Bigbelly streetside trash and recycling bins are already pretty smart they use solar power to compact certain materials
When hit with an electric charge, this special RF-C glows because of an electroluminescent paint. Which means that the faster you drive
which can be excited at two different energy levels. This produces luminescence at two separate wavelengths that have lifetimes ranging from 277 millionths of a second to about 100 billionths of a second.
Likewise, young blood can restore the memory and energy of older mice. Neuroscientist Saul Villeda of UCSF homed in on one actor he thought might be responsible for some of that effect:
who claim to have found conclusive evidence for the existence of so-called pentaquarks within the debris of high-energy proton collisions.
They measured the combined energy of two of the decay products proton and a meson known as J/Psi,
and antiquarknd then totted up how many times they recorded each energy value across the thousands of collisions they studied.
They found that the number of pairings with a certain energy little under five times the mass of the protonas far higher than would be expected by chance.
Energy and mass are equivalent, according to Einstein's equation E=mc2. The researchers concluded that that was the mass of a fleeting"charmonium"pentaquark containing two up quarks, one down quark, one charm quark,
the LHCB collaboration made use of data showing not only the energy of the particles produced in the CERN collisions but also their directions.
#Cool new material could make fuel cells cheaper It not enough for a new alternative energy technology to work.
That been a high hurdle for devices called solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCS) that convert fuelsuch as methane and hydrogenirectly to electricity without burning them.
a materials scientist and fuel cell expert at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who was involved not in the work. think it going to generate a lot of excitement. fuel cell works much like a battery.
Within it, two electrodes are separated by a charge-conducting electrolyte. In the case of SOFCS, the electrolyte consists of a solid ceramic membrane.
In the typical setup, air is fed to the negatively charged electrode, or cathode, where oxygen molecules pick up extra electrons.
generating water, carbon dioxide, and electricity. The electricity is fed through a circuit where it powers our devices,
and then is returned to the anode. As long fuel as is fed in, the SOFC continues pumping out electricity.
SOFCS have some promising capabilities. The devices make electricity at an efficiency that can match a large natural gas-based power plant.
But whereas a power plant is huge and costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build,
SOFCS can be made to be any size. That makes them attractive as backup power sources for hospitals and manufacturing plants
as well as for producing distributed power systems not connected to the grid. But SOFCS also have their drawbacks.
These devices work best at converting hydrogen gas and oxygen to water and electricity, and even work at lower temperatures around 600°C. Unlike conventional SOFCS the BZY membranes allow the flow not of negatively charged oxygen ions toward the anode,
and his colleagues have found a way to boost the power from BZY fuel cells. The researchers suspected one problem with the BZY membranes was in the way they were made.
the sweet spot temperature targeted by the fuel cell industry. Oayre and Haile caution that the new advance won revolutionize the SOFC industry overnight.
Commercial devices, by contrast, work by wiring many such devices together into what known as a fuel cell tackthat generates more power.
If future BZY-based SOFC stacks work as well as the individual devices, then it could finally produce the tipping point the fuel cell industry has been looking for n
The Pacific gas and electric company in San francisco and global energy giant Chevron are testing a handheld earthbound version that is 1000 times as sensitive as existing methane sniffers.
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.
But existing methods for creating usable hydrogen gas from water require a lot of electricity. That means renewable energy sources like wind or sunlight which are often patchy are not reliable enough.
It can also be hazardous to scale up artificial leaves which make fuel from sunlight just like plants says Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow UK.
To get around it they built a device that uses a single pulse of power to split water so continuous energy is needed not.
The device zaps water with electricity to release oxygen then a silicon-based chemical mediator dissolved in the water mops up stray protons and electrons.
The whole process uses a single whack of power and patchy renewable energy will suffice for this says Cronin.
The discovery hinged on the assumption that certain kinds of supernovae detonate in thermonuclear explosions that have fixed a amount of energy
if these sorts of energy-hungry civilisations exist WISE should have detected them Wright says. But identifying them is another story.
