This is according to the latest edition of Tracking the Sun, an annual PV cost tracking report produced by the Department of energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Installed prices for residential and small nonresidential systems completed in 2014 were $0. 40-per-watt (W) lower,
or even particular market segments, as a whole. he report, Tracking the Sun VIII: The Installed Price of Residential and Nonresidential Photovoltaic systems in the United states,
is the eighth edition in Berkeley Lab Tracking the Sun report series. It is collected based on data from more than 400,000 residential and nonresidential PV systems installed between 1998 and 2014 across 42 states,
The latest edition of Tracking the Sun along with a summary slide deck and data file, may be downloaded at trackingthesun. lbl. gov. Source:
#Novel technology may illuminate mystery moon caves It widely believed that the moon features networks of caves created when violent lava flows tore under the surface from ancient volcanoes.
The ultimate goal is to include the technology on a satellite that orbits the moon at close range
Even cooler are the implications for future manned missions to the moon. hat interesting for space travel is you can have people on the surface for long periods because of the temperature extremes
and they should provide Velten with geologic features comparable to the moon. hese are likely much bigger than
whereas waves in natural sunlight vibrate in all directions. Manipulating the polarization of light is essential for the operation of advanced microscopes, cameras and displays;
because it had never been seen before. t just the same as wanting to look at Pluto in more detail
but hotspots are regions of volcanic activity at Earth surface that show no obvious association with plate boundaries.
They are thought to form above mantle plumes narrow upwellings of hot rock that originate at the Earth core-mantle boundary
outermost shell of the Earth known as the lithosphere can control the type and volume of hotspot-related volcanic rock at the surface.
the carbon nanotubes act as antennas to capture light from the sun or other sources. As the waves of light hit the nanotube antennas,
which protect the organisms from negative effects of sunlight, such as DNA damage. The research also shows that the exact manner in which the photoreceptors bind to the DNA is novel.
found in only 0. 0017 percent, by weight, of the Earth crust. Because of that it comparatively expensive,
which is 880 times more abundant in the Earth crust than lithium. The new findings show that it can work effectively with graphite or soft carbon in the anode of an electrochemical battery.
which has remarkable efficiency converting sunlight to electricity. Despite this success, the delicate nature of perovskite a very light, flexible, organic-inorganic hybrid material stalled further development toward its commercialized use.
Their new cell construction extends the cell effective life in air by more than 10 times, with only a marginal loss of efficiency converting sunlight to electricity.
#Comet: A supercomputer for the ong tailof science The San diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San diego this week formally launched omet,
and across a wider range of domains. he launch of Comet marks yet another stage in SDSC leadership in the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem,
Comet is designed to meet the emerging requirements often referred to as the ong tailof sciencehe idea that the large number of modest-sized computationally based research projects represent, in aggregate,
Comet joins SDSC Gordon supercomputer as another key resource within the NSF XSEDE (extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) computer resource-sharing system
SDSC used the formal launch of Comet to also celebrate 30 years as a national resource for advanced computation.
and Society Comet is configured to help transform advanced computing by expanding access and capacity not only among research domains that typically rely on HPCUCH as chemistry
Some of the domains already being served by Comet include: Astrophysics: Supercomputers can greatly accelerate timescales for researching the origins of the universe.
Key Features of Comet: 2 petaflops of overall peak performancene million billion operations or calculations per second.
researchers find A type of bacteria plucked from the bottom of the ocean could be put to work neutralizing large amounts of industrial carbon dioxide in the Earth atmosphere,
Still, Mckenna said he is encouraged by the prospect of discoveries that could ultimately benefit the planet. t shows that it physically possible to take known enzymes such as carbonic anhydrase
which themselves each contain hundreds of billions of stars. The clusters grow bigger and bigger over time as they acquire new members.
