Good article on the potential for nuclear power on the moon.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23247/

I wonder how they satisfy treaty agreements surrounding nuclear power in space?

PG&E just requested approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to enter into a power purchase agreement with Solaren Corp.  Solaren would deploy a solar array into space to beam an anticipated 850 gigawatt hours for the first year and 1,700 gigawatt hours for the subsequent years.

An actual contract from an actual Power company.

Wow.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30198977/

Boerman said Solaren's plan called for four or five heavy-lift launches that would put the elements of the power-generating facility in orbit. Those elements would dock automatically in space to create the satellite system. Boerman declined to describe the elements in detail but noted that each heavy-lift launch could put 25 tons of payload into orbit.

In our world of ever increasing change, where bandwidth, CPU speed, memory continue to increase exponentially.  What is the long pole? --> Battery life. 

We have fantastic laptops such as this: ThinkPad X301

And yet we are still limited to mere hours of battery life.

It turns out that storing electricity is a difficult thing to do.  We've been stuck on Lithium Ion Batteries now for awhile and there has been very slow progress in improving the capacity of said batteries.

There are many teams around the globe working on the problem to increase battery life.  A team in South Korea has made a breakthrough by using Silicon instead of Graphite as the anode in the battery.

Silicon Could Give Lithium Ion Batteries 10X More Capacity

This would have far ranging and awesome impacts on all of our devices, including ones you currently own as you could conceivably go out and buy a replacement battery if/when they become available.  It also has direct impact on the viability of electric cars.

This is of course just research findings right now so don't get your hopes up.

Here is a new kind of solar cell, using nano scale antennas, that can convert infra read (heat) radiation into electricity.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200808221

Using an antenna tuned to the resonant frequency of IR light is very efficient, theoretically you should be able to get 90% efficiency or more.  Imagine:

1. Putting IR collectors on the interior walls in your house to collect IR radiation, cool the room and generate electricity at the same time.
2. Rooftop IR collectors to collect heat energy from the air, even at night.
3. Lining the engine compartment of your hybrid car with IR collectors to collect waste heat to charge the batteries while the engine is running and even after you turn the engine off.

The waste energy of most machines (and chemical reactions) always comes out as heat.  If you can convert the heat back into useful energy (electricity) you should be able to achieve near 100% efficiency from any kind of machine. 

In fact, if the working part of the machine is kept in a vacuum bottle, like a thermos, the ONLY way it can radiate energy is as IR radiation.  In this way you could capture 100% of the waste energy from any machine.

For example, there is a new catalyst which can be used to extract hydrogen from ethanol.  Just add the catalyst plus heat.  The waste from the reaction comes out as heat, so if you put the whole reactor inside a vacuum chamber (really just a double walled vessel with a vacuum between the walls), now line the inside of the OUTER wall with the IR collector, and 100% of the waste heat is collected as electricity.

Same thing is true of a hydrogen fuel cell.  Hydrogen fuel cells convert hydrogen plus oxygen to electricity, but there is some waste and the waste comes out again as heat.  Again, put the whole thing in a double walled vessel, with a vacuum between the walls, all the waste comes out as heat, which becomes IR radiation, which is collected again using IR collectors (with 90%+ efficiency) and now you have a hydrogen fuel cell with 90%+ efficiency. 

See a trend here?  Any kind of technology can become 90%+ efficiency by collecting waste heat as IR using IR collectors.

Cool stuff.

Electric motocross bike.  Zero X.

Cool bike.  Cool tech.

A low-speed mode limits the bike to about 30 mph and is good for tooling around. Switch to high-speed mode and you get unfettered acceleration to about 57 mph. The Zero X will hit 30 mph in under two seconds and 57 in about twice that. Juice comes from a proprietary li-ion battery that weighs 40 pounds and provides about two hours of riding time. It recharges in about two hours using any household socket

Road bike in the works.

Company site: [linky]

Twelve and a half square miles of solar panels --> Produces 1/3 the power of one coal burning power plant.

Two Large Solar Plants Planned in California

That means to get the same output from a solar power facility as you would from a coal plant, that inhabits a few acres, you would need a facility in the neighborhood of 35 square miles.  That's a lot of space to have set aside for generating power.

What is the environmental impact comparison between the two?

The quote at the very end of the article is telling:

Neither approaches the economy of fossil-fuel burning plants, said Ms. Zerwer, the spokeswoman for Pacific Gas & Electric. But they will be competitive with wind power and with power from solar thermal plants, which are equipped with mirrors that use the sun’s heat to boil water into steam. And prices will fall, she predicted.

Then why build them?

I wonder how this companies sales have done over the past year...I would expect they have gone up a bit.

http://www.scangauge.com

I'm going on a long car trip in June, maybe I'll pick one up. I'm not sure if I could save that much gas on a long highway trip but it might come in handy afterwards.

Like a grandfather clock.  This is brilliant, but not produced yet.

To "turn on" the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp. An hour-glass like mechanism is turned over and the weights are placed in the mass sled near the top of the lamp. The sled begins its gently glide back down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs come on and light the lamp,

That is very cool.

The LED lightbulb should last a lifetime so you are looking at a family heirloom.  Kind of a 21st century candle. 

Check out this cool demo for the Prius' main gear.

http://eahart.com/prius/psd/

There is a simulation at the bottom of the page that let's you vary the input parameters and watch the gearing adjust.

The PSD is a planetary gear set that removes the need for a traditional stepped gearbox and transmission components, and also the familiar rev-lurch-rev-lurch of acceleration in an ordinary gas powered car. It acts as a continuously variable transmission (CVT) but with a fixed gear ratio.

Cool stuff.  They need to get their car designers to work on the car though because it is the ugliest thing on the road...well maybe that Pontiac Aztec thing was uglier, but it's close.

So if you are the Soviet Union back in 1971 and oh let's say you are out exploring for natural gas and umm...one of your exploration rigs happens to fall into a sinkhole...that'd be bad right?

Now let's say that all of a sudden natural gas starts coming out of this hole, what do you do?

1. Devise some clever way of stopping the flow of natural gas and perchance capture it for using to create energy?
2. Scramble and backfill the hole as best you can to "cap" the problem and then re-assess how you can access this seemingly rich natural gas deposit.
3. Light it and watch it BUUURRRRRN!

You guessed it!

Soviet ingenuity stretched as far as a match and the natural gas hole has been burning for 40 years...

Awesome! Communism at work.  Second world creation, third world sustained engineering.

Update: This comment from techRivet's #1 fan.  This must be a the cause of Global Warming!  We can blame the ice [not] melting at the south pole on the Soviet Union!

Where oh where is the Goreical to save us?  Oh the Earthanity.

[I may have changed her words up a bit in that last sentence.]

On March 19th of 2008, Arthur C. Clarke passed away.  Earlier in that day [Earth time] there was an event, an explosion the likes of which has never been witnessed in human history.

A powerful stellar explosion detected March 19 by NASA's Swift satellite has shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye.

NASA Satellite Detects Naked-Eye Explosion Halfway Across Universe

It was a gamma ray burst of such magnitude that it was visible to the naked eye from across half the universe.

Later that evening, the Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas measured the burst's redshift at 0.94. A redshift is a measure of the distance to an object. A redshift of 0.94 translates into a distance of 7.5 billion light years, meaning the explosion took place 7.5 billion years ago

For those following along at home, that is CRAAAZY far away.

Well this is all mind-boggling, but now there is an effort to get the event named after Arthur C. Clarke.  Why not the “Clarke Event?”

Sounds worthy to me.

This is a great chart showing the different energy transfers that occur in the universe.  From the smallest wiggle of a photon to all the energy expended since ever in the whole Universe...

http://www.circlon-theory.com/HTML/joules.html

Some notable items on the chart:

• 2.6845 * 10⁶ - One horsepower per hour
• 10¹³ - Titanic fall to the bottom
• 10⁴⁸ - yearly output of the Milky Way

Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth

"Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material—it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Lorenz.

...maybe when we get there we can bring along our big SUV's.

Just saying what a lot of people are thinking.

– Global warming is a “total crock of ****.” Then he added: “I’m a skeptic, not a denier. Having said that, my opinion doesn’t matter. (With the battery-driven Volt), “I’m motivated more by the desire to replace imported oil than by the CO2 (argument).”

I think we are going to wake up from this mass hypnosis in 10 years with the realization that it was exactly as Bob Lutz has so succinctly put it.

If the X-Prize worked to get the private commercial space race kicked off and it was only $10 Million, what would a payout of $1 BILLION do for results. 

This is an ambitious set of problems laid out by the Victory Project. 

To the first person(s) that solves any of these Problems:

1. Develop a cure for breast cancer.
2. Develop a cure for diabetes.
3. Reduce greenhouse emissions from petroleum powered automobiles by 95% without increasing the cost of a normal car more than 5%.
4. Achieve 150 miles per gallon of gasoline in a 3,000 lb. car, using EPA standards; without increasing the cost of a normal car more than 10%.

Is it big?   Yes.

Is it different?   Yes.

Will it work?   Yes.

This is inspiring.  But some of these might take the full Billion dollar prize to develop.

They're looking for donations, feel free to contribute.

What a perfect platform for an electric conversion.  The Porsche 914.

Russ Cunniff is the creator.  A home inventor and engineering manager at nVidia.  Here is his blog detailing the entire process. volt914 - Electric Porsche 914.  Most excellent Russ.  We here at techRivet salute you!

Go check it out.

http://standby.lbl.gov/Data/SummaryChart.html

It may not make all that much difference to you or your energy bill, but just multiply this by millions of appliances in the US and you can get a sense of the energy savings impact we could have if we fully turned off all the appliances that we could.

The FAQ explains it fairly clearly.

Anything with an external power supply (wallpack), remote control, or clock display require standby electricity.
    
Some of the most common products are TVs, VCRs, cable boxes, stereo systems, and telephone answering machines. Our Data page presents measured standby power use of these and other domestic appliances.

The message is, not everything needs stand by power, turn off what you can.

Not sure about the net balance of energy in this reaction but he is igniting saltwater with radio waves.

The question is how much energy doe sit take to create the radio waves to begin with?