UAV’s Explained

For years, engineers have been working on making smaller and smaller UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). DARPA (Defense Research Advanced Projects Agency) has been taking the lead for years, and is now pushing the envelope by providing a second round of funding for the development of nano-UAVs, unmanned flyers with a mass of just 10 grams, approximately equivalent to two nickels. The multi-vehicle testbed developed by MIT uses several Draganflyer four rotor electric RC helicopters and a computer tracking and positioning system to monitor and control multiple unmanned aerial vehicles. The components of the system communicate with each other through Ethernet connections. Operations of unmanned aerial vehicles by public agencies in the National Airspace (NAS) is a predominantly uncharted territory and thus the FAA regulations are considered interim at best, according to the FAA website. The Sheriff’s Office hopes to provide flight mission data to the FAA to aid them in the drafting of federal aviation regulations to govern the use of these small unmanned systems.

The Helios was designed to be the forerunner of high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles that could fly ultra-long duration environmental science or telecommunications relay missions lasting for weeks or months without using consumable fuels or emitting airborne pollutants. On August 13, 2001, Helios demonstrated its capability when it reached an unofficial altitude record for non-rocket-powered aircraft of 96,863 feet. Today, energies are focused at the implementation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for domestic emergency service applications. Because of its perceived impracticality and expense, aerial photography from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) remains virtually unused as a rangeland management tool. This underuse suggested 2 objectives.

Using bats to carry incendiary bombs into enemy territory wasn’t a good idea, and it wasn’t the first bad idea in the history of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs ). During the American Civil War , an inventor patented an unmanned balloon that carried explosives that could be dropped after a time-delay fuse mechanism triggered the basket to overturn its contents. This paper outlines how light Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can be used in remote sensing for precision farming. It focuses on the combination of simple digital photographic cameras with spectral filters, designed to provide multispectral images in the visible and near-infrared domains. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are important to each branch of the U.S. The United States Army uses unmanned aerial vehicles for both enemy reconnaissance and to attack enemy forces.

Air Force deployed in Afghanistan this unmanned aerial vehicles, aimed at testing its leap over China when the stealth performance. The maximum flight duration of unmanned aerial vehicles varies widely. Internal combustion engine aircraft endurance depends strongly on the percentage of fuel burned as a fraction of total weight (the Breguet endurance equation), and so is largely independent of aircraft size. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) like the MQ-1 Predator have excelled in the theaters of war in which they have been deployed. However, the ability of those controlling the UAV to conceive of new missions for the Predator and other deployed UAVs in the field has led to the U.S.

The FAA feels that the technology is not at a point in which unmanned aerial vehicles can operate in this environment. Some law enforcement agencies disagree strongly. Why unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) not missiles? Obtaining missiles with the range and guidance required to strike deep into enemy territory are expensive and not so easy to transport across the rugged terrain of Bora Bora. Unmanned aerial vehicles have many attractions for the military. They can generally be smaller and lighter than manned aircraft because, among other things, they don’t need equipment to support a crew.

In general, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a term used to describe flying vehicles without pilots onboard. These vehicles are embedded with certain level of autonomy which allows them to perform semi-autonomous or autonomous flight, fulfill planned missions, and changing mission targets during operations. The company develops and produces so-called “lighter-than-air” unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAV, which are designed to provide persistent surveillance for longer durations of time at mid and high altitudes. It provides an integrated suite of aerospace communications products and services employing UAV technologies.

Their PowerSheet cells contrast the current solar technology systems by reducing the cost of production from $3 a watt to a mere 30 cents per watt. This makes, for the first time in history, solar power cheaper than burning coal. First, silicon-based solar technology has decoupled from the semiconductor industry and is achieving steady cost reductions, so that those following PV discern a kind of Moore’s law at work. In 2005, production of silicon for solar cells already surpassed production of silicon for semiconductors. Ausra has developed a new Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector (CLFR) solar technology that utilizes heat from the sun’s rays to create steam. The system employs solar collectors that boil water at high temperatures to power steam turbine generators, in a manner similar to the way that traditional fossil-fuel power plants work, but without the use of fuel or emissions.

The stagnant condition of solar energy development was influenced by solar technology and cost. Don’t fall victim to the manufacturers who are keeping their prices high due to the newness of solar technology. Learn how to build the panels at home at an affordable cost, and you will be able to save quite drastically. Over the past two decades progress has been made in solar technology, moving it forward as a large-scale energy source. However, the historical low efficiency of solar panels combined with the relatively high cost of solar material has made it difficult for the economics to work on a large scale without incentives.