For example, we are seeing the newfound galaxy cluster called Massive Overdense Object (MOO) J1142+1527 as it existed 8. 5 billion years ago, long before Earth formed.
the scientists were then able to determine that the cluster mass is a quadrillion times that of our sun making it the most massive known cluster that far back in space and time.
when the plant turns the Sun energy into chemical energy and then transported to the seeds.
and can detect motion in conditions ranging from a poorly lit room to very bright sunlight outdoorshree times faster than fast flying insects,
Benner, who works with NASA trying to find life on other planets, suggests that synthetic biology might also improve the ability to detect new earthly life forms. aybe they exist on earth,
flexible superconducting tapes made of rare-earth barium copper oxide, the ARC reactor can achieve magnetic fields with much higher energyhus enabling a reactor design much smaller than other tokamak-based machines.
#Nasa confirms water on Mars, increasing chance of alien life Mars has long been known as our barren sister planet but today,
NASA scientists have announced they have found flowing water on the red desert planet. NASA and the Nature Geoscience journal released their findings on a Live Stream announcement stating that the long,
dark streaks found on Mars are a telltale sign of still flowing water on the Martian surface.
These dark features, some of which span 5 meters wide and 100 meters long, were discovered originally in 2010.
and cater walls during the summer months on Mars. Eventually these dark streaks dry up as the planet's surface cools in autumn.
Another likely theory could be the water condenses into a liquid from Mars'atmosphere. To this day, Earth is still the only planet in the known universe with liquid H2o on its surface
and so finding out flowing water once exists on Mars is huge. Beyond the geological discovery, dramatically increases our chances of finding extraterrestrial life.
If life On earth is any indication, water is the central building block to all animals, bacteria and everything else alive today y
and Wisconsin have developed a new type of electrode for splitting water with sunlight, harvesting the hydrogen to be used as clean fuel.
Sun-capturing electrodes are designed to absorb as much of the solar spectrum as possible to maximise efficiency.
which he relaunched in collaboration with stars including Madonna and Daft punk. Regional variations Amid the growth in streaming,
ensuring patient privacy. ploaded images often look like a mess of black holes where things have been deleted, but that fine this is not about aesthetics,
who heralded the technology as fundamental transformation in how energy is delivered across the Earth Wall-mounted, with a sleek design,
when sunlight is low, during power cuts or at peak demand times, when electricity costs are highest.
which is hardly a representative sample for the three billion or so women on the planet. The study also leaves out mention of other factors.
so this is obviously not something that is going to be used to draw the Millennium Falcon into the Death Star any time soon.
sending two astronauts around the moon
#Europe's top court rejects'Safe harbor'ruling Europe's top court on Tuesday ruled that a 15-year-old agreement allowing American companies to handle Europeans'data was invalid,
and lead author Jingchuan Sun. This discovery suggests that a single ORC rather than the commonly believed two-ORC system loads both helicase rings.
and measured how microbes in the seafloor sediments consume the greenhouse gas methane as part of understanding how the Earth works.
--and pretty much every ocean basin in the world noted Thurber an assistant professor (senior research) in Oregon State's College of Earth Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences The study is important scientists say
By contrast all of the planet's gas and oil deposits are thought to total about 200-300 gigatons of carbon.
#Earths magnetic field could flip within a human lifetime Imagine the world waking up one morning to discover that all compasses pointed south instead of north.
Earth's magnetic field has flipped--though not overnight--many times throughout the planet's history. Its dipole magnetic field like that of a bar magnet remains about the same intensity for thousands to millions of years but for incompletely known reasons it occasionally weakens
Sprain and Paul Renne director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and a UC Berkeley professor-in-residence of earth and planetary science are coauthors of the study
Flip could affect electrical grid cancer ratesthe discovery comes as new evidence indicates that the intensity of Earth's magnetic field is decreasing 10 times faster than normal leading some geophysicists to predict a reversal within a few
Though a magnetic reversal is a major planet-wide event driven by convection in Earth's iron core there are no documented catastrophes associated with past reversals despite much searching in the geologic and biologic record.
And since Earth's magnetic field protects life from energetic particles from the sun and cosmic rays both
and why Earth's magnetic field episodically reverses polarity Renne said. The magnetic record the Italian-led team obtained shows that the sudden 180-degree flip of the field was preceded by a period of instability that spanned more than 6000 years.
