Oil-rich Abu Dhabi is building a green metropolis. Should the rest of the world care?
A Smart Grid for Intelligent Energy Use
GE Energy Unveils WindINERTIA, Latest Technology Designed To Enhance Grid Integration Capabilities of Wind Turbines
MIT Will Publish All Faculty Articles Free In Online Repository
Direct Biological Conversion of Electrical Current into Methane by Electromethanogenesis
How the E. Stadium Bridge Gets Monitored Fifth beam holding steady at 7/8 inch; eighth beam now stained
Enhancing Education.
Fujitsu Begins On-Line Consumer Sales of World’s First Color E-Paper Mobile Terminal FLEPia
Making the Smallest, Most Perfect Polymer Films
Charging Ahead: The Case for Plug-In Hybrid Cars
Microsoft TechFest 2009
The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2009
Oil-rich Abu Dhabi is building a green metropolis. Should the rest of the world care?
By Kevin Bullis "The construction is the start of a vast experiment, an attempt to create the world's first car-free, zero-carbon-dioxide-emissions, zero-waste city. Due to be completed in 2016, the city is the centerpiece of the Masdar Initiative, a $15 billion investment by the government of Abu Dhabi, which is part of the United Arab Emirates. The new development, being built on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi city, will run almost entirely on energy from the sun and will use just 20 percent as much power as a conventional city of similar size. Garbage will be sorted and recycled or used for compost; sewage will be processed into fuel. Concrete columns will lift the city seven meters off the ground, creating space underneath for a network of automated electric transports that will replace cars. Planners predict that the development will attract 1,500 clean-tech businesses, ranging from large international corporations to startups, and--eventually--some 50,000 residents."
Read about it at http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22121/?nlid=1809
A Smart Grid for Intelligent Energy Use
"The Smart Grid involves the use of communications and computing technology to transmit and distribute energy more efficiently. This video describes the smart grid and how it will reduce our carbon footprint through energy efficiency and the integration of renewable sources of energy. Featuring interviews recorded at the IEEE Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles: Accelerating Innovation Conference (2007) and the IEEE Energy 2030 Conference (2008). "
Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrcqA_cqRD8&feature=related
GE Energy Unveils WindINERTIA, Latest Technology Designed To Enhance Grid Integration Capabilities of Wind Turbines
"GE Energy introduces WindINERTIA, the latest in a series of continuing technology advancements to help move the wind industry forward. WindINERTIA joins the GE suite of grid integration products designed to give wind turbines the capability to meet transmission reliability standards similar to those demanded of thermal generators. Grid integration of wind turbines is critical to the performance of a wind installation. GE’s WindINERTIA feature allows wind turbines to provide an inertial response for large, short-duration frequency deviations through a control system upgrade, to enhance grid reliability and operation. By utilizing the mechanical inertia of the turbine rotor, GE’s WindINERTIA control enables an operating turbine to increase its power output by 5-10% of its rated turbine power, over a wide range of wind speeds. The duration of the power increase is several seconds and benefits the grid by allowing time for other non-wind power generation assets to increase power production during large underfrequency events. "
Read more at http://www.ge-energy.com/about/press/en/2009_press/031709b.htm
MIT Will Publish All Faculty Articles Free In Online Repository
By Natasha Plotkin "Faculty voted unanimously this week to approve a resolution that allows MIT to freely and publicly distribute research articles they write. MIT plans to create a repository to make these articles available online. The resolution, effective immediately after it was passed on Wednesday, makes MIT the first university to commit to making its faculty’s research papers publicly available. Though the School of Education at Stanford and several departments at Harvard have already adopted these policies, MIT is the first entire university to make this pledge. "
Read the details at http://tech.mit.edu/V129/N14/open_access.html
Direct Biological Conversion of Electrical Current into Methane by Electromethanogenesis
Shaoan Cheng, Defeng Xing, Douglas F. Call and Bruce E. Logan "New sustainable methods are needed to produce renewable energy carriers that can be stored and used for transportation, heating, or chemical production. Here we demonstrate that methane can directly be produced using a biocathode containing methanogens in electrochemical systems (abiotic anode) or microbial electrolysis cells (MECs; biotic anode) by a process called electromethanogenesis. At a set potential of less than −0.7 V (vs Ag/AgCl), carbon dioxide was reduced to methane using a two-chamber electrochemical reactor containing an abiotic anode, a biocathode, and no precious metal catalysts. At −1.0 V, the current capture efficiency was 96%. Electrochemical measurements made using linear sweep voltammetry showed that the biocathode substantially increased current densities compared to a plain carbon cathode where only small amounts of hydrogen gas could be produced. Both increased current densities and very small hydrogen production rates by a plain cathode therefore support a mechanism of methane production directly from current and not from hydrogen gas. The biocathode was dominated by a single Archaeon, Methanobacterium palustre. When a current was generated by an exoelectrogenic biofilm on the anode growing on acetate in a single-chamber MEC, methane was produced at an overall energy efficiency of 80% (electrical energy and substrate heat of combustion). These results show that electromethanogenesis can be used to convert electrical current produced from renewable energy sources (such as wind, solar, or biomass) into a biofuel (methane) as well as serving as a method for the capture of carbon dioxide. "
Read it at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es803531g
How the E. Stadium Bridge Gets Monitored Fifth beam holding steady at 7/8 inch; eighth beam now stained
By Dave Askins "Since late February, the East Stadium Boulevard bridge over State Street has funneled vehicles across the span in just two of the available four lanes. The lane reduction is a strategy to protect the fifth – counting from the southern edge of the bridge – of the 16 beams in the structure. That fifth beam is “sagging” 7/8 of an inch lower than other beams in the bridge. So traffic is currently restricted to the northern lanes. ... The weekly monitoring entails regulating traffic under the bridge to allow for a truck with an elevated platform to park and lift the inspectors right up to the underside of the structure. Traffic control was done by a two-man crew, born and bred in Ann Arbor, one wearing a hardhat stickered with a UM winged helmet. They let cars through the one-lane gap on an alternating basis. "
Read and view it at http://annarborchronicle.com/2009/03/26/how-the-e-stadium-bridge-gets-monitored/
Enhancing Education.
Educators who are interested in incorporating new technologies into their classroom experience often wonder where to start. They may want to start by visiting the Enhancing Education site, which is maintained by staff members at the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University. The site is organized a bit like a weblog, as there are different posts organized into subjects that include "Noted", "Solutions", and "Primers". The "Noted" postings highlight interesting technologies that may be of interest to educators, and the "Solutions" entries are composed of a quick "how-to" that addresses a broad range of technologies and approaches to classroom learning. Finally, the "Primers" posts cover the basic elements of a compelling new technology or idea, including incorporating a weblog into the class or peer editing. Visitors can also view the top ten tags on the site, or take a look at the most recent posts. [KMG] Copyright Internet Scout, 1994-2008. Internet Scout (http://scout.wisc.edu/), located in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides information about the Internet to the U.S. research and education community under a grant from the National Science Foundation, number NCR-9712163. The Government has certain rights in this material. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the entire Scout Report provided this paragraph, including the copyright notice, are preserved on all copies.
See it at http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/enhanced/
Fujitsu Begins On-Line Consumer Sales of World’s First Color E-Paper Mobile Terminal FLEPia
" Displays up to 260,000 colors; features Bluetooth and high-speed wireless LAN; thin and lightweight - Tokyo and Kawasaki, Japan, March 18, 2009 – Fujitsu Frontech Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Limited today announced the start of consumer sales in Japan of the world’s first color e-paper mobile terminal, FLEPia, available for purchase from today through Fujitsu Frontech’s online store “FrontechDirect”. Developed by Fujitsu Frontech and Fujitsu Laboratories, FLEPia is the first ever mobile information terminal to feature color electronic paper (color e-paper). In addition to being lightweight and thin, the color e-paper mobile terminal features an easy-to-view 8-inch display screen capable of showing up to 260,000 colors in high-definition, in addition to being equipped with Bluetooth and high-speed wireless LAN. FLEPia is also power-efficient, enabling up to 40 hours of continuous battery operation when fully charged, and does not require power for continuous display of a screen image, consuming power only during re-draw. Featuring significant storage capabilities, when used with a 4GB SD card, the color e-paper terminal can store the equivalent of 5,000 conventional paper-based books when each book is 300 pages long at 600KB per book, thus being environmentally friendly. "
Read about it (but you can't read it yet) at http://www.frontech.fujitsu.com/en/release/20090318.html
Making the Smallest, Most Perfect Polymer Films
"Russell, a leading expert on polymer behavior and director of the UMass Amherst Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, with colleagues there and at the University of California Berkeley, have developed a faster, more efficient way to produce defect-free thin polymer films with the smallest domains ever achieved and ordered in the densest way possible for any given size—to dramatically improve storage density. The new technique for guiding self-assembly of block copolymers—two chemically dissimilar polymers joined together—should not only increase data storage volume, but will save months in manufacturing and open up vistas for entirely new applications, say Russell and Ting Xu, leader of the UC Berkeley team. The density achievable with the technology they’ve developed could allow the contents of 250 DVDs to fit on a surface the size of a quarter, for example, says Xu. Their work was supported by the Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Science, the National Science Foundation-funded Materials Research and Engineering Center at UMass Amherst and the university’s Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing. In seeking to design a new way to guide the self-assembly of layered block copolymers, Russell and Xu recall a specific conversation one day when they saw in a flash of insight that atomic order could be translated to larger scales by using surface ridges of a base crystal to guide the assembly of a copolymer. It’s like using the corrugations in cardboard to direct how closely-packed marbles will order, Russell explains. "
Read about it at http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/549354/
Charging Ahead: The Case for Plug-In Hybrid Cars
"Featuring interviews recorded at the IEEE Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles: Accelerating Innovation Conference (2007) and the IEEE Energy 2030 Conference (2008). "
Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Flw8hnsFw_w
Microsoft TechFest 2009
"February 24, 2009 TechFest is an annual event that brings researchers from Microsoft Research’s labs around the world to Redmond to share their latest work with Microsoft product teams. Attendees experience some of the freshest, most innovative technologies emerging from Microsoft’s research efforts. The event provides a forum in which product teams and researchers can discuss the novel work occurring in the labs, thereby encouraging effective technology transfer into Microsoft products. "
Read and look at it at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/techfest2009/default.aspx
The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2009
"Each year, Technology Review chooses 10 emerging technologies with the potential to change lives around the world. Some of this year's choices, such as paper-based medical tests and intelligent software that acts as a personal assistant, could reach the market within a year. Others, like biological machines and nanopiezotronics, could take longer but promise fundamental shifts in fields from computing to medicine, communications to manufacturing. The list includes technologies miniature and massive--from fast, cheap, capacious computer memory to batteries that can store enough energy to power a city. All are technologies that we bet will make a huge impact in the years ahead. "
Read more at http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22110/?nlid=1804&a=f