Slippery Ships and Cramped Canals

Here is article on how the expansion of the Panama Canal and new technology for ships that uses air as a lubricant will make supertanker super efficient.

The Recharging Road

Here is a great article out of the US, where MIT researchers are working with magnetic resonance coupling to try to make feasible roads that recharge electric cars. This means you would never have to stop to recharge or get fuel again, assuming you staying on road.

230% efficient LED bulbs

It has been a long time indeed.

There was quite a fascinating article today about how scientists have created 230% efficient LED bulbs. Now, that's not violating any principles of energy conversion, merely outputting more energy in the form of light than is being input in the form of electrical potential. The extra energy comes from lattice vibrations in the system - which means the device is actually converting ambient temperature/heat into light!

Some thermodynamics calculations are in order. However it's MIT, so I'm gonna believe them. It's also a south Indian PI, so I'll try to believe harder. A slightly technical synopsis is here.

Turning waste to energy - the new approach

Hello, from a long absence I’m here again to update you of interesting new technologies!

Reading about what my friends have written in my blog since I left really makes me impressed how much promising technologies there are out there! What about power from the people where humans in the future will be able to power their own pacemakers. To be our own slef sustaining energy sources, wouldn't that be a most sustainable outcome! 

This reminded me of a lecture I had in water and waste treatment a few weeks ago where my teacher mentionned microbial fuel cells that you can read more about here or watch for example here. The fuelcells themselves might not be any news, but if they are applied on wastewater treatment plants they can be an alternative to the wastewater energy production from gas.

The world energy demand will increase with almost the double between 2003 and 2030 and as soon as this morning I heard that Sweden won't reach our target to decrease our energy consumption per capita by 2015 - it will increase! So Microbial fuel cells - turning waste to energy, could be the answer to our prairs in a few years. Especially in places where wastewater treatment is sophisticated because of its cost- and energy efficiency. Wouldn't the future be great if we could rename wastewater tretment plants power plants instead?

Increasing Capacity of Wireless Data Transfer Using Light

Here is a video on how using the visible light spectrum would allow us to increase our wireless data transfer capabilities, make wireless data more efficient and greener, more secure, and provide opportunities for integration into systems where wireless data transfer by radio waves is limited.

3D Printing

I've said it before, but here it is again, the future of manufacturing, 3D printing. It reduces waste, allows us to make structures impossible with anyother method, it will reduce shipping, reduce the need for things like warehouses, allow anyone to become a designer, and all around is just convient.

On the promise of the artificial leaf

MIT's Dan Nocera is one of the forerunners involved in the development of an 'artificial leaf', a device that would mimic photosynthesis and store solar energy in the form of high-energy chemical bonds, a sort of generalization of solar cells, and photosynthesis itself.

Here's the MIT news article. This particular device uses solar energy to split water and store hydrogen. I recently attended a talk by Prof. James Barber of the Imperial College, London where he described his own work on understanding photosynthesis and described Dan Nocera's work as well. The photosynthetic machinery relies on a fantastically engineered molecular design which we would need to replicate using some heavy studies into single-molecular electron transfer in inorganic compounds. Time to hit the inorganic chemistry books, I say.