As these companies are providing us with the opportunity to use solar power for more and more applications, researchers are working harder than ever to further solar technology to be cheaper to manufacture and be more efficient. At the University of Washington, a team of experts headed by David Ginger has been experimenting with manufacturing solar cells out of organic plastic polymers. Current solar technology puts the price of solar power at about $3 to $4 per watt. Anil Sethi of Flisom foresees his thin-film solar panels (commercially available in late 2009) reaching $.80/watt in five years, and $.50/watt within ten. Compatible with both Solar Technology’s FreeLoader and FreeLoader Pro solar gadget chargers, the CamCaddy can be ready to charge even when a mains supply is unavailable. A 12v DC power supply enables the CamCaddy to be connected to any car socket for instant power, along with a USB cable which can connect the CamCaddy to any PC or Laptop.

The company’s thin film silicon solar technology offers advantages over traditional crystalline silicon and other thin film PV technologies including higher energy yield, better performance at high temperatures, no polysilicon price risk and zero toxicity issues. At the same time, it provides long-term competitive advantages compared with other solar technologies due to long-term efficiency gain opportunities. The station would use a new type of solar technology that has been successfully tested at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., but never deployed. The project consists of a dish-shaped mirror array (eventually to include about 20,000 dishes) that focuses the sun’s rays on a receiver connected to a Stirling engine, heating up hydrogen gas that expands and drives the pistons of an engine (which resembles an internal combustion engine). Sometimes it’s not enough to merely say that the hot ticket for a guaranteed future job is training in solar technology. Sometimes not even an article in the venerable New York Times is enough to alert those seeking job training and those wanting to increase their already existing alternative energy training skills that the way to future economic prosperity is though studying at solar schools.

Yet, if you have the biggest companies in the world putting solar technology on their rooftops, that will drive up supply and demand of the systems. In turn, this will bring down the costs – making it affordable for even the smallest of homeowners. There are two areas of solar technology – generation and manufacturing. Several growing solar generation companies are looking at Arizona for potential investment. Some outsiders questioned the move, claiming solar technology couldn’t produce hot-enough steam at a low-enough cost to compete with fossil fuels. But last summer, BrightSource opened a demonstration facility in Israel that showcased its technology. The company is part of a pilot project implemented by the Government of Zambia with the aim to apply the ESCO concept for diffusion of solar technology. The change in livelihood as a result of the access to electric services has been investigated in a survey.

Solar-powered devices rely on the steady delivery of special particles called photons to keep the electricity generating process going. As soon as the sun falls below the horizon at night, photons stop striking the solar panels and the power drops instantly. Solar-powered refrigerators are now available on the market. They are useful in places where there is no conventional electricity supply.

Solar panels produce no energy at night, but that is not a significant problem because the electricity is often most needed in the daytime, when consumers turn on lights and televisions and air-conditioning. Solar panels are covered with solar photovoltaics, arrangements of cells which contain a material for converting solar energy into electricity. Even a small amount of sunlight will produce energy that can be converted to electricity which can power a home.

Solar panels are sold at a variety of places locally and online and vary in price. There are products ranging from a few hundred dollars to several thousand depending on the size of the system and how much energy you need it to produce. Solar panels have a life span of 20 to 30 years. Solar panels used to be so extortionately expensive that the mere thought of shelling out thousands of dollars for very little return for your investment made very little sense. However with the advances in technology there is now no reason not to think about building your own DIY solar panel.

Solar panels and shade simply don’t mix. While some panels claim to be shade tolerant, you will lose substantial charging power even if only a partial area of the panels is affected by shade. Solar panels should always face true south. Books and articles on solar energy often give the advice that the tilt should be equal to your latitude, plus 15 degrees in winter, or minus 15 degrees in summer. Solar Panels can cut your electricity bill down by half each month. Many argue that solar panels are too expensive.

Solar energy is as plentiful as daylight, as limitless as organic life itself, a fuel that comes free of charge and replenishes itself every time the earth rotates on its axis. Almost all energy, after all, is ultimately stored solar power: Oil, gas, and coal were born of the ancient sunlight that fed prehistoric animals and plants, the wind is set howling by the sun’s unequal heating of the atmosphere, and even a campfire draws its warmth from solar power trapped long ago through photosynthesis. Solar energy is the future of getting electricity to your homes. It is great way to save money on electricity during these economic crises. Solar Energy International (SEI) classes started with solar photovoltaic techniques, but have now grown to include wind power, micro hydro power, solar hot water systems and several other green home building skills.

Solar energy is sustainable and renewable unlike gas, coal and oil that most utility companies use. It does not produce sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury or carbon dioxide as byproducts so it doesn’t pollute the air. Solar energy is destined to be the next super star in the quest for renewable energy. On the surface solar energy appears to be the solution to our world’s energy crisis, but what is not obvious is the dark side to solar energy. Solar energy is collected in photovoltaic cells made of solid-state silicon. They are the smallest semi-conductor devices that convert sunlight into electricity, and are similar to computer chips.

