Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Sunday, December 22, 2013
China Super Train - Never Stops at Stations -Continuous Motion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DIeRrU4_M3Q
Thursday, December 19, 2013
A: Automatic - smart driving pod + app
In the future we will have self-driving cars that weave in and out of traffic and coordinate silently with other vehicles on the road, all while we sit back with a latte, reading a book.
That future is still a ways off, and even when those cars arrive they will be expensive. But Automatic brings a bit of the smart-car future to our existing vehicles with a small device that attaches to a car's onboard computer via a port under the steering wheel.
It works with most gas-powered cars from 1996 or later. The hardware syncs with an iPhone app over Bluetooth. (There's an Android app coming in December.)
Automatic pulls data about your engine and driving habits and displays the results on your phone so you can save energy and money. It maps out each trip using GPS, tallies gas usage and mileage, and gives you a driving score. When your car flashes the dreaded "check engine" light, it deciphers the code and tells you exactly what the problem is. It even remembers where you parked.
Together, these small steps can add up to a positive environmental impact. When you're burning up fuel unnecessarily by speeding, accelerating too quickly or slamming on the brakes, the app will make a sound.
Automatic also can detect when you're in a car accident. If your smartphone is on, has a GPS signal and is still working, it will automatically contact local authorities and your family members.
http://www.automatic.com/
Monday, December 9, 2013
Glow-in-the dark tech: very strong luminescence
A firefighter’s plan to save lives and employ brothers
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- Zachary Green, President, MN8 Productions, Wyoming Ohio © Malinda Hartong, …
With a high-paying job and a promising future on the team that had launched Cialis, Green faced with a tough decision two years ago.
In his spare time, he’d been inspired by a TV show about photo luminescence technology to mix the compound into a silicone band for his volunteer firefighter’s helmet.
“Most people don’t know what true darkness is,” he explains. For an emergency responder it can be when “someone’s hand is four inches from your nose and you have no idea how many fingers they’re holding up.” A glow-in-the-dark helmet would let his fellow firefighters see him on the job, or find him if he fell through a floor. The first time he wore his enhanced helmet in a fire, he says, “Guys were throwing $20 bills at me. They all wanted one.”
In October 2010, Green started spending weekends driving to fire departments hawking his illuminated helmets. In six months, he says, he made about $5,000 selling from the trunk of his car. Then his fire chief persuaded him to take it to the next level. “You have a product that’s revolutionary,” Green says the chief told him.
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While green glow-in-the-dark tape has been used on exit signs and stairwells in some buildings, applying it directly to firefighters’ apparel and tools had not been done before in the U.S., Green says. He and his colleagues saw how it could save lives. “When you look at what kills firefighters, it’s often getting disoriented so you can’t get out of a dark smoky environment,” Green says.Photo luminescence applied to a window, a door, or another firefighter can guide the way out, he says. Taped to an axe, it lets a firefighter recover a misplaced tool to break a window or shine light under a bed to locate a victim.
The technology could also save victims of fires. “People died walking down 110 floors in total darkness during the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centers,” Green notes. “Just a little bit of light on the stair or railing can make such a difference at helping people get out safer and more efficiently.”
What about flashlights and electronic strobes? Green says what all emergency responders know well: “Anything with batteries or electricity is going to fail when you need it most.”
His Eli Lilly boss tried to talk him out of it, but Green quit his job, refinanced his house, maxed out his credit cards, named his business MN8 (as in “emanate”), and headed to the giant FDIC firefighting trade show in 2011. He did $85,000 in sales in a month.
Since then, Green has developed more than 50 “MN8-Foxfire” safety and egress products using a Japanese patented pigment that he says has been engineered to glow brighter and longer than less expensive versions. His offerings, all made in America, include signage materials, adhesive stickers, magnets, and paint. He has hired a dozen full-time employees, established a board, raised a round of venture financing, leased an 8,000-square-foot warehouse in Cincinnati, and engaged a salesforce of nearly 200 firefighters. Ultimately, he envisions 1,500 sales reps, all from the firefighters’ brotherhood.
He compares the business model, which enables firefighters to earn a side income after investing $125 in a sales kit and demo tools, to an Avon or an Amway “without the multilevel-marketing bull—it’s just direct sales.” So far, his products have reached 55,000 firefighters in 25 countries, generating over $1 million in revenues, he says. He sees the future of the business in industrial safety, lighting large workplaces and sports arenas—Nassau Coliseum in New York is already a customer.
“It’s the perfect storm of an innovative product, a great strategy, and good people working with us,” Green says. And for him, running this business is far more exciting than marketing Cialis.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Ultra Efficient Solar Cells- 34%
http://www2.technologyreview.com/article/427673/ultra-efficient-solar/
Ultra-Efficient Solar
Under the right circumstances, solar cells from Semprius could produce power more cheaply than fossil fuels.
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This past winter, a startup called Semprius set an important record for solar energy: it showed that its solar panels can convert nearly 34 percent of the light that hits them into electricity. Semprius says its technology, once scaled up, is so efficient that in some places, it could soon make electricity cheaply enough to compete with power plants fueled by coal and natural gas.
Because solar installations have many fixed costs, including real estate for the arrays of panels, it is important to maximize the efficiency of each panel in order to bring down the price of solar energy. Companies are trying a variety of ways to do that, including using materials other than silicon, the most common semiconductor in solar panels today.
For example, a startup called Alta Devices (see the TR50, March/April 2012) makes flexible sheets of solar cells out of a highly efficient material called gallium arsenide. Semprius also uses gallium arsenide, which is better than silicon at turning light into electricity (the record efficiency measured in a silicon solar panel is about 23 percent). But gallium arsenide is also far more expensive, so Semprius is trying to make up for the cost in several ways.
One is by shrinking its solar cells, the individual light absorbers in a solar panel, to just 600 micrometers wide, 600 micrometers long, and 10 micrometers thick. Its manufacturing process is built on research by cofounder John Rogers, a professor of chemistry and engineering at the University of Illinois, who figured out a way to grow the small cells on a gallium arsenide wafer, lift them off quickly, and then reuse the wafer to make more cells. Once the cells are laid down, Semprius maximizes their power production by putting them under glass lenses that concentrate sunlight about 1,100 times.
Concentrating sunlight on solar panels is not new, but with larger silicon cells, a cooling system typically must be used to conduct away the heat that this generates. Semprius's small cells produce so little heat that they don't require cooling, which further brings down the cost. Scott Burroughs, Semprius's vice president of technology, says utilities that use its system should be able to produce electricity at around eight cents per kilowatt-hour in a few years. That's less than the U.S. average retail price for electricity, which was about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2011, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Semprius's advantages are tempered by the limitations of using lenses to concentrate light: the system works best when the cells receive direct sunlight under a cloudless sky, and energy production drops significantly under any other conditions. Even so, it could be suitable for large, utility-scale projects in places such as the American Southwest.
First, however, Semprius has to begin mass-producing its panels. The company, which has raised about $44 million from venture capital firms and Siemens (which builds solar power plants), plans this year to open a small factory in North Carolina that can make enough solar panels annually to deliver six megawatts of electricity. The company hopes to expand that to 30 megawatts by the end of 2013, but to do so it must raise an undisclosed amount of money in an atmosphere that is no longer kind to capital-intensive energy startups.
All the while, Semprius will also have to reduce its manufacturing costs fast enough to compete with conventional silicon panels, whose prices fell by more than half in 2011 alone.
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