20110602:
Proton dissector http://www.isgtw.org/feature/case-missing-proton-spin!
20100615:
Silacon does it better!
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20100613:
ScienceDaily (Oct. 16, 2009) — In the recent past, producing lasers with terawatt (a trillion watts) beams was impressive. Now petawatt (a thousand trillion watts, or 1015 watts) lasers are the forefront of laser research. Some labs are even undertaking work toward achieving exawatt (1018 watts) levels.
Todd Ditmire at the University of Texas currently produces petawatt power through a process of chirping, in which a short light pulse (150 femtoseconds in duration) is stretched out in time. This longer pulse is amplified to higher energy and then re-compressed to its shorter duration, thus providing a modest amount of energy, 190 joules in a very tiny bundle.
20100612:
You can write. You can entertain.
20100601:
Silacon comments on article below: Silacon in R&D with hybrid concentrated solar project that could boost the SunPower units dramatically.
What Does the Future Hold for SunPower?
The high-efficiency solar maker is at a crossroads.
Will SunPower make it?
For the past six or seven months, that’s been one of the primary questions in the solar market. Will the pioneering manufacturer of high-end, high-efficiency solar panels succumb to competitors or somehow pull through.
First, the dismal take. SunPower appears stuck in an unenviable spot. It competes against First Solar, which can offer lower prices, for utility-scale contracts. In the residential market, it must contend with Suntech Power Holdings and a raft of other Chinese manufacturers that (a) can produce products for less and (b) are increasing the efficiency of their products.
To top it off, the distinguishing mark of SunPower’s products — high efficiency — is butting up against the walls of physics. Crystalline silicon solar panels can, in theory, convert 29 percent of the light that strikes them into electricity, but the real number is closer to 25 percent, SunPower CEO Tom Werner told me last year.
By the end of 2010, SunPower will be at 23 percent efficiency. Further gains will be more difficult to achieve, and this situation is already forcing the company to examine things like concentrators and different materials for making solar cells, which to date have had virtually no success in the market.
Wall Street analysts are continuing to gripe about the company. For all these reasons, we picked SunPower as a Top Ten Acquisition Target in greentech in 2010.
Now, the optimistic argument. SunPower remains one of the most innovative companies in what can sometimes be a fatally conservative market. Two years ago, it launched a consumer branding campaign emphasizing the distinctive look of their panels. Now, branding and marketing are becoming bigger issues in solar; see Akeena’s recent deal to license the Westinghouse name.
SunPower has also become one of the most successful panel makers to date to expand into developing utility-scale solar parks. Besides improving solar cell efficiency, the company has devised new racking and installation techniques. Last month, for instance, it unveiled Oasis, a modular power station in a box, adapting a concept in part pioneered by SunPods and going mainstream with it. To get to the low end, the company has launched a set of modules made from components from other suppliers.
And just a few days ago, SunPower unfurled a joint venture with AU Optoelectronics, the TV division of the Acer group and one of the select large Asian conglomerates horning into solar with manufacturing muscle and a large bank account. This makes SunPower one of the first to come to grips with an inexorable, far-reaching trend. It has also accomplished a string of seemingly sound acquisitions of companies like PowerLight and SunRay. Wall Street anxiety? Chalk up a good portion of it to herd mentality.
So for all those reasons, we also picked SunPower as a Top Ten Acquirer in 2010.
The company has its shares of missteps and challenges, but welcome to the world of solar. First Solar, which has experienced titanic growth in recent years, will likely soon face more direct competition against General Electric and many CIGS vendors. Suntech wants to triple the amount of modules it ships in North America in 2010, but Gemini, its joint venture to develop solar parks, has barely budged. SunTech bought a controlling interest in CSG Solar to expand into thin film, but now must retool the product line.
Kyocera and Sharp — what is supposed to make them different again? I forget.
So where will destiny take SunPower?
An apt analogy seems to be Sun Microsystems. Like SunPower, Sun prided itself on technical acumen. Its scientists and execs — Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, Greg Papadopoulos — became industry figures, much in the same way that SunPower’s Dick Swanson remains a well-known solar guru.
But even more importantly, Sun instinctively knew how to shift with the winds. Back in the mid-90s, it competed, and often lost, to Silicon Graphics over workstations. (Remember that company? They did the graphics for the movies Jurassic Park and South Park.)
Then the battle shifted to servers. Silicon Graphics bought Cray, but then sold one of the server groups to Sun. Sun converted it into the Enterprise 1000 line and exploded during the go-go internet days. Silicon Graphics headed to the tar pits.
And along the way, it commercialized things like Java and marketed the hell out of itself.
In the end, of course, Sun found its territory increasingly eroded by cheaper Intel-based servers, and last year it finally succumbed to an acquisition. But the company had a long run, and navigated the last 15 years — essentially from the beginning of the internet era until now — better than Digital Equipment, Compaq, Tandem, Intergraph, and a whole bunch of other big iron companies.
Solar has just begun. If SunPower continues on its path, it could have a long runway ahead of it.
http://thefutureofthings.com/news/5988/hps-memristor-on-a-chip.html
Following the introduction of the memristor in May 2008, HP engineers have recently unveiled the first functioning memristor circuit at the inaugural Memristor and Memristor Systems Symposium. By substituting some transistors with memristors, the team has created more physical space for more components to be added, increasing the computing power in the process (and possibly reducing energy consumption).