Solar energy might be one of the solutions to provide us energy and power when energy sources like oil will be gone. But what are the pros and cons of solar energy ? Solar energy receivers are special units used in electricity-generating hybrid solar thermal power plants. The plants have huge towers that run the plant?s engine using a combination of solar energy and fuels. Solar energy and prevent the loss of heat, it takes a long time to cook with the help of a solar cooker. Besides, a solar cooker can only be used when it is sunny.

Earth911 is an environmental services company that addresses product end-of-life solutions for businesses and consumers. It provides the platform and tools needed to support recycling and proper disposal for various products, giving the people who buy them a number of ways to participate in companies’ sustainability initiatives. Earth911.com is a great resource for finding places to dispose of these items. It allows you to type in what you would like to recycle and finds the nearest recycling center for that specific item. Earth911.com is an environmental services company that addresses product end-of-life solutions for businesses and consumers. We provide the platform and tools needed to support recycling and proper disposal for various products once their purpose is served, giving the people who buy them a number of ways to participate in companies’ sustainability initiatives.

Earth911.com is your one-stop shop for all you need to know about reducing your impact, reusing what you’ve got and recycling your trash. Get involved in our world by checking in for daily news, reading weekly feature stories, surfing product channels and opting into our weekly emails. Earth911.com also discovered additional insights into recycling and consumer behavior. For example, 40 percent of respondents to a poll conducted on the Earth911.com homepage noted that when they buy a product, the “green” factor they are most concerned about is its recyclability.

Earth911 was founded in 1991 to deliver actionable local information on recycling and product stewardship that empowers consumers to act locally, live responsibly and contribute to sustainability. For over 16 years, Earth911 and 1-800-CLEANUP have been the nation?s official environmental information network?providing access to data compiled by thousands of local government, non-profit and commercial coordinators for more than 74,000 locations for recycling, household hazardous waste disposal, reuse, and more.Recycle for cash programs drastically improve recycling rates—up to a 1,000 percent increase in lower-income neighborhoods, says Ron Gonen, CEO of RecycleBank. Recycled bags offered from the top of the range and more prosaically as complimentary items . Recycled cartridges produce the same quality and output as new cartridges.

Computer recycling is easy to do and very commonplace as computers can be easily refurbished in order to provide 3rd world countries with older yet functioning models of computers. Disposing of computers properly is extremely important because if you sell your computer or give it away then the person who receives it has unlimited access to all of your personal information that was stored on it. Computer recycling is nothing new, but getting your old electronics to the great motherboard in the sky can be tricky to do responsibly. For years, developed countries have been exporting tons of electronic waste for inexpensive, labor-intensive recycling and disposal, mostly to China. Computer recycling involves trying to save usable parts from these obsolete items and safely disposing those devices that contain toxic materials.

Computer recycling as the name suggest means recycling old, unused or defunct computers that can pose threat to environment or human health. Recycling is different from dumping because in recycling computer parts are reprocessed to make new computers, however in dumping computer are destroyed forever. Computer recycling and electronics recycling programs help keep waste out of our landfills. But don’t just give away your e-waste for free. Computer recycling refers to both whole computers and to parts of computers, not just one area. In the process of computer recycling, the equipment is broken down into smaller pieces that are easier to turn back into computer components or are easier to recycle in other ways.

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Like a 1984 Ford Tempo spewing out exhaust and with headlights held together by duct tape, our country’s infrastructure need a little tune-up if it hopes to make it into the future without breaking down. From transportation to sewage, PopSci examines the technologies in the works that to overhaul the U.S. infrastructure.

PowerUnderground Power Lines that heal themselves

Task: Coat cables with a self-repairing salve

Status: Commercially available in 10–15 yearsAnother way to dig up fewer streets is to avoid unearthing cables for small repairs. Whenever there’s a nick or hairline crack in an insulation sheath, the electrical field in the underlying copper subtly shifts. In a new insulation being developed by EPRI, nanoparticles sensitive to this shift heat up and melt surrounding polymer molecules, forming a fresh protective scar. As today’s decrepit lines gradually go kaput (about a quarter are already past their intended lifetime), EPRI hopes to replace them with these self-mending ones.

TransportationTrackless Elevated Trains

Task: Add urban railways for a third the cost of conventional light rail

Status: Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation Institute has offered free land for a two-mile test track

To save the multibillion-dollar cost of clearing 24-foot-wide swaths for new track, trainmaker Tubular Rail wants to shoot trains up to 150 mph over existing infrastructure through a series of elevated rings 100 feet apart. As it passes through each ring, the 400-foot-long carbon-fiber car is pushed along by electrically powered steel rollers. To save juice, the motors gear up only as a train approaches; up to 90 percent of the kinetic energy of the train can be recaptured as the rollers wind down.

SewageTurn Sludge into Electricity

Task: Reduce the energy we use to treat wastewater, currently 1.5 percent of our total national power

Status: Field-testing reactors; commercial units by 2015

Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State University, has designed a microbial fuel cell to turn the chemical energy in sewage directly into electricity—and clean the sewage in the process. Bacteria housed on a graphite fiber anode break down the fats, proteins and sugars in sewage, freeing up a steady stream of electrons, which the bacteria transfer directly into the electrode. Those electrons move to the cathode, providing electrical power and, at the cathode, producing hydrogen gas.

