#Autonomous drones flock like birds Autonomous drone flock The first drones that can fly as a coordinated flock has been created by Hungarian researchers.#
#The team watched as the ten autonomous robots took to the air in a field outside Budapest,
zipping through the open sky, flying in formation or even following a leader, all without any central control.
Video)##The aircraft, called quadcopters because they have four rotors, navigate using signals from Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers,
he makes an analogy with the energy industry. We re still burning wood. There s coal fired power plants. Those didn t go away,
from the filament in a light bulb to the silicon in a computer chip. Whether we 3d print them
which involves adding a new algorithm on top of his PETOT (parallel total energy) code, originally developed by Wang
when he worked at the National Renewable energy Laboratory and later parallelized by Wang and Andrew Canning after Wang moved to NERSC in 1999.
, the predicted energies and velocities of an atom passing through a layer of material are the same for both models,
With 16gb of GDDR5 memory and maximum power consumption of 235 watts AMD Firepro S9150 server GPUS provide massive compute performance
Many scientists have assumed that bottom feeders get most of their energy from tiny particles of organic matter that settle on the seafloor.
instead that at least half or more of all the fish living on the seafloor might get their energy from animals that migrate each day between the surface and deep water like jellyfish cephalopods and small fish.
which are natural tracers of the flow of energy through ecosystems Trueman explained. From an animal's isotope levels scientists can partially reconstruct its diet and place in the food web.
Even so as fishing energy and mining operations move into deeper waters Trueman said researchers will need to understand how bottom feeders which may play an important
because they can move through more than a kilometer of soil with the energy of an AA battery."
After long focusing on fuel economy and energy production environmentalists and scientists are now promoting a diet of more plants and less meat to slow climate change but why?
which requires extensive water energy and chemical use as well as energy for transporting that feed live animals and animal products.
The total process for bringing such vast quantities of meat egg and dairy products to our plates comes at a substantial cost to the environment.
#German bank and EU offers funding to Chile mining power plant State owned German bank Kfw has said it is to advance a#100 million loan ($123 million),
to help provide funding for Chile first solar-thermal power plant which will supply electricity to the mining industry.
the funding represents around 10%of the total investment that is estimated to be required for the power plant project.
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,
German Environment minister Barbara Hendricks said. ecause it can store energy, this technology is suited also for basic electricity supply and therefore highly innovative.
Furthermore, the European commission will provide a further#15 million euros, to be given to Kfw through its Latin american Investment programme.
The project is hoped to ease strain on Chile energy sector and improve efficiencies in the country mining industry;
at present it is estimated that mines operated in the country contributed to around a third of the nation total power consumption.
Chile lacks extensive fossil-fuels to support such ongoing energy consumption by industry that is necessary for its economy
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.
The achievement will have a number of significant impacts on the growing energy storage industry. Other manufacturers of vanadium flow batteries build their devices with virgin vanadium extracted from mining.
It must then be processed to a 99%plus level of purity. Through an extensive R&d program, Imergy has developed a way to produce flow batteries with vanadium at a 98%purity level that can be harvested from environmental waste sites.
By extracting vanadium from slag Imergy will lower the cost of obtaining and processing vanadiumhe principal active ingredient in many flow battery electrolytesy 40%relative to competitors.
As a result of this technology and other developments, Imergy will be able to lower the cost of its flow batteries from $500 a kilowatt hour, already an industry benchmark, to under $300 per kilowatt hour.
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
and other customers more flexibility and capacity for managing outages curbing peak power or reducing demand charges.
Wee taking industrial sludge and turning it into a source of clean energy said Bill Watkins, CEO of Imergy Power systems. t the same time,
wee lowering the cost and increasing the performance of energy storage, which is going to expand the market. a
#Halliburton releases CYPHER 2. 0 seismic-to-stimulation service Halliburton has announcedthe release of the CYPHER (SM) 2. 0 Seismic-to-Stimulation Service a proprietary
Devon Energy first applied the CYPHER service in the Grasslands Area of the Northern Barnett Shale.
It opens unique possibilities for 3d imaging and exact modeling of geological materials in oil and gas exploration, composite materials, fuel cells and electronic assemblies.
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
The University of Cincinnati's smart battery team with the Twike. Photo: Jim Motavalli) The big drawback of the Twike is the price around $27000 for the base model
and battery assist) that can reach 52 mph and cruise up to 300 miles on a charge.
It's also possible to extend the range by adding extra e-bike type li-ion battery packs.
(or solar panels) are less. That said I loved it the first time I saw one at the Vancouver World's Fair around 1987.
