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Could an inflatable kevlar tube make space elevators practical? | ExtremeTech

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Honestly, it’s really more of a stratosphere elevator than a “space” elevator, but a new space elevator concept from Canadian company Thoth Technology has some in the space industry buzzing. It’s an odd design, even by the standards of lifts to the heavens, and it makes some key compromises that make it less useful than a traditional space elevator design. But those very compromises mean that it might just be feasible enough to make a debut in the real, actual world.

Space elevators usually refer to devices where cars, or “climbers,” pull themselves up a long, flexible metal ribbon stretching from Earth to geosynchronous orbit, and held taught by the centrifugal force of a huge anchor weight at the end. The idea is to make “launch” to orbit several orders of magnitude cheaper and safer, so next-gen space projects like the colonization of Mars might become practically possible. A space elevator would allow us to power a launch to space with electricity, rather than explosive chemical energy, and thus beat the majority of Earth’s gravity for far, far less investment.

This new concept, however, is different, in that it allows an electric climb past a far smaller portion of the Earth’s gravity well. Topping out at about 12 miles (20 km), the elevator features a commercial space launch runway at the top, where single-stage reusable spacecraft can launch and land in thin atmosphere, and slightly reduced gravity. This would be well matched with other next-gen space technology programs, like several ongoing reusable spacecraft from companies like Lockheed and SpaceX, including those that can do vertical takeoff vertical landing (VTVL) maneuvers.

A “traditional” space elevator concept keeps itself rigid with centrifugal force, since it’s so long and heavy that the rotation of the Earth keeps it taught. At just 12 miles in length, however, this concept doesn’t generate enough outward acceleration to stay straight, and thus the engineers have come up with an alternative: gas pressure. They plan to make their huge cylinder out of kevlar rings stitched together and then blow it up — like the aerospace industry’s version of those inflatable car lot dudes. Thoth wants to fill it with either hydrogen or helium, but it’s not a matter of making the elevator float like a helium balloon — they plan to add enormous pressures of the gas, keeping it rigid through mechanical stress. On the one hand, hydrogen is flammable, on the other helium is expensive…

The elevator will purportedly feature a system of gyroscopes so it can detect large bends and keep itself stable. Cars will likely climb the tube itself, rather than using a cable or ribbon, and the creators are still deciding whether those cars should go on the insider or outside of the tube. The inside would seem to provide a bit of extra safety, and consistent buoyancy through gas pressure, but climbing the outside of the tube would certainly increase the appeal to space tourism.


Amazingly, the company thinks it could begin on a scale version quickly, hoping to finish a prototype at just under a mile in height within five years. They estimate a version could reach the 12-mile mark within a decade, for about $5 billion. That’s just a fraction of what it cost to build the international space station, mostly because this space elevator can be built on the ground and slowly erected higher and higher, rather than having to be built space, then unspooled down to the surface.

Still, I do wonder what the economic argument would be in favor of their 1-mile pilot project; spacecraft would still be subject to the vast majority of the Earth’s gravity, at that height, and thus the scale version might not save enough on launch budgets to justify investment. That’s honestly a potential problem for the full-scale version as well: will a 12-mile launch advantage be enough to offset the cost of construction? Thoth says the full version could cut fuel needs by 30% — will that be good enough to justify billions up front?

Space elevators are a big topic of discussion, which ought to show you how broken the aerospace launch industry is, given how totally hypothetical the devices really are. Places like NASA have a hard time imagining figurative (or literal) moonshot projects when there is such a stark price and difficulty barrier between them and the cosmos they study. The next great space-based mega-project might not be a space elevator, but you can bet it will address this problem somehow

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New diamond laser 20 times more powerful

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Researchers from the MQ Photonics Research Centre joined with fiber laser experts from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering in Jena, Germany to demonstrate a diamond laser 20 times more powerful than previous diamond lasers.


Average power levels were less than 20 Watts, with the new laser now providing up to 380 Watts of output power – the equivalent of approximately 400,000 laser pointers and enough power to easily cut through steel.

High-power diamond lasers are well-suited to applications that require beaming power over long distances, such as optical communications in space, laser ranging, and the tracking and removal of space debris.

Diamond is a relatively new material for creating laser beams, but it is rapidly becoming a technology leader in terms of generating powerful, high-brightness beams at wavelengths, or 'colours', where traditional lasers are not able to shine.

"Just as x-rays pass through flesh to enable us to see bones within a body, different colours of laser radiation can interact or be transmitted by different target materials," said Dr Robert Williams, the lead researcher on the project.

The wavelength of the new diamond laser, at 1240nm, has high transmission through the atmosphere, and is safer to use because of its reduced transmission through the front of the eye and lower risk of damage to the retina.

Diamond lasers have progressed enormously over the last few years due to advances in synthesis of high quality diamond – better than what can be obtained naturally.

"Diamond is an ancient material, yet only now many of its extraordinary properties are becoming evident. High power lasers is one such area that diamond looks like providing a major advantage," said Rich Mildren, Associate Professor in the MQ Photonics Research Centre.

"Diamond crystals seems to naturally fit to high power fiber lasers. It's interesting to see that such a development is now possible and I'm sure much exciting research will follow," said Thomas Schreiber, group leader for the fiber laser research at the Fraunhofer IOF Jena, Germany.

"Around the time of its invention, the laser was famously labelled 'a solution in need of a problem', but now it has penetrated so many aspects of industry, science and our daily lives that the number of applications are countless. A key to unlocking many more applications of lasers will be the development of high-brightness beams at new wavelengths, and diamond is providing just that," said Dr Williams.
 
Kid Gets Awesome New Bionic Hand, Reminds Us Not Everything is Garbage

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The stock market is tanking, North and South Korea are on the brink of war, and a cartoon character from a dystopian future is the most popular candidate for US President at the moment. But don’t despair. While most things are garbage, there are some things in the world that aren’t. Like this adorable kid who just got his own high-tech bionic hand.

Nine-year-old Josh Cathcart was often bullied in school for having just one hand. But he’s about to become the coolest kid in school, thanks to his new i-limb, developed by a company called Touch Bionics. The hand can be programmed via an iPad app.

“I made myself a bagel yesterday. I can open bottles and packets with it. I can stack up blocks, I can build Lego with it and I can pull my trousers up,” he told The Guardian. While he’s not the youngest to ever get a bionic hand, he’s the youngest that this company has fitted the device for. He’ll grow out of it in about a year and need a new one, and his parents have started fundraising to pay for it.

The arm has given Josh a new sense of self-confidence, and his mother says he couldn’t be happier. Josh had previously become withdrawn and frustrated that there were things he couldn’t do with ease, while children at school teased him.


“I think it’s great. Just to see him pull his trousers up this morning, it was just something that he had never done, and he has been shown how to cut with a knife and fork. It just looked so natural for him. He can do things for himself without us helping him,” the boy’s father told The Guardian.

It’s really really easy to feel down about technology here in the early 21st century. The past decade and a half have delivered techno-laced double-edged swords that seem best suited for stabbing us in the back. Like that device in your pocket that can access all the world’s information? Well, the people behind that device are arguably taking much more personal info about you than you’re getting from the world. That rise in automation and robotics? Well, they’re putting plenty of people out of work.

So thanks for reminding us technology still has the capacity to improve peoples’ lives. It’s happening every day. But with all the garbage in the world, sometimes we just need a reminder.

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:raise:

Me next! Can into robot, plox?

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Existence of cosmic neutrinos confirmed by Antarctic scientists | Science | The Guardian

Neutrinos, created by violent phenomena such as black holes and exploding stars, could hold the key to the universe’s most distant and mysterious events

Antarctic scientists have confirmed the existence of cosmic neutrinos – ghostly particles that have traveled from the Milky Way and beyond. These particles carry messages from distant galaxies, and could potentially help solve several cosmic puzzles.

Neutrinos are subatomic particles created by some of nature’s most energetic and violent phenomena, such as black holes and massive exploding stars. Spotting them is difficult, however, because they have very high energy and nearly no mass. If you can catch a glimpse of them they make the ideal long-distance messenger because the information they hold is pristine, unchanged as the particles travel millions of light years through space.