America’s Infrastructure Might Look Like…

Make Energy Like Plants Do Paul Wootton

In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama talked a lot about the need to upgrade our country’s infrastructure, from power plants to railroads, both to create jobs and to improve efficiency. He wasn’t kidding: We lose an average of seven billion gallons of water a day to leaks in the system. Power interruptions cost the economy about $79 billion annually. And we all remember the Minneapolis bridge collapse, but up to a quarter of all the bridges in the country are in need of attention.

Fortunately, there are some amazing technologies already rolling out, and more just waiting for the funding the President talked about. We reached out to experts in transportation, telecommunications, sewage and water to figure out what kinds of technologies might be part of this next generation of infrastructure and found that the key isn’t patches, it’s an overhaul.

Smart systems that deliver only the power needed or recycle sewage for water and energy. Cantilevered trains could be built over existing roads. Roads could de-ice themselves. Here are 25 of those transformational technologies that might become reality sooner than later.

Renovating American Infrastructure,

Step 1: Transportation

Roads, Bridges & Trains Paul Wootton

Chicago road crews are scrambling to fill 67,000 potholes a month. Communities in Pennsylvania rely on 100-year-old water pipes made of wood. Squirrels still cause widespread blackouts. The country’s 600,000 bridges, four million miles of roads, and 30,000 wastewater plants desperately need attention. The solution isn’t patches, it’s an overhaul. Soon roads and power lines will fix themselves, and we’ll mine energy from sewage. America’s 21st-century tune-up won’t happen overnight, but we could start reaping the benefits (faster broadband! cleaner water!) within the next few years.

Cars that Report Potholes

Task: Fix the third of major roads that are in poor shape
Status: Three years to a prototype

In a new system developed at Northeastern University, vehicles that cover lots of asphalt—taxis, buses, garbage trucks—will be outfitted with acoustic wave sensors to detect potholes before the human eye can see them. Sound waves probe the top three feet of the road for telltale air pockets and small cracks, while ground-penetrating radar looks inside bridge decks for corrosion and lasers scan the road surface. A cellular data connection sends data to control centers, where it can be assembled into maps of trouble spots.

Roads that De-Ice Themselves

Task: Reduce the 1,300 road deaths a year from snowy and icy winter conditions
Status: In testing by more than 20 state departments of transportation

A new road coating called SafeLane not only gives tires more traction, it actually helps prevent the accumulation of ice and snow by holding on to de-icing salts, allowing road crews to scatter salt a couple of days before a blizzard rather than waiting until the snow is already on the ground. SafeLane consists of layers of epoxy mixed with dolomitic limestone. The epoxy layer is snowplow-proof, lasts up to 15 years, and helps seal the pavement to keep corrosive salts from leaching down to steel bars in sensitive bridge decks. Anecdotal results from its first five years in the field show up to a 70 percent decrease in winter accidents.

Bridges that Flex on the Fly

Task: Upgrade the 26 percent of decrepit bridges
Status: Pedestrian versions exist; traffic bridges in 10 years

Regular bridges are fairly rigid structures that break down over time from stress. “Tensegrity” structures disperse load over a nest of tensed cables and compressed struts that allow them to be both flexible and structurally rigid. Now the University of California at San Diego is developing traffic-bearing tensegrity bridges with feedback sensors to guide subtle adjustments in cable length, which could alleviate the shifting stresses of an overladen truck, counteract the vibration frequency of an earthquake, or disperse the load of a severed cable.

Concrete that Senses Cracks and Heals on its Own

Task: Replace miles of concrete highways with smarter versions
Status: Field-testing for self-sensing concrete in progress

Carbon nanotubes are prized for both their strength and their piezoresistance—they change their electrical resistance as they’re stressed. Xun Yu, a mechanical-engineering professor at the University of Minnesota–Duluth, is cooking up a concrete mix that contains 0.1 percent carbon nanotubes, making it harder to crack than traditional concrete, and smart too. By embedding electrodes into it as it sets, Yu can measure changes in electrical resistance to detect compression from passing cars. Future versions will better calculate speed and vehicle weight on the go for a real-time view of the road’s stress. Meanwhile, a new concrete mix developed by Victor Li, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan, contains unhydrated cement grains that are activated when exposed to carbon dioxide in air and water from rain—exactly what you’d find in a small crack in the road. The reaction produces a calcium carbonate seal, restoring the slab to its normal load-bearing capacity.