The smart battery research at the University of Cincinnati is interesting. According to Jay Lee the IMS director the cells in a battery pack typically degrade
(and charge) at different rates and that throws off the efficiency and longevity. 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
Another use for the Smart Battery Watchdog Agent Dr. Lee said is to plot the optimal route to where youe going based on your past driving behavior the availability of charging stations along the way and other factors.
and perform complex tasks using very little energy. Researchers for the computer hardware giant have developed a postage-stamp-size chip,
Robotic bug springs to life The latest advancement in robotics may not look like much just a few small batteries attached to a flat sheet of paper
and then batteries are lifted off the ground, onto the back of what now looks like a small robotic bug.
which are connected to the batteries carried on the bug's back, the researchers said. Also on the robot's back is programmed a microprocessor
plants are the powerhouses that produce all of the sustenance On earth. This process also produces the oxygen that we breath,
And since all they require is a steady supply of electricity, laser weapons may also be more reliable than conventional weapons.
#Transparent solar windows generate energy without obstructing the view Imagine being able to generate solar energy on the surface of every window
"Luminescent solar concentrators generate electricity by concentrating radiation most often, non-ionizing solar radiation. They convert it by luminescence
is guided to the edge of a clear plastic panel where it is converted then to electricity using thin strips of photovoltaic solar cells.
"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.
Even better the filtration system uses just 2. 5 kilowatts (2500 watts) of electricity per hour so it's energy-efficient too.
and is powered battery. The user can select among six different grips. The arm's development would not have been possible without a host of technological advances
7 Clever Technologies Inspired By nature DNA alphabet The field of synthetic biology involves tinkering with DNA to create organisms capable of novel functions in medicine, energy and other areas.
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,
"Those applications could include better solar cells,"smart"coatings, new kinds of computers and all kinds of other devices or components.
#Honda Smart Home produces more energy than it uses Wouldn it be great if your house produced more energy than it consumed?
Does that mean negative utility bills? Indeed it does, because solar panels can return power to the grid
and make your meter spin backwards. Japanese companies are fascinated with net-zero energy buildings, usually incorporating transportation as part of the mix.
Panasonic Eco Ideas House, with solar, a fuel cell, battery backup and a plug-in Toyota prius, has stood long next to a company headquarters in Tokyo,
and the company is also developing a green-themed housing development. In Japan, Toyota is invested also heavily in green communities.
A 9. 5-kilowatt solar array, backed up by a 10-kilowatt-hour lithium battery and a 10-kilowatt DC car charger.
The solar will generate more than enough energy to heat the house, supply the appliances, and power a Honda Fit electric car.
Michael Koenig, Honda Smart Home project leader, said that converting DC to AC wastes energy,
The Home energy management System (HEMS) optimizes the house microgrid, so that the Fit can charge during the low-demand nighttime,
and run on stored solar power. A geothermal system with eight, 20-foot deep boreholes uses a heat pump to heat
and cool the home floors and ceiling all year. LED lighting, with five times the efficiency of conventional illumination, is used throughout.
essentially creating"living materials"that can be integrated into everyday objects and devices, from solar panels to adjustable furniture,
such as with energy technology. Improved batteries and solar cells could be produced, and biofilms with enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of cellulose could be used for the conversion of agricultural waste into biofuels.
The possibilities are endless furniture could even be built out of these"living materials.""Devices constructed from these materials could adjust to their environments in ways that traditional nonliving materials cannot."
when organisms absorb high-energy short-wavelength light (such as ultraviolet light) then re-emit that light at a longer wavelength.
In the case of robotic muscles electrical energy not temperature change would drive the contraction of fibers.
and close heavy windows in a building in response to the air temperature without motors or electricity which the researchers demonstrated.
a large machine/small waste treatment plant developed by Janicki Bioenergy (an offshoot of Sedro-Woolley-based Janicki Industries)
but electricity used to power the machine itself. Any leftover electricity generated through the process is fed back into the power grid.
The small amount of solid waste that comes out on the other end is no longer poop
000 people and, from that, produce 86,000 liters of clean water on a daily basis while also generating a net 250 kilowatts of electricity.
The researchers read the hologram using the microscope to measure the energy state of a single electron wave function.
They teased out the individual pages by scanning the hologram for electrons at different energy levels.
In encoding the'S',the researchers were concentrating the electron density at certain points and energy levels.
"You would change the energy level and you would have a different set of a wiring,
"Really, the options that are available are salvage logging of the wood for biomass or long-lived wood products to keep the carbon from the atmosphere,
The models suggested that there are between 0. 8 billion tonnes and 2 billion tonnes of fish biomass in the oceans.
The resulting films conduct electricity better than any other sample of graphene produced in the past. Until recently
His team is also looking at using the graphene electrodes in photovoltaic cells. Easing the pain
India wants to increase the proportion of its electricity generated from nuclear sources from 2. 8%to 25%by 2050.
or more new reactors to join the 17 existing ones and the 6 that are under construction.
The Nuclear power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) in Mumbai expects this month to finalize a total of US$15 billion in contracts with France's Areva group
but are due this month to visit India and scout out possible locations for reactors.
The NPCIL has readied four sites one for each vendor each capable of accepting eight to ten imported reactors.
On 5 december, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev signed a deal in New delhi that paves the way for four more 1-gigawatt reactors over the next decade,
says Ravi Bhushan Grover, director of strategic planning in India's Department of Atomic energy (DAE) and a key negotiator of the Indo-US nuclear deal.
Within India, DAE employees are concerned that an influx of proposed new reactors could lead to quality standards being compromised.
The country's Atomic energy Regulatory Board will have to inspect and clear several new reactors of different designs as they are approved."
"Our primary concern is over safety, "says A. Sathasivam, president of the National Federation of Atomic energy Employees.
Om Pal Singh, the board's secretary, says the problem is simply a lack of manpower.
and Padmanabha Krishnagopala Iyengar, former DAE secretary, claim that Indian nuclear scientists are giving up prematurely on their thorium research programme in exchange for a few uranium reactors from abroad.
its thorium research programme focuses on turning the material into fissile uranium-233 for use as reactor fuel.
Fast breeder reactors, of the type under construction in Kalpakkam, would breed uranium-233 in thorium blankets surrounding a plutonium core.
laboratory chemicals or low energy light bulbs that contain mercury.""I don't think these areas where mercury still has important uses will be the first to go,
and previously in North america if coal is replaced by oil and natural gas as an energy source, and if particulate filters in cars and factories become more common o
I wanted to found a prize to reflect the new challenges faced by humanity#such as climate change, energy shortages, emerging diseases, clashes of cultures and ideas,
they push and pull the charged gas in the corona, giving it the energy that heats it up.
#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).
the##15-billion (US$20-billion) experimental reactor being built in Cadarache, France, under the auspices of an international collaboration.
K-DEMO is intended to be the next step toward commercial reactors and would be the first plant to actually contribute power to an electric grid."
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.
a research fellow at NFRI and a former chairman of the ITER Management Advisory Committee, says that Korea is need desperately in of the energy that fusion could provide."
"Korea has a lack of energy resources, he says.#"#"The population density is high and the country consumes so much energy,
Lee adds, we have a different perspective on fusion energy compared to the United states. ITER has experienced repeated delays
to generate competitive energy, says Thomas Cochran, a consultant for the Natural resources Defense Council in WASHINGTON DC.
500#C. Varanasi says that hydrophobic ceramics could improve the efficiency of energy generation. As steam passes through the turbines of a thermal power station
water condenses onto the blades and forms droplets many micrometres across. The rotating blades lose energy as they smash into these droplets, accounting for up to 30%of the inefficiency of the turbine,
he says. A hydrophobic coating made of tough ceramic would prevent films of water forming on the blades,
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.
Varanasi is now working with energy and technology companies partnered with the MIT Energy Initiative,
which co-funded his work, to test the ceramics in real-world applications a
#Novel solar photovoltaic cells achieve record efficiency using nanoscale structures Here's how to make a powerful solar cell from indium and phosphorus:
First, arrange microscopic flecks of gold on a semiconductor background. Using the gold as seeds,
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.
#and validated at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar energy systems#this novel nanowire configuration delivered nearly as much electricity as more traditional indium phosphide thin-film solar cells
That suggests such nanowire solar cells could prove cheaper #and more powerful#if the process could be industrialized,
At the same time the novel cells could be built into so-called multijunction solar cells#compound devices that incorporate several different types of semiconductor material in layers like a sandwich to absorb as much of the energy in sunlight as possible.
Such multijunction cells have converted more than 43 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity#currently
Such multijunction solar cells are also the most expensive type of photovoltaic, but they can be made cheaper by combining them with low-cost lenses to concentrate the sunlight onto smaller versions of the cells.
Borgstr#m, for one, suspects that nanowire solar cells will stand on their own once the production process can be simplified,
such as ultra-efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDS) and solar cells, but the technology has found mainly niche applications.
in particular their energy gap#the energy needed to kick electrons into a higher energy band#which determines the colour of light that the mater#ial can emit.
Quantum dots have shown promise for electronics, too#for example in solar cells in which a mix of quantum dots tuned to absorb different wavelengths of light could capture more of the energy in the solar spectrum.
