New energy source? Scientists convert heat to power using organic molecules

New energy source? Scientists convert heat to power using organic molecules

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have successfully generated electricity from heat by trapping organic molecules between metal nanoparticles, an achievement that could pave the way toward the development of a new source for energy.

The discovery, described in a study published today in Science Express, an electronic publication of the journal Science, is a milestone in the quest for efficient ways to directly convert heat into electricity. Currently, the dominant method of power generation involves burning fossil fuels to create heat, often in the form of steam, to spin a turbine that, in turn, drives a generator that produces electricity.

An estimated 90 percent of the world's electricity - from power plants to car engines - is created through this indirect conversion of heat. In the process, a great deal of heat is wasted and released. Anyone who has ever had a car engine fail because of a malfunctioning radiator has experienced firsthand this excess heat.

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NewsFactor Network | Intel Shows Off New 80-Core Processor

NewsFactor Network Intel Shows Off New 80-Core Processor: "Intel first unveiled its terascale chip project in September 2006 at the company's developer forum, where it said that terascale performance will play a pivotal role in future computing. Following up on those plans, Intel's new 80-core prototype can process some 1.8 trillion operations per second. "

Intel has developed a prototype 80-core chip that the company claims can process some 1.8 trillion operations per second and is roughly the size of a Xeon chip.
Intel is emphasizing that the final version of the processor -- which has 100 million transistors -- will be different from the prototype and will take from three to eight years to reach the market.

Intel says it expects the technology to be integrated into some of its products, but not all. Intel also says it is likely that the teraflop chip will be used to test different technologies in development, such as energy-management strategies and high-bandwidth interconnects.

Sleep well before learning something new - being-human - 11 February 2007 - New Scientist

Sleep well before learning something new - being-human - 11 February 2007 - New Scientist

Sleep deprivation can severely hamper the brain’s ability to learn, a new study demonstrates.

The experiment showed that people who fail to get a good night’s sleep before studying new information remember roughly 10% less than their well-rested counterparts. The researchers say it is “a worrying finding” considering the average amount of sleep people get each night is decreasing.

Seung-Schik Yoo at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, US, and colleagues asked 14 people to avoid sleeping one night by playing board games and checking email in the lab. The participants stayed awake until the next evening, when they had to view a sequence of 150 images – as their brains were scanned – before going home to sleep.

After two good nights’ rest, the participants returned to the lab thinking they would simply have to sign some papers. But researchers surprised them with a pop quiz: The subjects had to pick out the 150 images they had seen before from a series of 225 pictures.

They correctly identified 74% of the previously viewed images, on average. By comparison, another group who had a proper night’s rest before viewing the 150 images at the start of the experiment correctly identified 86% of these pictures in the pop quiz.

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Physicists set 'speed limit' for future superconducting magnet

Physicists set 'speed limit' for future superconducting magnet

A research team led by a Northwestern University physicist has identified a high-temperature superconductor -- Bi-2212, a compound containing bismuth -- as a material that might be suitable for the new wires needed to one day build the most powerful superconducting magnet in the world, a 30 Tesla magnet.

The material currently used in magnetic resonance (MR) imaging machines in both hospitals and research laboratories -- a low-temperature superconducting alloy of the metallic element niobium -- has been pushed almost as far as it can go, to around 21 Tesla. (Tesla is used to define the intensity of the magnetic field.) There are no superconducting magnet wires currently available that can generate 30 Tesla.

"A new materials technology -- such as a technology based on high-temperature superconductivity -- is required to make the huge leap from 21 Tesla to 30 Tesla," said William P. Halperin, John Evans Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, who led the team. "We have shown that Bi-2212 could be operated at the same temperature as is presently the case for magnets made with niobium -- 4 degrees Kelvin -- and also achieve the stable state necessary for a 30 Tesla magnet."

The findings will be published online Feb. 11 by the journal Nature Physics.

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KurzweilAI.net

KurzweilAI.net

The Golden Age of space travel is still ahead of us. Over the next 50 years, thousands of people will gain access to the orbital realm -- and then, to the Moon and beyond, says Sir Arthur, 89.
Friends, Earthlings, ETs—lend me your sensory organs!

I send you greetings and good wishes at the beginning of another year. I’ll be celebrating (?) my 90th birthday in December—a few weeks after the Space Age completes its first half century. When the late and unlamented Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957, it took only about five minutes for the world to realise what had happened. And although I had been writing and speaking about space travel for years, the moment is still frozen in my own memory: I was in Barcelona attending the 8th International Astronautical Congress. We had retired to our hotel rooms after a busy day of presentations when the news broke—I was awakened by reporters seeking comments on the Soviet feat. Our theories and speculations had suddenly become reality!

Notwithstanding the remarkable accomplishments during the past 50 years, I believe that the Golden Age of space travel is still ahead of us. Before the current decade is out, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing sub-orbital flights aboard privately funded passenger vehicles, built by a new generation of engineer-entrepreneurs with an unstoppable passion for space (I’m hoping I could still make such a journey myself). And over the next 50 years, thousands of people will gain access to the orbital realm—and then, to the Moon and beyond.

In tiny supercooled clouds, physicists exchange light and matter

In tiny supercooled clouds, physicists exchange light and matter

Physicists have for the first time stopped and extinguished a light pulse in one part of space and then revived it in a completely separate location. They accomplished this feat by completely converting the light pulse into matter that travels between the two locations and is subsequently changed back to light.

Matter, unlike light, can easily be manipulated, and the experiments provide a powerful means to control optical information. The findings, published this week by Harvard University researchers in the journal Nature, could present an entirely new way for scientists and engineers to manipulate the light pulses used in fiber-optic communications, the technology at the heart of our highly networked society.

"We demonstrate that we can stop a light pulse in a supercooled sodium cloud, store the data contained within it, and totally extinguish it, only to reincarnate the pulse in another cloud two-tenths of a millimeter away," says Lene Vestergaard Hau, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Hau and her co-authors, Naomi S. Ginsberg and Sean R. Garner, found that the light pulse can be revived, and its information transferred between the two clouds of sodium atoms, by converting the original optical pulse into a traveling matter wave which is an exact matter copy of the original pulse, traveling at a leisurely 200 meters per hour. The matter pulse is readily converted back into light when it enters the second of the supercooled clouds -- known as Bose-Einstein condensates -- and is illuminated with a control laser.

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MIT improves protein sorting with a new microchip

MIT improves protein sorting with a new microchip

A new MIT microchip system promises to speed up the separation and sorting of biomolecules such as proteins. The work is important because it could help scientists better detect certain molecules, or biomarkers, associated with diseases, potentially leading to earlier diagnoses or treatments.

The microchip system has an extremely tiny sieve structure built into it that can sort through continuous streams of biological fluids and separate proteins accurately by size. Conventional separation methods employ gels, which are slower and more labor-intensive to process. The new microchip system could sort proteins in minutes, as compared to the hours necessary for gel-based systems.

The MIT team's results appear in the Feb. 5 issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

The new technology is an advance from a one-dimensional sieve structure reported by the same MIT group last year. The key to this new advance, called an anisotropic nanofluidic sieving structure, is that the researchers have designed the anisotropic sieve in two orthogonal dimensions (at a right angle), which enables rapid continuous-flow separation of the biological sample. This allows continuous isolation and harvesting of subsets of biomolecules that researchers want to study. And that increases the probability of detecting even the smallest number of molecules in the sample.

Technorati tags: nanotechnology, molecular biology, proteins