and saw my phone he'd be astounded says David Manning executive director of the New york state Smart Grid Consortium.
The city lost power because via water breakers tripped. The breakers tripped for good reasons. If you trip breakers prior to making the situation safe from water you have electrified a lot of fried circuits
Keep in mind that by combining the communication fiber optic builds required for smart grid systems with the needs of a fiber to the block system such as overlay's Google Kansas city
Though immensely powerful (we're talking two 10-mile wide boulders each with the mass of our sun) the collision would only have been visible from Earth for about a day
Maybe not if it happened to a location close to the Sun during daylight during summer
The fog clouds and hot sun follow each other in quick succession. The heavy rainfall insures permanent stagnant water where the larvae of the yellow fever
Towering piles of monitors printers and fax machines lined streets and occupied front yards. In a neighboring village women cooked circuit boards curbside in woks and children played atop ash heaps.
but he d succeeded in selling some recycled plastics back to IBM. We could look at a molded section
Several weeks later we chat on the phone and Biddle talks about a development that makes him more optimistic than the promises of British politicians.
Slowly though developers are coming around particularly those that grasp the economic benefits of building with CLT.
But the biggest driving force behind the turn toward wood is a growing awareness among architects and developers about their field s contribution to climate change.
In 2011 California-based Aerovironment demoed its Nano Hummingbird. The aircraft has a 16.5-centimeter wingspan;
The audible result is the hum of a hummingbird or buzz of a bee says Jayant Ratti Techject s president.
Unlike the much larger Instanteye Nano Hummingbird and Dragonfly drones Robobees must be connected to an external power source.
#Mix of graphene nanoribbons, polymer has potential for cars, soda, beera discovery at Rice university aims to make vehicles that run on compressed natural gas more practical.
By adding modified single-atom-thick graphene nanoribbons (GNRS) to thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) the Rice lab made it 1000 times harder for gas molecules to escape Tour said.
The researchers acknowledged that a solid two-dimensional sheet of graphene might be the perfect barrier to gas
but the production of graphene in such bulk quantities is not yet practical Tour said. But graphene nanoribbons are already there.
Tour's breakthrough unzipping technique for turning multiwalled carbon nanotubes into GNRS first revealed in Nature in 2009 has been licensed for industrial production.
But the overlapping 200-to 300-nanometer-wide ribbons dispersed so well that they were nearly as effective as large-sheet graphene in containing gas molecules.
The GNRS'geometry makes them far better than graphene sheets for processing into composites Tour said.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
The Air force Research Laboratory through the University Technology Corp. the Office of Naval Research MURI graphene program and the Air force Office of Scientific research MURI program supported the research.
solar-lighting technology cookstoves drip irrigation and a line of Nokia cellphones. From their research as well as interviews with product designers the researchers drew up guidelines on how to design for emerging markets.
and distributed in developing countries by Nokia. The company designed phones with a number of features that turned out to have wide appeal for microentrepreneurs:
Multiple contact lists allowed cellphone owners to rent out their phones to others and a time display marking the length of each call served as a method of metering--an easy way for cellphone owners to charge per call.
Nokia also provided reliability via dedicated service vans that traveled to rural Indian villages to fix broken phones.
This combination of features that help to make customers money along with a service plan that established a continuing relationship with the company likely swayed customers toward Nokia's phones.
Yang and Austin-Breneman found that service and reliability were also big factors for small farmers in choosing a system for drip irrigation--an efficient means of delivering small amounts of water directly to the base of each plant.
For example while Nokia was able to invest millions of dollars in developing a service network a startup may not have such resources.
Applied to the cells of plants (intracellular) via the seed it provides every cell in the plant with the ability to fix nitrogen.
With gigabytes of flash memory becoming steadily cheaper a 1k nonvolatile memory unit has little practical use.
