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Archive for the ‘sustainability’ category: Page 575

Mar 11, 2016

Solar energy rolls out like a carpet with groundbreaking Roll-Array photovoltaics

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability, transportation

The Roll-Array is easily towable by a standard 4×4 vehicle such as a Land Rover. When connected to the back of the car, the flexible solar panels are pulled out of a spool and create ground cover in a matter of minutes. On their website, Renovagen claims the panels will be able generate up to 100kWp – 10 times more power than other transportable solar panels on the market today.

solar power, solar energy, alternative energy, solar panels on a roll, rollable solar panels, Roll-array, rollarray, Renovagen, John Hingley, flexible solar panels, pv array, photovoltaic, photovoltaic panels, rolling solar panels

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Mar 10, 2016

ARPA-E Funding Personal Climate Control Systems with Robots, Foot Coolers, and More

Posted by in categories: energy, government, robotics/AI, sustainability

Government’s other big NextGen Program “Advanced Research Projects Agency-EnergyAdvanced Research Projects Agency-Energy” (ARPA) is funding a personal climate change solution with robots, foot coolers, etc. There is one fact; US Government does love their acronyms.


Why heat or cool a whole building when you could heat or cool individual people instead?

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Mar 9, 2016

GE wants to use CO2 pollution to make huge solar batteries

Posted by in categories: habitats, solar power, sustainability

Two big problems have been vexing environmental scientists for decades: How to store solar energy for later use, and what to do with CO2 that’s been captured and sequestered from coal plants? Scientists from General Electric (GE) could solve both those problems at once by using CO2 as a giant “battery” to hold excess energy. The idea is to use solar power from mirrors to heat salt with a concentrated mirror array like the one at the Ivanpah solar plant in California. Meanwhile, CO2 stored underground from, say, a coal plant is cooled to a solid dry ice state using excess grid power.

When extra electricity is needed at peak times, especially after the sun goes down, the heated salt can be tapped to warm up the solid CO2 to a “supercritical” state between a gas and solid. It’s then funneled into purpose built turbines (from GE, naturally) which can rapidly generate power. The final “sunrotor” design (a prototype is shown below) would be able to generate enough energy to power 100,000 homes, according to GE.

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Mar 8, 2016

Windows Could Soon Power the Entire Building

Posted by in categories: habitats, materials, particle physics, quantum physics, solar power, sustainability

Q-Dots windows to power homes and other buildings.


Researchers at the Los Alamos National Lab may have found a way to take quantum dots and put them in your ordinary windows to turn them into solar collectors.

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Mar 7, 2016

Crowdsourcing The Hyperloop: How A Group Of Redditors Are Taking On Elon Musk’s Challenge

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, engineering, law, sustainability, transportation

VideoDisclaimer: The author of this article, Jason Belzer, is a member of rLoop and serves as the non-profit’s legal counsel. When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk proposed the Hyperloop — a futuristic transportation system capable of propelling passengers to supersonic speeds — back in 2013, it is unlikely that even he could have imagined that just a few years later his vision would be tantalizing close to reality. Yet ironically, Musk, who has helped build companies like Tesla Motors and SpaceX that are on the leading edge of technological innovation, will not receive the credit if the Hyperloop indeed becomes a reality. Instead, that honor will be bestowed upon on a small group of teams now working feverishly to construct a prototype that will be tested this summer at SpaceX headquarters in California.

Imagine tackling one of the most complex engineering projects in the history of the human race, requiring countless hours of collaboration and experimentation by some of the world’s most talented engineers, and never actually meeting the people you are working with in a physical setting. You might think it’s impossible, or you might be a member of rLoop — the only non student team to reach the final stage of the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition.

rLoop V6 3AM.259 - Final

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Mar 3, 2016

Cheap, simple technique turns seawater into drinking water

Posted by in categories: economics, sustainability

Researchers from the University of Alexandria have developed a cheaper, simpler and potentially cleaner way to turn seawater into drinking water than conventional methods.

This could have a huge impact on rural areas of the Middle East and North Africa, where access to clean water is a pressing issue if social stability and economic development is to improve.

Right now, desalinating seawater is the only viable way to provide water to growing populations, and large desalination plants are now a fact of life in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries.

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Mar 3, 2016

Shocking new way to get the salt out

Posted by in category: sustainability

MIT team invents efficient shockwave-based process for desalination of water.

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Mar 2, 2016

MIT creates solar cell from grass clippings

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

A researcher at MIT has created solar panels from agricultural waste such as cut grass and dead leaves. In a few years, it’ll be possible to stir some grass clippings into a bag of cheap chemicals, paint the mixture on your roof, and immediately start producing electricity.

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Mar 1, 2016

Round Up linked to cancer

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, health, sustainability

Bad news if you use RoundUp.


Local councils across Australia that use the weed killer glyphosate on nature-strips and playgrounds are being warned that the chemical probably causes cancer.

An updated World Health Organisation (WHO) warning for the herbicide, often trade marked as Roundup, is also routinely used in household gardens and farms.

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Feb 26, 2016

Artificial control of exciplexes opens possibilities for new electronics

Posted by in categories: computing, electronics, materials, solar power, sustainability

Demonstrating a strategy that could form the basis for a new class of electronic devices with uniquely tunable properties, researchers at Kyushu University were able to widely vary the emission color and efficiency of organic light-emitting diodes based on exciplexes simply by changing the distance between key molecules in the devices by a few nanometers.

This new way to control electrical properties by slightly changing the device thickness instead of the materials could lead to new kinds of organic electronic devices with switching behavior or that reacts to external factors.

Organic such as OLEDs and organic solar cells use thin films of for the electrically active materials, making flexible and low-cost devices possible.

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