If you dig deep enough into the Earth’s climate change archives, you hear about the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. And then you get scared.
That was a time period, about 56 million years ago, when something mysterious happened — there are many ideas as to what — that suddenly caused concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to spike, far higher than they are right now.
The planet proceeded to warm rapidly, at least in geologic terms, and major die-offs of some marine organisms followed due to strong acidification of the oceans.
Outer space is about to get its first pop-up retail shop.
Lowe’s, the home-improvement store, has teamed up with Made In Space, the company behind the world’s first zero-G 3D printer, to launch the first commercial manufacturing facility on the International Space Station.
The Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF), as it is called, is an advanced, permanent 3D printer that will be available for use not only by NASA and its station partners, but also by researchers, educational organizations and commercial customers.
The world is shifting to clean and renewable energy to power homes and transportation. Just like electronic devices, all green homes and cars will require Lithium-ion batteries to store energy and power them. LiTHIUM X locates and develops lithium assets with the goal of supplying the increasing demand from global battery giants like Panasonic, AESC, LG, BYD and – soon – utility companies.
LiTHIUM X is a lithium resource explorer and developer with a focus on becoming a low-cost supplier for the burgeoning lithium battery industry. Its Sal de los Angeles project is situated in the prolific “Lithium Triangle” in Salta Province, Argentina. The project is comprised on 8,156 hectares covering the nucleus of Salar de Diablillos with approximately C$19 million having been invested in the property by previous operators, including $16.2 million in work completed at Sal de los Angeles between 2010 to 2015. It contains high grade brine with a historic NI 43–101 resource of 2.8 million tonnes LCE and historic positive project economics.
LiTHIUM X also has the largest land package in Clayton Valley, Nevada covering over 15,040 acres between its Clayton Valley North project and Clayton Valley South extension. Both land packages are contiguous to the only producing lithium operation in North America – Silver Peak, owned and operated by Albemarle, the world’s largest lithium producers.
Dubai’s skyline is an ever-growing collection of impressive towering skyscrapers, including the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. And you know what loves tall buildings even more than tourists do? Lightning.
Instagrammer faz3, also known as Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum (the Crown Prince of Dubai), captured this amazing lightning show over Dubai at 1,977 frames per second, turning what is normally a split second occurrence into a beautifully drawn-out ballet of bolts splintering their way across a dark stormy sky.
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.
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.
Photovoltaic cells may be cheaper and more efficient than ever, but you still need to find a place to put them.
Looking to solve these space constraints, Los Alamos partnered with the University of Milano in Italy to see if they could turn windows into electric generators.
As nanocrystals roughly one-billionth of a meter across, — that is as small as 10 atoms wide — quantum dots can absorb light at one wavelength, convert it and re-emit it at another wavelength.
So the dots would absorb sunlight and convert it to a wavelength best suited for the photovoltaic cells, then be guided to the solar cells installed at its edges to electricity.
The University of Milan is responsible for the new industrial method that embeds the dots in a transparent material.
Needs lots and lots of work still.
The humanoid robot Walk-man showed of some of his life-saving capabilities in Genoa Thursday, as the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and University of Pisa develop the hardware for disaster response operations.
The 185-centimetre-high (72 inch) robot is a result of the four-year research program which started in October 2013 aimed at assisting or even replacing humans in civil damaged sites including buildings, such as factories, offices and houses.
“This is actually an anthropomorphic robot that was developed to assist humans during situations where actually we have physical disaster: disasters made by humans or the environments that becomes hostile and dangerous for emergency responders to intervene,” said IIT Senior researcher Nikolaus Tspgarakis.
