Coffee Grounds Can Absorb Global Warming-Causing Methane Through a Simple Treatment September 8, 2015

Tech Times noted on their article published on Wednesday that scientists have found a way to convert coffee grounds used in compost, allowing them to act as sponges that absorb greenhouse gas methane, which causes global warming.

In order to come up with methane sponges, the coffee grounds are submerged in a solution that consists of ingredients found in oven cleaners and are boiled in a furnace with a temperature of over 700 degrees Celsius. This process will hopefully eradicate methane from the atmosphere. It could even be used in natural gas fuel cells.

“The big thing is we are decreasing the fabrication time and we are using cheap materials,” said one of the study’s authors Christian Kemp of Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea. “The waste material is free compared to all the metals and expensive organic chemicals needed in other processes. In my opinion, this is a far easier way to go.”

Activated carbon or activated charcoal is absorbent enough to wash away the toxins in people who experience poison-ingestion or drug overdose. With coffee grounds being absorbent as well, scientists have been able to do away with the filtering and washing methods, which are usually done to activate a material’s carbon.

In the method conducted by the scientists, the coffee grounds’ carbon are activated during the treating process and heating process in the furnace. These steps are enough to make the coffee grounds absorb methane gas and fight global warming.

On an article published today by the Business Insider, methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, with carbon dioxide topping the list. In a period of a century, it has been found that methane is 25 times more harmful in global warming compared to carbon dioxide.

The fast and low cost way of turning coffee grounds into methane sponges can help save the world from global warming without causing hazards to humans, considering that current methods are expensive, heavy and dangerous.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch: 20-Year-Old to Launch World’s First Ocean Cleaning System Next Year August 23, 2015

There are an estimated 5 trillion pieces of plastic floating through the world’s oceans, enough to fill almost 600 jumbo jets. Cleaning up so much pollution might seem like a monumental task, but one 20-year-old is setting out to make a difference — in a big way.

Boyan Slat, the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, announced earlier this week that his organization will deploy the world’s first system to passively remove plastic waste from oceans around the world.

The system is comprised of a series of floating barriers that spans over a mile long, making it the longest floating structure in the ocean. The barriers trap floating plastic debris, which is then picked up a via conveyer belt 7900 times faster and 33 times cheaper than other methods:

“Taking care of the world’s ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today. Not only will this first cleanup array contribute to cleaner waters and coasts but it simultaneously is an essential step towards our goal of cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This deployment will enable us to study the system’s efficiency and durability over time,” said Slat.

The Ocean Cleanup plans to deploy the structure off of the coast of Japan during the second quarter of 2016.

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Sunflower Oil Hits the Road June 22, 2015

It turns out that sunflower oil is good for baking and braking.

That’s right, braking — as in your car’s brakes.

Michelin’s new Primacy MXM4, unveiled earlier this year, boasts a unique rubber compound that incorporates sunflower oil in order to offer improved performance in both wet and snowy weather.

Production of the tire using sunflower oil began at a Michelin facility in South Carolina.

Mike Wischhusen, director of industry standards for Michelin North America, notes that vegetable oils have been used as extender oils in the rubber industry (not only tires) for several years.

Why sunflower oil, in particular?

“We encountered sunflower oil specifically over the past decade when we were faced with the technical challenge of developing a high-performance tire for modern luxury performance vehicles that could still deliver superior cold-weather winter grip on wet and snowy roads — the concept of a high-performance all-season tire,” Wischhusen comments.

The use of sun oil in the tire’s patented “Helio Compound” increases traction at low temperatures for braking and handling in wet conditions and has better overall performance in the snow. In fact, Primacy MXM4 tires are able to stop up to 19 feet shorter in wet conditions than a leading competitor, according to Michelin.

The company’s priority was to design a new tire with a specific consumer benefit in mind. Sunflower oil provides unique properties to cured rubber that allowed Michelin to overcome one of the traditional balance-of-performance issues when trying to design high-performance all-season tires.

“The use of sunflower oil in our tread rubber delivers the rigidity, grip and durability characteristics necessary for high-performance tires — and, more importantly, retains that same performance as temperatures decrease to freezing levels: a snowy or wet winter road,” Wischhusen explains. “Other types of oils can achieve that performance level at high temperatures (summer) or low temperatures (winter) but not both. Sunflower oil allows us to break a traditional compromise and deliver the full-time balance of performance that consumers need.”

Tire developers at Michelin use a high-oleic variety of sunflower oil. For tires produced in the United States, they use U.S.-sourced sunflower oil.

Not only does the new technology give the driver better stability on the roadway, it also helps the environment. The oil compound gives increased rigidity in the tread block or groove pattern, increasing mileage and, in turn, decreasing CO2 emissions.