Douglas Natelson a professor of physics and astronomy and of electrical and computer engineering and Krishna Palem the Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computer science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and a professor of statistics.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
and to analyze their characteristics The hope is that MDS could be joined with graphene which has no band gap
Last year Lou and Ajayan revealed their success at making intricate patterns of intertwining graphene and hbn among them the image of Rice's owl mascot.
The study of graphene prompted research into a lot of 2-D materials; molybdenum disulfide is just one of them.
Essentially we are trying to span the whole range of band gaps between graphene which is a semimetal and the boron nitride insulator.
MDS is distinct from graphene and hbn because it isn't exactly flat. Graphene and hbn are flat with arrays of hexagons formed by their constituent atoms.
But while MDS looks hexagonal when viewed from above it is actually a stack with a layer of molybdenum atoms between two layers of sulfur atoms.
We would like to stick graphene and MDS together (with hbn) into what would be a novel 2-D semiconductor component.
or graphene Najmaei said. We started learning that we could control that nucleation by adding artificial edges to the substrate
With ORNL's images in hand they were not only able to calculate the energies of a much more complex set of defects than are found in graphene
#Even with defects, graphene is strongest material in the worldin a new study published in Science Columbia Engineering researchers demonstrate that graphene
even if stitched together from many small crystalline grains is almost as strong as graphene in its perfect crystalline form.
Graphene consists of a single atomic layer of carbon arranged in a honeycomb lattice. Our first Science paper in 2008 studied the strength graphene can achieve
if it has no defects--its intrinsic strength says James Hone professor of mechanical engineering who led the study with Jeffrey Kysar professor of mechanical engineering.
But defect-free pristine graphene exists only in very small areas. Large-area sheets required for applications must contain many small grains connected at grain boundaries
This our second Science paper reports on the strength of large-area graphene films grown using chemical vapor deposition (CVD)
and we're excited to say that graphene is back and stronger than ever. The study verifies that commonly used methods for postprocessing CVD-grown graphene weaken grain boundaries resulting in the extremely low strength seen in previous studies.
The Columbia Engineering team developed a new process that prevents any damage of graphene during transfer.
We substituted a different etchant and were able to create test samples without harming the graphene notes the paper's lead author Gwan-Hyoung Lee a postdoctoral fellow in the Hone lab. Our findings clearly correct the mistaken consensus that grain boundaries of graphene
are weak. This is great news because graphene offers such a plethora of opportunities both for fundamental scientific research and industrial applications.
In its perfect crystalline form graphene (a one-atom-thick carbon layer) is the strongest material ever measured as the Columbia Engineering team reported in Science in 2008--so strong that as Hone observed it would take an elephant balanced on a pencil to break through a sheet
of graphene the thickness of Saran wrap. For the first study the team obtained small structurally perfect flakes of graphene by mechanical exfoliation or mechanical peeling from a crystal of graphite.
But exfoliation is a time-consuming process that will never be practical for any of the many potential applications of graphene that require industrial mass production.
Currently scientists can grow sheets of graphene as large as a television screen by using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) in
which single layers of graphene are grown on copper substrates in a high-temperature furnace. One of the first applications of graphene may be as a conducting layer in flexible displays.
But CVD graphene is stitched'together from many small crystalline grains--like a quilt--at grain boundaries that contain defects in the atomic structure Kysar explains.
These grain boundaries can severely limit the strength of large-area graphene if they break much more easily than the perfect crystal lattice
and so there has been intense interest in understanding how strong they can be. The Columbia Engineering team wanted to discover what was making CVD graphene so weak.
In studying the processing techniques used to create their samples for testing they found that the chemical most commonly used to remove the copper substrate also causes damage to the graphene severely degrading its strength.
Their experiments demonstrated that CVD graphene with large grains is exactly as strong as exfoliated graphene showing that its crystal lattice is just as perfect.
