timgspears:

Window Socket - Kyuho Song & Boa Oh

So this is an absolutley brilliant idea! Just attach the plug on to a window and it will harness solar energy. A small converter will convert it into electricity which can be freely used as a plug when you are in the car, on a plane or outside.

Love this design and I really think it has a great potential.

The Universe in a Jelly Bean Jar Interactive Flash Site. [Click images to enlarge.]

“Most of the Universe is dark. The protons, neutrons and electrons that make up the stars, planets and us represent only a small fraction of the mass and energy of the Universe.”

Check it out here to learn more about the observable cosmos, black holes, galaxy clusters, supernovas, missing baryons, and more!

scienceyoucanlove:

Researchers have identified a burst of high-energy radiation known as ‘dark lightning” immediately preceding a flash of ordinary lightning. The new finding provides observational evidence that the two phenomena are connected, although the exact nature of the relationship between ordinary bright lightning and the dark variety is still unclear, the scientists said

“Our results indicate that both these phenomena, dark and bright lightning, are intrinsic processes in the discharge of lightning,” said Nikolai Østgaard, who is a space scientist at the University of Bergen in Norway and led the research team.

He and his collaborators describe their findings in an article recently accepted in Geophysical Research Letters—a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

OK, can science get any cooler? Like really can it? Read more here

upcominghorizon:

New Plasma Device Considered The ‘Holy Grail’ Of Energy Generation And Storage

Scientists at the University of Missouri have devised a new way to create and control plasma that could transform American energy generation and storage.

Randy Curry, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering, and his team developed a device that launches a ring of plasma at distances of up to two feet. Although the plasma reaches a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun, it doesn’t emit radiation and is completely safe in proximity to humans.

While most of us are familiar with three states of matter – liquid, gas and solid – there is also a fourth state known as plasma, which includes things such as fire and lightning. Life on Earth depends on the energy emitted by plasma produced during fusion reactions within the sun.

The secret to Curry’s success was developing a way to make plasma form its own self-magnetic field, which holds it together as it travels through the air.

“Launching plasma in open air is the ‘Holy Grail’ in the field of physics,” said Curry.

more

ikenbot:

When Supermassive Supergiants Go Superboom

Article by Phil Plait via Slate

I have long been fascinated by gamma-ray bursts (or GRBs). These are incredibly violent events: It’s like taking the Sun’s entire lifetime energy output and cramming into a single event that lasts for mere seconds! The energy emitted is so intense, so bright, we can see GRBs from a distance of billions of light years.

Gamma rays themselves are just a form of light, like the kind we see, but with huge energy; each photon is packed with millions or billions of times the energy in a single photon of visible light. Only the most energetic events in the Universe can make them, so if we detect a burst of them coming from the sky, we know something literally disastrous has happened.

We know GRBs come in many flavors. Some last literally for milliseconds, while others stretch on for minutes. We also know different events can cause them, too. Short ones seem to come from merging neutron stars, ultra dense compact objects left over after stars explode. The longer ones occur when massive stars explode, leaving their cores to collapse. In both cases, the huge blast of high-energy gamma rays signals the birth of a black hole.

But astronomers were recently surprised to find a third type of GRB, one that lasts not for minutes, but for hours. Whatever these objects are, they don’t just flash with light, they linger, blasting out far, far more gamma rays for far, far longer than was previously thought. What could do such a thing?

Several ideas were put forth, but new observations provided the linchpin: an ultra-long-duration GRB occurred on Christmas Day in 2010, and its distance was found to be a soul-crushing 7 billion light years away, about halfway across the visible Universe! This left only one possible candidate for the progenitor: a hugely massive star, one so big it dwarfs the Sun into insignificance.

Continue to Full Article..

(via kenobi-wan-obi)

kqedscience:

How Fracking Causes Earthquakes

Contributing Mother Jones writer Michael Behar “has an intriguing feature today that details the science behind the link between injection wells and earthquakes.”

electricspacekoolaid:

One Marine Animal Could Be Next Biofuel

Scientists are looking to the ocean for the next big thing in renewable sources of biofuel for your eco-car.

 Five researchers at the University of Bergen (UiB) and Uni Research say they found the marine animal tunicatecould be used as a renewable source of biofuel. These marine animals serve as bacteria eaters and as a foodstuff in Korea and Japan right now, but the cellulose, the protein and the Omega-3 fatty acids in tunicate are the cause for its many uses.