The tire was made available to consumers in North America on July 1. It is an original equipment release for luxury car makers including Acura, BMW, Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz and Lexus. Michelin also is considering developing the tire for replacement size tires.

The UK is striving to get 12% of their heat load from renewable heat by 2020. March 28, 2015

The UK is striving to get 12% of their heat load from renewable heat by 2020. Most popular are Air Source Heat Pumps and Biomass boilers. The map shows the spread of installations by technology. In urban areas, its more solar; the further north you go, the more pellet boilers installations there are. The majority of the homes and businesses are rural and switched from oil. Its the next frontier of renewable energy.

On the 29th September 2014, the domestic Renewable Heat Incentive reached the milestone of 10,000 accredited RHI installations.

The biggest technologies under the RHI so far have been Air Source Heat Pumps and Biomass boilers. The map on the right hand side shows the spread of Renewable Heat installations all over the UK by technology.

Installations replacing Oil account for almost half of all installations, showing consumers are incentivised by the significantly higher fuel savings on oil alongside RHI payments.

The East, South East and South West of England accounts for the greatest proportion of RHI installs to date.

The Renewable Heat Incentive rewards homeowners who install renewable heat technologies on their property. In order to offer consumers the RHI, an installer must be MCS Certified.

For further information on becoming an MCS Installer and offering your customers the RHI simply contact Easy MCS on Freephone 0800 612 43 42 or email enquiries@easy-mcs.com or to join the Easy MCS Support programme simply apply online.

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Meet the Enterprise of the Sea July 29, 2014

SeaOrbiter can carry a mix of scientists and crew members.

A French architect’s audacious plans for a ship that will change the ocean exploration is done.

Garnering comparisons to Star Trek’s starship Enterprise, the SeaOrbiter is the brainchild of French architect Jacques Rougerie. Set to begin construction this spring, the 190-foot-tall semisubmersible vessel will be the culmination of nearly 30 years of Rougerie’s research and development.

Six of the SeaOrbiter’s 12 floors are below sea level, allowing for uninterrupted underwater observation. Although the ship’s main mission is to research the biodiversity and climate of the sea, the real goal for Rougerie is to give the public a better understanding of how crucial the ocean is to Earth’s well-being.

Ninety-nine percent of the $50 million project was financed through the French government and private companies. To get people more involved, Rougerie is crowdfundingthe last 1 percent of the project. “The more humans understand about the underwater world, the more respect they will have for it,” he says.

22 People: Number the SeaOrbiter can host. The ship will carry a mix of scientists and crew members.

Quite a View: ‘We want people to appropriate the project to themselves,” says Rougerie. Which is why he raised money through KissKissBankBank, a French crowdsourcing website, to fund construction of the Eye of the SeaOrbiter. Equivalent to a ship’s crow’s nest, the Eye towers 60 feet above the surface. It serves as a lookout and houses a communications system that lets the crew send live broadcasts of life on board.

Hard at Work: Keeping busy won’t be a problem for the crew. The “modular lab” can be used as a laboratory for scientists as well as a fitness room equipped with treadmills. The lab also includes a medical zone. A certified doctor with basic surgery skills will be on board in the event of an emergency.

2,600 Tons Displacement: The overall weight of the ship. It is built from 500 tons of Sealium, a recyclable aluminum designed for marine environments.

A Life Aquatic: Given that voyages will last three to six months, there will be ample time to collect data and perform experiments. The underwater area, known as the hyperbaric lab, is equipped with an observation deck made of transparent polycarbonate panels, allowing for direct underwater observation. Because the conditions underwater are similar to those in space in terms of pressure and isolation, the SeaOrbiter will be used by NASA and ESA (the European equivalent) for protocol training as well as physiological and psychological experiments.

Go With the Flow: The SeaOrbiter was designed primarily to float along with the ocean’s natural currents, allowing scientists to study the relationship between those currents and climate. The keel weighs 180 tons and helps provide stability to the ship. It can be retracted when the vessel is in shallow water.

5 Ships: The total number of SeaOrbiters Rougerie eventually hopes to build, one to sail in each of Earth’s oceans. A number of partners have given their support to the SeaOrbiter project, including National Geographic and UNESCO.

Laser-sparked fusion power passes key milestone July 9, 2014

The dream of a completely clean, high powered and almost limitless renewable energy source is getting closer. Nuclear Fusion is the process by which atoms
are compressed to such a degree that their nuclei fuse, releasing a huge amount of energy. Essentially it is the opposite of current Nuclear Power, based on fission whereby large nuclei are torn apart to release energy. This is the process which happens in stars, turning Hydrogen into the heavier Helium, and all other natural elements.

