Lifeboat Foundation

Germany made so much renewable energy last weekend that customers actually made money.

Well you don’t see this every day…

China’s state-owned Shenhua Group Corp. has just signed a memorandum of understanding with Santa Monica based SolarReserve, partnering to bring 1,000 MW of clean energy into China.

Green is going global. More and more countries are getting in on the green energy bandwagon, shifting their energy dependencies from fossil fuel burning to renewable energy. And the biggest recipient of this? Solar.

Countries are increasingly depending on the Sun to provide for their energy needs. And this means the building of bigger and better solar farms.

Interesting method in controlling energy sources and efficiencies via Quantum legos.

The chrome-plated bricks can conduct electricity, integrate active parts such as LED lights, motor blocks, and even sound, light and proximity sensors. The conductive bricks feature flexible side-arms that ensure electrical connection between two adjacent blocks, and the whole assemblies are powered by a Bluetooth-controlled 9V battery block. The built-in Bluetooth controller lets users change the current’s direction and voltage levels via a mobile application.

That means the Brixo bricks can not only be triggered by sound, light and touch, but also controlled by any Bluetooth connected device, taking the good old Lego bricks further into the IoT world (the Danish company has its entries in the cloud via its Mindstorms Lego series and the augmented reality-capable Nexo Knights toys.

Continue reading “Lego-like electronic bricks redefines ‘playing with blocks’” »

Nice

Rice University photonics researchers have unveiled a new nanoparticle amplifier that can generate infrared light and boost the output of one light by capturing and converting energy from a second light.

The innovation, the latest from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP), is described online in a paper in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters (“Toward Surface Plasmon-Enhanced Optical Parametric Amplification (SPOPA) with Engineered Nanoparticles: A Nanoscale Tunable Infrared Source”). The device functions much like a laser, but while lasers have a fixed output frequency, the output from Rice’s nanoscale “optical parametric amplifier” (OPA) can be tuned over a range of frequencies that includes a portion of the infrared spectrum.

Continue reading “Photonics researchers create first nanoscale ‘optical parametric amplifier’” »

Researchers are developing a potentially game-changing method of producing fuels and chemicals.

Left hemisphere of J. Piłsudski’s brain, lateral view.

A new study has found that a faster metabolism is the main reason that humans were able to evolve bigger brains than other closely related apes. Humans burned 635 more calories per day than gorillas, and a whopping 820 more calories per day than the orangutans in the study.

Although the study findings seem promising, more research on the issue is required since the research was performed only on adults.

Continue reading “Humans Are Fatter Than Primates, But It Fuels Our Bigger Brains” »

Scientists have sustained human embryos in a petri dish for 13 days, shattering the previous record of nine days. The breakthrough will allow researchers to study early fetal development in unprecedented detail, and brings us one step closer to viable “artificial wombs.” But it’s adding fuel to an already heated ethical debate.

Two separate papers published this week, one in Nature and one in Nature Cell Biology, have reported culturing human embryos for nearly two weeks, going well beyond previous efforts. There’s no reason to believe that the embryos couldn’t have survived beyond the two-week mark, but the experiment had to be halted to adhere to the internationally agreed 14-day limit on human embryo research.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-to-build-an-artificial-womb-476464703

Continue reading “Artificial Wombs Just Got One Step Closer to Reality” »

Gearing up to offer one-gigabit-per-second Internet service in five U.S. cities this year. The first five cities to see the blazing speed are Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and Miami.

Comcast, the Internet provider everyone loves to hate, is gearing up to offer one-gigabit-per-second Internet service in five U.S. cities this year. The first five cities to see the blazing speed are Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and Miami. In line with Google Fiber, Verizon FiOs, and municipal offerings at one-gigabit speeds to the home, the new Comcast service will dramatically increase download speeds. Most subscribers currently receive download speeds of 25–100 megabits per second. For the customers with a 100Mbps connection, the increase boosts their speed 10 times over. For customers with 25 megabit connections, it’s 40 times faster. At that rate, one could download a full-length HD movie in around seven seconds. Not bad.

What sets Comcast’s gigabit service apart is the fact that the Internet provider is not using fiber optic lines to achieve the mega-fast speeds. Instead the company is using the existing coaxial cable lines that are already piped into people’s homes, giving Comcast a potentially huge advantage over a project like Google Fiber—which requires digging costly trenches through cities to lay fiber cables.

Continue reading “Comcast Can Now Sell You Fiber Speeds Over Coax, Thanks to a New Modem” »

The Illinois-based Northwestern University has utilized 3D printing technology to research a variety of vital applications, from 3D printing fuel cells to 4D printing materials on the nanoscale. Now, researchers from the prestigious institution are looking at 3D printing technology through a unique lens—a terahertz lens, to be exact. Generally unknown within the electromagnetic spectrum, hidden in between the more commonly known wavelengths of microwaves and infrared, lies the information-packed terahertz spectrum. The terahertz is not only a forgotten frequency, it’s also rarely studied, let alone well understood, yet it has high value in applications regarding imaging and communications.

One research group, led by Northwestern University’s Cheng Sun, has used metamaterials and a unique style of SLA technology called projection micro-stereolithography to manufacture a novel lens capable of working with terahertz frequencies. The 3D printed terahertz gradient-refractive index lens has better imaging capabilities than other commonly used lenses, and also enables researchers to make more advances with the relatively unknown world of the terahertz.