Wind panels?

Very tough times are coming for electric companies because renewable energy came to the game. Every year more and more people are talking about this source of electricity and heat, especially when climate is changing. Government is also trying to convince everyone to use renewable energy and does it by giving grants for installing equipment and even paying for generated and used electricity! This is still not enough as nowadays renewable energy technology is very expensive but new generation and new ideas are coming. Very impressive and promising is Keon Jae Lee from The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology work on piezoelectrics nanocomposite materials (material generating electricity from applied mechanical work like wind or waves). He and his team managed to increase critical limits by mixing piezoelectric nanoparticles with carbon-based nanomaterials. Those critical restrictions are: expensiveness, inability to create big scale samples and difficult way of manufacturing. Let's dream a bit how world can change right now. This technology allows changing existing house into off-grid house (house which doesn't take anything from main electricity or gas suppliers) very easily, you just need to cover the house with piezoelectric's panels (yes, not solar panels!). On the roof they would have a huge advantage against solar panels as it can generate electricity during the night and even winter (which is the biggest disadvantage of solar energy). Panels on the sides of the house could use huge amounts of wind power as it hits them perpendicularly and a lot of energy could be transferred. But this is not enough as it could also use sound waves coming from cars. Finally living close to very busy streets would pay back. Another option is to use piezoelectrics in asphalt. Just imagine you are going somewhere and generating electricity at the same time. So if you have electric car, you leave house with full battery and get to destination without discharging. It is possible to continue and continue talking about how big revolution could be made with this technology, but sadly posts have limits.

Check this for more details: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/tkai-pgt050712.php

Memories of holes in roads

Nowadays our world is based on transport so most people know the feeling that driving in bad roads is pain. Then all concentration is directed to think how to go around holes without damaging car and still moving quicker than snails. This is a problem not only for us. For road service companies it is difficult to find every crack in the road and fix it immediately. Another problem is that price of asphalt is very high as huge amounts are necessary. There is a solution to find material which could withstand loads of different critical conditions like freezing winter, hot summer and heavy trucks. Zhanping You from Michigan Technological University suggested to mix some nanoclay into asphalt, tried this technology and it worked! Nanoclay addition of around 3% by weight to asphalt changed its viscosity to the better side. This improvement won't let to deform asphalt as easily as before and rutting won't appear that often. Less maintenance means saving a lot of money and making roads safer. There still are loads to test, loads to do as characteristics of new asphalt under different temperatures are unknown. Zhanping You and his team are also inspecting asphalt characteristics containing other nano mixtures. Hopefully they will succeed to create material which could stay without any maintenance for more than 20 years. Such roads would be another step to a safer driving. In addition we wouldn't need to worry about holes appearing in the road from nowhere so all our attention would be concentrated on signs, other cars and pedestrians. Better roads, better tomorrow!

More details can be found in: http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2012/may/story67607.html

Glass without reflection

Today I was walking from university and swearing the sun for shining and not allowing to read my e-mails in the phone. I was forced to look for every shadow but reading didn't become even slightly easier. This is a frequent situation which makes very easy to derive equation: sun + screen = no good. This equation applies wherever you are. It doesn't care if you are sitting in front of your pc at home or using laptop outside. Usually bright sun is not the most important variable because even few beams of light can change a very exciting video into pain. The pain could be reduced by increasing brightness but this is not good for batteries and especially eyes so another solution is required. Just after coming back home I started reading science news and I was shocked that god heard me! One of the first articles was about recent improvement in this field. MIT researchers have just developed glass which won't reflect any images and also possesses other very impressive characteristics. The new generation of glass will be self-cleaning and hydrophobic. Instantly a question arises how this can be achieved? Researchers covered glass with nano (nano- 10^(-9) m) size conical spikes. I wish mass production would be started immediately but this technology still requires loads of testing and developing as new structure makes glass easily breakable. A single touch with a key could break it so holding your phone in a pocket with keys would be a horrible idea. This glass is also far away from being as strong as Gorilla Glass which is usually used in smartphones and tablets. Let's hope technology will improve quickly and studying outside in nice weather using laptop will be the best decision ever.  