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.
One problem with optimising their energy output is deducing what is going on inside them inserting a probe isn't an option as it would melt.
Enter the solar wind. Though less dense and cooler than the hydrogen of a fusion reactor the wind is a plasma
and can be probed thanks to STEREO. The great thing about solar wind turbulence is that the satellites sit right inside
which can cause plasma to escape the magnetic field containing it in the reactor. They may also be able to use turbulence to disrupt high energy plasma blobs that can rip holes in the reactor.
These results look very promising says Todd Evans of nuclear energy firm General Atomics in San diego California.
This article appeared in print under the headline Sunny surprise for fusion reactor r
#Canada uses satellite to scold Russia over Ukraine Canada has blocked the launch of a satellite aboard a Russian rocket as a result of tensions over Russia's actions in Ukraine.
The move is a step up from a largely symbolic US ban on cooperating with Russia in space earlier this month.
or align the electromagnetic fields of photons they came into contact with in the infant universe.
which creates an electromagnetic field that attracts the debris and pushes the net away from Earth's geomagnetic field.
And a US-based firm called Shackleton Energy company says it wants to send robots and teams of human miners to the moon to supply water for fuel depots that it would place in Earth orbit t
The particles annihilate on contact with ordinary matter vanishing in a puff of energy which makes it difficult to produce
and carried substances capable of supplying microbes with energy. We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and supportive of life that probably
and minerals that could act like batteries allowing electrons to flow and bring energy to any potential organisms.
They found all three. The instruments showed that between 20 and 30 per cent of the dust is called a clay mineral smectite
and so could have acted as microbial energy sources. All these clues point to ancient Mars hosting neutral slightly salty liquid water that could have supported primitive life.
but Miyake found a 1. 2 per cent leap in those years that could only have been caused by extremely high-energy cosmic rays hitting the Earth.
however as such a bright blast of energy would surely have been noted at the time and there is no historical record of such an energetic solar flare.
but this costs more and requires more energy to run. Color IQ is a thin glass tube,
all youe doing is replacing the light bulb, and yet the entire display looks much better.
Using the components in 20 million TVS is projected to save 600 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year worldwide enough electricity to power 50,000 average U s. homes. ee been able to show, cradle to grave,
When electrically charged, the dots illuminated a light bulb 25 times more efficiently than traditional devices.
In 2010, the company launched its first product, a QD light bulb, with partner Nexxus Lighting.
However, realizing this $100 light bulb would soon need to sell for $10 to remain competitive
QD light bulbs. he market has stabilized quite a bit, he says. omewhere down the line, we think there an application
MIT has a strong record of applying interdisciplinary approaches to large-scale problems from energy to cancer.
For example the MIT Energy Initiative has brought together faculty from across campus including the social sciences to conduct energy studies designed to inform future energy options and research.
These studies include technology policy reports focused on nuclear power coal natural gas and the smart electric grid.
#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,
at wind farms, making taller towers more economically feasible. Keystone system is a modification of spiral welding,
A 460-foot tower, for instance, could increase energy capture by 10 to 50 percent, compared with today more common 260-foot towers. hat site-dependent,
because the trees slow down the wind near the ground you can see a 50 percent increase in energy capture for the same wind turbine.
Solving transport problems The Keystone system value lies in skirting wind turbine transportation constraints that have plagued the industry for years.
Towers are made in segments to be shipped to wind farms for assembly. But theye restricted to diameters of about 14 feet
Smith explains. ut there no way to weld together a tower in a factory that 20 feet in diameter and ship it to the wind farm.
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,
Now, the company is working with the Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas Wind Systems, and other turbine makers, to plan out full-scale production,
In Maine, for example, there only a small percentage of the state where wind power is economically feasible today,
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,
t really opens up the whole country for turbines to capture large amounts of energy. l
#Beating battery drain Stream video on your smartphone or use its GPS for an hour or two and you ll probably see the battery drain significantly.