#Rediscovering Venus to find faraway Earths: Measuring gravitational pull of a planet should speed search Astronomers Chih-Hao Li
and David Phillips of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics want to rediscover Venus--that familiar nearby planet stargazers can see with the naked eye much of the year.
Granted humans first discovered Venus in ancient times. But Li and Phillips have something distinctly modern in mind.
They plan to find the second planet again using a powerful new optical device installed on the Italian National Telescope that will measure Venus'precise gravitational pull on the sun
. If they succeed their first-of-its-kind demonstration of this new technology will be used for finding Earthlike exoplanets orbiting distant stars.
We are building a telescope that will let us see the sun the way we would see other stars said Phillips who is a staff scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Astronomers have identified more than 1700 exoplanets some as far as hundreds of light years away. Most were discovered by the traditional transit method
when a planet orbiting a distant star transits that luminous body moving directly between the Earth
and the star This provides information about the planet's size but not its mass.
which offers complementary information about the mass of the distant planet. From this information astronomers will be able to determine
whether distant exoplanets they discover are rocky worlds like Earth or less dense gas giants like Jupiter.
The method is precise enough to help astronomers identify Earthlike planets in the habitable zone the orbital distance sweet-spot where water exists as a liquid.
Better Precision with a Laserthe radial velocity method works by measuring how exoplanet gravity changes the light emitted from its star.
As exoplanets circle a star their gravitation tugs at the star changing the speed with
which it moves toward or away from Earth by a small amount. The star speeds up slightly as it approaches Earth with each light wave taking a fraction of a second less time to arrive than the wave before it.
To an observer On earth the crests of these waves look closer together than they should so they appear to have a higher frequency and look bluer.
As the star recedes the crests move further apart and the frequencies seem lower and redder.
Astronomers measure it by capturing the spectrum of a star on the pixels of a digital camera
Only large gas giants or super-earths close to their host stars have enough gravity to cause those changes.
however will be able to detect Doppler shifts as small as 10 centimeters per second--small enough to find habitable zone Earthlike planets even from hundreds of light years away.
This way we can compare data we take tonight with data from the same star five years from now
--which is better for finding exoplanets. The stars we look at are brightest in the green visible range
and this is the range spectrographs are built to handle Phillips said. Building the green astro-comb was a challenge
The researchers plan to test the green astro-comb by pointing it at our sun analyzing its spectrum to see
when we point our spectrographs at distant stars Li said. The Harvard-Smithsonian team is installing this device on the High-Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher-North (HARPS-N) a new spectrograph designed to search for exoplanets using the Italian National Telescope.
We will look at the thousands of potential exoplanets identified by the Kepler satellite telescope by the transit method.
Together our two methods can tell us a lot about those worlds Li said. And because he will have discovered already Venus he will be more certain of the answers s
#Is matter falling into the massive black hole at the center of the Milky way or being ejected from it?
Is matter falling into the massive black hole at the center of the Milky way or being ejected from it?
of which was to investigate the scattering of pulsars--the cores of dead stars--by interstellar gas.
What the team found led them to examine additional observations of Sagittarius A-Star (A*)the source that marks the Milky way's central black hole.
This massive black hole--which contains 4 million solar masses--does not emit radiation but is visible from the gas around it.
The gas is being acted upon by the black hole's very strong gravitational field. The wavelengths that make Sagittarius A*visible are scattered by interstellar gas along the line of sight in the same way that light is scattered by fog On earth.
and about the emission region around the black hole Johnson said. It turns out that the size of that emission region is only 20 times the diameter of the event horizon as it would be seen from Earth.
With additional observations we can begin to understand the behavior in this extreme environment. While no scientific team has been able to produce a complete image of the black hole's emission astronomers have drawn inferences about scattering properties from observations at longer wavelengths.
From these they can extrapolate those properties to 1 centimeter and use that to make a rough estimate of the size of the source Gwinn said.
This will be important for future research on the gas near this black hole. This work is a good example of the synergy between different modern research infrastructures technologies and science ideas.
