ecstaticist

If we don’t extint ourselves, we might be able to do some amazing things…

MEDIA ADVISORY: M06-128

NASA Announces Dark Matter Discovery

Astronomers who used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 21, to announce how dark and normal matter have been forced apart in an extraordinarily energetic collision.

Reporters must call Megan Watzke at the Chandra Press Office at: 617- 496-7998 or e-mail: mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu for participation information. Shortly before the start of the briefing, images and graphics about the research will be posted at:

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/1e0657/

Batteries are increasingly being flagged as a huge enviromental problem. Especially as cell phones become disposable items, the leaching of heavy metals and toxins into the environment from batteries is a growing problem.

In what seems to be a miraculous development, researchers at MIT have devised a way to store electricity like water in a sponge. The technique involves the modification of an electronic component called an ultracapacitor, improving it to hold as much electricity in the same form factor as a conventional battery. Not only that, but they can be recharged in an instant, and they last ten years. read more »

I live in Victoria, BC. Americans call this the Pacific Northwest, even though it isn’t particularly north at all from a Canadian perspective. In any case, the area encompasses some very rich fishing and marine life habitat. The beauty of the area is unsurpassed, and people who live here enjoy a very mild climate and relatively clean environment. This is because of a low population compared to other coastal areas in North America, and only about 100 years of serious industrial civilization.

Despite this relative advantage, we can’t control what happens due to global systemic change. This drives home the point that Global Warming affects us all, regardless of the current state of our local environment.

Changes in the global climate are causing profound changes in our local oceans. These changes have a profound impact on sea life. We have seen the growing influx of warmer water predators, and the warming of the ocean overall, which reduces phytoplankton production in general and reduces the food supply. But increasingly wider fluctuations of warm and cold - the hallmark of global warming - are creating a more serious problem. read more »

Vikto Klimov has figured out a way to get more efficiency from solar cells [Solar crystals get 2-for-1 TRN 051904]. This is good news. Our collective ingenuity, when directed at the right problems, is capable of what seems to be an unending supply of insights and breakthroughs. I am very optimistic about the possibility for great innovation in energy research.

Some of the key scientific insights of the last few decades have emerged not from the “bigger is better” approach, which seemed to prevail for the first half of the twentieth century. It seems we are now going to move ahead by getting smaller and smaller. Modern communications devices; computing technologies; genetics; quantum research; new energy technologies - they all seem to be succeeding by getting smaller.

Think of the engineering and manufacturing achievements of the microprocessor. Billions of transistors on wafer of silicon. And yet, we are still not approaching the scale of the most amazing aspects of the physical universe, such as the human brain. We can get smaller yet, and beyond that there is the quantum universe with different laws and different opportunities.

Human’s have become too big for this planet. We must become smaller or perish. The way to do that is to achieve greater and greater efficiencies that reduce our footprint. One way to reduce footprint and think smaller is to democratize power production and consumption.

Right now global power production is dominated by big power production and centralized distribution companies. This needs to change so that each individual has a way to contribute to power production by implementing local technology solutions that offset or eliminate the need for power consumption from a central source. Efficient technologies like Klimov’s bring that ideal closer.