As data rates climb and smartphones adopt more power-hungry features battery life has become a concern.
Now a technology developed by MIT spinout Eta Devices could help a phone s battery last perhaps twice as long
and help to conserve energy in cell towers. The primary culprit in smartphone battery drain is an inefficient power amplifier a component that is designed to push the radio signal out through the phones antennas.
Similar larger modules are found in wireless base stations where they might use 10 or even 100 times the power.
Prepared to send sizeable chunks of data at any given time the amplifiers stay at maximum voltage eating away power more than any other smartphone component and about 75 percent of electricity consumption in base stations#and wasting
This means smartphone batteries lose longevity and base stations waste energy and lose money. But Eta Devices has developed a chip (for smartphones)
and a shoebox-size module (for base stations) based on nearly a decade of MIT research to essentially switch gears to adjust voltage supply to power amplifiers as needed cutting the waste.
You can look at our technology as a high-speed gearbox that every few nanoseconds modulates the amount of power that the power amplifier draws from the battery explains Joel Dawson Eta Devices chief technology officer
The savings could be substantial Dawson says noting that a large carrier could save $100 million in annual electricity costs.
Dawson says this could potentially double current smartphone battery life. Besides battery life Dawson adds there are many ways the telecommunications industry can take advantage of improved efficiency.
Eta Devices approach could lead to smaller handset batteries for example and even smaller handsets since there would be less dissipating heat.
The technology could also drive down operating costs for base stations in the developing world where these stations rely on expensive diesel fuel for power
At the time I was suffering as everyone else was from my iphone running out of battery at lunchtime Astrom says.
The research was supported by the U s. Department of energy the MIT Energy Initiative and the Chang family y
because scaling down emitters implies less power consumption less bias voltage to operate them and higher throughput says Velsquez-Garca a principal research scientist at MTL.
which produce energy that the cell can harness to control the flow of various molecules into and out of the cell.
The research was funded by the MIT Energy Initiative and the Department of energy y
#MIT launches Laboratory for Social Machines with major Twitter investment The MIT Media Lab today announced the creation of the Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), funded by a five-year, $10 million
#How to make a perfect solar absorber The key to creating a material that would be ideal for converting solar energy to heat is tuning the material s spectrum of absorption just right:
but not much of the rest of the spectrum since that would increase the energy that is reradiated by the material
The material works as part of a solar-thermophotovoltaic (STPV) device: The sunlight s energy is converted first to heat
which then causes the material to glow emitting light that can in turn be converted to an electric current.
When harnessing solar energy you want to trap it and keep it there Chou says; getting just the right spectrum of both absorption and emission is essential to efficient STPV performance.
Most of the sun s energy reaches us within a specific band of wavelengths Chou explains ranging from the ultraviolet through visible light and into the near-infrared.
which would add greatly to the complexity and expense of a solar power system. This is the first device that is able to do all these things at the same time Chou says.
and materials science to advance solar energy harvesting says Paul Braun a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was involved not in this research.
In this paper the authors demonstrated in a system designed to withstand high temperatures the engineering of the optical properties of a potential solar thermophotovoltaic absorber to match the sun s spectrum.
Of course much work remains to realize a practical solar cell however the work here is one of the most important steps in that process.
The work was supported by the Solid-state Solar Thermal energy Conversion Center and the U s. Department of energy y
Originally designed to look for cracks in nuclear reactors water tanks the robot could also inspect ships for the false hulls
In the robot s watertight chamber are its control circuitry its battery a communications antenna and an inertial measurement unit
The rechargeable lithium batteries used in the prototype Bhattacharyya says last about 40 minutes. Since the robot can travel between half a meter
Their next prototype Bhattacharyya says will feature wirelessly rechargeable batteries. And modifications to the propulsion system she says should increase the robot s operation time on a single charge to 100 minutes.
and require heavy battery packs a design that would significantly impede mobility and is given likely infeasible the limited power resources available to astronauts in space.
