Stories tagged solar energy
Last May, the Bureau of Land Management halted new projects for developing solar energy on public land, out of concern for the impact these might have on the environment. But on July 3, they lifted the ban in response to public concern over rising energy costs.
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Here comes the Sun: Scientists announce new breakthroughs in solar energy technology. Photo by S4N7Y from Flickr.com
A company in Massachusetts has developed a process for producing solar power cells using inkjet printers. This could drastically reduce the cost of producing the cells, and increase the number of ways they are used.
Meanwhile in Atlanta, Lonnie Johnson – the man who invented the Super Soaker squirt gun – is working on a solar-powered electrical generator that would be twice as efficient as current models.
Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century
Want to know what to do with your life. A diverse committee of experts from around the world, at the request of the U.S. National Science Foundation, identified 14 challenges that, if met, would improve how we live.
Here is their list in no particular order. You can learn more about each challenge by clicking on it.
- Make solar energy economical
- Provide energy from fusion
- Develop carbon sequestration methods
- Manage the nitrogen cycle
- Provide access to clean water
- Restore and improve urban infrastructure
- Advance health informatics
- Engineer better medicines
- Reverse-engineer the brain
- Prevent nuclear terror
- Secure cyberspace
- Enhance virtual reality
- Advance personalized learning
- Engineer the tools of scientific discovery
You can vote for which is most important
The committee decided not to rank the challenges. NAE is offering the public an opportunity to vote on which one they think is most important and to provide comments at the Engineering Challenges website
Types of carbon nanotubes
Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsUS researchers announced they have created the "darkest man-made material ever", using sheets of carbon just a single atom thick and rolled into tubes.
The nanotubes possess properties that make them great absorbers of light, and - at the same time – very lousy reflectors of it. And by roughing up the tube’s surface, scientists can adjust the material to make it scatter light even more.
"The periodic nanotube structures make an ideal candidate for creating superdark materials, because it allows one to tailor light absorption by controlling the dimensions and periodicities of nanotubes in the structure," said Dr Pulickel Ajayan, of Rice University in Houston, Texas, who led the team of researchers.
This stuff is so dark Ajayan and his team have entered it in the Guinness Book of World Records.
So what good is superdark material? Will it change your life? Just how dark do your groovy sunglasses really need to be?
Well, a super light-absorber could prove to be very useful in such things as electronics, computer chip technology, solar panels and solar-cells, or telescope optics. Just about anything that collects light or solar energy could benefit.
SOURCE
BBC.com
Houston Chronicle story
A successful test run of solar trees in Vienna, Austria may signal the beginning of a new cost-saving and environment-friendly trend in the illumination of city streets.
It’s a little early, but Popular Science has issued their list of the top innovations of 2007. Their grand prize winner are nanosolar powersheets, thin flexible films that use nanotechnology to harness solar energy -- and allowing me to tag this post as both "nanotechnology" and "energy." The health innovations section allows me to use the "health" tag, and a new toilet that uses 40% less fresh water allows me to tag this as "water." It's a win-win-win!
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