Trackless Elevated Trains

Task: Add urban railways for a third the cost of conventional light rail
Status: Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation Institute has offered free land for a two-mile test track

To save the multibillion-dollar cost of clearing 24-foot-wide swaths for new track, trainmaker Tubular Rail wants to shoot trains up to 150 mph over existing infrastructure through a series of elevated rings 100 feet apart. As it passes through each ring, the 400-foot-long carbon-fiber car is pushed along by electrically powered steel rollers. To save juice, the motors gear up only as a train approaches; up to 90 percent of the kinetic energy of the train can be recaptured as the rollers wind down.

Renovating American Infrastructure,

Step 2: Water

Clean Water Like Plants Do Paul Wootton

Our water infrastructure is older than our roads and power grid, with many pipes sitting in trenches dug by hand in the 1800s. In parts of the Northeast, up to 50 percent of our clean water leaks into the ground between the treatment center and the tap. Across the country, we lose an average of seven billion gallons of drinking water a day to leaks—and we have an 800,000-mile network of pipes that needs constant monitoring and repair. We also use far too much energy treating all our water, regardless of its end use, and piping it long distances. Besides fixing up the nation’s pipes, the future of water is cleaning only what we need.

Clean Water like Plants Do

Task: Treat our water on fewer terawatts
Status: First small-scale versions by 2011

Plants pull water into their roots by osmosis, using tiny channels called aquaporins, a method that doesn’t require any energy. Now a Danish company called Aquaporin is developing a membrane based on that same principle to extract pure H20 from saltwater at about a third of the cost and a tenth the energy of conventional reverse-osmosis systems. The membrane’s protein channels, each just a few nanometers across, allow a stream of water molecules—and only water molecules—to pass single file at a rate of one billion per second. No pumps are needed to force the water across the channels.

A Neighborhood-Sized Saltwater Purifier

Task: Decentralize our clean-water system
Status: Prototypes now; commercial units within a year

Yoram Cohen, a University of California at Los Angeles chemical engineer, has a solution for thirsty communities in states like California, which burns 20 percent of its power treating and pumping in water from far-off high-grade reservoirs: to spread out the task. His tanning-bed-size reverse-osmosis machines could be deployed up and down the coast, with each unit tapping into the ocean to provide neighborhoods with about 5,000 gallons of drinking water per day. The units carry software that can fine-tune filtering in response to local changes in water temperature, salinity, pH and silt, and can be remotely controlled from a central operations center.

Clot Leaky Water Pipes

Clot Leaky Water Pipes: Paul Wootton

Task: Pump rubberlike blocks into our system to find
and automatically fix leaks
Status: Deployed in the U.K. in 2008

Scottish oil-and-gas company Brinker Technology has a no-dig system of pipe repair that mimics the way clots form at a cut. When a leak is detected, a service truck could drive to a nearby fire hydrant and pump in Platelets—squishy, rubberlike cubes and balls ranging in size from less than a millimeter to nearly two inches across, depending on the size of the leak. The Platelets travel in the pipe until the outflowing pressure pulls them toward to the crack. There, they bunch together to form a long-lasting clot. Utilities don’t even need to know exactly where the leak is located.

Lay New Pipes Without Digging Trenches: Paul Wootton

Lay New Pipes Without Digging Trenches

Task: Deal with 240,000 annual water-main breaks more quickly by using simple slide-in liners
Status: Thousands of feet of pipe repaired since March

Another way of fixing broken pipe without summoning the backhoes is to coat it with a new inner lining—already common today in sewage pipes, which are under less pressure because they rely on gravity to move their contents along. But Missouri-based Insituform Technologies’s new InsituMain liner can withstand the internal forces of pressurized pipe, allowing in-place repair of drinking-water mains. Instead of a full-length trench, two access points (up to 700 feet apart) are cut on either side of the broken pipe. Then workers insert at one end a flexible liner made from a felt-and-glass-fiber composite and soaked in thermosetting epoxy resin and pull it through the inner walls of the crumbling pipe. Exposing the liner to steam or hot water stiffens and seals it, leaving it flush with the inside of the pipe.

Bacteria that Make Toxic Water Glow

Task: Install phosphorescent poison detectors at the nation’s 155,000 drinking-water systems
Status: Commercially available in 2–5 years

Bacteria are little geniuses at identifying molecules. They’re also prolific, cheap, and easy to manipulate, which makes them ideal workers. Using genetically modified, nonharmful strains of E. coli, chemist Sylvia Daunert of the University of Kentucky has designed a prototype biosensor system capable of detecting a variety of drinking-water toxins, including arsenic, anthrax, lead and PCBs. The bacteria are housed in the tip of a fiber-optic cable, which dangles in the drinking-water supply. When they detect a toxin, the bacteria glow; the light they produce is carried along the fiber to a monitoring station, where its intensity is measured to determine the precise concentration of toxic molecules (sensitive down to parts-per-billion scale).

