Science Quick Picks » Technology

Top 3 Most Exciting Innovations in Green Technology

Guest Blogger — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:18:25 +0000

With the continuing challenges we face as a result of climate change, the world’s greatest minds are constantly coming up with new ways to reduce carbon emissions as well as make the most of existing energy. If we are to avert climactic disaster, it could be that the solutions are discovered at the ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy) summit. Here are some of the most highly anticipated innovations in green technology from this year’s event.

Solar-Thermal Engine

With an increasing number of cars on the road, and our addiction to fossil fuels showing no signs of abating, it would be a major breakthrough to come up with an engine that can run on alternative energy. The Solar-Thermal Engine on show at ARPA-E runs on sunshine as you’d expect from the name, but it can also operate on synthetic gas derived from rubbish heated to just 260 degrees Celsius. It is the heat produced from these sources that the engine uses to produce steam which then powers the engine.

Artificial Photosynthesis

The secret to harnessing the power of the sun effectively could lie in plants. When sunlight hits a leaf, it splits the water inside it to produce carbohydrates, and this same process can be used to split water into Oxygen and Hydrogen which can be used as a fuel.
The real benefit of artificial photosynthesis is that, unlike other forms of renewable energy such as geothermal or wind power, it could have a real future as a fuel for transportation as it can be produced as and stored in photovoltaic cells as an actual fuel.
The artificial photosynthesis technology demonstrated at ARPA-E could be used to generate energy for the home cheaply.

Airborne Wind Turbines

At very high altitudes the wind never stops, and if utilised correctly could produce a constant stream of energy. On display at ARPA-E was a carbon-fibre “kite” that can circle high in the sky, and transmit that power it harnesses via a tether made of high strength fibres surrounded by conductors.
It works like any other wind turbine, where air rapidly moves across the blades and causes them to rotate, thus generating electricity. However, the AWT has a number of advantages over the traditional wind turbine. Firstly, it can produce power far more cost-effectively, at around half the cost, while it uses a massive 90% less material and is therefore far cheaper to build and install.
One major drawback to wind turbines that will often be cited is that they spoil the natural beauty of the countryside. With an AWT however, this isn’t an issue as they fly hundreds of metres in the air. It’s this altitude that also allows them to access significantly stronger winds.
We are beginning to see the effects of climate change throughout the world, including extended droughts in the planet’s hottest regions, coral reef bleaching and the continued retreat of the ice caps. If we are to avoid these and other problems getting increasingly more damaging, we will need to take significant steps both politically and technologically, and if ARPA-E is any indication, the best minds in green technology are working hard to discover the solutions.

This blog post was written by John Rooney on behalf of SolarTech, experts in delivering renewable energy technology for your home or business in the form of solar panels.

Top 3 Most Exciting Innovations in Green Technology is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Best iPad Science Apps for Kids

Guest Blogger — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:30:09 +0000

The iPad is a great resource if you want to supplement your child’s science education. The best way to learn about science is to explore the topic through experiments and hands-on applications. These applications help to bring science to life. You can use them to build your child’s curiosity in science or as a way for them to delve more deeply into a subject that they already love. You may want to explore the iBooks available for the iPad. They are each only $15.00 and will explore a topic in-depth with related videos.

Bobo Explores Light
This app takes children through a story that explores how light and electricity works. It has a cute main character that really appeals to kids. It explains how light works, and has games that demonstrates the various points that it teachers. The app itself is not very long; it may take about an hour at most to go through the entire thing the first time. However there is good replay value for the children, which allows your children to review the concepts. This is a good secondary source if your child is learning about electricity.

Solar Walk and Star Walk
The Solar Walk app is one of the first apps that was introduced along with the iPad. A similar application is Star Walk. Solar Walk allows you to explore the different planets in the solar system and the sun. You can check the different positions of the planets currently as well as learn more detailed information on each individual planet. Star Walk is another app that explores space. This application focuses more on space outside of the solar system. It can help you find stars in the night sky. It is a great app to have if you are planning on stargazing. These apps make great resources if your child is currently studying astronomy. The hands on interaction may help them to better understand and absorb the information about the planets and space.

