Réinventons les toilettes. Réinventons les toilettes Nous sommes bientôt 7 milliards d'humains sur la Terre et nous avons tous un point commun : Nous faisons caca !
(je sais, dit comme ça c'est la classe). Mais parmi ces 7 milliards d'individus, 2,6 milliards de personnes ne connaissent pas le plaisir de démouler à la fraiche dans un endroit où le B.A. -ba de l'hygiène est respecté. Non, non, ces 2,6 milliards de personnes qui déposent une petite pêche chaque jour que Dieu fait le font un peu n'importe où, contaminant les nappes phréatiques, ce qui provoque (entre autre) la mort de 1,5 million d'enfants chaque année suite à de mauvaises diarrhées. The Fun Theory. Researchers Develop a Heat Pump That Can Last 10,000 Years. Most heat pumps maintain an average useful life of 10-20 years, but researchers at the University of Stavanger in Norway (USN) and the University of Oslo believe that they have developed a new heat pump that will last up to 10,000 years.
The new heat pump is comprised of many miniature heat pumps, as small as one cubic millimeter, that can be arranged in an array to create a larger unit that can be tall and thin or short and wide, offering flexible modularity for application in any area of a building. “The most important advantage of the new heat pump is that you can regulate its size and form and that it is more durable than heat pumps are today. It is also more environmentally friendly,” Doctor of Physics and Chief Engineer at USN, Jan Kåre Bording told Phys.org. According to the researchers the heat pump will be ready to launch on the market in five to ten years. À Delft, les matériaux s'autoréparent. ENQUÊTE Troisième volet de notre série sur les laboratoires d'exception : aux Pays-Bas, une trentaine de chercheurs modifient les propriétés des matériaux pour accroître leur durabilité.
Delft, ses canaux, sa faïence, Vermeer... et son université technologique, TU Delft, où travaillent près de 2 700 chercheurs. Dans une ambiance très internationale : 80 % d'entre eux sont d'origine étrangère ! C'est dans ce contexte qu'est né le Centre des matériaux, où se croisent Espagnols, Russes, Français, Ukrainiens, Indiens, Canadiens et... quelques Néerlandais. Une équipe d'une trentaine de chercheurs qui, sous une dénomination très générale, s'est en grande partie concentrée sur un domaine innovant : les matériaux autoréparants, ou autocicatrisants ("self-healing materials", SHM). A fast and low-power microelectromechanical system-based non-volatile memory device : Nature Communications. Device fabrication and operation concept The design concept can easily be extended to other memory architectures in which a floating gate needs to be quickly and efficiently charged and discharged, however, there is an advantage of the CNT-FET design as demonstrated here.
The floating gate provides a potential barrier for the charge carriers in the CNT-FET and can rapidly switch between on and off states24. In ordinary flash memories, the floating gate, surrounded by a thin insulating barrier, is placed on a metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) channel1 as shown in Figure 1a. Electrons tunnel to the floating gate through the insulating dielectric on application of a high voltage to the control gate.
The tunnelling of electrons through the oxide layer causes a time delay resulting in a low operation speed and also limits the number of useful cycles that can be achieved. New Discovery May Lead to Typing-Powered Laptops and Everlasting Batteries. Self-powered laptops and everlasting batteries could soon become a reality thanks to a new study from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology that measured a piezoelectric film’s capacity for turning mechanical pressure into electricity.
Piezoelectricity is a phenomenon already at work in small devices such as cigarette lighters, which use a piezoelectric crystal to create a charge when struck by a spring-loaded hammer. Piezoelectric materials such as crystals or ceramics are nothing new, but this is an application with a greater scope for use. Photo by Declan Jewell “Our study focused on thin film coatings because we believe they hold the only practical possibility of integrating piezoelectrics into existing electronic technology,” the study’s lead co-author Dr. Madhu Bhaskaran said.
Dr. . + Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. New Graphene Super Paper is 10x Stronger Than Steel. The University of Technology in Sydney recently unveiled a new type of graphene nano paper that is ten times stronger than a sheet of steel.
Composed of processed and pressed graphite, the material is as thin as a sheet of paper yet incredible durable — this strength and thinness gives it remarkable applications in many industries, and it is completely recyclable to boot. Photo by Wikimedia Commons To make graphene paper, raw graphite is milled and purified using a chemical bath, which reshapes its structure, allowing it to be pressed into thin sheets. These graphene sheets boast excellent thermal, electrical and mechanical properties – including excellent hardness and flexibility. Graphene offers many advantages over steel – it’s two times as hard, six times lighter and ten times higher in tensile strength. Raw graphite is a relatively plentiful material in Australia, where the research is being conducted. . + University of Technology Sydney. New Memory Device Rethinks Data Storage and Saves Energy. Scientists at Konkuk University, Seoul National University and the University of Edinburgh’s School of Chemistry have developed an energy-efficient device capable of storing the memory needed for smart phones, mp3 players and digital cameras.
The new device rethinks the way memory is currently used by introducing a self-propelled floating cantilever which reacts to electrical currents within the device to convert this electrical information into binary code. The floating cantilever not only works much more quickly than current electronically powered conversion devices, but with less energy than conventional devices. The new development promises more efficient and faster gadgets in the future. Current memory devices — NAND- and NOR-type flash memories — are widely used because of their ease of manufacturing and advanced technology. GreenIT : 7 ordinateurs sur 10 ne sont pas recyclés. C’est à pas de souris que semble avancer la collecte des DEEE (déchets d’équipements électriques et électroniques) ménagers.
Dans son enquête 2011 – qui vient d’être publiée - l’association nationale des consommateurs et usagers (CLCV) montre que le taux de reprise des DEEE en magasin stagne. Seulement 27 % des clients ont ainsi bénéficié en 2011 de la règle du « un pour un ». Pourtant, 86% des consommateurs expliquent aujourd’hui être informés de ce dispositif (contre 81 % en 2009). Energy Materials: Nanoscale Characterization of Energy Generation from Piezoelectric Thin Films (Adv. Funct. Mater. 12/2011) - Bhaskaran - 2011 - Advanced Functional Materials.
The "1-10-100 Principle" for experimenters.