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Regional Storage Facilities Could Handle Nuclear Waste
"My hope is that over time, the administration will rethink its priorities in this area," says Richard Lester, professor of nuclear engineering and director of the Industrial Performance Center. In a recent article published in Issues in Science and Technology, Lester argued that the Bush administration's plan, known as GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership), is not the best way to encourage further development of nuclear energy. GNEP, which President Bush announced earlier this year, is meant to stimulate the nuclear industry by coming up with better ways to manage spent nuclear fuel. The plan focuses on reprocessing spent fuel, but Lester believes the administration should focus on finding regional storage facilities for the nuclear waste. Right now, uncertainty over how to deal with spent fuel, which remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, is one of the major obstacles to the construction of new plants. Thousands of spent fuel rods are now stored in secure pools or concrete casks located near nuclear plants, which is not considered a long-term solution......... Posted by: Kevin Permalink Source A Different Kind of Buff
Dave Moloney spotted these metal buff pieces on the lifts in The Meridian Hotel in Nice......... Posted by: Tom Permalink Source How Light Pushes Atoms
Einstein proposed that a light wave is made of photons that carry discrete packets of energy. "When a photon hits an atom, the atom recoils with a speed that is determined by the photon's momentum, similar to two balls colliding on a billiard table," Gibble explains. Physicists often think of a focused laser beam as the intense intersection of two or more infinitely wide light waves, and Gibble's discovery provides an important new understanding of what happens to an atom that is pummeled by photons coming from the different directions of these multiple intersecting light waves. "You might believe that an atom would absorb a photon randomly from only one of the beams, but this paper shows that the atom feels the effect of the photons from all of the beams simultaneously and, surprisingly, that it recoils with a speed that is less than it would get from the momentum of any one of the infinitely wide photons"......... Posted by: Kevin Permalink Source Advanced Imaging Facility And Hydrogen Fuel Cells
With visualization powers 10 times better than those achieved previously, scientists can "see" water production and removal in fuel cells under a range of simulated operating conditions, from arctic cold to desert heat. "This as-it-happens, inside view is essential because fuel-cell performance depends on a delicate balance," explains NIST physicist Muhammad Arif, who leads the NIST team that developed the instrument. "Too little--or too much--water can shut it down. "Better water management is fundamental to meeting targets for fuel cell performance, reliability and durability. Reaching these targets, in turn, is integral to efforts to replace petroleum with hydrogen to power cars and trucks by 2020--the goal of President Bush's Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. In fuel cells, which actually are stacks of battery-like devices, water is the by-product of the chemical process that uses electrons stripped from hydrogen molecules to generate electricity. With the newly commissioned Neutron Imaging Facility, water quantities smaller than 1 microgram (millionth of a gram) are revealed, and details as small as 0.02 millimeter can be discerned in images. Even better spatial resolution is expected......... Posted by: Kevin Permalink Source Innovative Generator For Energy Savings
MIT alumnus Eric Guyer, CEO of Climate Energy, describes his company's micro-combined heat and power unit at an MIT Energy Club event. Photo / Dan Bersak
Guyer described Climate Energy's micro-combined heat and power unit (micro-CHP) to the standing-room-only crowd gathered in the Tang Center as "hopefully, the next big thing in energy". Guyer's talk was part of the Energy Club's lecture and discussion series, sponsored by the Graduate Student Council. These biweekly events occur year-round and feature lecturers or student-led discussions on important energy topics. The idea for combined heat and power (CHP) is nothing new, Guyer said. "Thomas Edison's first power plant was combined," he explained. Still, the idea of generating both heat and energy in a way that is not only affordable but also quiet enough for use in a private home is a more recent development. "On an industrial scale, CHP is used all the time," Guyer said. A natural gas-powered micro-CHP unit has the potential to save the consumer money by using the same fuel they buy anyway to generate both heat and electricity with greater efficiency. The micro-CHP systems are driven by heat-demand, delivering electricity as the byproduct. "This is all about providing thermal comfort to homeowners," Guyer said......... Posted by: Kevin Permalink Source Deformation Of Nanoscale Materials