Science 360 for the iPad
This app by the National Science Foundation is one of the most highly rated apps with hundreds of five-star reviews. It is updated on a regular basis and provides the latest news stories. It also provides streaming video and photos if you are interested in exploring a topic more in-depth. This is a great resource to have on hand to support all the different science fields. It can be used as a resource for younger and older students as well.

BrainPop Featured Movie
This app offers a new topic every day with a video that explains the topic and then at least four more resources that allows your child to explore the topic more in-depth. You can subscribe for $1.99 a month, which gives you access to the featured topic for the day. Another subscription rate of $6.99 a month allows you to access all of the topics each day. It is a good option if you want to encourage your children to learn. The topics expand beyond just science topics into other educational areas as well.

Heather Green is a freelance writer for several regional magazines in North Carolina as well as a resident blogger for onlinenursingdegrees.org. Her writing experience includes fashion, business, health, agriculture and a wide range of other topics. Heather has just completed research on healthcare administration degree and online physical therapy assistant classes.

Best iPad Science Apps for Kids is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Infographic: The Digital Classroom

Jorge Goncalves — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:00:58 +0000

Courtesy of Accredited Online Universities Guide

Infographic: The Digital Classroom is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

PlanIT Valley: The First Sustainable City in the World

Jorge Goncalves — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:16:03 +0000

PlanIT Valley promises to be the first sustainable city from an economic, social, technological and environmental point of view. The story begins as many others, on a local level: Miguel Rodrigues, a Portuguese entrepreneur, simply wanted to build an electric car factory in Paredes, near Porto (Portugal). But the idea quickly jumped borders, transformed itself onto a global stage which became the project to build an intelligent city in Paredes and became a Harvard case study. “It is amazing the confluence of paths of Miguel Rodrigues. He met Celso Ferreira, President of Paredes, and introduced him Peter Van Manen, from McLaren Electronics, and Manuel Simas, from Microsoft Automotive, who knew Steve Lewis, from Living PlanIT.”

Living PlanIT, the company that will operate PlanIT Valley, predicts that the new city will occupy an area of 1700 hectares, host 12 thousand companies and create tens of thousands of jobs. Investment might exceed 10 billion euro, involving partners such as Cisco, McLaren and Buro Happold and could be considered a Project of National Interest (PIN).

Companies like IBM, Bosch, Intel and Microsoft have also been reported as potential partners. Planned to be an urban scale living laboratory where new techniques will be used to reduce the impact of infrastructure on the environment, this new city plans to host companies and researchers, retail, hotels, housing, offices, industry and entertainment venues, combining intelligent buildings and advanced mobility, transport and communication solutions.

At the core of Living PlanIT’s approach is an integrated platform for managing city operations. The high-level convergence of information and control systems with the fabric of buildings, infrastructure, places and mobility is critical to being able to respond holistically to the challenges posed by urbanization and associated issues of environmental sustainability. The convergence of manufacturing processes and enabling technologies is delivered through Living PlanIT and Cisco’s ecosystem of partners.

Cisco’s technologies provide the infrastructure for Living PlanIT’s Xtreme Construction (XTC) and Urban Operating System (UOS) platforms. XTC provides the method by which technologies are embedded in the fabrication of buildings and places while the UOS provides the orchestration, sensing and operational framework for urban environments. This process separates and supports city hardware such as renewable energy, water and waste systems from resident and user focused applications

PlanIT Valley – Next Generation Intelligent City: Innovation in a Living Laboratory
In order to demonstrate technological innovation at urban scale Living PlanIT will soon break ground at a 1,700 hectare (4,000 acre) Greenfield site in the municipality of Paredes outside Porto, Portugal. This is the initial phase in the construction of the first of a new generation of intelligent cities – PlanIT Valley.

PlanIT Valley will be the R&D platform for Living PlanIT and its Partners. The assimilation of technologies in PlanIT Valley means that innovations can be deployed at city scale.

PlanIT Valley: The First Sustainable City in the World is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Physics World Magazine Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Invention of the Laser

Jorge Goncalves — Mon, 17 May 2010 23:17:49 +0000

Physics World and physicsworld.com are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser – one of the outstanding success stories in physics with a special edition that we can download for free (after registration).