A friendly international race is going on to see who will be the first to image the black hole's emissions
whether gas falls into the black hole or is being ejected in the form of a jet.
and we can get closer to the black hole. We may be able to extract more information than just the size of the emission region.
We might possibly be able to make a simple image of how matter falls into a black hole
and reduce carbon dioxide emissions on the earth Shimoi said. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by American Institute of Physics (AIP.
#Solar activity impacts polar ozone The increase in greenhouse gases explains to a large extent the rise in the average temperature of Earth.
According to the research study published in Nature Communications today the Sun affects middle atmosphere ozone with potential implications on smaller scale to regional but not global climate.
However according results published today fluctuations in the activity of the Sun impact middle atmosphere ozone providing a potential link to regional scale climate variability.
This climate variability is not a trend like climate change but rather year-to-year fluctuations following solar activity.
The detected ozone variation may in part help understand the alternation of local mild and cold winter seasons as hints have been obtained in previous research that the ozone changes in the middle atmosphere may link as far as the surface of Earth
The ozone variation between the extremes of the Sun's activity is so great that it is likely to impact the temperature balance of the atmosphere.
but an important one allowing us to better understand the long-term impacts of this type of solar activity
Earth's radiation belts are regions in near-Earth space that contain vast quantities of solar energetic electrons trapped there by Earth's magnetic field.
During magnetic storms which are driven solar wind the electrons accelerate to high speeds and enter the atmosphere in the polar regions.
Triggers for stress so called stress factors include not only emotional strain but also physical factors such as heat cold too much sun infections injuries and toxic substances--for example in cigarette smoke.
but the high cost of platinum due to its low abundance motivates researchers to find efficient catalysts based on earth-abundant elements.
because we used self-assembling DNA techniques it is relatively easy to manufacturesays Wujin Sun lead author of the paper
The research team included Jun Sun Longbing He Tao Xu Hengchang Bi and Litao Sun all of Southeast University in Nanjing China;
exposed to the sun, eat and rest in very specific places at the household.""Using a device that can be placed on the forearm of the older person and a webcam that records movement patterns,
Over the years scientists have been very successful at making complex 3d shapes from DNA using diverse strategies said Wei Sun a postdoctoral scholar in the Wyss'Molecular Systems Lab
and functionally-relevant materials such as gold and silver Sun said. Just as any expanding material can be shaped inside a mold to take on a defined 3d form the Wyss team set out to grow inorganic particles within the confined hollow spaces of stiff DNA NANOSTRUCTURES.
From recognizing speech to identifying unusual stars, new discoveries often begin with comparison of data streams to find connections and spot outliers.
Evans and his team have all of the membrane proteins required to construct a fully working mimic of the way plants capture sunlight.
#Innovative solar-powered toilet ready for India unveiling A revolutionary University of Colorado Boulder toilet fueled by the sun that is being developed to help some of the 2. 5 billion people around the world lacking safe and sustainable sanitation
The CU-Boulder invention consists of eight parabolic mirrors that focus concentrated sunlight to a spot no larger than a postage stamp on a quartz-glass rod connected to eight bundles of fiber-optic cables each consisting of thousands of intertwined fused
The energy generated by the sun and transferred to the fiber-optic cable system--similar in some ways to a data transmission line--can heat up the reaction chamber to over 600 degrees Fahrenheit to treat the waste material disinfect pathogens in both feces and urine and produce char.
which try to maximize exposure to sunlight, or fuel cell electrodes, which catalyze reactions at their surfaces.
Sahin Laboratory, Columbia University An immensely powerful yet invisible force pulls water from the earth to the top of the tallest redwood
Since her system is powered by the sun, operational and maintenance costs are fairly minimal: The system requires an occasional cartridge filter change,
The space between stars is not empty it contains a vast reservoir of diffuse material with about 5-10%of the total mass of our Milky way galaxy.
Not least, in the early stages of a star evolution the dust can coagulate into large clumps the first step towards forming planets.
the inner winds of a class of evolved stars, and the ejecta of supernovae. The grains form out of molecular seeds.