“Its mantle consists of cellulose, which is a collection of sugars. When cellulose is cleaved, one can obtain ethanol. And ethanol can be used for biofuel in cars. The animal’s body consists of large amounts of protein and Omega-3. This can be used for fish feed,” says Professor Eric Thompson at UiB’s Department of Biology.

The researchers say they have already acquired a patent for biofuel and have a patent application pending for the cultivation of tunicate as fish feed.

Dr. Sc. Christofer Troedsson of Uni Research’s Molecular Ecology Group and head of the research at UiB’s Marine Development Biology and the tunicate research project said the bioethanol used today is unsustainable, as it comes from foods already used for human consumption.

“That is why there has been a move towards using cellulose from the timber industry to produce bioethanol,” Troedsson said. “However, it is quite complicated to break down the cellulose in trees and convert it into ethanol. This is because the wood contains a substance called lignin, which is hard to separate from the cellulose. Tunicates contain no lignin. Their cellulose is also low in crystals and is more efficiently converted into ethanol.”

He said using tunicate rather than trees is more environmentally friendly because it does not occupy large tracts of land that could be used for other purposes.

Read

(via sagansense)

science-junkie:

NASA’s cold fusion tech could put a nuclear reactor in every home, car, and plane.

When we think of nuclear power, there are usually just two options: fission and fusion. Fission, which creates huge amounts of heat by splitting larger atoms into smaller atoms, is what currently powers every nuclear reactor on Earth. Fusion is the opposite, creating vast amounts of energy by fusing atoms of hydrogen together, but we’re still many years away from large-scale, commercial fusion reactors.

A nickel lattice soaking up hydrogen ions in a LENR reactorLENR is absolutely nothing like either fission or fusion. Where fission and fusion are underpinned by strong nuclear force, LENR harnesses power from weak nuclear force — but capturing this energy is difficult. So far, NASA’s best effort involves a nickel lattice and hydrogen ions. The hydrogen ions are sucked into the nickel lattice, and then the lattice is oscillated at a very high frequency (between 5 and 30 terahertz). This oscillation excites the nickel’s electrons, which are forced into the hydrogen ions (protons), forming slow-moving neutrons. The nickel immediately absorbs these neutrons, making it unstable. To regain its stability, the nickel strips a neutron of its electron so that it becomes a proton — a reaction that turns the nickel into copper and creates a lot of energy in the process.[…]

So why don’t we have LENR reactors yet? Just like fusion, it is proving hard to build a LENR system that produces more energy than the energy required to begin the reaction. In this case, NASA says that the 5-30THz frequency required to oscillate the nickel lattice is hard to efficiently produce. As we’ve reported over the last couple of years, though, strong advances are being made in the generation and control of terahertz radiation. Other labs outside of NASA are working on cold fusion and LENR, too: “Several labs have blown up studying LENR and windows have melted,” says NASA scientist Dennis Bushnell, proving that “when the conditions are ‘right’ prodigious amounts of energy can be produced and released.”

Source: extremetech.com

mypubliclands:

In honor of Women’s History Month, we are sharing the stories of women who work in BLM science, technology, engineering and math-related positions (STEM) or positions that are as unique as our multiple-use mission…

Did you know that the Amarillo Field Office employs BLM’s only two Chemists at the Cliffside Helium Plant? While we are proud of both our Chemists, we are highlighting the work of Roya Mortazavi. Roya’s degree in Organic Chemistry is unusual in the BLM workplace. Her work as a Chemist for BLM includes analysis of routine and non-routine samples for mass spectrometry and gas chromatography for helium, natural gas, and atmospheric samples. Roya has made presentations as well as cryogenic demonstrations to different schools and the local state fair, encouraging young girls to pursue careers in science.

ikenbot:

South Korea Makes Billion-Dollar Bet on Fusion Power

A fusion power demonstration reactor to be built in the 2030s in collaboration with the DoE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, represents a step toward commercial use

From Nature magazine

Image: The inside of KSTAR, one of the first research tokamaks in the world with fully superconducting magnets, after a recent upgrade that will allow the study of pulses of up to 300 seconds duration Copyright: Nation Fusion Research Institute PR team, Korea

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 provisionally named 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).

