Lifeboat Foundation

What if the wood your house was made of could save your electricity bill? In the race to save energy, using a passive cooling method that requires no electricity and is built right into your house could save even chilly areas of the US some cash. Now, researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado have harnessed nature’s nanotechnology to help solve the problem of finding a passive way for buildings to dump heat that is sustainable and strong.

Despite this, electric garbage trucks are still few and far between. BYD’s main competitor is Motiv Power Systems, which has sold small fleets of class 8 side-loading garbage trucks to Los Angeles and Sacramento, California. Wrightspeed, which was also making hybrid-electric garbage trucks—featured in this article from 2015—appears to have gone dormant, despite a contract to supply the New Zealand cities of Auckland and Wellington. And recently, Volvo announced a battery electric garbage truck, the FE Electric, although it appears to be limited to the European market.

The European research institution Jülich just released new information on “zero-point energy” and its effect on the stability of nanomagnets. If scientists can determine how to magnetically store data, information can be stored in extremely small spaces.

Quantum mechanics becomes important when we’re talking about small spaces, such as nanometers. Magnetic moments are difficult to stabilize, or point in designated directions. A specific direction corresponds to effectively storing data.

In order to save data, the magnetic moments of atoms in constant motion must be counteracted by energy barriers, which is dependent on the material used. Otherwise, the magnetic moments change and any information saved is then lost.

Continue reading “Zero-Point Energy Nanomagnet Stores Data In Small Spaces” »

Radiation generally comes under the heading of “things you want to stay away from,” so it’s no surprise that radiation shielding is a high priority in many industries. However, current shielding is bulky and heavy, so a North Carolina State University team is developing a new lightweight shielding based on foam metals that can block X-rays, gamma rays, and neutron radiation, as well as withstanding high-energy impact collisions.

So-called supercapacitors, AKA ultracapacitors, are amazing devices. While they don’t store as much total energy as a comparable battery, they can discharge this energy extremely quickly. They can also charge rapidly, as demonstrated by Mike Rigsby’s “Little Flash.” As described in his project write-up, the mini rover “runs for twenty minutes, charges in ten seconds.”

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Watch Giant Flow Batteries Could Power Your City In The Future, an Earth video from Seeker.

Scientists have discovered a new material that could hold the key to unlocking the potential of hydrogen powered vehicles.

As the world looks towards a gradual move away from fossil fuel powered cars and trucks, greener alternative technologies are being explored, such as electric battery powered vehicles.

Another ‘green’ technology with great potential is hydrogen power. However, a major obstacle has been the size, complexity, and expense of the fuel systems—until now.

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As the number of electronics devices increases around the world, finding effective methods of recycling electronic waste (e-waste) is a growing concern. About 50 million tons of e-waste is generated each year and only 20% of that is recycled. Most of the remaining 80% ends up in a landfill where it can become an environmental problem. Currently, e-waste recycling involves mechanical crushers and chemical baths, which are expensive, and manual labor, which can cause significant health and environmental problems when not performed properly. Thus, researchers from Kumamoto University, Japan have been using pulsed power (pulsed electric discharges) to develop a cleaner and more efficient recycling method.

Pulsed power has been shown to be successful in processing various waste materials, from concrete to waste water. To test its ability to be used in e-waste recycling, researchers examined its effectiveness in separating components found in one of the most prolific types of e-waste, CD ROMs. In previous work, they showed that complete separation of metal from plastic occurred using 30 pulses at about 35 J/pulse (At the current price of electricity in Tokyo, this amount of energy costs about 0.4 Yen for recycling 100 CD ROMs). To examine the mechanism of material separation using this method, researchers performed further analyses by observing the plasma discharge with a high-speed camera, by taking schlieren visualizations to assess the shock wave, and using shadowgraph images to measure fragment motion.

Images at the early stage of electrical discharge showed two distinct light emissions: blue-white and orange. These indicated excitation of aluminum and upper protective plastic materials respectively. After the plasma dissipated, fragments of metal and plastic could be seen flying away from the CD ROM sample.

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