Water going down the drain should hardly be wasted. Or at least that's the way Doug Guldan and Steve Mackenzie see it. The partners are using that idea as the core of their new start-up – Waste Water Heat Transfer Systems. The West Bloomfield-based firm has developed technology that will use the hot draining water to heat water that is about to be used, saving energy costs. "We saw an opportunity to recapture the energy we create when we heat water," says Guldan, president of Waste Water ...
More...
High-speed videos reveal the strange technique and delicate balance of physical forces cats use to lap milk from a bowl. Unlike dogs, who use their tongues as ladles to scoop water into their jaws, cats pull columns of liquid up to their mouths using only the very tips of their tongues."Cats are just smarter than dogs from the point of view of fluid mechanics," said civil engineer Roman Stocker of MIT.
More...
ConEdison Development and SunPower Team to Deliver Long-Term Energy Savings to Historic Bell Labs campus. MURRAY HILL, N.J., SAN JOSE, Calif. and VALHALLA, N.Y., Nov. 3, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- In 1954, Bell Labs pioneered the development of solar power technology, creating solar panels able to support the telephone service of American farmers living off the electricity grid. Today, more than 50 years later, Alcatel-Lucent /quotes/comstock/13*!alu/quotes/nls/alu (ALU 3.32, +0.08, +2.47%)...
More...
The Dow Chemical Company (NYSE: DOW) has achieved record supply volumes of DOWTHERM™ A for solar power applications in 2010. To date, Dow has filled fourteen large Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants in Spain and the United States, with a total capacity of more than 700 MW. These plants will provide power for the equivalent of approximately 415,000 homes and save 1.6 million metric tons of CO 2 emissions per year. The United States is set to gain global prominence in the CSP market, with th...
More...
All ISS systems continue to function nominally, except those noted previously or below. Sunday - Crew rest day. Ahead: Week 6 of Increment 25. Today 10 years ago, Soyuz TM-31 launched in Baikonur at 7:52 GMT (3:52am EDT) with Yuri Gidzenko, Sergei Krikalev & William Shepherd, beginning the permanent occupancy of ISS two days later as Expedition 1. TM-31 returned to Earth on May 6, 2001, with Talgat Musabayev, Yuri Baturin & Dennis Tito. At wake-up, FE-2 Skripochka conducted the regular daily ear...
More...
Howie Hawkins is the Green Party’s gubernatorial candidate, running on a platform called the “Green New Deal,” which focuses on stimulating economic recovery and stopping climate change. “The Democrats have abandoned their New Deal legacy, which is what most Democrats hope they are voting for,” Hawkins says. “We want to bring back the demands they are asking for.” Demands like single payer healthcare, fully funded public schools, colleges and universities, progressive income tax re...
More...
today announced the launch of ANSYS 13.0, the newest release of its engineering simulation technology suite designed to optimize product development processes - reducing the time and cost needed to foster product innovations. The advanced technology behind ANSYS 13.0 includes hundreds of new features that make it easier, faster and cheaper for users to bring new products to market, with a high degree of confidence in the ultimate results they will achieve. ANSYS 13.0 delivers new benefits in thr...
More...
The U.S. Interior Department approved yesterday a permit for the world's biggest solar power project that will provide electricity to up to 750,000 homes. The 1,000-megawatt project was proposed by a subsidiary of Solar Millennium and will be located on federal lands near Blythe, Calif. The Blythe plant will use parabolic trough technology to generate solar energy. "The Blythe Solar Power Project is a major milestone in our nation's renewable energy economy and shows that the United States inten...
More...
In a series of experiments, researchers at the Université Paris Diderot, led by physicist Yves Couder, demonstrated that small droplets of liquid can be made to behave like quantum particles. The results indicated that the small droplets were capable of bouncing up and down on a vibrated fluid bath, as they were carried away by waves that they themselves produced. This reminded the science team of the abandoned pilot-wave theory, which was one of the primary attempts of interpreting the emergin...
More...
Autonomous robots may be able to tell us just how bad the melting ice situation is in Antarctica and other hard-to-reach locations. Gavia, a bullet-shaped robot developed by the University of British Columbia, is attempting to do just that. The robot is currently in Antarctica on a mission to explore heretofore uncharted areas of the ocean. The eight foot by two foot robot, which comes decked out with mapping sonar, a digital camera, current meters, and a slew of sensors, is currently in Antarct...
More...
