Tag: alternative energy

Spinning straw into liquid gold

Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. Rumplestiltskin, in the famous fairy-tale, has the knack of spinning straw into gold. We can’t do that–but we are learning to spin straw into something just about as valuable: biofuel. Sure, you can make ethanol out of corn or wheat, but in a hungry …

Continue reading

Making fuel from air and water

Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. We can and do recycle all sorts of things. Paper, plastic, glass (OK, that last one not so much right now), Christmas fruitcakes…the list goes on and on. Wouldn’t it be great if we could also recycle the hydrocarbons we burn as fuel? Imagine …

Continue reading

What did I do on my summer vacation?

I toured a nuclear power plant under refurbishment, a tour which included a rare visit (for anyone) inside the vault of a reactor. Those would be the fuel tubes, currently being replaced, in the background. That’s my lovely wife Margaret Anne beside me. The reactor is at the Bruce Power plant near Kincardine, Ontario. This …

Continue reading

WiTricity? Why not?

Unless it’s your smoke alarm saving your life, mysterious electronic beeping in the middle of the night is highly annoying. It certainly annoyed Marin Soljacic a few years ago when he found himself standing in his kitchen in his pajamas in the middle of the night for about the sixth time in a month, staring …

Continue reading

Turning waste heat into sound…

…and then into energy: Symko expects the devices could be used within two years as an alternative to photovoltaic cells for converting sunlight into electricity. The heat engines also could be used to cool laptop and other computers that generate more heat as their electronics grow more complex. And Symko foresees using the devices to …

Continue reading

Forget your hybrids…

…how about a car that runs on compressed air? Most importantly, it is incredibly cost-efficient to run – according to the designers, it costs less than one Euro per 100Km (about a tenth that of a petrol car). Its mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car (200 to 300 km or …

Continue reading

Rotating skyscrapers

Not just a great name for a rock band, rotating skyscrapers (that’s a video link, by the way) are an interesting new form of architecture that would drastically change the skyline of any city where they were built (because each floor can be slowly rotated independently) and improve that city’s energy efficiency (because the wind …

Continue reading

A big step toward the hydrogen economy?

It sounds promising, at least: A Purdue University engineer has developed a method that uses an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water for running fuel cells or internal combustion engines, and the technique could be used to replace gasoline. The method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen – two major challenges in …

Continue reading

SCORE one for efficiency

This being hockey playoff season, everyone is talking about scores. In the hope I might be taken as something other than a science geek, I thought I would, too. So let me tell you what the score is regarding SCORE–the Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity. SCORE is a joint research project by four U.K. …

Continue reading

Remember cold fusion?

Remember how it became a joke? How there was nothing to it at all? Think again: However, a recently published academic paper from the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego throws cold water on skeptics of cold fusion. Appearing in the respected journal Naturwissenschaften, which counts Albert Einstein among its …

Continue reading

A different kind of airship…

…but still an airship (I guess): the M.A.R.S. Floating Wind Generator (which, despite its name, does not generate wind, but rather electricity. Go figure.)

Talk about your low-emission automobiles…

…this one runs on compressed air. Not only that, it’s on the verge of production.

Easy AdSense Pro by Unreal