And more surprisingly their experiments also showed that CVD graphene with small grains even when tested right at a grain boundary is about 90%as strong as the ideal crystal This is an exciting result for the future of graphene
because it provides experimental evidence that the exceptional strength it possesses at the atomic scale can persist all the way up to samples inches
or more in size says Hone. This strength will be invaluable as scientists continue to develop new flexible electronics and ultrastrong composite materials.
Strong large-area graphene can be used for a wide variety of applications such as flexible electronics
and strengthening components--potentially a television screen that rolls up like a poster or ultrastrong composites that could replace carbon fiber.
Or the researchers speculate a science fiction idea of a space elevator that could connect an orbiting satellite to Earth by a long cord that might consist of sheets of CVD graphene
since graphene (and its cousin material carbon nanotubes) is the only material with the high strength-to-weight ratio required for this kind of hypothetical application.
The team is excited also about studying 2d materials like graphene. Very little is known about the effects of grain boundaries in 2d materials Kysar adds.
Our work shows that grain boundaries in 2d materials can be much more sensitive to processing than in 3d materials.
This is due to all the atoms in graphene being surface atoms so surface damage that would normally not degrade the strength of 3d materials can completely destroy the strength of 2d materials.
However with appropriate processing that avoids surface damage grain boundaries in 2d materials especially graphene can be nearly as strong as the perfect defect-free structure.
Graphene a single sheet of carbon atoms is the thinnest electrical conductor we know. With the addition of the monolayer molybdenum disulfide and other metal dichalcogenides we have all the building blocks for modern electronics that must be created in atomically thin form.
For example we can now imagine sandwiching two different monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides between layers of graphene to make solar cells that are only eight atoms thick--20 thousand times smaller than a human hair!
The nanostructured black silicon coating features very low reflectivity meaning that a larger portion of the Sun's radiation can be exploited.
and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences.
http://www. nap. edu/catalog. php? record id=18264story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by National Academy of Sciences.
The technique believed to be the first of its kind uses advanced computer technology to analyze photographs taken of root systems in the field.
The roots are photographed then against a black background using a standard digital camera pointed down from a tripod.
and have spreadsheets of results ready for study the next day. In the lab you are just seeing part of the process of root growth said Bucksch who works in the group of Associate professor Joshua Weitz in the School of Biology and School of Physics at Georgia Tech.
Dr. Mahalingam is studying how wildland fire propagates in an effort to be able to more accurately model such fires via physically based computational models.
Everyone from government agencies to developers to forest managers to firefighters --and even potential evacuees--could benefit from reliable physically sound fire prediction tools.
#New test reveals purity of graphene: Scientists use terahertz waves to spot contaminantsgraphene may be tough
Because it's so easy to accidently introduce impurities into graphene labs led by physicists Junichiro Kono of Rice
They expect the finding to be important to manufacturers considering the use of graphene in electronic devices.
It was made possible by the Rice-based Nanojapan program through which American undergraduates conduct summer research internships in Japanese labs. Even a single molecule of a foreign substance can contaminate graphene enough to affect its electrical and optical properties
The researchers used it as a substrate for graphene. Hitting the combined material with femtosecond pulses from a near-infrared laser prompted the indium phosphide to emit terahertz back through the graphene.
Imperfections as small as a stray oxygen molecule on the graphene were picked up by a spectrometer.
The change in the terahertz signal due to adsorption of molecules is said remarkable Kono. Not just the intensity but also the waveform of emitted terahertz radiation totally and dynamically changes in response to molecular adsorption and desorption.
The laser gradually removes oxygen molecules from the graphene changing its density and we can see that Kono said.
The experiment involved growing pristine graphene via chemical vapor deposition and transferring it to an indium phosphide substrate.
Laser pulses generated coherent bursts of terahertz radiation through a built-in surface electric field of the indium phosphide substrate that changed due to charge transfer between the graphene and the contaminating molecules.
For any future device designs using graphene we have to take into account the influence of the surroundings said Kono.
Graphene in a vacuum or sandwiched between noncontaminating layers would probably be stable but exposure to air would contaminate it he said.