Researchers have long assumed that a crystal needs to be perfect to sustain stress at its theoretical limit. Beyond this point dislocations in the crystal lattice occur, and the crystal undergoes a nonreversible change of shape, or plastic deformation. Now a team from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Purdue University, and Hysitron Incorporated in Minneapolis has observed that things don't necessarily happen this way. Using special instrumentation with the JEOL 3010 In Situ Transmission Electron Microscope at the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM), the scientists were able to correlate high-resolution load-displacement measurements with individual video frames, showing how nanoscale volumes of aluminum deform under stress from a diamond "nanoindenter." "Eventhough it's been assumed that you need a perfect volume of material to reach the ideal strength, our results show this is not always true," says Andrew Minor of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, who led the research team. "The situation is more complex. We observed that plenty of defects accumulate before the point that would commonly be interpreted as the initial yield point."........ Posted by: Kevin Permalink Source OneWebDay: September 22, 2006
Add the OneWebDay Button to your site and get together with friends in your town to plan an outdoor celebration with an online component that people elsewhere on the Web can appreciate. Put a link on the OneWebDay wiki In New York's Bryant Park, San Francisco's Union Square, in London with the Lord Mayor, near City Hall in Austin, in downtown Chicago, in downtown Portland, Maine, all over Canada, and in Naples (Italy), and Canberra (Australia), OneWebDay will be celebrated for the first time on Sept. 22 - and those are just the celebrations we know about. The goal of OneWebDay is to make the Web, and our individual connection to it, visible - so that we don't take it for granted. We make progress when we make things visible......... Posted by: Kevin Permalink Source Color 3D Prints
With the help of some friends at CADD Edge we were able to get a color 3D print of our favorite World of Warcraft gnome. All we had to do was export our cleaned up and textured models as VRML files, which they fed right into their ZCorp printer. If you are interested in doing the same with your video game avatars, I suggest contacting Anvil Prototypes. They are interested in helping people who want to pay to have their characters printed (see their sweet flyer), and took this funny photo of a color-printed gnome in the woods: (is it just me, or are the monochrome prints from Eyebeam's Dimension so much less fulfilling now?)......... Posted by: Kevin Permalink Source Kodak pianos? Buick aspirin?
"Eventhough the FTDA does not require consumer confusion to establish harm from dilution, it appears that the presence of confusion magnifies the amount of harm likely to be incurred by the first user of the brand name (and provides a greater benefit to be enjoyed by the second use of the brand)," write Maureen Morrin (Rutgers University), Jonathan Lee (California State University Long Beach), and Greg M. Allenby (Ohio State University). The scientists measured trademark dilution by looking at brand-exclusive recall, that is, the proportion of customers who only think of one brand's products when asked about the brand name in question. The scientists observed that a single exposure to another, similar logo reduces brand-exclusive recall by one-third, on average. "The results also indicate a factor not typically considered by the courts, the consumer's relative knowledge about the two product categories involved, also may have an impact on retrieval," add the authors. "When consumers are confused about the sources of two products, or when they believe the two logos are similar in appearance, the first user's category is less likely to be recalled, eventhough the second user's category is more likely to be recalled"......... Posted by: Tom Permalink Source new mobile robot that balances and moves on ball
Ralph Hollis and Ballbot
Ballbot's creator, Robotics Research Professor Ralph Hollis, says the robot represents a new paradigm in mobile robotics. What began as a concept in his home workshop has been funded for the last two years with grants from the National Science Foundation. Hollis is working to prove that dynamically stable robots like Ballbot can outperform their static counterparts. Traditional, statically stable mobile robots have three or more wheels for support, but their bases are generally too wide to move easily among people and furniture. They can also tip over if they move too fast or operate on a slope. "We wanted to create a robot that can maneuver easily and is tall enough to look you in the eye," Hollis said. "Ballbot is tall and skinny, with a much higher center of gravity than traditional wheeled robots. Because it is omnidirectional, it can move easily in any direction without having to turn first"......... Posted by: Kevin Permalink Source |
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