Tesla and solar financier and installer Solarcity (Musk other energy company) have been quietly selling small volumes of Tesla batteries as energy storage paired with Solarcity solar projects.
seem nearly endless including peer-to-peer investment funds, Kickstarter-like crowdfunding, binding arbitrations, and even nonfinancial transactions such as naming rights management and encrypted communication.
#New 3d printed materials lighter than water and as strong as steel A Nanoscribe 3d printer can print models of the Empire state building in a space the width of a human hair using precision lasers.
believe such 3d printers may help craft a new generation of materials lighter than water and strong as steel.
Now, there s the Nanoscribe 3d printer. The printer s mirror-focused laser shines on and hardens a droplet of liquid plastic on a slide.
Microscale 3d printing is still new, but it s quickly progressing. In 2012, researchers at the Vienna University of Technology 3d printed a race car and cathedral smaller than a dust mite.
A year later, Nanoscribe printed models of about the same size, only four times faster. Though there isn t yet a good way to cheaply scale the process up to an industrial level,
Investments in autonomous vehicles accelerating SOUTHFIELD, Mich. Google and various automakers have increased their activity and investment toward the goal of self-driving vehicles,
The findings support IHS Automotive global forecast of nearly 12 million self-driving cars in 2035, with nearly all autos likely to be self-driving on some level by 2050.
Last year, Google adjusted its approach to focus on fully autonomous vehicles that have the ability to operate without a driver at all,
the report said. oogle path goes through low-speed testing of self-driving cars in restricted areas beginning in 2015 and lasting three to five years,
when he worked at the National Renewable energy Laboratory and later parallelized by Wang and Andrew Canning after Wang moved to NERSC in 1999.
Connectx-4 adapters provide the means to increase data center return on investment while reducing IT costs. Connectx-4 has already been selected to power CORAL (Collaboration of Oak ridge,
Our efforts are targeted at supporting organizations that seek to optimally deploy SQL SERVER 2014 flawlessly in their data center,
An expert on sustainable agriculture and the potential environmental risks of biotechnology Mellon holds a doctorate in molecular biology and a law degree.
The North Central Sustainable agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program and the Conservation Technology Information center conducted the survey of more than 759 commercial farmers from winter 2012 through spring 2013.
#Precision farming Gains Global Foothold (Op-Ed) Lloyd Treinish leads the environmental science team in the Industry Solutions Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research center.
A co-developer of IBM's Deep Thunder precision agriculture system he contributed this article to Livescience's Expert Voices:
Fueling better farming is a practice known as precision agriculture which uses extensive data from a farmer's field
Precision agriculture can help farmers from Brunei to Brazil pinpoint the best time for harvesting to mitigate crop damage and loss;
Precision agriculture helps address that problem by improving weather forecasting and modeling and localizing it even within a particular farm.
At IBM we developed a precision agriculture weather-modeling service using Deep Thunder our Big data analytics technology for local customized high-resolution and rapid weather predictions.
By combining supercomputing and Big data analytics with other technological innovations even farmers with modest means can bolster production and profits.
The plant is set to be built by Abengoa SA (ABG) a Spanish company that offers global renewable energy solutions. his project will help prove the economic operation of concentrated solar power technology in the Earth sunbelt,
and therefore has invested in renewable energy resources and innovative technologies to improve efficiency. The plant is expected to be operational by 2017
#Imergy Power systems develops high-performance flow batteries Imergy Power systems has achieved a milestone in energy storage by developing a process for producing high-performance flow batteries with recycled vanadium from mining slag oil field sludge fly ash and other forms of environmental waste.
Imergy flow batteries from low-grade vanadium will also be capable of storing more energy per kilogram than conventional vanadium flow batteries by more than twice, giving cell phone operators, solar power plant developers, microgrid owners
wee lowering the cost and increasing the performance of energy storage, which is going to expand the market. a
and technology that enable effective seismic data processing and imaging, velocity modeling and seismic interpretation. In this release, significant enhancements were made in the Paradigm processing
The center is working on something like Big data for smart batteries turning these mysterious devices into information centers that according to doctoral student Mohammad Rezvani can tell their users
If every part of the pack can be monitored with the kind of Big data equipment that now hugely in vogue one bad apple won spoil the whole bunch
Greater energy efficiency means you could compute things directly on your phone instead of relying on cloud computing,
"The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created The researchers said that this new method of building machines could serve as a form of 3d printing for robotics, turning a complex manufacturing process into something that's both more accessible and less expensive for the average user.