Bacteria that Make Toxic Water Glow: Paul Wootton

Renovating American Infrastructure,

Step 3: Power

Overhauling inefficient plants and an ancient grid

Make Energy Like Plants Do Paul Wootton

A 2006 study at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that power interruptions cost the economy about $79 billion annually, or about one third of national electric spending, thanks to our aging grid. Meanwhile, energy use is expected to grow by 1,150 terawatt-hours—the equivalent of adding 13 New York Cities—by 2030. A smarter power grid will surely help, but we’ll need additional innovations like these to keep up with spiking demand.

Make Energy like Plants Do

Task: Convert sunlight into chemical energy
Status: Last year, scientists found a plentiful raw material that can free oxygen from waterSolar panels are not the only energy-harvesting strategy under the sun. For years, scientists have also been trying to do what plants do—use sunlight to photosynthesize fuel. Until now, most approaches relied on impractically scarce materials like iridium as a catalyst that triggers the reaction. But last year, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory figured out how to use cobalt oxide, one of the most abundant industrial catalysts. To overcome the relative inefficiency with which cobalt oxide uses sunlight to crack water molecules and free the oxygen, researchers layered the catalyst on a tightly stacked scaffold that makes it effectively 1,600 times as efficient. The net result: Arrays of cobalt-oxide panels could provide a steady supply of oxygen, protons and electrons. The next goal is to find a similarly efficient second catalyst to transform the by-products into an energy-dense fuel like methanol to give gasoline a run for its money.

Hang Superconducting Cables that Won’t Leak Electricity

Task: Replace miles of copper wire with cables that carry up to 10 times as much electricity per cubic inch
Status: 10–20 years to wide use

Instead of clearing paths for thousands of miles of new power lines to carry renewable energy across the country, we could restring the existing ones to run with high-temperature superconducting cables like those being studied at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The cables transmit electricity along a one-micrometer-thick superconductive layer of tape wrapped around a stainless-steel tube full of liquid nitrogen that cools the line down below –321ºF. In that chilled superconducting state, the lines lose no energy to resistance (today’s copper cables lose 5 to 7 percent).

Cram More Copper Underground: Paul Wootton

Cram More Copper Underground

Task: Replace thousands of miles of buried wire with a better-insulated version that carries 25 percent more power
Status: 5–10 years away from widespread use

In urban areas, overhead power lines are a nuisance and a danger, which means most electricity crosses the city in underground tubes. As urban power demands increase, we could rip up streets to lay new lines, but an easier solution is just to cram more copper into the conduits we already have. That’s what the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), an industry R&D consortium, is aiming for with a new insulation material that’s embedded with vinylsilane-coated particles of silicon dioxide to give it 33 percent more insulating ability than existing line coatings. That means the next generation of power lines could carry up to a quarter more current without adding any more bulky insulation.

Underground Power Lines that heal themselves

Task: Coat cables with a self-repairing salve
Status: Commercially available in 10–15 years

Another way to dig up fewer streets is to avoid unearthing cables for small repairs. Whenever there’s a nick or hairline crack in an insulation sheath, the electrical field in the underlying copper subtly shifts. In a new insulation being developed by EPRI, nanoparticles sensitive to this shift heat up and melt surrounding polymer molecules, forming a fresh protective scar. As today’s decrepit lines gradually go kaput (about a quarter are already past their intended lifetime), EPRI hopes to replace them with these self-mending ones.

Copper-Crawling Robots

Copper-Crawling Robots: Paul Wootton

Task: Deploy fleets of nimble robots that scoot along power lines, looking for flaws so that humans don’t have to
Status: First commercial versions around 2012Conventional inspection is slow and expensive, often requiring a helicopter flyby. EPRI is working on a robot that can autonomously survey an 80-mile length of line twice a year for cheaper and more reliable inspections. The robot will straddle the line, carrying a camera, a diffused scanning laser and on-board image-analysis software, which it will use to construct both a visual history of the deterioration of the line, as well as a 3-D map of encroaching tree branches and other potential problems.

Add Storage to the Grid

Task: Build plants full of spinning drums that store electricity, so we can finally save surplus energy
Status: 20-megawatt plant under construction in Stephentown, N.Y.

Incredibly, today’s grid has practically no storage capacity. The electricity coming out of your socket was generated less than a millisecond ago, so power plants have to continually generate enough energy for the biggest spikes. To prepare for the power fluctuations endemic to renewable energy, we’ll need to inventory excess power to use during cloudy, windless afternoons and nights. The Massachusetts-based company Beacon Power’s solution is to store the grid’s surplus energy in hundreds of spinning carbon-fiber-and-fiberglass drums. Each of its Generation 4 flywheels features a 2,500-pound rotor mounted on magnetic bearings and sealed in a vacuum to create a near-friction-free environment. Energy coming in from the grid accelerates the three-foot rotor to 16,000 rpm (about Mach 2), where it keeps spinning with at least 97 percent efficiency. To pump energy back into the grid, some of the rotational energy is bled off to power a generator on the main shaft. Each flywheel can store a 15-minute, 100-kilowatt charge and can discharge 150,000 times over 20 years.

