Nanotechnology researchers are developing the perfect complement to the power tie: a “power shirt” able to generate electricity to power small electronic devices for soldiers in the field, hikers and others whose physical motion could be harnessed and converted to electrical energy.
The February 14 issue of the journal Nature details how pairs of textile fibers covered with zinc oxide nanowires can generate electrical current using the piezoelectric effect. Combining current flow from many fiber pairs woven into a shirt or jacket could allow the wearer’s body movement to power a range of portable electronic devices. The fibers could also be woven into curtains, tents or other structures to capture energy from wind motion, sound vibration or other mechanical energy.
“The fiber-based nanogenerator would be a simple and economical way to harvest energy from physical movement,” said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If we can combine many of these fibers in double or triple layers in clothing, we could provide a flexible, foldable and wearable power source that, for example, would allow people to generate their own electrical current while walking.”
EurakAlert
Researchers at the Biodesign Institute are using the tiniest organisms on the planet ‘bacteria’ as a viable option to make electricity. In a new study featured in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering, lead author Andrew Kato Marcus and colleagues Cesar Torres and Bruce Rittmann have gained critical insights that may lead to commercialization of a promising microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology.
“We can use any kind of waste, such as sewage or pig manure, and the microbial fuel cell will generate electrical energy,” said Marcus, a Civil and Environmental Engineering graduate student and a member of the institute’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology. Unlike conventional fuel cells that rely on hydrogen gas as a fuel source, the microbial fuel cell can handle a variety of water-based organic fuels.
Science Daily
Sandia researcher Rich Diver checks out the solar furnace which will be the initial source of concentrated solar heat for converting carbon dioxide to fuel. Eventually parabolic dishes will provide the thermal energy.
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico have found a way of using sunlight to recycle carbon dioxide and produce fuels like methanol or gasoline.
The Sunlight to Petrol, or S2P, project essentially reverses the combustion process, recovering the building blocks of hydrocarbons. They can then be used to synthesize liquid fuels like methanol or gasoline. Researchers said the technology already works and could help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, although large-scale implementation could be a decade or more away.
Wired
The traditional flat solar panel looks like becoming a thing of the past now that a Japanese company has developed a spherical equivalent that is both more efficient and far cheaper to make.
The Sphelar, which is the brainchild of Kyoto-based Kyosemi, is a perfectly round solar cell that can be made as small as 1mm in diameter. In serial or parallel, hundreds or thousands of the devices can be used to form a solar panel of any shape.
While it may not seem like a major difference, the practical effect of making a non-flat solar panel is that it doesn’t have to precisely face the sun to capture energy. In fact, Sphelar cells can generate electricity from both direct and indirect sunshine; effectively soaking up available light whatever direction it comes from.
digital tokyo
Physicists at UC Riverside have created molecular positronium, an entirely new object in the laboratory. Briefly stable, each molecule is made up of a pair of electrons and a pair of their antiparticles, called positrons.
The research paves the way for studying multi-positronium interactions—useful for generating coherent gamma radiation—and could one day help develop fusion power generation as well as directed energy weapons such as gamma-ray lasers. It also could help explain how the observable universe ended up with so much more matter than “antimatter.”
The researchers made the positronium molecules by firing intense bursts of positrons into a thin film of porous silica, which is the chemical name for the mineral quartz. Upon slowing down in silica, the positrons were captured by ordinary electrons to form positronium atoms.
Science Daily
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Organized crime may have brought in more than $2 trillion in revenue last year, about twice all the military budgets in the world combined, according to the “2007 State of the Future” report, published by the Millennium Project of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, by Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon.
The report called organized crime one of the most pressing global issues that needs to be addressed in the next 10 years, along with global warming, terrorism, corruption, unemployment, and income disparities.
But the report noted success in tackling other issues, saying the world has made progress on ending poverty, improving access to education and settling conflicts. It also says the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa has begun to level off.
KurzweilAI
A new way of transmitting electricity wirelessly has been discovered by U.S. researchers. It could pave the way for the wireless charging of portable electronic devices, rendering power cords obsolete in the process.
Devised by physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Boston, the new technology is detailed today in the U.S. journal Science.
At the turn of the 20th century, famed physicist and inventor Nikola Tesla devoted considerable effort towards achieving large scale wireless power transfer. Success proved elusive, however, and the demand for such schemes declined.
Now, the revolution in consumer technology has re-ignited the interest of researchers.
cosmos
An Australian firm has developed a renewable tidal energy conversion system based on the highly efficient fin structure of shark, tuna, and mackerel.
BioPower Systems Pty Ltd., a renewable energy systems company based in Eveleigh, New South Wales, says that its bioSTREAM technology for converting tidal and marine current energy into electricity is modeled on biological species, such as shark and tuna, that use Thunniform-mode swimming propulsion.