Now MIT researchers have developed an algorithm for bounding that they ve successfully implemented in a robotic cheetah a sleek four-legged assemblage of gears batteries
The group designed light bulbs called/0 Bulbs, that not only projected information, but also collected the information from a surface it projected onto.
and is exploring powering the device on solar energy an important consideration for poor rural areas. The research was funded by the Singapore National Research Foundation through SMART T
especially for large models, Knezevic says. igh-fidelity simulation enables more cost-effective designs, better use of energy and materials,
#Recycling old batteries into solar cells This could be a classic win-win solution: A system proposed by researchers at MIT recycles materials from discarded car batteries a potential source of lead pollution into new,
long-lasting solar panels that provide emissions-free power. The system is described in a paper in the journal Energy and Environmental science,
co-authored by professors Angela M. Belcher and Paula T. Hammond, graduate student Po-Yen Chen,
It is based on a recent development in solar cells that makes use of a compound called perovskite specifically,
organolead halide perovskite a technology that has progressed rapidly from initial experiments to a point where its efficiency is nearly competitive with that of other types of solar cells. t went from initial demonstrations to good efficiency in less than two years,
says Belcher, the W. M. Keck Professor of Energy at MIT. Already, perovskite-based photovoltaic cells have achieved power-conversion efficiency of more than 19 percent,
which is close to that of many commercial silicon-based solar cells. Initial descriptions of the perovskite technology identified its use of lead,
whose production from raw ores can produce toxic residues, as a drawback. But by using recycled lead from old car batteries,
the team analysis shows that the lead from a single car battery could produce enough solar panels to provide power for 30 households.
As an added advantage, the production of perovskite solar cells is a relatively simple and benign process. t has the advantage of being a low-temperature process,
and the number of steps is reducedcompared with the manufacture of conventional solar cells, Belcher says.
Battery pileup ahead One motivation for using the lead in old car batteries is that battery technology is undergoing rapid change, with new, more efficient types, such as lithium-ion batteries,
swiftly taking over the market. nce the battery technology evolves, over 200 million lead-acid batteries will potentially be retired in the United states,
and that could cause a lot of environmental issues, Belcher says. Today, she says, 90 percent of the lead recovered from the recycling of old batteries is used to produce new batteries,
but over time the market for new lead-acid batteries is likely to decline, potentially leaving a large stockpile of lead with no obvious application.
In a finished solar panel, the lead-containing layer would be encapsulated fully by other materials, as many solar panels are today,
limiting the risk of lead contamination of the environment. When the panels are retired eventually, the lead can simply be recycled into new solar panels. he process to encapsulate them will be the same as for polymer cells today,
Chen says. hat technology can be translated easily. t is important that we consider the life cycles of the materials in large-scale energy systems,
Hammond says. nd here we believe the sheer simplicity of the approach bodes well for its commercial implementation.
Old lead is as good as new Belcher believes that the recycled perovskite solar cells will be embraced by other photovoltaics researchers,
who can now fine-tune the technology for maximum efficiency. The team work clearly demonstrates that lead recovered from old batteries is
just as good for the production of perovskite solar cells as freshly produced metal. Some companies are already gearing up for commercial production of perovskite photovoltaic panels,
which could otherwise require new sources of lead. Since this could expose miners and smelters to toxic fumes
and provide a solution for future renewable energy. The work, which also included research scientist Jifa Qi, graduate student Matthew Klug and postdoc Xiangnan Dang, was supported by Italian energy company Eni through the MIT Energy Initiative y
#RNA combination therapy for lung cancer offers promise for personalized medicine Small RNA molecules including micrornas (mirnas)
and crawls away as soon as batteries are attached to it. The exciting thing here is that you create this device that has embedded computation in the flat printed version says Daniela Rus the Andrew
That technique passes successive frames of video through a battery of image filters, which are used to measure fluctuations,
or microfluidic devices or solar panels that could automatically clean themselves of dust and grit. Most surfaces are passive says Kripa Varanasi an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT
For example solar panels and the mirrors used in solar-concentrating systems can quickly lose a significant percentage of their efficiency
The issue of dust basically makes the use of solar panels to be less efficient than in North america or Europe.