#Transparent solar windows generate energy without obstructing the view Imagine being able to generate solar energy on the surface of every window
"It opens a lot of area to deploy solar energy in a non-intrusive way, "said Lunt.""It can be used on tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e reader.
They did so by producing quantum bits using electrons trapped in diamonds at extremely low temperatures. These ultra-cold gemstones effectively acted as prisons trapping the electrons
If they can repeat the experiment over distances significantly larger than 10 feet it could mean that incomprehensibly fast quantum computers
and because molecular biology techniques can be used to help proteins"evolve"to have desired properties, Romesberg said.
"and both crowdsourcing video for it and raising money through a Kickstarter campaign. She wants a modest $40, 000,
#Graphene discovery: A low-end kitchen blender can make a high-end batch of this valuable material Blenders can be a great way to make smoothies or margaritas,
Researchers have figured out how to use ordinary kitchen blenders to create thin sheets of graphene, a marvelous high-tech material that is just one atom thick but 100 times stronger than steel.
Graphene is also an incredibly efficient conductor of heat and electricity. All of these qualities make it valuable for use in electronics and a variety of other applications,
but so far production of high-quality graphene has been limited to fairly small batches. This new discovery, published this week in the journal Nature Materials,
and come up with graphene sheets. Not only that, they did it at higher quantities and better qualities than most existing methods.
"This clearly shows that even very crude mixers can produce well exfoliated graphene, "the authors wrote in their paper.
This doesn't mean that your average person could start mixing up graphene in their kitchen the liquid and detergent need to be removed
and remaining graphite flakes must be extracted without damaging the graphene sheet but an engineer certainly could.
it will be necessary to develop industrially scalable methods to produce large quantities of defect-free graphene."
graphene will find commercial applications in many areas from high-frequency electronics to smart coatings. Some important classes of applications,
such as printed electronics, conductive coatings and composite fillers, will require industrial-scale production of defect-free graphene in a process-able form."
They tell Nature they hope to be producing a kilogram of graphene a day by the end of the year
and run on stored solar power. A geothermal system with eight, 20-foot deep boreholes uses a heat pump to heat
and biofuels the creators say. Researchers took tiny snippets of man-made DNA and joined them together to create a synthetic version of a chromosome the structure that contains DNA inside cells from brewer's yeast.
and biofuels and the ability to create custom-made yeast would provide useful too for the biotech industry.
Synthetic yeast could also churn out more efficient biofuels such as alcohol butanol or biodiesel which could enable humanity to transition off of a petroleum economy Boeke said.
and biofilms with enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of cellulose could be used for the conversion of agricultural waste into biofuels.
That is the conversion of waste n this case both locally sourced food waste and human sewage nto a methane-rich biogas.
Astroskin is just part of a trend of wearable technology bursting into the market in recent years.
#Quantum computer technology now capable of holding data with 99 percent accuracy Perhaps the zaniest property of quantum mechanics is that of entanglement,
The latest breakthrough in quantum computing, however, brings the technology much closer to reality. Australian scientists have developed the first silicon quantum technology capable of holding data with over 99 percent accuracy
First, the scientists refined a technique used to turn phosphorous atoms into qubits, the units of measurement for quantum information.
"We have demonstrated that with silicon qubit we can have needed the accuracy to build a real quantum computer.
because magnetic spin can mess with the phosphorous atoms that the qubits are made of.""In natural silicon each atom also has its own spin
which information was retained in their silicon qubits, a function known as"coherence time.""The capability of building a quantum computer from materials already widely used for building conventional computers might be this study's most significant accomplishment, however.
It means that quantum computers can potentially be mass-produced, lowering the costs of developing the technology for both researchers and, eventually, for future consumers s
#Robots learn to cook with a little help from Youtube When it comes to learning how to cook,
#Rice-sized laser could be a breakthrough in quantum computing A microwave laser also called a"maser"has been built by Princeton researchers
"and the innovation could lead to new advancements in quantum computing.""It is basically as small as you can go with these single-electron devices,
The successful maser demonstration represents a breakthrough in efforts to build a quantum computer out of semiconductor materials.
