Graham Hawkes explains how a Deep Flight sub can ‘fly’ underwater

One thing was very clear at the recent Future of Electric Vehicles conference in San Jose – innovative design and development of electric vehicles is not restricted to the automotive sector. The case-in-point is the Deep Flight Super Falcon submersible. The two-occupant underwater vehicle was designed and manufactured by Hawkes Ocean Technologies, and is one of only two in the world. Like most of the other Hawkes vehicles, the Super Hawk is more like an underwater airplane than a submarine, soaring through the water column instead of rising and sinking. Company founder and Chief Technical Officer Graham Hawkes was a presenter at the conference, and showed us just how his submarine is able to “fly” underwater. Read More

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha www.sciencearticlesonline.com

Atlantis Resources Corporation is one of the world’s leading suppliers of tidal power solutions. Atlantis recently unveiled the world’s largest single axis tidal power turbine at the European Marine Energy Centre in Scotland, United Kingdom. Over 400 additional turbines in negotiation with utilities and governments in the United Kingdom, India and Korea. 49% owned by Morgan Stanley, and Statkraft (State owned Norwegian Utility – Europe’s largest generator of renewable energy) is also a shareholder. Click here to view their feature on the BBC UK

seemingly kooky concepts

Michael Liedtke October 13, 2010 – 10:05AM

In its self-proclaimed drive to make the world a better place, Google has immersed itself in far more than internet search and online ads. But driverless cars and a wind energy farm in the Atlantic Ocean?

It may not always be immediately apparent to frustrated investors – they wish management would be more frugal and focus more on the stock price – but there’s usually some calculated logic underlying Google’s unconventional strategy.

Google’s brain trust – founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with CEO Eric Schmidt – clearly think differently than most corporate leaders, and may eventually encourage more companies to take risks that might not pay off for years, if ever.

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Google has invested $US1.05 million into this scheme – a form of alternative transportation that places people in plastic tubes so that they can cycle to their destination whilst hung upside down.

The time is ripe for long-term thinking, with memories still fresh of the financial meltdown – a byproduct of Wall Street’s demands for companies to deliver ever-higher profits every three months and meet earnings targets set by analysts.

“Everywhere you look in this country, it seems that we are suffering from the consequences of too much short-term thinking,” said longtime Silicon Valley forecaster Paul Saffo, managing director of foresight for Discern Analytics.

“Google doesn’t have this disease,” he said. “It is one of the few lone bright spots we have in that regard.”

Google’s founders have told investors in the past that the company would be willing to finance projects with just a 10 per cent chance of yielding a return of at least $US1 billion. Photo: Frank Maiorana

Even so, it might be difficult to fathom how Google can justify paying for the development of robotic technology that has driven cars thousands of miles on California roads without a major accident and committing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to help build a wind farm hundreds of miles from the Eastern Seaboard.

With a little imagination, it’s easier to see how Google might benefit. For instance, Saffo surmises that the driverless technology eventually could be implanted into a fleet of vehicles used for car sharing.

Google then could use a camera to take new pictures of streets and highways that appear in its online maps, another example of a service that once seemed like a diversion from its internet search engine but is now an indispensable tool that helps the company sell advertising.

The company announced this week it would buy a 37.5 per cent stake in the Atlantic Ocean wind energy project, investing in a network of deepwater transmission lines to bring power from still-to-be-built offshore wind farms.

That makes more sense when you realise Google already sucks up massive amounts of energy from the power grid and expects to consume even more in the next decade as it opens more datacentres filled with row upon row of computers to run its internet services.

And if the value of renewable energy rises, as many analysts expect, Google eventually could even sell its stake for a tidy profit.

Or it could turn out to be a total bust, something Page and Brin warned potential investors could happen in April 2004 when they laid out their iconoclastic approach to business before Google sold its stock in an initial public offering.

“Our long-term focus may simply be the wrong business strategy,” they warned. “Competitors may be rewarded for short-term tactics and grow stronger as a result. As potential investors, you should consider the risks around our long-term focus.”

The Google founders also told investors that the company would be willing to finance projects with just a 10 per cent chance of yielding a return of at least $US1 billion – bets that seem “very speculative or even strange”.

Google’s transparency about its unorthodox ways may be one reason the company hasn’t been stung yet by an outcry from its shareholders, although most analysts agree the stock price probably would be higher if management were to use some of the company’s $US30 billion in cash to pay a quarterly dividend or buy back shares.

Google stock closed at $US541.39 on Tuesday US time, down 13 per cent for the year and far off its all-time high of nearly $US750 three years ago.

The company’s uninterrupted streak of prosperity since its August 2004 IPO hasn’t hurt, either.

Google can afford to gamble more frequently than most companies because it dominates the internet’s most lucrative market, the ads running alongside search results. And Google has seized on that opportunity in a manner that would make Gordon Gekko proud, beating back its competitors to boost its annual revenue from just $US86 million in 2001 to nearly $US30 billion now.

