batteries

 

Google and others are starting to use Soldi Oxide fuels cells to power their data centers

 

‘For decades, experts have agreed that solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) hold the greatest potential of any fuel cell technology. With low cost ceramic materials, and extremely high electrical efficiencies, SOFCs can deliver attractive economics without relying on CHP. But until now, there were significant technical challenges inhibiting the commercialization of this promising new technology. SOFCs operate at extremely high temperature (typically above 800°C). This high temperature gives them extremely high electrical efficiencies, and fuel flexibility, both of which contribute to better economics, but it also creates engineering challenges.

 

Bloom has solved these engineering challenges. With breakthroughs in materials science, and revolutionary new design, Bloom's SOFC technology is a cost effective, all-electric solution.

 

Over a century in the making, fuel cells are finally clean, reliable, and most importantly, affordable.’

 

http://www.bloomenergy.com/fuel-cell/solid-oxide/

 

 

Fwd: methane microbes/Solar from any semi

From: larry.r.trout

'Microbes that convert electricity into methane gas could become an important source of renewable energy, according to scientists from Stanford and Pennsylvania State universities.

 

Researchers at both campuses are raising colonies of microorganisms, called methanogens, which have the remarkable ability to turn electrical energy into pure methane -- the key ingredient in natural gas. The scientists' goal is to create large microbial factories that will transform clean electricity from solar, wind or nuclear power into renewable methane fuel and other valuable chemical compounds for industry.'

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120727144534.htm

 

 

'A technology that would enable low-cost, high efficiency solar cells to be made from virtually any semiconductor material has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. This technology opens the door to the use of plentiful, relatively inexpensive semiconductors, such as the promising metal oxides, sulfides and phosphides, that have been considered unsuitable for solar cells because it is so difficult to taylor their properties by chemical means.

 

"It's time we put bad materials to good use," says physicist Alex Zettl, who led this research along with colleague Feng Wang. "Our technology allows us to sidestep the difficulty in chemically tailoring many earth abundant, non-toxic semiconductors and instead tailor these materials simply by applying an electric field."'

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120726180307.htm

 

 

Roger Ebert on the Higgs Boson

"Every second at the Large Hadron Collider, enough data is generated to fill more than 1,000 one-terabyte hard drives -- more than the information in all the world's libraries. The logistics of filtering and analyzing the data to find the Higgs particle peeking out under a mountain of noise, not to mention running the most complex machine humans have ever built, is itself a triumph of technology and computational wizardry of unprecedented magnitude."

"My childhood question remains unanswered: "Why is there something and not nothing?" No scientist at Geneva, to my knowledge, has asked why there is a Higgs boson and not a Higgs boson? But they now know that there is something and not nothing, and they have seen it and identified it and named it and it is as they thought it would be. That is an enormous discovery to come during our lifetimes...

I don't understand the Higgs boson in the way a theoretical physicist does. What I know is that inside that mountain on the Swiss-French border, they went looking for something and they found it. They will keep on looking for centuries after we are dead. Maybe someday they will find God. Wouldn't that be a gas? Whatever they find, they will find more and more and more. It's not turtles all the way down."***

Roger Ebert   

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/07/there_is_something_and_not_not.html

*** This is a reference to a Stephen Hawking story:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

Re: God Particle

This should not be called the God particle.  It should be called "The mother of all ..."

Maybe the Higgs Boson is dark matter ...

larry.r.trout wrote:

'They found the "God-Particle."

 

That was the headline in many of America's news media. It turns out that the name actually derives from substituting "God-particle" for "goddamn particle," the original name some scientists had given the elusive particle. But the media adopted the former nomenclature…

 

So, sincere congratulations to the physicists and other scientists who discovered the Higgs boson. We now think we have uncovered the force or the matter that gives us the four percent of the universe that we can observe (96 percent of the universe consists of "dark matter," about which scientists know almost nothing).'

 

 

Vanishing dust belt around star baffles scientists - Tech

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/48073142/ns/technology_and_science-space/

The Higgs boson made simple

What good is it?

Particle physicists try to avoid forecasting the applications of an experimental advance before the actual advance is confirmed, but in the past, advances on a par with the discovery of the Higgs boson have had lots of beneficial applications, and some that are more questionable. The rise of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry is a prime example of that double-edged sword.

 

The discovery of antimatter is what made medical PET scanning possible, and antimatter propulsion could eventually play a part in interstellar travel, just like on "Star Trek." Particle accelerators have opened the way to medical treatments such as proton eye therapy — as well as advances in materials science, thanks to neutron scattering.

 

It's conceivable that the discoveries made at the Large Hadron Collider will eventually point to new sources of energy, Michio Kaku, a physicist at City College of New York, told me during a discussion of the LHC's promise and peril. And if the discovery of the Higgs leads to fresh insights into the fabric of the universe, it's conceivable that we could take advantage of the as-yet-unknown weave of that fabric for communication or transportation. Who knows? Maybe this is how "Star Trek" gets its start.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12547980-the-higgs-boson-made-simple

http://m.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/w-boson-higgs/

http://www.wired.com/geekmom/2012/07/higgs-boson-anticipation/

 

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/higgs-leaked-video

 

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/higgs-boson-breaks-physics

The Higgs boson made simple

What good is it?

Particle physicists try to avoid forecasting the applications of an experimental advance before the actual advance is confirmed, but in the past, advances on a par with the discovery of the Higgs boson have had lots of beneficial applications, and some that are more questionable. The rise of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry is a prime example of that double-edged sword.

 

The discovery of antimatter is what made medical PET scanning possible, and antimatter propulsion could eventually play a part in interstellar travel, just like on "Star Trek." Particle accelerators have opened the way to medical treatments such as proton eye therapy — as well as advances in materials science, thanks to neutron scattering.

 

It's conceivable that the discoveries made at the Large Hadron Collider will eventually point to new sources of energy, Michio Kaku, a physicist at City College of New York, told me during a discussion of the LHC's promise and peril. And if the discovery of the Higgs leads to fresh insights into the fabric of the universe, it's conceivable that we could take advantage of the as-yet-unknown weave of that fabric for communication or transportation. Who knows? Maybe this is how "Star Trek" gets its start.

What Finding the Higgs-Boson Means

http://www.wired.com/geekmom/2012/07/higgs-boson-anticipation/

 

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/higgs-leaked-video

 

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/higgs-boson-breaks-physics