Basically, the device makes it possible to use double quantum dots two quantum dots joined together as quantum bits,
or qubits, which are the basic units of information in quantum computers.""I consider this to be a really important result for our long-term goal,
which is entanglement between quantum bits in semiconductor-based devices, "said collaborator Jacob Taylor, an adjunct assistant professor at the Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland-National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Essentially, the maser allows the double quantum dots to communicate with each other. To construct the tiny contraption,
Aside from its importance in the development of quantum computers, the maser could also lead to advancements in a variety of fields such as communications, sensing and medicine,
The Launcherone rocket while still in the design and testing phase hopes to eventually deliver payloads from 250 pounds to 500 pounds into space for less than $10 million per flight.
The same is true for the smart city. In the Economist Autodesk head of sustainability Emma Stewart writes about how the smart thing to do is to figure it out before you build.
which may eventually be needed to wire together a quantum computer.""You would change the energy level
The agency argued that the RECOMBINANT DNA used to engineer the animals was in effect an animal'drug'.
#Graphene electrode promises stretchy circuits: Nature News A transparent, flexible electrode made from graphene could see a one-atom thick honeycomb of carbon first made just five years ago replace other high-tech materials used in displays.
It could even be used instead of silicon in electronics. Byung Hee Hong from Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, Korea,
and his colleagues transferred a wafer-thin layer of graphene, etched into the shape needed to make an electrode, onto pieces of polymer.
The resulting films conduct electricity better than any other sample of graphene produced in the past. Until recently
high-quality graphene has been hard to make on a large scale. To produce their graphene, Hong and his colleagues used a technique that is well known in the semiconductor industry chemical vapour deposition.
This involves exposing a substrate to a number of chemicals, often at high temperatures. These chemicals then react on the surface to give a thin layer of the desired product.
The results in Hong's case were relatively large, high-quality films of graphene just a few atoms thick and several centimetres wide.
and by cooling the sample quickly after the reaction the researchers could produce up to ten single-atom layers of carbon in graphene's signature honeycomb pattern.
The graphene samples can be chemically etched into specific shapes. And when stamped onto the polymer,
Because the layers of graphene are so thin the resulting electrodes are transparent, and Hong says that makes the material ideal for use in applications such as portable displays.
"We are planning to get an investment to build up mass-production facility of the large-scale graphene films,
His team is also looking at using the graphene electrodes in photovoltaic cells. Easing the pain
Geim had predicted that chemical vapour deposition would be the best technique for making high-quality graphene films3.
"Hong thinks that graphene's most promising application will be to replace the silicon-based materials used in semiconductor technologies.
But this would need technological breakthroughs such as the ability to grow larger-scale uniform monolayer graphene films
and to modify the conductivity of graphene nanostructures. Such applications could be some time off, says Geim."
a partnership to promote sustainable agriculture in Africa. The mapping project, called the African Soil Information Service,
#The genomics of the sniffles: Nature News Genome sequences of the cold virus could reveal new secrets behind its prowess.
"says Stephen Liggett, director of cardiopulmonary genomics at the University of Maryland Medical center in Baltimore,
Another complication is that soot from burning biofuels, widely used for cooking and heating in India and Africa,
Kundra also embraced'cloud computing'by moving all 38,000 employees for WASHINGTON DC onto the Google Apps office suite
Any federal reliance on cloud computing, for example, will have to be evaluated in the light of security requirements.
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and its close cousin magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) give information about a sample s structure by detecting the weak magnetic forces in certain atomic nuclei, such as hydrogen.
There is also#16.6 billion for the international fusion energy project ITER, which has been beset by budgetary difficulties
#South korea makes billion-dollar bet on fusion power South korea has embarked on the development of a preliminary concept design for a fusion power demonstration reactor in collaboration with the US Department of energy's Princeton Plasma physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New jersey.
The project is named provisionally K-DEMO (Korean Demonstration Fusion power Plant), and its goal is to develop the design for a facility that could be completed in the 2030s in Daejeon, under the leadership of the country s National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI).
and to immediately proceed to construct a fusion power plant like K-DEMO, says Stephen Dean, president of Fusion power Associates, an advocacy group in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
K-DEMO will serve as prototype for the development of commercial fusion reactors. According to the PPPL, it will generate"some 1 billion watts of power for several weeks on end,
establishing the know-how to permit the construction of a commercial fusion power plant between 2022 and 2036.
we have a different perspective on fusion energy compared to the United states. ITER has experienced repeated delays
Another application could be in wind turbines, where films of water on the blades can, if they freeze in cold weather, lead to catastrophic failures.