The National Ignition Facility in California began experimenting in 2009 to slow progress. They are using lasers and X-rays to compress a fuel pellet with a frozen Hydrogen Istotope, but it takes significantly more energy to start the fusion reaction than the process actually produced, making it currently ineffective as a fuel source.

However, an article in Nature this week confirmed that a milestone had been passed, whereby of the amount of energy actually delivered to the pellet, the reaction released a surplus of energy. The next step is to improve the efficiency of how the lasers deliver energy to the pellet. However, this is still a long way away, perhaps decades, but once that has been refined, mankind will essentially be able to build miniature stars to produce nearly unlimited energy.

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Magnets Mean Your New Refrigerator Will Make History

Heat-transferring fluid moves into the heart of the magnetic refrigeration unit, where regenerators comprised of advanced alloys are exposed to magnetic fields. The visible rotating magnets turn on and off as they move, heating and cooling the fluid. (GE)

Coming soon to a kitchen near you—magnets in your refrigerator. And we’re not talking about slapping your kid’s artwork inside the fridge next to the milk and butter.

It’s the next generation of residential food and drink cooling, and it’s powered by magnets. Gone will be the almost century-old unit in your kitchen that uses a heat-transfer process based on liquid refrigerants called vapor compression refrigeration. Condensers and refrigerants will be replaced with magnets and special alloys that get hot and cold based on their proximity to magnetic fields. The technology could also be used for air-conditioning.

Magnetic refrigeration, proponents say, is a rapidly approaching technology that will amount to a revolution in domestic energy use.

“It’s the equivalent to a gas-powered car moving to electric—that’s the kind of leap we’re making in refrigeration,” said Ed Vineyard, a senior researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Vineyard’s Building Technologies Programhas teamed up with GE to bring magnetic refrigeration to the public in around five years.

The idea behind refrigerators and air conditioners is all the same. In their broadest sense, they are heat pumps—devices that take heat energy from inside your refrigerator box or room and move it outside. Removing this energy makes the temperature go down.

In most contemporary home and commercial refrigeration systems, mechanical work compresses and expands a liquid refrigerant. The pressure drop associated with expansion lowers the temperature of the refrigerant, which then cools air blown over it by a fan into the refrigerator box or the cooled room. In magnetic refrigeration systems, the compressor is replaced with magnetic fields that interact with solid refrigerants and the water-based cooling fluid. Changing the strength of magnetic fields alters how much heat is pulled away from the refrigerator box.

Along with this refrigerator revolution comes a dramatic drop in the amount of energy you need to cool your cucumbers and cantaloupes. ORNL says magnetic refrigeration “is a promising alternative to the vapor compression systems used in today’s appliances” that could theoretically drop energy consumption by 25 percent compared to current technology. Those liquid refrigerant chemicals that can be damaging to the environment and hard to recycle at the end of a refrigerator’s life are also being replaced by cheaper water-based fluid.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Ayyoud Momen works on the team’s “breadboard” prototype refrigerator-freezer: a flexible platform used to evaluate material compatibility and to analyze components including the magnet, generators, motor, pump, heat exchangers, plumbing and leakless rotating valve. ( ORNL.)

Developers expect the new refrigerators to cost a bit more than vapor compression models, but buyers should see savings through spending less on electricity over the long term. If the technology is adopted broadly, it could mean major electricity savings on the national scale. Besides savings from more efficient refrigerators, magnetic cooling would lower electricity use in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning equipment, which accounts for around 60 percent of the average household’s energy use.

“We’ve spent the past 100 years making the current technology more efficient, but most of the major efficiency increases have been achieved,” Venkat Venkatakrishnan, director of advanced technologies for GE Appliances, said in a company statement. “We figured out how to create heat or cold without a compressor or chemical refrigerants. This breakthrough can power your fridge with greater efficiency, and because the technology does not contain traditional refrigerants, recycling refrigerators at end of life will be easier and less costly.”

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Safe Nuclear Reactor Runs on Spent Fuel June 20, 2014

ALTERNATIVE POWER SOURCES

Molten salt is the key to this reactor’s safety.

It’s pretty straightforward to get some coders together in a spare room to create a software start-up. Should a nascent company have hardware inclinations, it might set out to make a consumer electronics gadget with an assist from Kickstarter. And then there’s Transatomic Power Corp., of Cambridge, Mass., which is trying to build a nuclear reactor.

Cofounders Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie began dreaming up the idea in 2010, while working on their Ph.D.s in nuclear engineering at MIT. “We realized this is probably the smartest we will ever be in our lives,” Dewan remembers. So the two decided to use their knowledge to design a better reactor, one that deals with what they see as the nuclear industry’s biggest problems: waste and safety.
The Fukushima disaster reignited the nuclear power debate, but it turns out, even with its faults, nuclear power is saving lives! That’s according to a new NASA study about the effects of pollution on health.