Add Storage to the Grid: Paul Wootton

Renovating American Infrastructure,

Step 4: Telecom

Boosting anemic broadband speeds and wireless networks stuck in the 20th century

Faster Fiber: Paul Wootton

The U.S. ranks 17th worldwide in broadband access, but not for long—last year’s stimulus package allotted $7.2 billion for upgrading our underperforming broadband infrastructure. Our legacy copper wiring just can’t carry the data to support HD-video streaming, for instance, and next-gen wireless networks are slower to roll out than in, say, Japan, because of the sheer size of this country. But advances in fiber-optic cables and broadband blimps could bring serious speed increases to homes and smartphones.

Faster Fiber

Task: Replace our international fiber-optic trunk lines with thicker cables that carry 10 times the data per second
Status: Demonstrated last year

Our next generation of transoceanic submarine fiber cables may be built according to the Alcatel-Lucent design that recently set transmission speed records by moving data 10 times as fast as current cables. The new cables started with a fiber core that is on average 40 percent thicker than the ones currently draped across the ocean floor. Engineers designed an array of 155 lasers that emit light of different wavelengths, and in addition to encoding information in the timing of the light pulses the way current cables do, they modulated the polarization and the phase to pack extra data onto each light wave. The new fiber cables can send 15.5 terabytes—the equivalent of 400 DVDs—each second from Boston to Bilbao.

Make the Network Airborne

Task: Float broadband blimps above areas that are a headache to hardwire
Status: Delivery of a first ship to a military contractor this year; full platforms in 3–5 yearsWe’re going to need to dig a lot more fiber and copper in the coming years to meet the exploding communications demand. Or we can just float a few blimps. Sanswire, a manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles, is working on a 525-foot helium- and fuel-gas-filled airship, the Stratellite, which would provide blanket broadband coverage from the tranquil heights of the stratosphere. Hovering at 65,000 feet, each blimp could provide phone, TV and high-speed Internet to an area about the size of Texas, without the lag times that have plagued satellite-based communications. Stratellites can even daisy-chain to link cities and rural areas across the country—all without a single new wire touching the ground.

Flexible Fiber

Flexible Fiber: Paul Wootton

Task: Snake high-speed fiber-optics into virtually every home
Status: Available nowCorning’s new, flexible ClearCurve cable features a nanomaterial mesh wrapped around the cable core that keeps the photons in line even when stapled, bent, or twisted around a nail—usually any such quick turns would make the line go dark. That means telecoms can finally put fiber-optic lines into people’s homes, where cables often run up against right angles and tight squeezes from the sidewalk to the house. Verizon is already using the cable for its FiOS service.

Renovating American Infrastructure,

Step 5: Sewage

Banishing energy-hogging treatment plants and rotting pipes

Turn Sludge into Electricity Paul Wootton

Every year, Americans produce 12 trillion gallons of wet sewage and burn 21 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to clean it to drinking-water standards. Why not put the smelly stuff to good use? Thanks to clever new technology, sewage will be reclaimed to provide power, produce fertilizer and, eventually, yield clean water. In other words, sooner than you think, you’ll be drinking your own urine.

Turn Sludge into Electricity

Task: Reduce the energy we use to treat wastewater, currently 1.5 percent of our total national power
Status: Field-testing reactors; commercial units by 2015

Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State University, has designed a microbial fuel cell to turn the chemical energy in sewage directly into electricity—and clean the sewage in the process. Bacteria housed on a graphite fiber anode break down the fats, proteins and sugars in sewage, freeing up a steady stream of electrons, which the bacteria transfer directly into the electrode. Those electrons move to the cathode, providing electrical power and, at the cathode, producing hydrogen gas.

Drop Robots Down the Drain

Task: Deploy fleets of autonomous machines to spot leaks in sewage pipes
Status: New models that use a laser to measure inside pipes could be ready by 2011RedZone Robotics’s new Solo sewer robots will use image-interpreting software developed at Carnegie Mellon University to analyze their video feeds and tag potential problems in the pipe, so a 10-hour run can be condensed to a two-hour highlight reel of dripping cracks and grasping roots. Each Solo carries a camera at either end, sonar to scan below the water, and lasers to search sewer walls for acid corrosion.

Recycle Urine

Task: Recover phosphorus and nitrogen from wastewater to make fertilizer
Status: First U.S. plant opened last June; another coming this year

Believe it or not, the wastewater of 100,000 people could yield an annual crop of about 200 tons of high-grade fertilizer. The Vancouver company Ostara hopes to use this fact to overcome our shrinking supply of recoverable phosphorus rock, one of three essential components of modern fertilizer. Ostara’s PEARL Nutrient Recycling system extracts phosphates and other minerals like ammonia from municipal wastewater and then churns the nutrients into safe, slow-release fertilizer pellets sold under the name Crystal Green. The challenge is sequestering the urine, which accounts for just 1 percent of sewage by volume. One solution: source-separated toilets (think: a little bowl within a big bowl), already being tried in Sweden and Denmark.