Now, Albrecht Karle at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues working at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica have sorted through billions of particles that bombarded their detectors between 2010 and 2012 and identified 21 ultra high-energy muons – secondary particles created on the rare occasions that neutrinos interact with other particles.

They say that these muons are indicative of neutrinos that could have traveled from our solar system and beyond.

The observations, which were reported today in Physical Review Letters, were made by sifting through data collected from thousands of optical sensors arranged like strings of pearls sunk beneath the ice at the South Pole.

In 2013, scientists used these sensors to glimpse two candidate neutrinos which they subsequently nicknamed “Bert and Ernie”. Two events was too few to pinpoint where they came from, but these extra sightings will help researchers locate their source - potentially outside the Milky Way.

When a neutrino smashes into another particle, the subsequent muon leaves a trail of light that mirrors the trajectory of the neutrino – allowing scientists to work out where the neutrino came from. That in turn provides vital information as to the position and activity of many of the universe’s most distant and mysterious cosmic events.

“This is an excellent confirmation of IceCube’s recent discoveries, opening the doors to a new era in particle physics,” said Vladimir Papitashvili , astrophysics and geospace sciences program director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Polar Programs.

“These neutrinos may give us an understanding about the origin of the most energetic processes in the universe,” said Karle. “They may tell us about fundamental properties of particle physics and the origins of dark matter.”

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Stanford researchers build fully internal optical brain interfaces | ExtremeTech

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Two prominent Stanford researchers, Ada Poon and Karl Deisseroth, recently teamed up to create a completely wireless optogenetic implant. Instead of relying on fiber optic tethers and bulky headset receivers, their tiny mouse stimulator generates light from LEDs that are powered with an ingenious technique: a 1.5 GHz RF cavity that couples energy to the implant by using the whole mouse as an efficiently matched receiver.

In contrast to more conventional inductive energy transfer systems that need to have direct coupling between two opposed coils, the animal is free to move about anywhere above the energizing lattice in the floor of its chamber. But this is not just some scaled-down version of a subsurface highway charger for electric vehicles. Instead, resonant excitation of a confined electromagnetic field pattern (i.e. its intrinsic mode) can be localized to the mouse independent of its position.

It’s all in a closed-access paper Poon previously published not so long ago. We are not yet sure how to scale this up to humans. But as long as our dielectric properties are similar, the main variable should just be physical dimension. Provided you get that right, and have a way to get a few opto-enabled ion channels — preferably the channelrhodopsin 2 (ChR2) variety — into select parts of your nervous system, the actual hardware to rectify sufficient power for the LEDs is fairly simple.

In fact, all you need to boost up the raw DC voltage is four Schottky diodes and four capacitors configured into a two-stage doubling circuit. Together with three small turns for the antenna receiver, everything should fit into 10 mm3 package that weighs under 20mg. As the researchers show in their actual experimental paper, that’s small enough to fit nearly anywhere in the central or peripheral nervous system, even just under the skin at sensory nerve endings.

Just to make sure everything is on the up and up, you may initially want to use a bit of exploratory fiber optics anyway. They make for a highly accurate and localized temperature probe. In the course of due diligence, the researchers demonstrated that any incidental temperature rises associated with the stimulation were limited to <1 °C. That presumably includes any heat from LED light itself, the associated electronics, and the more generalized absorption of RF energy. More sophisticated power conversion might even wring a little more efficiency from the micro LEDs. The researchers estimated they were getting about 20% efficiency (emitted light power/input power) while the manufacturer spec sheet indicated that efficiencies up to 60% should be possible. More importantly perhaps, the researchers could generate light pulses as tight as 100 μs. This kind of temporal precision would allow one to exploit the full dynamic range of the channel opsin now available. We have been chronicling the dramatic advances made by both Poon and Deisseroth for several years now. The technological fruits now falling out of their mutual labor, while clearly awesome just to behold, are even more seductive when we can fully view them in their transparent simplicity with an eye to one day possess.
 
Hydrogen fuel cell integrated into iPhone 6 powers it for a week | Apple | Geek.com

Fuel cells have been promising to solve the rechargeable battery problem for years now. Rather than relying on a battery that takes hours to recharge once drained, you instead have hydrogen fuel cells that can be instantly topped up for hours more use. We haven’t seen such a fuel cell system make it into a mass-market device just yet, but a British company has now managed to hook one up to a modern smartphone.