South Korea is already developing the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (K-STAR) project and contributing to ITER, 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.

“It is a very smart strategy to take advantage of the experience gained in constructing ITER 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”, a much greater output than ITER’s goal of producing 500 million watts for 500 seconds by the late 2020s.

Building up know-how

In early 2012, the South Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced that developing technologies to build K-DEMO would be a priority for the next 10 years, establishing the know-how to permit the construction of a commercial fusion power plant between 2022 and 2036. The government also announced that it planned to invest about 1 trillion won (US$941 million) in the project. About 300 billion won of that spending has already been funded, according to a source within the ministry. The government expects the project to employ nearly 2,400 people in the first phase, which will last throughout 2016.

Robert Goldston, who was the director of the PPPL when it helped with the initial design of K-STAR, believes that the K-DEMO project is feasible, considering South Korea’s commitment to its previous project. “There was a financial crisis in Asia right in the middle of the K-STAR project, but the government and fusion scientists were steady and serious about getting the job done, despite lots of hardship,” he says. “My sense is that the Korean team, at all levels, is very dedicated to a steady pace even in adversity — and there is always adversity in big projects.”

Lee Gyung-Su, a research fellow at NFRI and a former chairman of the ITER Management Advisory Committee, says that Korea is desperately in need 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 and cost increases, prompting some critics to question whether the project will ever be completed. “It is already obvious that future commercial-size machines will be too large and costly, and too expensive to operate, to generate competitive energy,” says Thomas Cochran, a consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington DC. He adds that he believes South Korea should spend its resources on technologies that have the potential to provide a nearer-term impact on carbon emissions and climate change.

Lee acknowledges the criticism, but says that most of ITER’s issues were of a management, rather than a technical nature. “The schedules are now mostly fixed and sorted out,” he says. “And risks always exist when it comes to a new finding in science, and the investment on the research and development has been made based on the estimation of such risks.”

Moreover, Lee adds, “we are willing to take risks, and need to innovate to survive”.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on January 21, 2013.

(Source: kenobi-wan-obi)

ikenbot:

South Korea Makes Billion-Dollar Bet on Fusion Power

A fusion power demonstration reactor to be built in the 2030s in collaboration with the DoE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, represents a step toward commercial use

From Nature magazine

Image: The inside of KSTAR, one of the first research tokamaks in the world with fully superconducting magnets, after a recent upgrade that will allow the study of pulses of up to 300 seconds duration Copyright: Nation Fusion Research Institute PR team, Korea

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 provisionally named 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).

South Korea is already developing the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (K-STAR) project and contributing to ITER, 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.

“It is a very smart strategy to take advantage of the experience gained in constructing ITER 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”, a much greater output than ITER’s goal of producing 500 million watts for 500 seconds by the late 2020s.

Building up know-how

In early 2012, the South Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced that developing technologies to build K-DEMO would be a priority for the next 10 years, establishing the know-how to permit the construction of a commercial fusion power plant between 2022 and 2036. The government also announced that it planned to invest about 1 trillion won (US$941 million) in the project. About 300 billion won of that spending has already been funded, according to a source within the ministry. The government expects the project to employ nearly 2,400 people in the first phase, which will last throughout 2016.

Robert Goldston, who was the director of the PPPL when it helped with the initial design of K-STAR, believes that the K-DEMO project is feasible, considering South Korea’s commitment to its previous project. “There was a financial crisis in Asia right in the middle of the K-STAR project, but the government and fusion scientists were steady and serious about getting the job done, despite lots of hardship,” he says. “My sense is that the Korean team, at all levels, is very dedicated to a steady pace even in adversity — and there is always adversity in big projects.”

Lee Gyung-Su, a research fellow at NFRI and a former chairman of the ITER Management Advisory Committee, says that Korea is desperately in need 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 and cost increases, prompting some critics to question whether the project will ever be completed. “It is already obvious that future commercial-size machines will be too large and costly, and too expensive to operate, to generate competitive energy,” says Thomas Cochran, a consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington DC. He adds that he believes South Korea should spend its resources on technologies that have the potential to provide a nearer-term impact on carbon emissions and climate change.

