Algorithmic Intelligence Has Gotten So Good, It’s Easy To Forget It’s Artificial Artificial intelligence becomes hard to ignore when it starts taking over tasks that used to require human judgment — such as winnowing job applications or prioritizing stories in a news feed.
Watch enough movies in which aliens contact humans, and you’ll notice a trend: the people deciding how Earth should respond to the extraterrestrial communications are usually politicians or scientists.
But the UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) thinks the average person should have a say in how Earth responds if aliens ever decide to say “hello” to humanity.
Researchers have come up with a way we could harvest energy from Earth by turning excess infrared radiation and waste heat into electricity we can use.
The concept involves the strange physics of quantum tunnelling, and key to the idea is a specially designed antenna that can detect waste or infrared heat as high-frequency electromagnetic waves, transforming these quadrillionth-of-a-second wave signals into a direct charge.
There’s actually a lot of energy going to waste here on Earth – most sunlight that hits the planet gets sucked up by surfaces, the oceans, and our atmosphere.
Circa 2015
For our modern, technologically-advanced society, in which technology has become the solution to a myriad of challenges, energy is critical not only for growth but also, more importantly, survival. The sun is an abundant and practically infinite source of energy, so researchers around the world are racing to create novel approaches to “harvest” clean energy from the sun or transfer that energy to other sources.
This week in the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada report a novel design for electromagnetic energy harvesting based on the “full absorption concept.” This involves the use of metamaterials that can be tailored to produce media that neither reflects nor transmits any power—enabling full absorption of incident waves at a specific range of frequencies and polarizations.
Continue reading “Harvesting energy from electromagnetic waves” »
One of the coolest electric conversions we have ever seen, an old-school VW Bug powered by Tesla batteries, is being given away for a good cause.
Zelectric, a California-based company specializing in electric conversion, has equipped a 1958 VW Bug with their conversion kit, including an electric motor and Tesla battery modules.
Continue reading “You can win this Tesla-powered old-school VW Bug” »
A loophole in a result from classical electromagnetism could allow a simple device on the Earth’s surface to generate a tiny electric current from the planet’s magnetic field.
It might seem that classical electromagnetic theory would hold few surprises, but two researchers argue that one aspect of received wisdom is wrong. They show theoretically that a device, sitting passively on the Earth’s surface, can generate an electric current through its interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field. The power from the proposed device would be measured in nanowatts, but might, in principle, be scaled up.
A century-old experiment showed that if any electromagnet with cylindrical symmetry (the symmetry of a bar magnet) rotates about its long axis, its magnetic field does not rotate [1]. There is a component of the Earth’s magnetic field that is symmetric around the rotation axis (which is not aligned with the magnetic poles), so according to this old principle, the axisymmetric component does not rotate. Any stationary object on the Earth’s surface sweeps through this component of the field, which is constant at any given latitude.
U NITED S TATES P ATENT O FFICE.
NIKOLA TESLA, OF NEW YORK, N. Y.
COIL FOR ELECTRO-MAGNETS.
A system for generating electricity from the geomagnetic field and rotation of the earth is presented. The earth rotates through the geomagnetic field to form a potential difference between first and second terrestrial charged bodies. The first and second charged bodies are spaced apart in a direction substantially normal to the earth’s surface. The system comprises an electrical load, a first current path, and a second current path. The electrical load has a supply input and a ground output. The first current path is coupled to the first charged body and to the supply input of the electrical load, for supplying the potential difference to the electrical load. The second current path is coupled to the ground output of the electrical load and to the second charged body. As a result of this arrangement, an electric current related to the potential difference is generated in the electrical load.
Entitled “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy — With Special References to The Harnessing of The Sun’s Energy”, it was published by his friend Robert Johnson in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine for June 1900 soon after Tesla returned from Colorado Springs where he had carried out an intensive series of experiments from June 1899 until January of 1900.
The exact title of the chapter where he discusses this device is worth giving in its entirety:
