Turns out that your average plasma TV sucks more electricity from the grid than those fancy new plug-in hybrid cars that are coming on the market. According to officials at the Electric Power Research Institute who were quoted in a recent Associated Press article, big-screen plasma TVs drain about four times as much power as plug-in hybrids.
Why should you care? It means that the U.S. power grid is capable of handling a few million plug-in hybrids without blowing its gigantic, irreplaceable fuse. The logic goes something like this: Consumers have purchased millions of big-screen plasma sets during the past few years. They’ve all plugged them in and probably leave them on for HOURS each day. Plug-in hybrids, on the other hand, will likely be plugged in during off-peak hours, late at night while most people sleep and when the grid isn’t being taxed.
The grid may be able to handle plug-in cars, but we’ll still need to generate more electricity to meet their demands. Hopefully that energy will come from solar and wind rather than coal-fired power plants.
A new glass developed by engineers at MIT can soak up sunlight and divert it to tiny photovoltaic cells along its edge. The sunlight-collecting glass is so efficient and inexpensive to manufacture that it could make solar power as cheap as coal power, the engineers say.
The glass would replace the lenses and mirrors that typically focus sunlight in photovoltaic systems. It works like this: Each pane is coated with a special dye that sucks up light and then channels it through the glass to small solar cells along the panes’ edges. Researchers have created several tints of the dye, each one capable of capturing a particular wavelength of light. It’s an important development because some wavelengths, or colors, of light produce more energy than others. High-frequency ultraviolet light is supercharged while lazy infrared yields little juice.
The researchers have stacked different panes of the glass, allowing a solar system to absorb several wavelengths of light. Using two panes, they say, nearly doubles the efficiency of the system. The panes are also good at sucking up indirect light, which means they don’t need to be mounted in expensive motorized sun-tracking apparatuses.
Marc Baldo, a lead member of the team, says that the panes could replace windows in homes and would be much more effective on rooftops, hilltops, or anywhere the sun shines. His team is testing several different combinations of the glass and hopes to produce large-scale solar collectors soon.
Google is great for driving directions, but not so great for bicyclists. Plug in an address and the maps app will likely funnel you through major thoroughfares choked with traffic. Take your bike and you’ll be sucking exhaust fumes, dodging taxis and delivery trucks and you might end up as a smear on the blacktop. The Google Maps Bike There Team wants to change all that. They’re petitioning Google to include a “Bike There” option that highlights bike lanes and back streets on a route. If you ever ride your bike in a big city, you’ll appreciate their efforts. Stop by and sign the petition:
A team of photochemical cooks at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland have whipped up a batch of inexpensive solar cells that could revolutionize solar energy. The “Dye-sensitized Solar Cells” use dye and an electrolyte solution to harness solar radiation to make electricity. The components are sandwiched together to form a flexible film that’s durable and long lasting.
Professors Michael Grätzel and Brian O’Regan invented the solar cells in 1991, but only recently developed an easy, low-cost way to manufacture them. So how do they work? The cells consist of a porous film of white, nanometer-sized titanium dioxide particles covered in a dark dye. The film is suspended in an electrolyte solution. When sunlight hits the dye, it injects an electron (negative charge) into the titanium particles.
Grätzel and his team have tweaked the manufacturing process, nixing the volatile organic solvents that typically make up the electrolyte solution in favor of a mixture of three salts. The bottom line: Dye-sensitized cells that can be made on the cheap without harsh solvents.
The new salt-based dye-sensitized cells have an efficiency of about 8.2 precent, a little more than half the efficiency of silicon-based photovoltaic cells. No official word on cost, but Grätzel and friends claim that their panels will be considerably cheaper than traditional solar cells. They should also last more than 10 years, says Grätzel.
Volkswagen’s 1-liter concept car has been winding its way through the twists and turns of the automotive news back roads lately. British auto mag Car has reported that the 600-pound streamlined fuel sipper will go into production in 2010, sporting a hybrid diesel drivetrain and sequential motorcycle-style gearbox. The original concept ran a one-cylinder, 1-liter petrol engine wrapped up in a carbon fiber body. The microcar features tandem seating like a fighter jet, but performance promises to be less than stellar.
The fact that small, fuel-efficient cars are making a comeback fills my heart with a warm fuzzy feeling that’s not unlike the buzz one gets from huffing gasoline fumes.
The early morning light lances gleefully through the holes in your mini-blinds, searing your tender eyelids and turning your slothful dreamworld bloody pink. For some of us, dawn brings a hellish realization that we’ll trudge through the day wearing a shroud of exhaustion, a clammy sheet of fatigue that will dull our senses, smarts and motivation. We’re called “night owls,” and we’re forced to live in a world run by early risers.
Researchers in Portugal have proven what we’ve always known; night people are burdened with greater sleep debt during the week, sleep more on weekends and suffer more sleep-wake irregularities than early birds. Ana A. Gomes, of the University of Aveiro in Portugal, studied 1,654 undergrads at her university, where most classes start at 9 a.m. She found that night people were at a significant disadvantage when compared to early risers. Their performance and grades suffered, as did their sleep. She found the same performance deficits even after night owls were given a few weeks to adjust to a morning schedule.
Gomes believes that the university should adapt to the students’ variations in sleep-wake cycles, offering at least two different schedules. From the ScienceDaily article:
“Given the inevitable existence of diurnal-type variations from person to person, we may infer that any single standardized schedule is likely to be inappropriate. We share the idea that a wiser alternative would be the availability of at least two schedules (early/later), so that all diurnal types may gain. Sleep education would also be of great value in helping students to better adjust the sleep-wake cycle to externally imposed timetables.”
With any luck, Gomes’ suggestion will be taken to heart, both in school and in the workplace. A simple switch in schedule could improve learning and productivity for night owls. Globalization and digitally connected virtual offices should also help shatter rigidly structured work schedules. Internet connectivity means that workers and students can collaborate without being in the same space, or even country, 24-hours a day.
San Jose powerhouse Nanosolar has improved the efficiency of their printable solar cells, made from nanoparticle ink. The company now claims it can pump out enough solar panels every year to harness 1 gigawatt of power from the sun. Still not enough to power the Flux Capacitor (1.21 GW), but it would put a considerable dent in U.S. power usage. The typical U.S. home consumes about 8,900 kilowatt hours per year.
We’ve all seen how dames are drawn to bad dudes like iron filings to electro-magnets. Now scientists have confirmed the anecdotal evidence: Bad guys really do get the girls. Peter Jonason at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces found that guys who harbor three antisocial personality traits, dubbed the “Dark Triad,” had far more sexual partners than nice guys.
What’s the Dark Triad? A nasty, prickly trident forged from narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Members of the Dark Triad aren’t antisocial like chain-smoking basement shut-ins huddling in the warmth of their Xbox 360s. They’re charismatic, outgoing and popular. They just don’t give a flying squirrel about other people’s feelings and will do pretty much anything to get what they want. Which, in this case, is lots of sex with multiple partners.
Jonason tested 200 college guys for the telltale signs of Dark Triadism. Those who racked up the highest evil scores had far more sexual partners than goody-two-shoes. The scientist theorizes that there must be some sort of evolutionary advantage to being just a little evil, otherwise the Dark Triad of personality traits would’ve been bred out of the population ages ago. He believes that it simply comes down to bad guys being able to spread their seed more effectively than good guys. They may not stick around to raise psychologically healthy kids, but they produce a lot of them.
If being a card-carrying member of the Triad is so good, from an evolutionary standpoint, then everybody should be a certified psychopath, right? That’s obviously not the case and researchers have yet to discover why. There must be negative aspects of membership in Club Evil (like incarceration, getting gunned-down by other psychopaths in Old-West style shootouts, contracting STDs).
Another possibility, and I’m just talking off the cuff now, is that these personality traits aren’t actually inborn. They’re learned. It may explain why the kids of Dark Triad dads don’t all turn out to be bad apples.
Research is still being carried out to answer these questions. In the meantime, it may payoff to flip up your collar and adopt a wicked scowl.
U.S. superstar climate scientist D.r James Hansen estimates that if humankind wants to avoid global warming catastrophe, we’ll need to slash atmospheric co2 to no more than 350 parts per million. 350.org ran with it, launching a campaign and a dazzling video to encourage people everywhere to reduce co2 emissions. Check out the video:
Craig Venter etched his name into the annals of history by decoding the human genome (his own genome, in fact) in less time than it takes the ebola virus to replicate. Now he has his sights set on oil. In a recent Newsweek interview with Fareed Zakaria, Venter outlines his plans to genetically engineer bacteria that will suck up C02 and spit out ethanol or biodiesel. The bug could solve two of humanity’s biggest problems—global warming and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels. From the interview:
Zakaria: How are you going to create the fuel of the future? Venter: We think multiple fuels of the future are going to come out of biology, by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline.
What would a “refinery” that uses microorganisms to create fuel look like?
They’re just large, bacteria-processing fermenters. People are familiar with this: that’s how wine and beer are made. We’re using similar processes, but ones that are designed to produce much more complex molecules than ethanol, and therefore fuels that will be much higher in energy content, and will work well with the existing energy infrastructure.
How close are you to creating an organism that can produce fuels in this way?
We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We’re definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.
It’s a must-read interview that’ll fill even the most pessimistic doomsday prognosticators with warm fuzzy optimism. Kinda like wine and beer. All hail our genetically modified bacterial overlords!