Exposed to the sun, a solar cell employing such nanowires can turn nearly 14 percent of the incoming light into electricity#a new record that opens up more possibilities for cheap and effective solar power.
but proponents of a hydrogen economy say that it could be produced in vast quantities from water using excess electricity from wind turbines and solar plants.
Many materials proposed for hydrogen storage however, either don t trap much, or hold onto the hydrogen so tightly that it takes an unfeasible amount of energy to retrieve.
Peter Hall, who studies energy storage at the University of Sheffield, UK, says that people who hope to use methanol,
Long-term, large-scale storage of wind energy could best be achieved by simply storing compressed hydrogen underground. Where methanol-hydrogen systems might have a role,
but rely on harvesting renewable energy and storing it as hydrogen, and want to move the gas around."
But advances in sequencing have allowed biologists to accumulate large data sets of RNA sequences including some from RNA without tails.
#FDA Approves First Retinal implant An article by Scientific American. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Thursday approved the first retinal implant for use in the United states. The FDA s green light for Second sight s Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System gives hope to those blinded
by a rare genetic eye condition called advanced retinitis pigmentosa, which damages the light-sensitive cells that line the retina.
The Argus II is not the only retinal implant under development. Retina Implant AG takes a slightly different approach by making a prosthetic inserted beneath a portion of the retina.
Stanford university researchers are in the early stages of developing self-powered retinal implants where each pixel in the device is fitted with silicon photodiodes.
eventually, artificial organs tailor-made for specific patients. Researchers have been able to engineer tissue samples in the past by combining artificial scaffold-like structures and animal cells.
and its inventors hope that it could be used to measure the performance of biofuel-producing organisms,
Other researchers are trying to repurpose the biochemistry of green algae to make biofuels, and Saraf thinks that his device could monitor how efficiently the new strains photosynthesize.
which will be touting for customers at a meeting of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics in Phoenix, Arizona, on 19-23 march.
Seven Bridges Genomics, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aims to be accessible to people with no expertise in bioinformatics,
enhance battery technology and expand the use of biofuels, among other clean energy efforts. The ultimate goal:
but that may soon change due to recent research on ultifunctional fibersdone by MIT Bioelectronics group.
Scientists at MIT Bioelectronics group not as interested in creating applications for these new multifunctional fibers as they are in perfecting the technology,
In order to address the big data challenge of the human brain, researchers at the SPECS lab of Paul Verschure have developed recently Brainx3,
Brainx3 serves as a hypotheses generator of big data. As is often the case with complex data,
and associations in big data might be a necessary incubation step for formulating well-defined hypotheses. On this platform, the researchers reconstructed a large-scale simulation of human brain activity in a 3d virtual reality environment.
Using the brain known connectivity along with detailed biophysics, the researchers reconstruct neuronal activity of the entire cortex in the resting-state.
Within the immersive mixed/virtual reality space of Brainx3 users can explore and analysis dynamical activity patterns of brain networks
said study co-leader David B. Goldstein, Phd, professor of genetics and development and director of the new Institute for Genomic medicine at CUMC.
Their findings are reported in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular biology. Dr Samuel Cohen a Research Fellow at St john College, Cambridge,
Protein complexes, molecules that transport payloads in and out of cells, and other cellular activities are organized all at the nanoscale.
#Wearable device Changes Your Mood Wake up on the wrong side of the bed? Got a case of the Tuesdays?
It Thync, a wearable device that zaps your brain with low levels of pulsed electrical energy to calm you down
I/O developer conference, displaying how users could move their fingers in the air to control objects in the virtual world.
Wearable device Changes Your Moodthe technique could also be used to create a new kind of brain-computer interface.
such as producing scalable augmented reality (AR), aerial user interfaces and volumetric images. Laser Levitates Diamondsalthough the displays right now are tiny, at just eight cubic millimeters,
Bigbelly streetside trash and recycling bins are already pretty smart they use solar power to compact certain materials
Iris Scanner Identifies A Person 40 Feet Awayto manage the high-octane number crunching required, SCIO uses cloud technology and a kind of crowdsourcing solution.
and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei are composed themselves of three quarks and how other particles known as mesons are made from pairs of quarks and their antimatter counterparts, antiquarks.
and future Earthlings enabling them to use renewable energy sources for making hydrogen fuel. Hydrogen fuel cells can power vehicles ranging from cars to submarines and rockets.
