StartupsToFollow. Energy. TED. For One Tiny Instant, Physicists May Have Broken a Law of Nature. This image of a full-energy collision between gold ions shows the paths taken by thousands of subatomic particles produced during the impact. For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.
Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed.
Parity was long thought to be a fundamental law of nature. Now this law appears to have been broken by a team of about a dozen particle physicists, including Jack Sandweiss, Yale's Donner Professor of Physics. It was the equally gargantuan magnetic field produced by the plasma — the strongest ever created — that alerted the physicists that one of nature's laws might have been broken. Scottish Scientists Are Trying to Create Inorganic Life. Scientists at Glasgow University are on a mission to create a form of life from inorganic molecules.
The team, led by Professor Lee Cronin, has demonstrated a way of creating an inorganic cell, in which internal membranes control the movement of energy and materials, just as in a living cell. These cells can also store electricity and could be used in medicine and chemistry as sensors or to contain chemical reactions. This research is part of Cronin's larger project to show that inorganic compounds are able to self-replicate and evolve like biological cells do. The ultimate goal is to give these inorganic cells life-like properties so they can evolve and eventually be used in materials science. Cronin said he believes creating inorganic life is entirely possible, that if biological organisms evolved from single-cell bacteria, so should life be able to evolve from inorganic microorganisms. The ‘Tacocopter’ Would Deliver Tacos Via An Unmanned Drone. Researchers generate liquid fuel using electricity. While electric vehicles have come a long way in the past decade, they still have many disadvantages when compared to internal combustion engine-driven vehicles.
The lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles have a much lower energy storage density when compared to liquid fuel, they take longer to “refuel,” and they lack the supporting infrastructure that has built up around conventional vehicles over the past century. Now researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a process that could allow liquid fuel to be produced using solar generated electricity. Using only electricity for the energy input, the team was able to convert carbon dioxide into the liquid fuel isobutanol. The team says storing electrical energy as chemical energy in higher alcohols in this way would allow it to be used as liquid transportation fuels. "Instead of using hydrogen, we use formic acid as the intermediary," Liao said. U.S. Army tests renewable energy systems for soldiers in the field.
In a bid to mitigate the risks associated with fuel transportation and to make soldiers’ work less technically complex, U.S. military scientists have started to test microgrids that would provide clean energy to soldiers in the field. Since 2009, scientists from the Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) have been developing two systems – RENEWS and REDUCE – which are being tested at the Fort Irwin National Training Center in California, and by U.S. Africa Command. RENEWS mixes solar, wind power and batteries into a “solution set” that allows soldiers the flexibility to tap the energy source that is available at a given location. It was designed to power small communications systems in remote locations, to which transporting fuel could be a dangerous task.
In fact, safety is a major motivation behind the project, since two percent of fuel truck convoys are attacked. The Army is not the only group embracing clean tech, though. Recently the U.S. Germany Sets New Solar Record By Meeting Nearly Half of Country's Weekend Power Demand. Germany fed a whopping 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour into the national grid last weekend, setting a new record by meeting nearly half of the country’s weekend power demand. After the Fukushima disaster, Japan opted to shut down all of its nuclear power stations and Germany followed suit after considerable public pressure. This seems to have paved the way for greater investment in solar energy projects. The Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster announced that Saturday’s solar energy generation met nearly 50 percent of the nation’s midday electricity needs AND was equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity!
Germany’s solar power industry has always been a world leader, but since the the country closed eight nuclear power plants after the Japanese disaster and announced they would be shutting down the remaining nine by 2022, pressure to find alternative energy has mounted. . + Renewable Energy Industry via Reuters. Green energy will cut healthcare costs. What impact does changing from one energy system to another have on the national healthcare budget?
Scientists have found the answer using mathematical models that calculate how air pollution spreads. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Stephan Mosel) Air pollution is an indirect cost to society as it is a source of asthma and heart and lung diseases. The Centre for Energy, Environment and Health (CEEH), a multi-disciplinary research centre in Denmark, has developed a new mathematical model that makes it possible to include healthcare costs in the overall costs of different energy systems. The new model shows that an energy system with sustainable energy sources is cheaper than previously thought when all costs are included. Climate commission’s scenarios get cheaper In 2010, a government-appointed climate commission issued a report proposing how Denmark’s energy system can be made independent of fossil fuels. New advanced models Local areas included CEEH’s model system comprises:
New material claimed to store more energy and cost less money than batteries. The low-cost, high-density energy-storage membrane, created at the National University of Singapore Researchers from the National University of Singapore's Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Initiative (NUSNNI) have created what they claim is the world's first energy-storage membrane. Not only is the material soft and foldable, but it doesn't incorporate liquid electrolytes that can spill out if it's damaged, it's more cost-effective than capacitors or traditional batteries, and it's reportedly capable of storing more energy. The membrane is made from a polystyrene-based polymer, which is sandwiched between two metal plates. When charged by those plates, it can store the energy at a rate of 0.2 farads per square centimeter - standard capacitors, by contrast, can typically only manage an upper limit of 1 microfarad per square centimeter.
Due in part to the membrane's low fabrication costs, the cost of storing energy in it reportedly works out to 72 cents US per farad. About the Author. Energy & Resources. Forbes.com Breaking News. Solar Electric Cells Have A Suprising Benefit: Cooling | Fast Company. Installing photovoltaic solar cells is a great way to easily tap into an environmentally sustainable energy source, and in sunnier parts of the world it's even feasible to use them to actually make money by selling power back to the grid as part of a smart grid installation.
But according to new research by the University of California at San Diego, there's a massive payoff just by having the things on your roof: They act to insulate your home from heat, and actually lower your air-conditioning bills. The research team from the engineering department used thermal imaging cameras to look at the heat radiation signature from building roofs and structures on top of them. The result was simple, but starkly interesting: Beneath a solar panel, a building's ceiling structure was 5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than under a section of roof that was exposed directly to the sun. There is a downside, of course. [Image: Flickr user steevithak] Low-cost solar cells from nanotube ‘forests’ By replacing platinum with carbon nanotubes, researchers hope to make efficient solar cells at a fraction of the current cost for silicon-based solar cells. Single-wall nanotube arrays, grown in a process invented at Rice University, are both much more electroactive and potentially cheaper than platinum, a common catalyst in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSC), says Jun Lou, a materials scientist.
Full story at Futurity. More research news from top universities. Photo credit: Jeff Fitlow, Rice University. Crowd funding and financing loans with micropayments part 1. There is new extremely powerful model emerging for fund raising and loans and it is called "Crowd funding". This sort of internet funding first took place with charities but these days there are new sites appearing every day that offer you loans or investing into various projects.
Basically it works by connecting people who need to borrow certain amount of money with all the visitors of such sites who are interested about investing small sums into multiple projects. So if you need $1000 and instead of borrowing this money from one person or institutions it will get funded by 258 unknown persons from the internet. At first glance this seems like something that would never work because there are so many scammers out there who would ruin it for everyone involved. This is exactly what these crowd funding web sites are tackling with using various very smart techniques. One of the best ways to guarantee funding is to give some sort of sample to your investors.
Pearltrees tips.