The Rice and Osaka labs are continuing to collaborate on a project to measure the terahertz conductivity of graphene on various substrates he said.
Plants in full sun absorb red light while shaded plants receive only the leftover far-red light. The type of light the phytochrome sees tells the plant
By mutating the phytochromes we created plants that think they're in full sun even when they're not Vierstra says.
and as part of the planning process developers must now provide data on presence and abundance of this species and provide mitigation plans to prevent their disturbance before planning applications will be considered.
Tour is Rice's T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry and professor of mechanical engineering and nanoengineering and of computer science.
For example manufacturers have announced plans for RRAM prototype chips that will be capable of storing about one terabyte of data on a device the size of a postage stamp--more than 50 times the data density of current flash memory technology.
We envision dozens of SPOTS on a space habitat said Dane Larsen who is working on a master's degree on computer science.
For Daniel Zukowski who is also working on a master's in computer science the X-Hab Challenge is an opportunity to use terrestrial-based know-how
Hava noted that the team has benefited from support from former NASA astronaut Joe Tanner who now is a senior instructor of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado and Nikolaus Correll assistant professor of computer science at the university.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and nanoengineering and of computer science.
But such simple steps as leaving slash--the plant waste left over after crop production--on fields after harvests so it could be incorporated into the soil could reintroduce between 0. 4 and 1. 1 gigatons of carbon annually to soil the study says.
and radiation as well as elements that enable wireless connectivity between the greenhouse and mobile devices like cell phones.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and by Google's Faculty Research Award program.
#Innovative solar-powered toilet ready for India unveilinga 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
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.
It could also be incorporated into new plant designs to further reduce operating costs. We hope to move from the laboratory scale to a commercially available technology within four to six years.
Its developers foresee electrical generators driven by changes in humidity from sun-warmed ponds and harbors.
when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow and we have no good way of storing enough of it to supply the grid for long said Wyss Institute Founding Director Don Ingber M d. Ph d
Dave Bartlett, the Vice president of IBM's Smarter Buildings Initiative, recently made predictions for the top five building trends that are going to make a big impact in 2012,
For example, IBM is involved in a project in Boston's Backbay to help the neighborhood implement smart grid technology that electronically monitors
According to Bartlett, this system helped IBM identify carbon in unexpected places like in methane leaks from utilities.
IBM â¢s campus in Rochester, Minnesota has implemented this system of transparency. The buildings there take up a massive 3. 2 million square feet,
and IBM takes real time data from over 300,000 data points, combining the results help make the campus as efficient as possible,
Sensor technology, that is coming from the physical infrastructure (like that used on the IBM campus),
Apps, like the parking app Streetline that helps drivers find available parking spots, use this sensor technology too.
and apps can help them contribute, said Bartlett. He called this environmental crowd sourcing, or the ability of a citizen to use their smartphone to alert the city to building issues,
or using an app to identify the problem. Bartlett said that IBM has found that people want to be involved in the improvement of their communities,
and have been very receptive to the apps that have been introduced so far. Â Just as smarter buildings and smarter neighborhoods are the building blocks of smarter cities
people are as well. Prediction 4: More energy options for buildings Bartlett predicts that in the near future,
This method was implemented on IBM's campus, following a new sustainability mandate. I think that it is said really cool
IBM has been working with New york city a city whose buildings are much more responsible for green house gasses than many other cities due to its density,
The goal, with the help of IBM's carbon intelligence software is to reduce New york city's greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2017.
Aires Almeida/Flickr, IBM
A capitalist's view on water conservation (or, why a price on water is impractical) Laura Shenkar,
Look at the cell phone--they sell them incredibly in Asia and Africa. But that was only when it was developed and matured and proven in the developed world.
Look at Google. It's really changed the world in a lot of good ways. But they never set out to do that.
said Nater, a former banker and Dell executive. We â¢re talking thousands. Yet even then, he expects Briggo to capture only a few percentage points of the coffee market.
Nater pulled out his iphone and entered Melanie as the pick-up name so the robot would announce that the drink he was about to order was for me.
So passengers will be able to get on their mobile apps and place the order while they're standing in the security line.
an iphone? Derek Peterson sure hopes that may someday be the case. The 36-year-old former investment banks is CEO of Growop,
nutrient injectors and even an app that allows owners to control all these processes remotely from their iphone.
which integrates weather forecasts, via a computer or a free Apple iphone application. Cyber-Rain claims that the system investment might be covered in certain places by water utility rebate programs.
and even through an iphone app. Users can create efficient watering schedules that are customized to their landscape through an intuitive interface that is easy to use.
Plant types Soil composition Slope of the soil Sun exposure The type of irrigation you're using (hose versus sprinkler versus drip lines, etc.
Plus, an explanation of the pyrolysis process from Honeywell UOP's Jim Rekoske. SP: How did Crane get involved with renewable energy sources?
HOW IT WORKS Smartplanet also spoke with Jim Rekoske of Honeywell UOP, one-half of the duo (Ensyn Technologies of Ottawa, Ontario,
IBM analytics technology helps Sun World use drip irrigation to decrease its water usage by 8. 5%.That difference is readily apparent in a new agribusiness case study that was brought to my attention by the IBM mid-market group.
It involves Sun World International, a midsize operation in Bakersfield, Calif, . that produces various fruits and vegetables on approximately 12,000 acres of farmland across the state of California.
Sun World has been collecting information about its business for years. An example: The company has been acting on its water consumption to change irrigation techniques,
Sun World, which specializes in table grapes, peppers, stone fruits and citrus varieties, can now look at everything from unit costs
according to IBM and Sun World. Fuel usage has also been cut by 20 percent. The sales team can also use Sun World's data in conjunction with industry buying trends to figure out the best timing for campaigns.
This has helped with balancing product mix. It also resulted in $3 million in new business in 2009
Sun World is tracking $175 million in total annual revenue, according to Robertson. The plan is only as good as Day One.
Steve Greenwood, Sun World's director of budgets and reporting, says the technology behind these changes was Cognos,
Sun World worked with an IBM Business Partner Applied Analytix, to craft the solution. Here's his perspective from the IBM press release about the solution:
We've aimed to transform the company culture from a farming business where you'grow
director of business analytics for IBM, says there are typically three things that hold entrepreneurs back from a technology investment like this that could yield results similar to the Sun World example.
Reliance on outdated applications such as spreadsheets, which were intended never really for forecasting. An aversion to change.
If you want to be generate results like Sun World, you'll need to get over all three things
They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world,
You really don't want an iphone box that says'Invented in America, made in China.'
via tech licensing and assistance and support. As for biobutanol the company is partnering with oil giant BP on commercialization in the U s. and Brazil.
productivity with IBM analyticsanalytics technology that has enabled a Michigan agricultural cooperative better account for the source of fruits
The technology platform, built by IBM business partner N2n Global, collects, stores and analyzes data about the food being handled by Cherry Central Cooperative from the time it is harvested and processed,
From there it is uploaded to a central database, where the information can be shared with Traverse City, Mich.
Steve Eiseler, vice president of operations at Cherry Central Cooperative, said the IBM-based technology has allowed his organization to significantly reduce the amount of paperwork necessary to remain in compliance with government food traceability requirements
Cherry Central reported that its database was growing at a rate of 1. 6 million records per month.
The technology that Cherry Central is using includes IBM DB2 Web Query running on the Power system platform.
The cooperative is using a custom IBM System x application from N2n Global called the Quality & Food safety Manager.
Veolia offer twist on smart water management The philosophy behind Molson Coors beerprint Tech giant LG extends into water treatment Pepsico,
management tips from Intel Pepsico grant supports clean water in rural China Many businesses blind to water risks
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