That means renewable energy sources like wind or sunlight which are often patchy are not reliable enough.
The whole process uses a single whack of power and patchy renewable energy will suffice for this says Cronin.
which NIF engineers originally designed to implode fuel capsules for research into nuclear fusion power. The team fixed a diamond inside a hole cut in a small gold cylinder
An unexpected pattern has been glimpsed in the solar wind the turbulent plasma of charged particles that streams from the sun. It offers clues for handling plasmas that roil inside nuclear fusion reactors On earth.
The result may help to control nuclear fusion reactors. These create energy in the same way as the sun by fusing a superheated plasma of hydrogen nuclei to form helium.
so it can be observed in exquisite detail says Steve Cowley of the Culham Centre for Fusion energy UK.
Russia's launch is likely to still go ahead as M3m was due to be a secondary payload. Com Dev
Longmier's team began their first crowdfunding campaign on the Kickstarter website in July. Although they failed to raise their $200
#3d printed rocket engine gets its first fiery test Thought current 3d printing was only good for creating cute plastic versions of teapot lids key rings and other curios?
They wondered if additive layer manufacturing the engineer's name for 3d printing could make a precision part called a rocket injector in less time than the year it takes using conventional methods.
Fed liquid oxygen and gaseous hydrogen the injector performed perfectly in a series of tests says Aerojet's programme manager Jeff Haynes. Better still it took only four months to make the injector using 3d printing
NASA is not the only organisation trying to take 3d printing into space however: a public competition is under way to create a crowdsourced design for an open-source 3d-printable rocket engine that commercial spaceflight operators will be able to use
The Dragon capsule can deliver a payload of 3 tonnes. The two craft have comparable capabilities claims Mark Pieczynski of Orbital Sciences.
#Hewlett Foundation funds new MIT initiative on cybersecurity policy MIT has received $15 million in funding from the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation to establish an initiative aimed at laying the foundations for a smart sustainable cybersecurity policy to deal with the growing cyber threats faced by governments businesses and individuals.
The MIT Cybersecurity Policy Initiative (CPI) is one of three new academic initiatives to receive a total of $45 million in support through the Hewlett Foundation s Cyber Initiative.
With the new awards the Hewlett Foundation has allocated now $65 million over the next five years to strengthening cybersecurity the largest-ever private commitment to this nascent field.
and the Hewlett Foundation s remarkable generosity provide an opportunity for MIT to make a meaningful and lasting impact on cybersecurity policy MIT President L. Rafael Reif says.
And UC Berkeley s Center for Internet security and Policy will be organized around assessing the possible range of future paths cybersecurity might take.
And we ll bring that expertise to the understanding of connected digital systems and cybersecurity.
This is the state of cybersecurity policy today: growing urgency but no metrics and little science he says.
CSAIL is home to much of the technology that is at the core of cybersecurity such as the RSA cryptography algorithm that protects most online financial transactions and the development of web standards via the MIT-based World wide web Consortium.
Developing cybersecurity policy frameworks for autonomous vehicles like drones and self-driving cars; andhow to achieve regional and even global agreements on both privacy and security norms in online environments.
Immunologists geneticists and genomics researchers drive Progress to this wealth of information clinicians contribute patient-based insights and gain potential targets for therapeutics.
#Wind energy reaches greater heights Wind turbines across the globe are being made taller to capture more energy from the stronger winds that blow at greater heights.
and Alexander Slocum, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical engineering at MIT is developing a novel system that adapts a traditional pipe-making technology to churn out wind turbines on location,
while conducting an independent study on wind energy issues with Slocum. Running a consulting company for machine design after graduating from MIT
Smith was vetting startups and technologies in wind energy, and other industries, for investors. As wind energy picked up steam about five years ago, venture capitalists soon funded Smith, Slocum,
and other wind energy experts to study opportunities for cost savings in large, onshore wind turbines. The team looked, for instance,
at developing advanced drivetrain controls and rotor designs. ut out of that study we spotted tower transport as one of the biggest bottlenecks holding back the industry,
In the Midwest, wind energy has reached already grid-parity, undercutting even today low-cost natural gas but in areas like New england and the Southeast,
taller towers are needed to reach the strong winds that make wind energy economically feasible. nce youe at the heights wee looking at,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011