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Following the introduction of the memristor in May 2008, HP engineers have recently unveiled the first functioning memristor circuit at the inaugural Memristor and Memristor Systems Symposium. By substituting some transistors with memristors, the team has created more physical space for more components to be added, increasing the computing power in the process (and possibly reducing energy consumption).
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20100529:
In Los Angeles, Tokyo, and other rich cities in fault zones, the added expense of making buildings earthquake resistant has become a fact of life. Concrete walls are reinforced with steel, for instance, and a few buildings even rest on elaborate shock absorbers. Strict building codes were credited with saving thousands of lives when a magnitude 8.8 quake hit Chile in late February. But in less developed countries like Haiti, where a powerful quake in January killed some 222,500 people and left more than a million homeless, conventional earthquake engineering is often unaffordable. “The devastation in Haiti wouldn’t happen in a developed country,” says engineer Marcial Blondet of the Catholic University of Peru, in Lima. Yet it needn’t happen anywhere. Cheap solutions exist.
20100529:
Greater Rooftop Coverage and More Solar Electricity Generated
Conventional flat PV panels typically must be tilted and spaced apart to achieve effective energy generation. The sunlight striking the spaces between the panels is not collected and therefore is wasted. Solyndra’s panels achieve effective energy generation when mounted horizontally and spaced closely together, thereby enabling greater rooftop coverage and enhancing energy production over the system’s lifetime compared to a conventional panel installation as shown in the illustrations below.
20100526:
Cree and Philips, both well-known LED packager and luminaire maker combined into one, are included the Energy Star certified manufacturer list. The famous phosphor maker Intematix also appears in the additional March list. As for the Taiwan maker, the recessed downlight of Neo-Neon Holdings Limited received LED Energy Star certification on December 4th, 2009.
LEDinside: among 300 certified products, 240 recessed downlights make up the lion’s share by 80%, followed by 8% under cabinet lights and 4% surface mounted downlights.
20100525:
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20100303:
Hybrid Moped from India
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24568/
02/11/2010:
http://ecogeek.org/power-storage/3057
A new material developed by researchers at Princeton and Caltech is capable ofharvesting energy from the simplest of movements like walking or breathing. This new rubber chip made of PZT (lead zirconate titanate) nanoribbons could eventually power small portable electronic devices like cell phones.
02/11/2010:
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_14373150?source=email Google to create own network 100 times faster than existing end user networks. ” Ingersoll said Google “will be funding the deployment of the network” and “would probably be laying some fiber as part of this,” the cost to the company also remains uncertain because, she said, Google may work with other Internet providers to set up the system. She said Google’s motivation “is to experiment and learn” and that the company intends to share what it learns with others. “We don’t have plans to expand beyond the test-bed we’re going to build….”
02/08/2010
http://video.mus.ge/video_-_zhOBibeW5J0_-_Chaotic-Lorenz-Water-Wheel.html
Description: Edward Norton Lorenz a pioneer of chaos theory died April 16th 2008. He discovered the strange attractor notion and coined the term butterfly effect. This is the Lorenz Waterwheel my lab partner and I built for our final physics practical. Load and watch the chaotic waterwheel work.
Related tags: Tech Norton Lorenz Waterwheel Water WheelPhysics
http://www.reuk.co.uk/OtherImages/concentrated-solar-water-heating-system.jpg Evacuated tube concentrated solar tubes. 
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/pubs_research_development.html Trough better than PV at present.
https://seia.browserevents.com/organizations/new/25 Excellent organization for alll solar energy news and technologies.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24498/?nlid=2727 Solar power to double in the USA over the next year
02/07/2010
http://www.technologyreview.com/ This issue includes phase change chemistry for temperature regulation in buildings. Many other interesting advancements.
Brain Imaging Lets Vegetative Patient Communicate
The surprising new research is likely to challenge our notions of consciousness.
02/06/2010
http://www.greencarmagazine.net/2009/09/myers-motors-introduces-new-two-passenger-75-mph-electric-vehicle/ The Silacon Tensor realized by Myers Motors
02/06/2010
Nest of little hybrids and electric cars
02/06/2010
Piping light from intense light source saves energy
\02/06/2010
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0710-brain_scans_of_the_future.htm
July 1, 2007 — Psychologists have found that thought patterns used to recall the past and imagine the future are strikingly similar. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to show the brain at work, they have observed the same regions activated in a similar pattern whenever a person remembers an event from the past or imagines himself in a future situation. This challenges long-standing beliefs that thoughts about the future develop exclusively in the frontal lobe.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100204204438.htm Physicists use nanobubles to kill cancer cells.
Rapidly expanding nanobubbles blasted through arterial plaque in a 2009 study
02/06/2010
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100205115810.htm
researchers at Linköping and Umeå universities, working with American colleagues, are presenting an alternative to OLEDs, an organic light-emitting electrochemical cell (LEC). It is inexpensive to produce, and the transparent electrode is made of the carbon material graphene.
“This is a major step forward in the development of organic lighting components, from both a technological and an environmental perspective. Organic electronics components
Intelligence:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain/intelligence/
New research finds that an increase in brain magnesium improves learning and memory in young and old rats. The study suggests that increasing magnesium intake may be a valid strategy to … > full stor