The company, based in Mountain View, California, began branching out beyond search well before it went public.

It set up an online news section that compiles the day’s top stories in 2002. Just a few months before its August 2004 IPO, Google unveiled a free email service that boasted an unprecedented – and still expanding – amount of space per inbox.

In 2004, it bought an obscure digital mapping service called Keyhole that eventually turned Google into the place to go for directions. Even rival CEOs, such as Yahoo’s Carol Bartz, say it’s the best around.

More recently, Google created a free mobile operating system called Android that now powers millions of smart phones. This month, it’s rolling out technology with Sony that weds traditional television viewing with web surfing.

Google’s expansion into mobile phones and television never seemed like quantum leaps for the company because they are little more than attempts to transplant its advertising model onto other internet-connected screens that attract a lot of eyeballs.

The company also has poured money into building more widely available and faster ways for people to connect to the internet, reasoning that it will make money if more web surfers have the opportunity to use its ubiquitous services.

Schmidt, Google’s CEO, frequently tries to defuse the perception that the company is frivolous. He contends the company’s formula is disciplined: 70 per cent of its resources go to the main search business, 20 per cent to other projects connected to search, and 10 per cent to initiatives that have nothing to do with search.

It’s difficult to argue with the formula so far, said Colin Gillis of the stock market research firm BGC Financial.

“As an analyst, I do hammer them on their [rising] expenses and some of their questionable investments,” he said. “But as a user of all their products, I love them. And from a purely personal perspective, I appreciate that Google is trying to use technology to solve the world’s problems.”

Received & published by Henry Sapiecha

To Fuel Cars And Trucks

Science (July 30, 2009) — Call it a “shrimp cocktail” for your fuel tank. Scientists in China are reporting development of a catalyst made from shrimp shells that could transform production of biodiesel fuel into a faster, less expensive, and more environmentally friendly process.

Xinsheng Zheng and colleagues note that an energy-hungry world, concerned about global warming, increasingly puts its future fuel hopes on renewable fuels like biodiesel. Today’s biodiesel production processes, however, require catalysts to speed up the chemical reactions that transform soybean, canola, and other plant oils into diesel fuel. Traditional catalysts cannot be reused and must be neutralized with large amounts of water — another increasingly scarce resource — leaving behind large amounts of polluted wastewater.

The researchers describe development of a new catalyst produced from shrimp shells. In laboratory tests, the shrimp shell catalysts converted canola oil to biodiesel (89 percent conversion in three hours) faster and more efficiently than some conventional catalysts. The new catalysts also can be reused and the process minimizes waste production and pollution, the scientists note.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

YOU CAN DRIVE THIS SHARK
Jumping the shark: the Innespace Seabreacher X

If you saw this thing on your neighbor’s trailer, you’d laugh at him. “What sort of pretentious man-child buys a boat shaped like a shark,” you’d scoff into your mugaccino, secure in the knowledge that you’d never shell out for something so ridiculous. But you might change your tune if you caught him down at the lake and watched him pulling 50mph (80km/h) barrel rolls, then diving under the surface and launching the thing 12-feet (3.6m) into the air like some sort of evil mechanical dolphin. The Seabreacher X is preposterous in theory, but in practice it’s an adrenaline machine that can do things pretty much no other watercraft can – take a look at the video after the jump. Read More

Feasible Within 15 Years,

Researchers Predict

Science (Aug. 13, 2010) — Within 10 to 15 years, it will be technically possible to produce sustainable and economically viable biodiesel from micro-algae on a large scale. Technological innovations during this period should extend the scale of production by a factor of three, while at the same time reducing production costs by 90%. Two researchers from Wageningen UR (University & Research Centre) believe this to be possible.

In their article in Science (published 13 August), they provide a detailed explanation of the route that needs to be taken.

By producing microscopically small algae in bulk in large-scale installations, Europe should be able to become independent of fossil fuels in a sustainable way. Algae could even contribute to the sustainable production of food. To cultivate algae on a large scale, fertilisers (nitrogen and phosphates) could be extracted from manure surpluses and wastewater, with CO₂ coming from industrial residues. The energy source for algae is sunlight. Biodiesel and an almost unlimited quantity of protein and oxygen are the sustainable products of this process. The amount of fresh water consumed in algal cultivation is minimal because seawater can be used.

In a nutshell, that is the idea put forward by Professor René Wijffels and Dr Maria Barbosa of Wageningen UR in their perspective article An Outlook on Microalgal Biofuels in Science.

Sunlight and wastewater

Both authors demonstrate in their article that, according to calculations on energy consumption in transport in Europe, almost 0.4 billion m³ biodiesel would be needed to replace all transport fuels. The cultivation of micro-algae requires 9.25 million hectares of land — equal to the surface area of Portugal — assuming a yield of 40,000 litres of biodiesel per hectare, to supply the European market.