Lee acknowledges the criticism, but says that most of ITER’s issues were of a management, rather than a technical nature. “The schedules are now mostly fixed and sorted out,” he says. “And risks always exist when it comes to a new finding in science, and the investment on the research and development has been made based on the estimation of such risks.”

Moreover, Lee adds, “we are willing to take risks, and need to innovate to survive”.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on January 21, 2013.

(Source: kenobi-wan-obi)

laboratoryequipment:

Snail Teeth to Improve Solar Cells, Batteries

An assistant professor at the Univ. of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering is using the teeth of a marine snail found off the coast of California to create less costly and more efficient nanoscale materials to improve solar cells and lithium-ion batteries.

The most recent findings by David Kisailus, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering, details how the teeth of chiton grow. The paper was published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. It was co-authored by several of his current and former students and scientists at Harvard Univ., Chapman Univ.and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/01/snail-teeth-improve-solar-cells-batteries

sagansense:

Belgium wants to build a doughnut-shaped island to store energy

Belgium’s North Sea minister has revealed the nation’s novel solution to preserving excess energy — build a doughnut-shaped island a few miles of the coast that continually pumps water through its delicious centre.

Apparently the country has so much clean energy, it doesn’t know what to do with it, and while that doesn;t appear to sound like a problem on the surface, storing renewable energy is a big problem. At the moment, excess energy generated by Belgium’s wind farms is simply going to waste, reports Reuters.

“We have a lot of energy from the wind mills and sometimes it just gets lost because there isn’t enough demand for the electricity,” a spokeswoman for minister Johan Vande Lanotte said.

Once completed, the island would receive excess energy from the country’s wind farms and use it to pump water out of the doughnut hole (its reservoir). When Belgium is in need of an energy top up, the water will be allowed to flow back into the reservoir where it will spin turbines and generate electricity.

The idea does not sound so bizarre when you consider that pumped hydroelectricity reportedly has a storage efficiency of more than 80 percent. There are pumped storage power stations around the world and in Norway mountain reservoirs are being used to pump water uphill using excess energy, before releasing it downhill from a second reservoir to turn a generator and produce energy.

“Pumped storage hydroelectricity is a particularly good match for wind power because water pumped into an upper reservoir will stay there for a long time, making up for potentially large gaps in wind generation,” explains David Linley in an issue of Nature.

Trouble is, Belgium’s coastline is pretty small — a brief stretch of about 65km — so there would be no chance of imitating Japan’s Okinawa Yanbaru Seawater Pumped Storage Power Station along the Philippine Sea coastline. And Belgium is not the most mountainous place, aside from within the Ardennes forest region. The small country’s dense population, along with environmental concerns, would count this region out as a viable location for energy storage. As Linley comments in his overview of renewable energy storage options, “building such storage tends to be expensive and environmentally destructive, and installing high-voltage transmission lines to connect remote storage sites to grids often triggers opposition on environmental grounds.”

For the doughnut island to take shape, Belgium’s grid operator Elia will need to strengthen its coastal lines, which is happening anyway. Once that’s sorted, there’s just the small feat of building the island. The village of Wenduine will get a nice addition to its seaside vista, with sand dumped three kilometres off the coast from it to build the storage facility.

There are no concrete plans in motion to begin work on the island, but according to the Reuters report it could take five or more years. Belgium has time, considering it just delayed its nuclear energy phase-out, but if it wants to stay on track to its 2025 deadline this looks like a viable option.

The country had just 1,078 megwatts of wind power connected to the grid in 2011, but the European Wind Energy Association issued a report the same year predicting Belgium would expand capacity to more than 4,000 megawatts by 2020.

Image: Shutterstock

laboratoryequipment:

Microalgae Has Liquid Fuel Potential

Due to continuing high demand, depletion of non-renewable resources and increasing concerns about climate change, fossil fuel-derived transportation fuels face constant challenges from both a world market and an environmental perspective. Producing renewable transportation fuel from microalgae attracts much attention because of its potential for fast growth rates, high oil content, ability to grow in unconventional scenarios, and its inherent carbon neutrality.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/01/microalgae-has-liquid-fuel-potential

mothernaturenetwork:

How smart LEDs could change your home

If a 10-watt LED bulb replaced all the 60-watt incandescent bulbs in the U.S., it could save about $3.9 billion in the country’s annual electric bill.