Physics World’s special May issue contains the story of the race to build the world’s first laser, a special timeline of laser history and six experts’ predictions for where laser science will go next.

The editors also take a look at the laser’s huge impact on popular culture and everyday life, and delve into the latest research into ultrafast and ultrahigh-power lasers. Find out about the technological impact of lasers in fibre optics, and the quest to create green-wavelength laser diodes that could allow mobile phones to project full-colour images onto any surface.

Physics World Magazine Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Invention of the Laser is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Next Generation Nanofilms

Jorge Goncalves — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:54:31 +0000

Next generation nanofilms created – new research described in AIP’s the Journal of Chemical Physics. ‘With the human genome in hand, biochemists have cataloged the 3-D structures of thousands of proteins isolated from living cells. But one important class of proteins — those stuck in the cell membranes — has proven difficult to extract and study in 3-D crystals. Now an international team of scientists has developed a way to train such molecules to line up neatly on the surface of water in thin, tissue-like layers called nanofilms. This technique should allow biochemists to better see and study the molecules and may lead to a new generation of molecular electronics and ultra-thin materials only one molecule thick.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time aligned films less than a nanometer thick have been produced,” say Iftach Nevo, a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and Leslie Leiserowitz of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Together with their colleagues at these institutions and at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Germany and Northwestern University in Evanston, they describe their research in the 14 April 2009 issue of The Journal of Chemical Physics, published by the American Institute of Physics.

One way of creating a nanofilm is to build it on the surface of water. First, the building blocks of the film are dissolved in a volatile substance. When a drop of this solution is splashed onto water, the solvent evaporates. The building blocks left floating on the water interact with each other and spontaneously come together – like soap scum in a bathtub – to create a thin crystalline layer.

The shortcoming of this technique is that the thin crystals in the film created will be a mess. Like a mob in a dance club, molecules floating on a surface tend to spin around chaotically with little regard for order. Different patches of molecules will point different, random directions. Because the orientation of these molecules dictates the electrical, magnetic, and optical properties of the final film, these jumbled regions are difficult to develop into useful technologies. They are also difficult to analyze using imaging techniques like X-ray diffraction.

To force the molecules to line up, the team blasted them with nanosecond laser pulses. These pulses create an electric field that interacts with the molecules, rotating them slowly. The electric field associated with these laser pulses is polarized, filtered so that all of the light waves vibrate in the same direction. Molecules caught in the laser feel most stable when they line up along this direction, a process analogous to the needle in a compass swinging to line up with the Earth’s magnetic field. Eventually, this forms an aligned film with long range order.

The technique has not been completely perfected yet. Its success rate is about 30 percent, but the group believes that a better understanding of what is happening during the evaporation process and how the molecules interact with each other just before solidifying into a film will improve the efficiency.’

Next Generation Nanofilms is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

TEAM 0.5: The World’s Most Powerful Microscope

Jorge Goncalves — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:42:17 +0000

Debut of TEAM 0.5, the World’s Best Microscope. ‘TEAM 0.5, the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope capable of producing images with half angstrom resolution (half a ten-billionth of a meter), less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom has been installed at the Department of Energy’s National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The TEAM Project (TEAM stands for Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope) is led by Berkeley Lab in a collaboration with DOE’s Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the Frederick Seitz Materials Laboratory of the University of Illinois, and two private companies specializing in electron microscopy, the FEI Company headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and CEOS of Heidelberg, Germany.

Now that TEAM 0.5′s basic systems are operational, additional components and facilities are being completed and tuned, including a state-of-the-art control room display that shows the sample under the microscope on a flat panel resembling a wide-screen, high-definition TV. After a long series of rigorous tests and adjustments, TEAM 0.5 will become available to outside users by October, 2008.’

TEAM Project Homepage. ‘(…) In 2009, exactly 50 years later, a group of scientists will meet the Feynman challenge with delivery of the TEAM microscope, an instrument to provide unprecedented opportunities to observe atomic scale order, electronic structure and dynamics of individual nanostructures.’