Algae produce the maximum quantity of oily substances when growing under stress. Such conditions can for instance be induced by a shortage of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphate.

Algae are much more efficient at converting sunlight and fertilisers into usable oily substances than agricultural crops such as oilseed rape. It is not even necessary to have full sunshine for algal cultivation, which is why it is possible to design reactors that look like vertical plates, on to which the light shines from one side. In this way, it is possible to produce 20-80,000 litres of oil per hectare. In comparison, one hectare of oilseed rape or oil palm yields only 1500 or 6000 litres, respectively.

Financial aspects

The 5000 tonnes of algae (dry matter) now produced annually in the whole world has a value of €250/kg. The price is so high because algae can make rare (and therefore expensive) substances like carotenoids and omega 3 fatty acids that are converted into high-quality products such as food supplements. That is extremely expensive when compared with the palm oil (cost price €0.50 /kg) used as a fuel. However, palm oil and other fuel crops are controversial. To investigate whether the use of algae as biofuels is feasible, a feasibility study was carried out on scale enhancement in algal cultivation. This showed that presently the cost price could be reduced to €4/kg. By making use of residues such as wastewater and CO₂ from exhaust gases, by improving the technology and by shifting production to sunnier countries, it would even be possible to reduce the price to one-tenth of that level, namely, €0.40 /kg.

Even then, however, the production of bioenergy from algae would not be financially viable. To achieve that goal, the whole algal biomass would have to be utilised. This consists of roughly 50% oil (40 cents/kg, thus), 40% proteins (yielding 120 cents/kg) and 10% sugars (100 cents/kg). This causes the value to rise to €1.65/kg which is enough to run production on a large scale.

Proteins

Algal proteins offer interesting possibilities. If all transport fuels were to be replaced by algal oil on a European scale, 0.3 billion tonnes of protein would become available as well. That is 40 times more than the amount of protein in the soya that Europe imports each year. Thus, algae would allow us to produce food and feed proteins as well as sufficient quantities of biofuel.

In order to manufacture biofuels from agricultural crops such as oilseed rape, 10,000 litres of fresh water are required to produce each litre of fuel. This is an incredibly large volume. By cultivating algae in seawater, it is possible to achieve the same result with just 1.5 litres of fresh water/kg of product.

With the aid of sunlight, algal growth requires 1.3 billion tonnes of CO₂ (Europe produces 4 billion tonnes/year, mainly from fossil fuels) and 25 million tonnes of nitrogen (wastewater and fertilisers contain 8 million). In other words, algal cultivation would not normally compete with food production.

A sustainable pilot-study facility AlgaePARC (Algae Production and Research Centre) will soon be starting up in Wageningen. Here it will be possible to study the scaling up of algal production and to compare various technologies, taking into account energy costs for building, production and logistics during the production of biofuels from algae.

Algae need to be interesting as a food source for fish and shellfish farming within five years. Five years after that, it should be possible to achieve applications such as providing protein sources in foods as well as basic chemicals for the manufacturing industries. Then, in 10-15 years’ time, biofuels should be available.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

A team of MIT researchers has managed to mimic the photosynthetic process in plants by engineering M13, a simple and harmless virus, to help splitting water into its two atomic components – hydrogen and oxygen – using sunlight. The researchers hope this is the first step toward using sunlight to create hydrogen reserves that could then be used to generate electricity or even produce liquid fuels for transportation.

Other researchers had already produced systems that use electricity to split water molecules but, as the team explained in a Paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the difference is that here the system is based on biology, using sunlight to power the reaction directly rather than by using electricity.

The approach that proved the best was to mimic the processes that take place in plants, rather than simply borrowing their components and re-adapt them like others had done before. In plants, chlorophyll absorbs sunlight while catalysts promote the water-splitting reaction. The team decided to engineer a bacterial virus called M13 so that it became wire-like and could very efficiently split the oxygen from water molecules.

The virus acts as the chlorophyl by capturing light, then transfers the energy down its length, acting like a wire. The wire-like structure of the viruses also allows the light-absorbing pigments and catalysts to line up with the right spacing to trigger the water-splitting reaction, drastically improving the system’s efficiency.

But according to Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics Thomas Mallouk, who was not part of the research team, there are still problems to be tackle before artificial photosynthetic systems such as this could be useful for practical energy conversion. To be cost-competitive with other approaches to solar power, the system would need to be at least 10 times more efficient than natural photosynthesis, be able to repeat the reaction almost indefinitely, and be built from cheaper materials. While achieving these objectives will take time, this first apparatus from MIT is undoubtedly still a big step toward solving the problem.

In the current system, the hydrogen atoms from the water get split into their component protons and electrons, but a second part of the system, which the team hopes to develop within the next two years, would combine these back into hydrogen atoms and molecules so that hydrogen could be both produced and stored.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha