices from next year. But will you have to throw out your old router and get a new one? And is this going to make your Netflix run faster? Here’s everything you need to know about the new standard.

A brief history of wifi

Those of you of a certain age will remember when home internet access was very much wired—only one computer could get online, a single MP3 took half an hour to download, and you couldn’t use the landline phone at the same time.

Continue reading “Wi-Fi 6 Is Coming: Here’s Why You Should Care” »

A Harvard study raises questions about just how much wind should be part of a climate solution.

In this video, we’ll be discussing the evolution of computing – more specifically, the evolution of the technologies that have brought upon the modern computing era.

[0:30–5:33] — Starting off we’ll look at, the origins of computing from as far back as 3000 BC with the abacus and progressing to discuss some of the first mechanical computers. After this, we’ll get to see the first signs of modern computing emerge, through the use of electromechanical relays in computers along with punched cards for data I/O.

[5:33–8:36] — Following that we’ll discuss, the 1st generation of modern computing, the vacuum tube era. The first technology that was fully digital and resembled how modern computers operate.

Scarlet protein has a protective effect against Parkinson’s disease in fruit flies.

Researchers at the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, discovered that a protein known as Scarlet has protective effects against the fruit fly version of Parkinson’s disease [1].

Abstract

Continue reading “Scarlet Protein Might Protect Against Parkinson’s Disease” »

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a super-hydrophobic surface that can be used to generate electrical voltage. When salt water flows over this specially patterned surface, it can produce at least 50 millivolts. The proof-of-concept work could lead to the development of new power sources for lab-on-a-chip platforms and other microfluidics devices. It could someday be extended to energy harvesting methods in water desalination plants, researchers said.

A team of researchers led by Prab Bandaru, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, and first author Bei Fan, a graduate student in Bandaru’s research group, published their work in the Oct. 3 issue of Nature Communications.

The main idea behind this work is to create electrical voltage by moving ions over a charged surface. And the faster you can move these ions, the more voltage you can generate, explained Bandaru.

Continue reading “Flowing salt water over this super-hydrophobic surface can generate electricity” »