Cheaper Solar Thermal Power

Sun catchers: This is the latest design of a system for focusing sunlight on a Stirling engine to generate electricity.
Credit: Sandia National Laboratories/Randy Montoya

A simpler design could reduce the cost of solar power generated by concentrating sunlight on Stirling engines.

Stirling Energy Systems (SES), based in Phoenix, has decreased the complexity and cost of its technology for converting the heat in sunlight into electricity, allowing for high-volume production. It will begin building very large solar-power plants using its equipment as soon as next year.

The company is currently building a 1.5-megawatt, 60-unit demonstration plant that will use the company’s latest design. Stirling expects to finish that project by the end of the year. It also has contracts with two California utilities to supply a total of 800 megawatts of solar power in Southern California. The first of the plants that will supply this power could be built starting the middle of next year, pending government permits and loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The projects are part of a resurgence in what’s known as solar thermal power. Various solar thermal technologies were developed starting in the 1970s, but a breakdown in government funding and incentives caused them to stall before they reached a scale of production large enough to drive down costs and allow them to compete with conventional sources of electricity. “It was a classic problem with solar. The market support to bring solar to high volume wasn’t there,” says Ian Simington, the chairman of SES and chief executive of the solar division of NTR, a company based in Dublin, Ireland, that bought a controlling share of SES last year.

Recent state mandates and incentives for renewable energy have led to a new push to commercialize the technology. There are over six gigawatts of concentrated solar power under contract in the southwestern United States right now, says Thomas Mancini, program manager for concentrated-solar-power technology at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. That’s equivalent to about six nuclear-power plants. BrightSource Energy has contracts to provide 1.3 gigawatts of solar power with concentrated solar power, and Solar Millenium has announced a project that would generate nearly one gigawatt of power.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23079/

Flywheel Power Storage Coming On Line

Flywheel-based utility power storage is one method for dealing with the variability of power from renewable sources such as wind and solar that may be more variable in their output than engineered power plant systems. Utilities like to provide an even level of power, and problems can occur in the grid when power production and power demand are not coordinated.

Using flywheel systems allows for load balancing – adding power when production levels fall below the demand for power, and then storing excess when the production level exceeds that demand. Otherwise, power utilities need to use other methods, such as gas turbine power plants to adjust the power level.

Beacon Power has installed its second megawatt-sized, flywheel-based energy storage system connected to the grid in New England, and is providing energy storage and load balancing for the New England ISO.

This first made news on EcoGeek a couple of years ago when Beacon first sought approvals for grid connection. Now, they have had one system installed and operating since last fall and have a second system now part of the grid infrastructure. At present, these represent only a tiny fraction of a percent of even just the production capacity of the New England grid. But these systems are proving their functional and economic viability, and more of them will find their way onto the forthcoming smart grid in the coming years.

http://www.ecogeek.org/component/content/article/2873

Flywheel Tech – http://www.beaconpower.com/products/about-flywheels.asp

Beacon’s Smart Energy 25 flywheel has a high-performance rotor assembly that is sealed in a vacuum chamber and spins between 8,000 and 16,000 rpm. At 16,000 rpm the flywheel can store and deliver 25 kWh of extractable energy. At 16,000 rpm, the surface speed of the rim would be approximately Mach 2 – or about 1500 mph – if it were operated in normal atmosphere. At that speed the rim must be enclosed in a high vacuum to reduce friction and energy losses. To reduce losses even further, the rotor is levitated with a combination of permanent magnets and an electromagnetic bearing.

Next Five Years Will Warm Faster Than Predicted, Scientists Say

An oft-heard claim by climate change skeptics supporting their position is that since 1998, the hottest year on record, global temperatures have stabilized or actually declined a bit, therefore global warming is bunk. Well, new research to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters shows why that argument is just a bunch of hot air. The Guardian sums it up:

Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, looked at the combined impact on global temperatures of human impacts like CO2 and aerosol emissions, heating from the sun, volcanic activity, and El Niño. This is the first time all these factors have been studied together (surprisingly).

Solar Cycle, El Niño Lowpoints Mask Influence of GHGs
They found that the stability in global temperatures in the past several years is due to declines in incoming sunlight, the result of the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, combined with no strong El Niño events occurring. These have masked the warming caused by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Lean and Rind go on to say that as solar activity again picks up, temperatures are likely to rise 150% faster than predicted by the last IPCC report.