The company in question is called Intelligent Energy. What they’ve managed to do is add a very slim hydrogen fuel cell to an iPhone 6. It doesn’t replace the need for a rechargeable battery, instead complementing it. However, the combination means that the iPhone can run for an entire week without need of a recharge.

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Intelligent Systems is thought to be working closely with Apple on the prototype and importantly they’ve managed to integrate the fuel cell without needing to modify the iPhone. The only difference users will see is the back of the iPhone covered in vents. This is necessary to allow heat and water vapor to escape, but you’ll never notice it happening.

The fuel cell works by creating electricity from hydrogen and oxygen with the waste products being water vapor and heat. That electricity is then used to keep the iPhone battery topped up and powering the phone. When the fuel cell runs out of hydrogen it can be topped up with a cartridge.

Typically with fuel cell news it ends with “now they just have to make it small enough” or “they just need to find a commercial partner.” However, in the case of Intelligent Energy, the fuel cell is already small enough and Apple is thought to be on board. All they need to do now is design a disposable cartridge for the refills and decide on pricing.
 
NASA Aircraft to Begin NOAA Hurricane Mission

NASA Remotely Piloted Aircraft to Begin NOAA Hurricane Mission | NASA

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NASA’s remotely piloted Global Hawk aircraft arrived at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility early on Saturday, Aug. 22, where it will begin a NOAA-led mission seeking to improve hurricane forecasts.
Credits: NASA Photo / Jamie Adkins


NASA’s remotely piloted Global Hawk aircraft will begin flights this week in support of a NOAA-led mission to improve hurricane track and intensity forecasts.

Operating from the aircraft ground control station located at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia, NOAA will work with NASA scientists on the mission called Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology, or SHOUT. The mission builds on earlier collaborative storm research led by NASA and will move the Global Hawk closer to being put into operational use as a weather forecast observations tool.

“We’re flying the Global Hawk above hurricanes and other severe storms to refine it as a new, powerful tool to better forecast where hurricanes go and how intense they are,” said Robbie Hood, director of NOAA’s Unmanned Aircraft System Program. "The mission is part of NOAA’s work to improve our nation’s preparedness and resilience to hurricanes and other severe storms.”

From now until the end of September, pilots and scientists will direct a series of flights out over the Atlantic Ocean basin to collect data on temperature, moisture, wind speed and direction. The real time data will go into National Weather Service forecast models at the National Hurricane Center.

“The Global Hawk allows us to stay over these weather patterns a greater amount of time than manned aircraft,” said Gary Wick, NOAA’s lead scientist for the mission. “It provides us with an observing tool that has the endurance of a satellite but provides finer resolution data and precision of an aircraft.”

The Global Hawk is equipped with instruments to profile the inner workings of storms, including:

  • Dropsondes developed by NOAA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research that are released from the aircraft to profile temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction
  • High-Altitude Imaging Wind and Rain (HIWRAP) instrument, developed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and designed to measure precipitation and wind speed
  • High Altitude MMIC Sounding Radiometer (HAMSR), a microwave sounder instrument developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory which takes vertical profiles of temperature and humidity
  • Lightening Instrument Package (LIP), an instrument managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center that will measure the electric field of thunderstorms
This season, scientists will also test whether the data from the Global Hawk can help replace data collected by satellites in the unlikely event that a satellite goes down. “We’re hopeful that won’t occur, but we need to evaluate all options,” said Wick.

NASA’s Global Hawk, based at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, provides a unique vantage point for weather observations because it flies higher and longer than any manned aircraft. It allows data collection from 60,000 feet, an altitude nearly twice as high as manned aircraft, to the ocean surface. It can gather weather data continuously for up to 24 hours.

SHOUT is funded in part by the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013, passed by Congress in the wake of the devastating Hurricane Sandy.
 