The design they came up with is a variant on the molten salt reactors first demonstrated in the 1950s. This type of reactor uses fuel dissolved in a liquid salt at a temperature of around 650 °C instead of the solid fuel rods found in today’s conventional reactors.

Improving on the 1950s design, Dewan and Massie’s reactor could run on spent nuclear fuel, thus reducing the industry’s nuclear waste problem. What’s more, Dewan says, their reactor would be “walk-away safe,” a key selling point in a post-Fukushima world.

“If you don’t have electric power, or if you don’t have any operators on site, the reactor will just coast to a stop, and the salt will freeze solid in the course of a few hours,” she says.

Dewan and Massie incorporated the company in April 2011, but they were still essentially just two grad students with a cool idea. Then, after their presentation at a TEDx meeting in November 2011, they met Russ Wilcox, the founder and former CEO of E Ink Corp. Having sold E Ink for US $215 million in 2009, Wilcox was looking for a new project, and he had reason to be receptive to Dewan and Massie’s scheme for extra safe nuclear power: He and his family had been at Tokyo Disneyland when the Fukushima disaster began, and he had gotten a dose of Japan’s nuclear fear.

Wilcox also thought it augured well for the technology when the TEDx attendees gave the talk a standing ovation, as nuclear projects often depend on public support. Soon the three decided to go into business together.

The team has raised about $1 million so far, much of that from friends, family, and angel investors who aren’t expecting immediate returns; now they’re looking for $15 million more to fund a series of lab experiments. Wilcox says this research will quickly reveal whether the reactor will work.

“You want to start with the riskiest parts of your design and test those first,” he says, adding that he learned that lesson while at E Ink. “Don’t spend effort designing the box before you’ve built the product.”

If those experiments reveal no showstoppers, Transatomic hopes to find industrial partners to help build a 5-megawatt demonstration plant at a U.S. national lab site. And if that demonstration is convincing, Dewan and Massie’s reactor will be ready for full-scale commercialization.

But Dewan says that’s where the entrepreneurial ride will end. “We can’t become the next Westinghouse,” she says. “The goal is to demonstrate that this is a functional technology; then we would likely be subsumed by one of the industrial partners that funded us in the earlier phases.”

Where Do We Store Nuclear Waste?

According to Albert Machiels, an expert on advanced nuclear reactors at the Electric Power Research Institute, the industrial giants of the United States and the European nuclear industry are “not bullish” on advanced reactors. But the global market looks quite different, with countries such as China and India pursuing ambitious nuclear power policies.

Machiels also notes that another interesting nuclear start-up, the Bill Gates–backed TerraPower, is cooperating with international organizations in China and elsewhere to develop its technology. If these start-ups can prove out their engineering and economics, they might find willing buyers for their intellectual property on other shores.

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Coca-Cola Creates Modular System To Reuse Plastic Bottles June 4, 2014

 

Plastic waste is a huge problem in the world today, with recycling centers struggling to figure out what to do with all the plastic bottles being thrown away every day and landfills filling up with waste that won’t degrade for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

So what do we do with all those leftover plastic bottles? Coca-Cola has come up with a very creative way to reuse their plastic bottles- the 2ndLives cap system.

2ndLives is a set of 16 screw on sprayers, marker tips, pencil sharpeners and other useful objects that can be attached to the top of any plastic soda bottle, essentially upcycling the plastic waste and giving it new life.

So far the bottle tops are only being distributed (for free) in Vietnam, with Indonesia and Thailand to start receiving them soon, and hopefully they’ll soon make their way to the U.S. because they look like a great idea!

The Tiny Creek That Connects the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans April 22, 2014

There’s a natural spring in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming that flows in 2 directions. One ultimately connects to the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. The other connects to the Columbia River, which flows into the Pacific Ocean. It’s a natural wonder called the Parting of the Waters.

There’s a natural spring in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming that flows in 2 directions. One ultimately connects to the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. The other connects to the Columbia River, which flows into the Pacific Ocean. It’s a natural wonder called the Parting of the Waters.

 

 

 

You can reach the spot after a 15-mile hike from a trailhead in the park. A sign points to the flow of both oceans.

(Photo: Actroterion)

But there’s more! The Parting of the Waters isn’t the only water connection in the United States between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Just a few miles away is Isa Lake, which also divides its two outlets between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But Isa Lake does it backwards. The western outlet loops around and flows to the Gulf of Mexico. The eastern outlet also loops around and heads toward the Pacific.

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