TEAM 0.5: The World’s Most Powerful Microscope is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Plastic Steel: Light and Transparent but Strong as Steel

Jorge Goncalves — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 18:10:09 +0000

U-M research: New plastic is strong as steel, transparent. ‘By mimicking a brick-and-mortar molecular structure found in seashells, University of Michigan researchers created a composite plastic that’s as strong as steel but lighter and transparent. It’s made of layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble polymer that shares chemistry with white glue.

Engineering professor Nicholas Kotov almost dubbed it “plastic steel,” but the new material isn’t quite stretchy enough to earn that name. Nevertheless, he says its further development could lead to lighter, stronger armor for soldiers or police and their vehicles. It could also be used in microelectromechanical devices, microfluidics, biomedical sensors and valves and unmanned aircraft.

Kotov and other U-M faculty members are authors of a paper on this composite material, “Ultrastrong and Stiff Layered Polymer Nanocomposites”, published in the Oct. 5 edition of Science.

The scientists solved a problem that has confounded engineers and scientists for decades: Individual nano-size building blocks such as nanotubes, nanosheets and nanorods are ultrastrong. But larger materials made out of bonded nano-size building blocks were comparatively weak. Until now.’

Plastic Steel: Light and Transparent but Strong as Steel is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Economist Article on Biofuels

Jorge Goncalves — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:53:31 +0000

Economist: Ethanol, schmethanol. ‘Everyone seems to think that ethanol is a good way to make cars greener. Everyone is wrong.
SOMETIMES you do things simply because you know how to. People have known how to make ethanol since the dawn of civilisation, if not before. Take some sugary liquid. Add yeast. Wait. They have also known for a thousand years how to get that ethanol out of the formerly sugary liquid and into a more or less pure form. You heat it up, catch the vapour that emanates, and cool that vapour down until it liquefies.

The result burns. And when Henry Ford was experimenting with car engines a century ago, he tried ethanol out as a fuel. But he rejected it — and for good reason. The amount of heat you get from burning a litre of ethanol is a third less than that from a litre of petrol. What is more, it absorbs water from the atmosphere. Unless it is mixed with some other fuel, such as petrol, the result is corrosion that can wreck an engine’s seals in a couple of years. So why is ethanol suddenly back in fashion? That is the question many biotechnologists in America have recently asked themselves.’

Add to the discussion (September 29): Reuters: Many biofuels have more climate impact than oil. ‘Most crops grown in the United States and Europe to make “green” transport fuels actually speed up global warming because of industrial farming methods, says a report by Nobel prize winning chemist Paul J. Crutzen.

The findings could spell particular concern for alternative fuels derived from rapeseed, used in Europe, which the study concluded could produce up to 70 percent more planet-warming greenhouse gases than conventional diesel.

The study suggested scientists and farmers focused on crops, which required less intensive farming methods, to produce better benefits for the environment.’

Report: N₂O release from agro-biofuel production negates global warming reduction by replacing fossil fuels (PDF), P. J. Crutzen, A. R. Mosier, K. A. Smith, and W. Winiwarter, Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 7, 11191–11205, 2007.

Economist Article on Biofuels is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Lab-on-a-Chip to Detect H5N1

Jorge Goncalves — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:35:46 +0000

Made in Singapore Lab-on-a-chip Device to Transform Field Testing for Avian Flu Virus (PDF). ‘Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) and Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) have successfully developed a miniaturized device that can be used to detect the highly pathogenic avian flu (H5N1) virus. If successfully commercialized, this device could be deployed in affected regions for pre-emptive surveillance of nascent avian flu epidemic.

According to project leader and lead author of the Nature Medicine publication, IBN Research Scientist Dr Juergen Pipper, “With our device, medical or humanitarian aid workers would be able to detect the presence of the H5N1 virus directly from throat swab samples on-site in less than half an hour”.’

Lab-on-a-Chip to Detect H5N1 is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Science Quick Picks » Technology

Top 3 Most Exciting Innovations in Green Technology

Solar-Thermal Engine

Artificial Photosynthesis

Airborne Wind Turbines

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