The entire article can be found at Popular Science By Mike Haney, and Adam M. Bright

Microsoft tags have started showing up in magazines and newspapers. Tags can also be placed on business cards, products, and even large outdoor signs.

“It’s the hyperlink in the physical world,” said Marja Koopmans, marketing leader for Microsoft’s start-up accelerator unit.

Tags can link to anything from a Web page to an online brochure or electronic business card (see video below). Golf Digest magazine, for example, uses tags to link directly to YouTube videos that can be viewed on an iPhone or other smartphone. That allows the magazine to, essentially, include not just how-to articles, but also instructional videos within its publication.

To be able to “read” tags with your phone, you need to download a piece of software; luckily enough, Microsoft has supported most modern smartphone operating systems, including several varieties of Symbian, the iPhone OS, Android, BlackBerry and others.

Check out CNET’s video about Tag below.

TechCrunch reported that Steve Jobs is talking about the new Apple Tablet as his pride and joy. We have never heard this kind of excitement come from Steve before, but it reminds me of Bill Gates when he said the same thing 7 years ago when talking about the PC tablet. It looks like this time everyone has finally caught up with the technology and is ready for the tablet technology. Back when Bill Gates was talking about his PC Tablet the iPhone was not even a concept.

With every major technology company talking about mobile being the way of the future it makes you wonder how integrated the Apple Tablet is going to be. If anyone has sneak peak – please let me know.

I have compiled several 2010 lists due to popular demand, and I am getting a lot of positive feedback on them. As far as this list it was inspired by a conversation I had over Christmas Holiday that talked about some of the gadgets that came out in 2010 and which ones were preferred. After doing more research on the topic I have put together the best list of gadgets for 2010, as always enjoy.

Here is a list of the TOP … best gadgets of 2010

1. vPhone: The vPhone is a new promising gadget of 2010. The main reason this has made the top of the list is its ability to allow you to perform video calls from your cell phone. The Video Phone (vPhone) is being developed by Saygus a small firm that specializes in video-calling software. Verizon will be the first to carry a two-way video-conferencing phone complete with a large touch screen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and a 3D accelerometer. This phone is meant to compete directly with the iPhone and to out-perform Droid (Droid is the current device Verizon is using for this market). The vPhone is set to be the first mobile device approved through Verizon’s Open Development initiative, a program designed to allow developers to build technologies to operate on the Verizon network. The vPhone from Saygus will not be available in stores but only through the Utah based company Saygus.
2. The mCube90 developed by Innergie is a universal power adapter and surge protector that can be used on airplanes, in cars, or at home. This adapter is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand (comparable size to an iPhone) and solved the problem that most of us who travel face… How do you keep track of all your chords and adapters for your mobile devices, but more so this device powers your mobile devices with its battery power. It has the ability to power your laptop, cell phone, MP3 Player, or any other device that has a USB power input.
3. Copenhagen Wheel, a dream come true for any cyclist
   

The Skiff Reader is similar to the PC tablet with some of the functionality but is geared more towards being the eReader of choice at a reasonable price. The Skiff Reader is from Hearst and Sprint.

The sole purpose of the Skiff Reader is to turn newspapers, magazines, and other paper only products into a digitized electronic copy. The eReader is not a new idea and was considered to be brain-child of Bill Gates and has since been adapted by Amazon with the Amazon Kindle & its newer version Amazon Kindle 2. The Skiff Reader was released at the 2010 CES show. As mentioned in the video below you will notice that the Skiff Reader has one feature that makes it stand out more than any other eReader and that is the simple fact that you can bend the Skiff Reader just like a newspaper or magazine without breaking it. Cool idea.

One of the lead engineers for the Google Android Operating System has changed jobs and is now working for a leading edge company that is able to utilize the functionality of the Google Android Operating System to accept credit cards with an awesome gadget / add-on credit card swiper called a “Square”. Square inc has an awesome physical product (the square), but it is the software foundation that caught my attention. The software that runs the square has the ability to integrate photo verification, text or email receipts, manage all your coupon, and gift cards like a Starbucks punch card. @square – I am impressed with this device and also the functionality of the software that runs this. If you get a chance to use this I would recommend it, and I would love to hear your review on the square mobile device for credit card swiping. Let me know

The square device plugs in directly to the audio jack on most smart phones, the device is primarily focused towards Backberry, iPhone, and Android Phones at this time.

Square is backed by Khosla Ventures and a team of angels. Square, Inc. has offices in San Francisco (Product & Engineering), Saint Louis (Operations), and New York City (Risk & Partnerships).

Square inc. Has a new device out called the square, it allows users to swipe a credit card on your phone.