NASA's OMG Mission Maps Greenland's Coastline

NASA's OMG Mission Maps Greenland's Coastline | NASA

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NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland field campaign is gathering data to clarify how warm ocean water is speeding the loss of Greenland's glaciers. Credits: NordForsk

This summer, a refitted fishing boat is mapping the seafloor around Greenland as the first step in a six-year research program to document the loss of ice from the world's largest island. NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) field campaign is gathering data that will help scientists both to understand how the oceans are joining with the atmosphere in melting the vast ice sheet and to predict the extent and timing of the resulting sea level rise.

"A lot of the major uncertainty in future sea level rise is in the Greenland Ice Sheet," said OMG principal investigator Josh Willis, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. At about 660,000 square miles (1.7 million square kilometers), the ice sheet is three times the size of Texas. It's about a mile deep on average and contains enough water to raise global sea levels about 20 feet (6 meters), if it were all to melt. "The question is how fast it's melting," Willis said.

If the ice sheet were simply melting from the top down, researchers could track its disappearance more easily. However, ocean water melts ice too. The northwest Atlantic Ocean has been warming at an unprecedented rate for the last 10 to 15 years. Where that warm, salty water can reach Greenland's glaciers, it accelerates their melting.

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Seafloor depths on Greenland's west coast, measured by sonar aboard a research ship as part of the OMG project. Red and yellow are shallower areas, greens and blues deeper. The thin green line is the ship's path. The data give a better idea of where warm ocean water can reach glaciers. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Finding out where that is happening is no easy task. Greenland's coastline is more than 27,000 miles (44,000 kilometers) long -- longer than the distance around Earth at the equator -- because of the island's hundreds of long, narrow fjords, many containing glaciers. Just as the coast is scored by fjords, Greenland's shallow continental shelf is gouged by underwater canyons cut by the glaciers of the last ice age.

In this part of the world, the warmest water is down deep in the ocean, but that water may be able to get into the underwater canyons and reach the glaciers.

"We don't know how deep almost all of the glaciers and the fjords are, nor where the deep canyons cut through the continental shelf," said OMG co-investigator Ian Fenty of JPL. OMG is making the first high-resolution maps of the complete Greenland coast and continental shelf.

The maps are just the opening act of the OMG campaign, however. From next year to 2020, NASA's G-III research aircraft will take up the job of collecting data. The advantage of aircraft, Willis said, is that "we can encircle the island with observations of both the ocean and the ice. There's really no other way to do that." The G-III is based at Armstrong Flight Research Center, Palmdale, California.

Starting next spring, the plane will fly NASA's Glacier and Ice Surface Topography Interferometer (GLISTIN) instrument over the periphery of the island each year. GLISTIN will make very precise measurements of the heights and extents of more than 90 percent of Greenland's coastal glaciers that reach the ocean, enabling researchers to quantify how much each glacier melted and retreated during the preceding melt season.

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The M/V Cape Race (inset) measured seafloor depths around Greenland this summer. Its complex path followed deep trenches dug by ancient glaciers. The track starts light and becomes darker throughout the survey. Sea ice at the cruise outset, July 24, is shown at left.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech


In the early fall when sea ice is at its minimum, the G-III will circumnavigate Greenland's continental shelf, releasing about 250 expendable sensors that measure the temperature and salinity of the water up to a depth of about 3,000 feet (1,000 meters) -- from the cold, fresh meltwater at the surface down to the warmer, heavier saltwater below.

According to Fenty, these comprehensive measurements will give scientists a real chance to answer questions they can only guess at with the limited observations they have now. "People have been going to Greenland, studying a few glaciers at a time, trying to make sense of the complex melting and glacier-retreat pattern observed by satellites," he said. "But we really can't, unless we take a far-reaching approach."

NASA uses the vantage point of space to increase our understanding of our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. The agency develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records. NASA freely shares this unique knowledge and works with institutions around the world to gain new insights into how our planet is changing.
 
Self-Repairing Material Could Prevent Spaceship Catastrophes

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Orbiting the Earth is a bit like living in a minefield, with millions of tiny flecks of space junk whizzing about at thousands of miles per hour. If a rice-sized pellet whacked into the International Space Station, it could pack the punch of a hand grenade, causing precious oxygen to seep into space.