Furthermore, as the world is entering a new El Niño warm spell, the temperature rises could be even more pronounced.

More: The Guardian

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/07/next-five-years-will-warming-faster-than-predicted.php

TASER X3 triple-shot stunner arrives, subdues population

Right on schedule, Taser’s launching the TASER X3 “force option,” which allows “peace officers” the ability to shoot up to three probes in quick succession in order to “incapacitate” their “targets.” Not only that, but the X3 can display a “warning arc” when loaded, allowing officers to “gain voluntary compliance” and “avert use-of-force” by putting on a light show. When it comes time to take down that unruly Trustafarian, however, it’ll get done with style — the probes are aimed with laser sights, and the new Pulse Calibration System actively monitors the perp to deliver a Precision Shaped Pulse(TM) that provides “consistent effects.” Yeah, we want one. Video after the break.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/27/taser-x3-triple-shot-stunner-arrives-subdues-population/

 

Could Atmosphere of Venus Harbor Life? Experts Say “Yes”

Scientists suspect that Venus’s atmosphere might hide extraterrestrial lifeforms, and in the ultimate safari ever, they want to go there and capture them with a flying balloon.  Interplanetary travel, extraterrestrial life, and Venusian airships – anyone doing anything other than science is missing out. 

Venus doesn’t score very highly when we think of life-capable planets – with surface pressures twenty times those of Earth and temperatures which can melt tin and vaporise mercury, it’s not a a good place for organics.  In fact, it’s not a good place for Terminators.  But go up far enough and you find clouds with Earth-like temperatures, pressures, even chemistry (at least as far as original ingredients go).  The fact that Venus boiled off all its oceans and turned them into sulfuric acid doesn’t cancel out the fact there’s water and heat aplenty.

In fact, the sulphur might help.  High above the Venusian surface the atmosphere is bathed in ultraviolet radiation, aka “That stuff that burns big things and kills small ones”, but Professor Ingersoll (of the Californian Institute of Technology) and colleagues believe that extraplanetary microbes could learn to use these chemicals as a sunscreen – if they haven’t adapted to UV altogether.

We’ve already seen Earth-borne bacteria surviving high in the clouds or in acidic environments, and the fact we haven’t seen both at the same time is only because Earth doesn’t have places like that.  Some suggest that Venus’s conversion from an early Earth-a-like to a fair approximation of hell might have been slow – slow enough to allow life to occur, then evolve to adapt to a narrowing habitable zone.

There’s even a NASA option to fly there, deploy a floating collector, and rocket the samples back to Earth for analysis.  Not only might there be other life in the universe – they might live right next door.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/could-atmosphere-of-venus-harbor-life-experts-say-yes.html

http://http//news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3746583.stm

Warp Speed a Reality? -A Galaxy Insight

Some scientists are saying that warp drive might be possible after all.  Yes, it’s obvious pandering to the new Star Trek, but be fair: these guys are career physicists.  Star Trek was theirs to begin with, and now it’s cool we should at least give them press.  Especially when they want to talk about awesome things like faster than light travel.

Relativity states that it’s impossible to move through spacetime faster than the speed of light – and many, many things have been observed which confirm this fact.  Almost all of them, in fact.  So the “simple” solution (for a sufficiently radical definition of “simple”) is to move the spacetime instead.  Then you’re not breaking the lightspeed limit, you’re just picking up a piece of reality and throwing it faster than anything can ever move.

Which may already have happened.  Some models suggest that the universe’s early rapid inflationary period may have included such superluminal speeds, so scientist Mark Millis says “Why can’t we do the same?”  And despite how modern physics is almost entirely composed of reasons why we can’t do exactly that, it’s still a great question.

“If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not space drives?” ponders Mark.  Mainly because our drives don’t conjure realities out of their exhaust ports, but we will be the first to say that incredible breakthroughs always sound insane before they actually happen.  We are totally behind Mr Millis and his attempts to evade reality’s restrictions; we’d just prefer people sounded more sensible when they discussed it.

Any discussion of Millis’s admirable aims tends to degenerate into “wooboowubwub DARK ENERGY! wubwub” or “If collapsed stars can bend spacetime, couldn’t future engines?”  Sure, as long as the universe agrees that reducing decades of cosmological math into an analogy is a valid method of design.  We’re all in favor of realizing there may be some incredible breakthrough (in fact, that’s kind of our entire job), but waving words you got off the cover of Nature around is not the route to credibility.