In evolved stars, such seeds might be molecules like Tio, VO, Zro, C 2, CN, or C 3, species that have been known for a hundred years;
Carbon-rich stars are ones that have this excess carbon. The dust forms from nucleation seeds that grow as molecules condense onto it via numerous steps that are still quite mysterious,
The materials in most of today residential rooftop solar panels can store energy from the sun for only a few microseconds at a time.
plants that are exposed to sunlight use carefully organized nanoscale structures within their cells to rapidly separate charges pulling electrons away from the positively charged molecule that is left behind,
The polymer donor absorbs sunlight and passes electrons to the fullerene acceptor; the process generates electrical energy.
Michael Krauthammer, et al, xome sequencing identifies recurrent mutations in NF1 and RASOPATHY genes in sun-exposed melanomas, Nature Genetics, 2015;
#First Direct evidence of the Formation Process of Brown dwarfs Using the Very Large Array, an international team of astronomers has discovered jets of material ejected by still-forming young brown dwarfs,
revealing the first direct evidence that brown dwarfs are produced by a scaled-down version of the same process that produces stars.
The astronomers studied a sample of still-forming brown dwarfs in a star-forming region some 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus,
and found that four of them have the type of jets emitted by more-massive stars during their formation.
The jets were detected by radio observations with the VLA. The scientists also observed the brown dwarfs with the Spitzer
and Herschel space telescopes to confirm their status as very young objects. his is the first time that such jets have been found coming from brown dwarfs at such an early stage of their formation,
and shows that they form in a way similar to that of stars, said Oscar Morata, of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. hese are the lowest-mass objects that seem to form the same way as stars,
he added. Brown dwarfs are less massive than stars, but more massive than giant planets such as Jupiter.
They have insufficient mass to produce the temperatures and pressures at their cores necessary to trigger the thermonuclear reactions that power ormalstars.
Theorists suggested in the 1960s that such objects should exist but the first unambiguous discovery of one did not come until 1994.
A key question has been whether brown dwarfs form like stars or like planets. Stars form when a giant cloud of gas
and dust in interstellar space collapses gravitationally, accumulating mass. A disk of orbiting material forms around the young star,
and eventually planets form from the material in that disk. In the early stages of star formation, jets of material are propelled outward from the poles of the disk.
No such jets mark planet formation, however. Previous evidence strongly suggested that brown dwarfs shared the same formation mechanism as their larger siblings
but detecting the telltale jets is an important confirmation. Based on this discovery, e conclude that the formation of brown dwarfs is scaled a-down version of the process that forms larger stars,
Morata said. Morata led an international team of astronomers with members from Asia, Europe, and Latin Americ
#How 3g technology is improving HIV patient care in Kenya Kenya has an extensive population that infected with HIV and until very recently,
they have been getting poor care if they get any at all. Council Lead Partner Qualcomm is helping to change that.
according to study released in February by Ceres. The study found 97 billion gallons of water were used to frack more than 39,
and we'll cool planet Siemens: 880m euros'worth of wind power orders since July Google invests $75 million in U s. wind far r
the installed costs of Wal-mart Stores Inc. s solar systems have dropped from $6 or $8 per watt of capacity to about $3. 50 per watt, said David Ozment, the company s senior director of energy management.
the sun. Saudi arabia has a lot of oil. But an increasing amount of that crude is staying in the country where it's used run to desalination and power plants.
which use thousands of mirrors to concentrate the sun onto heating liquid, which creates steam that turn power turbines.
Yesterday I spoke with Leslie Lancry, the founder and CEO of Language Stars, which offers full immersion language classes to toddlers, preschoolers and elementary school children.
Spanish has consistently been 60 percent of the demand for the Language Stars program. It s not surprising,
Mandarin chinese is the most popular first language on the planet. It beats out English by 5 million speakers.
a former electronics engineer with IBM and Sun who got the idea for a water-monitoring system
You can think of it as being biocompatible with our planet. But if this material gets put in your garden or on the side of the road,
because they cannot be adjusted to the position of the sun. Of course, the solar panels on the smart highway cover about 75 yards of roadway which is slightly more than you can fit on a roof.
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