The work was supported by the MIT-KFUPM Center for Clean water and Clean energy y
#Light pulses control graphene s electrical behavior Graphene, an ultrathin form of carbon with exceptional electrical optical and mechanical properties, has become a focus of research on a variety of potential uses.
Now researchers at MIT have found a way to control how the material conducts electricity by using extremely short light pulses
which electricity runs through a gas to produce light. These are very bright but can be as large as trucks
and fiber that first transfer energy from diode lasers into a medium usually a crystal before converting it into a laser beam.
and saving energy Huang says. This means the Terablade operates with just as much power and brightness as all other industrial lasers about 2600 megawatts per square centimeter per steradian at roughly 40 percent efficiency.
and Germany where energy costs are high Huang says. In April the company began shipping its system to Panasonic Welding Systems in Europe and Japan.
and draw on the Broad s Therapeutics Platform a technological powerhouse with the capacity to create
The new material is able to convert 85 percent of incoming solar energy into steam a significant improvement over recent approaches to solar-powered steam generation.
who led the development of the structure. specially in remote areas where the sun is the only source of energy,
if you can generate steam with solar energy, it would be very useful. Ghasemi and mechanical engineering department head Gang Chen,
But initiating this reaction requires very intense solar energy about 1, 000 times that of an average sunny day.
and retain solar energy. The structure bottom layer is a carbon foam that contains pockets of air to keep the foam afloat
They found they were able to convert 85 percent of solar energy into steam at a solar intensity 10 times that of a typical sunny day.
when water droplets spontaneously jump away from superhydrophobic surfaces during condensation they can gain electric charge in the process.
Now the same team has demonstrated that this process can generate small amounts of electricity that might be used to power electronic devices.
or other sources of ambient energy and represents an amount that could be sufficient to provide useful power for electronic devices in some remote locations.
and Wang s 2013 finding in attempting to develop an improved heat-transfer surface to be used as a condenser in applications such as power plants that droplets on a superhydrophobic surface convert surface energy to kinetic energy as they merge to form larger droplets.
They later found that in that process the jumping droplets gain a small electric charge meaning that the jumping
For powering remote automated environmental sensors even a tiny amount of energy might be sufficient;
Chuanhua Duan an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University who was involved not in this research says This work provides a new approach for energy harvesting
and anti-icing but no one has correlated condensation with energy harvesting before. The research which also included MIT graduate student Daniel Preston and former postdoc Ryan Enright now at Lucent Ireland Ltd. was supported by MIT s Solid-state Solar-Thermal energy Conversion Center
(S3tec) funded by the U s. Department of energy; the Office of Naval Research; and the National Science Foundation n
and inventor Nikola Tesla proposed a global system of wireless transmission of electricity or wireless power.
First in 2007 the team wirelessly lit a 60-watt light bulb from eight feet away using two large copper coils with similarly tuned resonant frequencies that transferred energy from one to the other over the magnetic field.
Now this wireless electricity (or Witricity) technology licensed through the researchers startup Witricity Corp.#is coming to mobile devices electric vehicles and potentially a host of other applications.
But it could also lead to benefits such as smaller batteries and less hardware which would lower costs for manufacturers and consumers.
which uses an electromagnetic field to transfer energy between two coils is used in transformers and wireless toothbrushes.
Lasers can also move energy between two points such as two satellites. But this requires an uninterrupted continuous path between the transmitter and the receiver
when Soljacic awoke at 3 a m. to the beeping of his cell phone running out of battery life.
At the time he was working on various photonics projects lasers solar cells and optical fiber that all involved a phenomenon called resonant coupling.
One transmitting coil was connected to an AC power supply while another connected to a 60-watt light bulb.
If an opera singer belts out a note inside that room the glass with the corresponding frequency accumulates enough energy to shatter
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