So materials scientists have developed a clever fix that could buy astronauts the time they need to fully repair a breach: A “self healing” material, consisting of a reactive liquid sandwiched between two layers of a solid polymer. When the researchers shot a bullet through the material (shown in the video below), the liquid reacted with oxygen in the air to form a solid plug in less than a second.


Such a material could see its way into everything from spaceship hulls to astronaut suits to military vehicles on Earth. More saliently, it’s a step toward the inevitable future in which human society is taken over by self-healing machines. Glad we’re still making progress on that.

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Remember, in space there might not be an abundance of oxygen on the outside of a spacecraft, but for the sake of those on board it, there is inside.
 
Video: The metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a monarch butterfly

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Here’s the life cycle of a monarch butterfly. From the wild green creepy critter crawler caterpillar to the unassuming cocoon to the beautifully complex and intricate butterfly itself. We get to see the entire process and it’s like a magic trick, enter one way and exit completely different. Nature is always the best magician.

 
Antimatter Will Surf on Plasma Waves in the Particle Colliders of the Future

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The best way to study the subatomic particles that make up the most fundamental building blocks of our universe is, of course, to smash them into each other with as much energy as possible. And now physicists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory say they’ve found a better way to do that.

Researchers at SLAC’s Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET) are especially interested in what happens when they crash high-energy beams of electrons into beams of positrons, their antimatter opposites. To answer the next generation of questions about these particles, however, physicists would need particle accelerators six miles long or more, with current accelerator technology.

That’s why FACET researchers developed a way to increase the energy of a particle beam in a shorter distance, so physicists could study electrons and positrons with smaller accelerators. It works like this: when physicists fire a concentrated group of electrons into an ionized gas, or plasma, the electrons create a wake. That wake can help accelerate a second group of electrons, travelling behind the first group, because they get to basically surf on a wave of plasma.


The technique, called plasma wakefield acceleration, works well for electrons, but it’s harder to accelerate positrons this way. Usually, the second group of positrons loses its shape or slows down when its hits the wake, rather than surfing the plasma wave and going faster. Researchers at FACET found a way to fire a single, carefully shaped group of positrons so that the front of the group creates a wake that helps accelerate the tail of the group and focus its shape.

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It works well, according to the researchers, who published the results of their experiments in the journal Nature. “In this stable state, about 1 billion positrons gained 5 billion electronvolts of energy over a short distance of only 1.3 meters,” said lead author Sébastien Corde, of France’s Ecole Polytechnique, in a statement. That means the particle colliders of the future could be much smaller, with higher energy collisions, than today’s colliders.

At the moment, FACET is the only facility that can accelerate positrons this way. Particle colliders are expensive, so it’s not likely that research facilities will be building new colliders to take advantage of the wakefield acceleration method anytime soon, but some may upgrade their existing accelerators. “It’s conceivable to boost the performance of linear accelerators by adding a very short plasma accelerator at the end,” said Corde, “That would multiply the accelerator’s energy without making the entire structure significantly longer.”
 
The Alaska Fire Season - Before and After

The Alaska Fire Season - Before and After | NASA

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After:
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Credits: NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team

The 2015 Alaska fire season has been particularly brutal this year. The fire season reached another milestone on Aug. 7 by surpassing the 5-million- mark in the number of acres burned so far this season. According to the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center’s (AICC) daily situation report on Aug. 7, a total of 743 fires have burned 5,013,053.4 acres to date. That total ranks the 2015 fire season No. 3 on the list of the largest fire seasons on record. As of today, 768 fires have ravaged the state and 153 fires are currently active there. AICC notes as of August 13 that Alaska is moving into its annual seasonal rain pattern which should help to diminish fire activity across the state.

These two images taken two months apart show in false-color the differences between the Alaskan landscape between June 14 and September 1, 2015. The darkened red areas show burn scars across the state. The first image was taken by the Terra satellite with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The second image was taken by the same instrument but on the Aqua satellite.

NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team. Caption: NASA/Goddard, Lynn Jenner
 
There's no story here, just some cool pictures:p:

Isotope Reactor Basically Looks Like a Sci-Fi Weapon in These Photos


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The so called High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee was refueled a few weeks ago, and the lab posted great images of the process. And what images!