Will we ever get off the Earth?  We hope so – but if people here would smarten up a bit, we wouldn’t actually have to.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/some-scientists-are-saying-that-warp-drive–might-be-possible-after-all-yes-its-obvious-pandering-to-the-star–trek-release.html

‘Brain-reading’ Methods Developed

Scientists have developed a highly accurate way to peer into the brain to uncover a person’s mental state and what sort of information is being processed before it reaches awareness. (Credit: iStockphoto)

It is widely known that the brain perceives information before it reaches a person’s awareness. But until now, there was little way to determine what specific mental tasks were taking place prior to the point of conscious awareness.

That has changed with the findings of scientists at Rutgers University in Newark and the University of California, Los Angeles who have developed a highly accurate way to peer into the brain to uncover a person’s mental state and what sort of information is being processed before it reaches awareness. With this new window into the brain, scientists now also are provided with the means of developing a more accurate model of the inner functions of the brain.

As reported in the Oct. 2009 issue of Psychological Science, the findings obtained by Stephen José Hanson, psychology professor at Rutgers; Russell A. Poldrack, professor at UCLA, and Yaroslav Halchenko, (now a post-doctoral student at Dartmouth College), have provided direct evidence that a person’s mental state can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The research also suggests that a more comprehensive approach is needed for mapping brain activity and that the widely held belief that localized areas of the brain are responsible for specific mental functions is misleading and incorrect.

Over the last several years, much of neuroimaging has focused on pinpointing areas of the brain that are uniquely responsible for specific  mental functions, such as learning, memory, fear and love. But this latest research shows that the brain is more complex than that simple model. In their analysis of global brain activity, the researchers found that different processing tasks have their own distinct pattern of neural connections stretching across the brain, similar to the fingerprints that distinctively identify each of us. Rather than being a static pattern, however, the brain is able to arrange and rearrange the connections based on the mental task being undertaken.

“You can’t just pinpoint a specific area of the brain, for example, and say that is the area responsible for our concept of self or that part is the source of our morality,” says Hanson. “It turns out the brain is much more complex and flexible than that. It has the ability to rearrange neural connections for different functions. By examining the pattern of neural connections, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy what mental processing task a person is doing.“

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090727140349.htm

Observing Bacteria As They Infect A Living Host

Confocal microscope image showing insect immune cells (green) containing E.coli bacteria (red). (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Bath)

Researchers have developed a new technique that allows them for the first time to make a movie of bacteria infecting their living host.

Whilst most studies of bacterial infection are done after the death of the infected organism, this system developed by scientists at the University of Bath and University of Exeter is the first to follow the progress of infection in real-time with living organisms.

The researchers used developing fruit fly embryos as a model organism, injecting fluorescently tagged bacteria into the embryos and observing their interaction with the insect’s immune system using time-lapse confocal microscopy.

The researchers can also tag individual bacterial proteins to follow their movement and determine their specific roles in the infection process.

The scientists are hoping to use this system in the future with human pathogens such as Listeria and Trypanosomes. By observing how these bacteria interact with the immune system, researchers will gain a better understanding of how they cause an infection and could eventually lead to better antibacterial treatments.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090727113102.htm

PHOTOS: Blue Rats Move Again After Food-Dye Injection

Fifteen minutes after researchers intentionally paralyzed this rat by dropping a weight on its back, they injected the rodent with Brilliant Blue G dye, a derivative of common food coloring Blue Number One. The dye reduced inflammation of the spinal cord, which allowed the rats to take clumsy steps—but not walk—within weeks, a new study says.

In both rats and people, secondary inflammation following spinal cord trauma causes more lasting damage than the initial injury: Swelling sparks a small “stroke,” which stops blood flow and eventually kills off the surrounding tissue.

Other than blue skin and eyes, “we can find no clinical effect on the rat,” said Maiken Nedergaard, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York.

That lack of side effects may also help make the blue dye a boon to paralyzed humans down the road. “The beauty of it is that it wouldn’t harm you,” Nedergaard said—unlike previous compounds used to treat spinal cord injuries, which had toxic effects.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/photogalleries/blue-rats-food-dye-heals-pictures/index.html