But one hurdle to their exploitation was their temperature sensitivity. Near the backlight of a liquid-crystal display (LCD), for example, temperatures can be around 100#C. At this temperature,
to make them more appealing as long-life, low energy light bulbs. But Bawendi says that LED designs
Current atomic clocks are based on the microwave signals emitted by electrons inside an atom as they move from one energy level to another.
giving materials scientists a new tool for investigating the behaviour of light in the interiors of the complex nanostructures used in lasers, light-based circuits and solar cells."
and energy of the light (see Metamaterial TV). The device is sensitive enough to pick up a signal even from materials that are barely luminescent, such as metals.
The team has mapped also the distribution of light in the silicon nanodiscs that are used as a coating on solar cells to improve efficiency,
Lukas Novotny, an optical physicist at The swiss Federal Institute of technology in Zurich, says that cathodoluminescence could be a useful tool for improving the performance of light-emitting devices and solar cells,
Physicists later realized that the absolute temperature of a gas is related to the average energy of its particles.
which particles have no energy at all, and higher temperatures correspond to higher average energies. However, by the 1950s, physicists working with more exotic systems began to realise that this isn't always true:
Technically, you read off the temperature of a system from a graph that plots the probabilities of its particles being found with certain energies.
Normally, most particles have average or near-average energies, with only a few particles zipping around at higher energies.
In theory, if the situation is reversed, with more particles having higher, rather than lower energies, the plot would flip over
lowest-energy state to the highest possible energy state, before they can react, says Schneider."
Exotic high-energy states that are hard to generate in the laboratory at positive temperatures become stable at negative absolute temperatures#"as
Messing s animals formed persistent memories for fears, objects, places and movements across a battery of behavioral tests.
Hydrogen has a high energy density and is completely clean, burning to leave behind only water vapour as waste.
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.
and takes a lot of energy. Many chemists have spent decades studying how best to trap hydrogen for use as a fuel.
or hold onto the hydrogen so tightly that it takes an unfeasible amount of energy to retrieve.
It is difficult to estimate how much energy will be saved, says Beller. The process is still at an early stage, years away from commercialization.
But he thinks that it could be enough to make methanol a viable energy carrier
potentially delivering hydrogen for fuel cells in mobile phones, computers or even cars. Edman Tsang, a chemist at the University of Oxford, UK, who also works on storing hydrogen in liquids including methanol2,
That means that it may be possible to combine a methanol-hydrogen reaction with a fuel cell that guzzles up the gas to produce electricity.
hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as fuel cells that directly run on methanol, for instance. Not everyone agrees with Beller and Tsang.
Peter Hall, who studies energy storage at the University of Sheffield, UK, says that people who hope to use methanol,
batteries will be key to energy transport and to small-scale storage of electricity from solar panels. 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, says Hall, is in communities that are isolated from the electricity grid
but rely on harvesting renewable energy and storing it as hydrogen, and want to move the gas around."
"Methanol would be ideal for this application, since it could be transported easily by road, he says r
But this year, the government offered some support for clean energy companies. Sustainable development Technology Canada, a foundation that supports clean technology startup companies, will get Can$325 million over 8 years.
This investment was welcomed by Clare Demerse, federal policy director at the Pembina Institute, an energy policy think tank in Calgary.
The Planck data also implies that dark energy makes up 68.3%of the energy density of the Universe,
but most require very low temperatures#otherwise, the electrons gather enough energy to tunnel through the semiconductor,
but is used in everything from stainless steel to rechargeable batteries. Rare-earth elements are concentrated much less at around 0. 1,
enhance battery technology and expand the use of biofuels, among other clean energy efforts. The ultimate goal:
The White house has argued that energy innovation is not only good for cutting carbon emissions to tame global warming,
and military leaders and enjoys support from Lisa Murkowski, the ranking Republican on the Senate s Energy and Natural resources Committee.
as one administration official stated, is to"double down on the opportunities for achieving a cleaner-energy future.
the crust"would be the first major ecosystem On earth to run on chemical energy rather than sunlight,
but wonder how the amount of living biomass there compares to that at the Earth s surface, says Konhauser s
The fact that more accessible and more palatable, energy-rich foods engage POMC neurons and shut down Agrp activity more strongly suggests that the circuit also has nticipatoryaspects, by
likewise, since energy-dense foods alleviate hunger for longer periods, discovery of these foods should more strongly tamp down the hunger circuit
It Thync, a wearable device that zaps your brain with low levels of pulsed electrical energy to calm you down
me feeling a meditative calm and an inspired energy just as theye supposed to. The Thync System, founded by Jamie Tyler,
The energy mode provide his brain with more clarity. Thync is considered a lifestyle product, as opposed to a medical device,
T hose coils generate directional electromagnetic fields that cycle on and off, causing the robot to oscillate
an engineering professor at the University of Virginia, told Phys. org. e can transmit more data without using any additional energy.
The technology would require no more energy than is used currently to emit light. The light waves can carry data at 300 megabits per second from LED fixtures to wireless devices.
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