Good old geothermal plants generate power using water heated by hot rocks deep underground. But what if we could get energy directly from the seething magma down below? In Iceland, an accidental discovery let scientists actually stick a pipe into magma to test this idea—and the results of their experiment has just been published in the journal Geothermics.
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First, dig a hole. Then, reinforce it with clay, concrete, steel, and plastic. Fill it with nuclear waste and cover it in forty more feet of concrete. Then profit. That’s how one company in Texas has struck radioactive gold, charging companies $10,000 per cubic foot to store nuclear refuse.
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Forget angels dancing on the head of a pin, recharging tomorrow’s mobile devices could be a question of how many micro-windmills can you fit on a cellphone cover, with one … Continue reading
Batteries are a distraction: the best way to store excess solar energy for nighttime use is using it to create “solar fuels” that rely on energy-dense chemistry, one research team … Continue reading
Photovoltaic panels aren’t the most glamorous technology: They’re usually tucked away on a roof, and when you can see them, they’re ugly. And inefficient. But what if they made architecture more beautiful? And what if they were more efficient, working even at night? Say hi to Rawlemon, a solar ball lens that is quickly making its way to market.
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Building the perfect battery is a hard problem. Batteries either too inefficient or too expensive or too unstable to power the renewable gadgets of the future. But a team of Harvard scientists just built a new kind of battery with a molecule found in food, and it could solve these problems.
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One of the ironies of CES, hosted here in Las Vegas, is that the largest and perhaps most spectacular gadget we could all be covering is nearly 80 years old, weighs 6.6 million tons, and supplies much of the electricity fueling the devices on display at the trade show.
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Be excited, Earthlings, because science has a surprise for you. Engineers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have devised a way to turn algae into crude oil in less than an hour. That oil can then be refined into gasoline that can run engines.
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The Belkin Conserve Insight gives you solid data about how many watts a device is burning, how it’s affecting your carbon footprint, and how much it’s hitting your wallet.
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This is basically the least worst thing that can happen with Russian nuclear bombs! For the past twenty years, the Russians have been turning 500 tons of uranium from decommissioned nuclear weapons into nuclear fuel for the United States. It’s called the Megatons to Megawatts program. The last shipment from that 1993 deal arrived at a U.S. storage facility Tuesday, according to reporter Geoff Brumfiel of NPR’s Morning Edition.
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