Because I continually run across interesting inventions and discoveries that I cannot give my full attention to I thought I would create a weekly summary of items that have caught my eye. I’ll publish these headlines every Friday and hope, you, my readers find them as interesting as I do. Let me know if you
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Ever heard of a hydrino? It is a form of shrunken hydrogen. Hydrogen is the first element in the periodic table. So you ask, how can you make hydrogen atoms even smaller? Well apparently you can by exposing them to ions, that is atoms that have lost an electron. These ions are called catalytic because
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A recent headline caught my eye, “Wind farms make climate change WORSE: Turbines actually heat up local areas.” This appeared in the London, England based Daily Mail. The article reported that air temperatures around four of the world’s largest wind farms had incresed over a decade by 0.72 degrees Celsius ( about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit).
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Carbon-based graphene was the topic around water coolers in materials science departments in the month of March as researchers at Hong Kong Polytechnic University claimed to have invented a graphene-based battery running solely on ambient heat. If the results can be duplicated by other laboratories then these researchers may have found a new technology for
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In a previous blog we talked about the challenges and promise of mining waste for energy. North America’s largest landfill and waste removal company, Waste Management Inc., today mines half of its 266 landfill sites in the United States and Canada for methane gas collected from decomposing garbage. The gas is used to fire turbines
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The most advanced batteries in today’s electric cars are based on lithium-ion technology. These batteries use metal-oxide cathodes combined with an encased oxidizer. They are heavy and provide a limited range, up to 160 kilometers (approximately 100 miles) before they need recharging. When compared to internal combustion engine (ICE) technology, with an average range of
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Urban Renewal and a Dash of White Paint A recent study published in the April 2012 edition of Environmental Research Letters, the Journal of the British Institute of Physics, and entitled The Long-Term Effect of Increasing the Albedo of Urban Areas, looks at proposals to make cities more sunlight reflective by painting roofs white and
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Eole Water S.A.S. is a French company that has developed a wind turbine able to collect water as a byproduct. The product, the WMS1000, achieves this using an airborne condenser within the wind turbine that can produce up to 1,000 liters of safe drinking water daily. The condenser is made of stainless steel alloy. The
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With solar panel prices dropping it seems almost every month you would think that roof tops throughout the world would be covered with them. But that’s not the case. In my neighbourhood of hundreds of homes here in Toronto one house has solar panels. It seems that what I observe here is not too dissimilar
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There are four reasons for making this claim. Conservation in the Developed World is reducing demand even though growth in demand is occurring in the Developing World. We are discovering a lot more conventional fossil fuels by using new technology to add capacity. Hydraulic fractioning or fracking has expanded our ability to draw on natural
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