May 1, 2013
- Starship Congress is the interstellar summit that Icarus Interstellar is hosting this summer in Dallas, August 15-18. As an event, Starship Congress will play host and give voice to a wide variety of interstellar organizations and distinguished proponents from the interstellar community.
Day 1—Interstellar Now (Next 20 years)
Day 1 will examine what we can do today and for the next twenty years. The... - The USGS says that the oil resources in shale formations of North Dakota, Montana and nearby states are 7.4 billion barrels which is double an estimate for the region made five years ago. The agency for the first time studied the Three Forks formation, which is estimated to include 3.73 billion barrels, exceeding the recoverable oil in the Bakken. Five years ago,...
April 29, 2013
- Splitting Singlets
Solar cell efficiency is limited because light at wavelengths shorter than the cell's absorption threshold does not channel any of its excess energy into the generated electricity. Congreve et al. have developed a method to harvest the excess energy in carbon-based absorbers through a process termed “singlet fission.” In this process, high-energy photons propel two current carriers, rather than just one, by populating a singlet state that spontaneously...
April 27, 2013
- The ITER project gained final approval for the design of the most technically challenging component – the fusion reactor’s “blanket” that will handle the super-heated nuclear fuel.
Over the next few years about a million individual components of... - Michigan micromotes are a development on the path to realizing Smart Dust
Micromotes will live off the power they can scavenge from their surroundings. A mote near a light source might use a tiny solar panel, while a mote running somewhere with greater temperature extremes can be built to tap into that, by converting the heat energy that flows between hot and cold into... - Volvo Cars tests of flywheel technology confirm fuel savings of up to 25 per cent in a S60 sedan.
Volvo Car Group has completed extensive testing of kinetic flywheel technology on public roads - and the results confirm that this is a light, cheap and very eco-efficient solution.
"The testing of this complete experimental system for kinetic energy recovery...
April 26, 2013
Some months back, the folks at DeVry University interviewed me as part of a series of articles they were doing to focus on the new careers of tomorrow.
April 25, 2013
- Canadian David LeBlanc is developing the Integral Molten Salt Reactor, or IMSR. The goal is to commercialize the Terrestrial reactor by 2021.
Molten Salt and Oilsands
* Using nuclear produced steam for Oil Sands production long studied
* Vast majority of oil only accessible by In-Situ methods
* No turbine island needed so 30% to 40% the capital cost saved (instead... - Harvard business review looked at the the Spacex process for lowering the cost of space.
Spacex has a big goal, learned from the past, looking at the whole picture to find and prioritize opportunities, then refining key aspects of the space flight model to achieve their objective — is an approach that can make any organization more creative about cutting costs.
SpaceX... - Lockheed Martin recently entered into an agreement with Beijing based Reignwood Group to develop and build a 10-megawatt Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) pilot power plant off the coast of southern China.
The offshore plant, to be designed by Lockheed Martin, will be the largest OTEC project developed to date, supplying 100 percent of the power needed for a...