“The motions, mechanisms, and caudal fin hydrofoil shapes of such species have been optimized by natural selection and are known to be up to 90% efficient at converting body energy into propulsive force,” said BioPower Systems in a media release. “The bioSTREAMâ„¢ mimics the shape and motion characteristics of these species but is a fixed device in a moving stream… By mimicking these creatures, the bioSTREAM benefits from 3.8 billion years of evolutionary hydrodynamic optimization. The inherited biological traits result in a cost effective and reliable renewable energy system.”
mongabay
Thanks to Michael Garfield
Safer, cleaner nuclear power is a step closer to reality after Norway’s state-owned energy company, Statkraft, this week announced plans to investigate building a thorium-fuelled nuclear reactor.
Statkraft (which translates to “state power”) announced an alliance with regional power providers Vattenfall in Sweden, and Fortum in Finland, along with Norwegian energy investment company, Scatec AS, in a bid to produce the thorium-fuelled plant.
Thorium (Th-232), has been hailed as a ‘greener’ alternative to traditional nuclear fuels, such as uranium and plutonium, because thorium is incapable of producing the runaway chain reaction which in a uranium-fuelled reactor can cause a catastrophic meltdown. Thorium reactors also produce only a tiny fraction of the hazardous waste created by uranium-fuelled reactors.
cosmos
A stove that uses acoustic technology to cook and cool, and generates its own electricity, is being designed for developing communities in Africa and Asia.
The Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity, or SCORE, could help improve the health and quality of life for the 2 billion or so people in the world who cook over open fires, its developers say.
When used in enclosed places, smoke from open fires can cause health problems. And the stoves can be notoriously inefficient.
A person can spend two hours a day collecting wood to burn in a fire that is so wasteful that 93% of the energy generated, literally, goes up in smoke.
“We make the burning more efficient so that they use less wood and have more time to spend on other things like education,” says Paul Riley, the project director at the UK’s University of Nottingham.
The efficiency comes from a technology known as thermoacoustics, which produces sound waves from heated gas and then converts them to electricity.
abc.au
New York’s yellow taxis will go hybrid in five years, in an effort to cut air pollution and tackle climate change, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said.
Hybrids run on petrol and electricity, therefore emitting less exhaust.
The new vehicles are to be phased in immediately, replacing the current fleet which numbers about 13,000.
“The benefits are going to be felt by generations of New Yorkers. Going hybrid will shrink the city’s carbon footprint,” Mr Bloomberg said.
bbc
Ethanol gets a lot of attention as the biofuel of choice in America. But BP claims that butanol will provide greater benefits than ethanol and is betting at least some of their chips on it as the gasoline-alternative to watch out for.
Butanol’s advantages over ethanol arise from its gasoline-like properties. A criticism of ethanol is the reduction in mileage per gallon because it has 2/3 the energy density of gasoline. Butanol, on the other hand, has more than 80% energy density of gasoline. Also, traditional fuel pipelines can not be used with ethanol since water mixes into it, but Butanol does this to a lesser extent and so could be used with more existing infrastructure. Best of all, butanol can be made from the same feedstocks as ethanol: corn starch, sugar beets, and other sugar starches.
BP currently has partnered with DuPont to find better ways to make butanol. They note that ethanol has taken a long time gain a foothold, and so butanol likely will not be available for quite some time.
Whatever the reason, if butanol really is better than ethanol, there is no reason why there should not be space for it in the world’s search for cleaner energy.
technology review by way of ecogeek
In this Discovery Channel documentary, we get a prediction of what life could be like in the year 2025, thanks to technological advancements that are happening today. This 5 part docu-drama delves into wearable computers, immersive telecom, intelligent homes, emotive AI, robots, genetics, clean energy, entertainment, and education.
Part 1
Ontario will ban the sale of inefficient incandescent light bulbs by 2012, a move that follows in the footsteps of Australia, the province said Wednesday.
The government estimates that replacing the 87 million incandescent bulbs in use across Ontario with more efficient bulbs would save six million megawatt hours every year — enough to power 600,000 homes.
Changing to more efficient bulbs is also the equivalent — in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions — of taking 250,000 cars off the road, said Ontario Environment Minister Laurel Broten, who announced the move along with Energy Minister Dwight Duncan on Wednesday morning.
“It’s lights out for old, inefficient bulbs in Ontario,” Duncan said in a statement.
CBC
Power generation: If people object to wind farms cluttering up the countryside, one answer might be to put them in the air.
If it ever seems windy where you live, be thankful you do not live 10km up in the air. At that height, the jet-stream winds blow stronger and more constantly than ground level winds, carrying up to a hundred times more energy.
So, just as oil companies are drilling deeper and in more remote locations in search of new reserves, pioneer wind-power engineers are looking higher in the sky for new sources of energy. Conventional turbines will not take them there—the highest to date is just over 200 meters tall. So they are trying to invent a whole new technology for harvesting wind: electricity generators that fly.
Economist.com
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