                                  

More information:http://vr-zone.com/articles/mit-researchers-develop-glare-free-self-cleaning-glass/15701.html

Supercomputer in your room

Who doesn't dream about quicker computers? I guess no one as everyone knows the feeling then program is opening for 5 minutes, sometimes even 15 or longer. I guess we can say a huge step is already made as our clocks are much quicker than first computers of the size of a room. Faster and faster computers are made which already overcomes 10 petaflops (10^(16) floating point calculations) whereas average computer runs at less than 5 GFlops (5*10^(9) Flops). But this is still not enough. Would you like what no operation take more than a millisecond? All files would open quicker than a second? All this may be achieved in coming years as king of electronics, graphene, is being dethroned by silicene (one atom thickness, two dimensional allotrope of silicon). As it will be easier to integrate into current equipment and should be available in the market faster than graphene devices. But this is not enough as engineers from University of Toronto found a way how to create photon pairs using an integrated circuit. This leads to the solution to numerous problems as photons not only travel at speed of light but also allows using more advanced algorithms. The future belongs to optical computers as they would be not only quicker but would use less energy, make less noise, last longer and generate less heat. Nowadays heat is also a very limiting characteristic as cooling systems do not allow reducing size of devices. I am already waiting for my laptop to be much quicker than world's fastest supercomputer 京 built in Japan.

Links to sources: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428625.400-move-over-graphene-silicene-is-the-new-star-material.html

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/uotf-rbt043012.php

Digitalizing the universe

In this century more and more things are becoming digital. I wouldn't be surprised if some people haven't even seen a real picture. Today if you go to the party, you already know that after there will be few hundred photos taken but non of them will be printed out. Even a big part of our lives is spent in websites like Facebook or Second Life. All information is being saved in hard drives as binary code but strangely the need of paper still increases quickly. I didn't mentioned photography just randomly. Nowadays everyone competes with each other, whose camera has more pixels, especially companies making cameras. But even those huge companies couldn't win against scientists. Today it was announced that the biggest digital camera received an approval to be assembled. It's characteristics are just staggering. This camera will have 3.2 billion pixels, 320 times more than normal digital camera! It is really very hard to call it camera as weight will be 3 tons! But you can guess that it's impossible to take this camera to capture your holiday moments. Every advertisement company would wish to have it. Just imagine how big and detailed adverts could be. Anyway SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory designed it to capture night sky. All received data will be used to study dark energy and dark matter, very hot field of science research. It will also allow to create 3D map of the sky, capture rapidly changing objects and lots more. Every year 6 million gigabytes of data will be collected. Let's hope this toy will help to answer all scientists' questions. You can find more about the project by pressing the link: http://scitechdaily.com/worlds-largest-digital-camera-lsst-gets-approval/

Dark Matter disappeared?

There are two huge news in science world today but the biggest disappearance in the whole UNIVERSE easily won against usual very strange behaviour of quantum mechanics. So what did disappeared today? The answer is 23% of the whole universe, all dark matter (DK) is gone! It's just impossible to imagine such quantities and how now one  haven't seen it disappearing? Well...actually, no one has even seen dark matter or received any evidence which could prove its existence. First time DK was mentioned in 1932 so exactly 80 years ago. For all this time scientists were looking for a way to confirm it's presence, they built huge detectors for this reason and spent loads of time. But today Marcel Pawlowski and his PhD student from the University of Bonn revealed their discovery of satellite galaxies circling around Milky Way. To find them photographic plates and images were used which were taken from different apparatus. These newly discovered galaxies formed a structure which continues from 30 000 light years to 1 million light years from the center of the Galaxy. This structure perfectly fits with all data and theory. Scientists wonders that it was formed in distant past when Milky Way smashed into another galaxy. Now everyone is waiting for confirmation or rejection of this new theory. It is really very pleasant that understanding of the universe is getting better and better so a day is coming when we will say "I know everything about Universe". Next step is to explain Dark Energy which forms more than 70 percent of universe so to do it won't be very easy. To get a more detailed view please visit: http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=119616&CultureCode=en

Where did you left your avatar?

I can bet that everyone has seen a film "Avatar" as it became the highest grossing film in the world of all times and some people speculates the most expensive as well. Despite everything said before this post is not about it or "Avatar" is not the main subject at least. Don't understand me wrong because there could be written a lot of articles about science used in "Avatar" as it required to improve most of technologies used before starting to make the film. Anyway few Switzerland scientists have watched it way too many times as they built a robot which is controlled by.........person's minds. This futuristic idea works with a help of brain signals, just like in the film, as they are recorded using head cap. Then signals are decoded by a computer and sent to the robot which completes a given task wherever it is as technology works over 100 kilometers distance. Most of the people from films would imagine them to be used in wars but not this time. These avatars are created to help for patients to communicate with other people if they have movement disability. The aim is really very generous but it is hard to imagine that entrepreneurs are not seeing this as a very good product of future, the future when everyone will have their own avatar or even two. So depending on your mood that day you will be able which person to be. This would be not a first mind controlled product which reached market. MindFlex is a dual game which allows you to challenge your friend and check which has a better concentration. Check this out: http://mindflexgames.com/. For more information about mind controlled robot follow the link: http://phys.org/news/2012-04-swiss-scientists-mind-robot.html.