The luminescent blue glow, caused by a phenomenon called Cherenkov radiation, was caught on camera, making the reactor looking like a spectral weapon from a science-fiction movie.

HFIR is a research reactor at ORNL, but it is also used for the production of isotopes for research, industrial and medical applications, isotopes such as californium-252 and other transuranium isotopes. What can we see in the photos below? ORNL explains:

The High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the highest flux reactor-based source of neutrons for research in the United States, and it provides one of the highest steady-state neutron fluxes of any research reactor in the world. Operating at 85 MW, an average fuel cycle for the HFIR generally runs for approximately 26 days—depending on the experiment loading for that cycle—followed by a refueling and maintenance outage for various scheduled calibrations, modifications, repairs, and inspections.

The reactor underwent routine refueling in July 2015, as seen in these photos. While submersed, the spent fuel emits a luminescent blue glow due to Cherenkov radiation, in which shedding electrons move through the water faster than the speed of light. Once removed from the reactor, spent fuel is then relocated into an adjacent holding pool for interim storage.

The end-of-cycle spent fuel elements in the HFIR vessel prior to removal. This is a view of the reactor core.

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Photo: Genevieve Martin/ORNL

Here we see the removal of a HFIR fuel element as it passes through a hatch in the top head of the reactor vessel during defueling operations.

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Photo: Genevieve Martin/ORNL

Spent fuel in the HFIR pool storage array.

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The flux trap of the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at the center of the reactor’s fuel element. This is the area of the reactor in which target materials are irradiated to produce specialized isotopes.

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Photo: Jason Richards/ORNL

The reactor pool at the High Flux Isotope Reactor

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Photo and caption: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
 
SolarCity Aiming To Produce Solar Modules With +20% Conversion Efficiency At 50¢/Watt | CleanTechnica

SolarCity’s goals for the Silevo solar module manufacturing facility under development in Buffalo, New York, are certainly not unambitious ones — based on the company’s recent SEC filing detailing the achievements needed via its performance-based compensation plan to vest tranches of shares.

Amongst these achievements, is the meeting of production costs of just 50¢/watt for solar modules with a +20% conversion efficiency — so, as stated above, the company certainly isn’t aiming low.

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Considering the scale of the facility, the target doesn’t sound that strange — the manufacturing facility will, after all, be one of the largest of its type in the world once completed. Altogether, SolarCity is aiming for an annual production output of 1 gigawatt of solar modules (1,000 megawatts).

If the 50¢/watt goal is met, the facility will then be in a highly competitive position with Chinese-produced solar modules — potentially making for some very interesting market happenings. When that will occur is currently unknown, though. The facility is expected to come online in 2016, but the ramp-up period is vague.

Worth a reminder here, as well, is that the solar modules produced by the facility are expected to be high enough in conversion efficiency (over 20% to 24%) that fewer modules will be needed for solar arrays or rooftop systems, thereby reducing space requirements, and presumably installation costs.



Electrek provides more:

20% efficiency would be great, but the company aims to eventually hit 24% with Silevo’s Triex technology. They think they could reduce the number of panels per installation by 25%. The breakthroughs would allow for 340 watt panels the size of current 250 watt high-efficiency panels.

These module cost improvements would help the co-founders achieve other milestones of their compensation plan, including the reduction of the total cost per watt, which was at $2.91 last quarter. According to the SEC filing, to vest the last tranche of their compensation plan, they would need to achieve a total cost of installation of $2.05 per watt. This could make residential solar energy more affordable than ever before.

Here are the achievements outlined in the recent SEC filing:

  1. Cost of Production of $0.50/Watt of solar modules with at least 20% efficiency
  2. 1 million Customers
  3. 3 million Customers
  4. 2,000 Cumulative Megawatts Installed
  5. 6,000 Cumulative Megawatts Installed
  6. PowerCo Available Cash of $170 million for Trailing Twelve Months
  7. PowerCo Available Cash of $600 million for Trailing Twelve Months
  8. Average Total Cost Per Watt of $2.75 as of the end of a fiscal quarter
  9. Average Total Cost Per Watt of $2.35 as of the end of a fiscal quarter
  10. Average Total Cost Per Watt of $2.05 as of the end of a fiscal quarter
 

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