Energy Daily Oct 10, 2015: Canadian firm opens facility to pull carbon from air; Dirt-cheap catalyst may lower fuel costs for hydrogen-powered cars...

October 10, 2015

Canadian firm opens facility to pull carbon from air Squamish, Canada (AFP) Oct 10, 2015 - A company with global plans to pull carbon from thin air to make fuel, while tackling climate change, opened a pilot plant Friday in this remote western Canadian community. Carbon Engineering, backed by Bill Gates and other investors, unveiled a test facility able to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using giant fans. That carbon goes through a series of chemical processes and e ... more

Dirt-cheap catalyst may lower fuel costs for hydrogen-powered cars Albuquerque NM (SPX) Oct 08, 2015 - Sandia National Laboratories researchers seeking to make hydrogen a less expensive fuel for cars have upgraded a catalyst nearly as cheap as dirt - molybdenum disulfide, "molly" for short - to stand in for platinum, a rare element with the moonlike price of $1,500 a gram. Sandia-induced changes elevate the plentiful, 37-cents-a-gram molly from being a welterweight outsider in the energy-catalyst ... more

Researchers create inside-out plants to watch how cellulose forms Vancouver, Canada (SPX) Oct 09, 2015 - Researchers have been able to watch the interior cells of a plant synthesize cellulose for the first time by tricking the cells into growing on the plant's surface. "The bulk of the world's cellulose is produced within the thickened secondary cell walls of tissues hidden inside the plant body," says University of British Columbia Botany PhD candidate Yoichiro Watanabe, lead author of the p ... more

Disney uses augmented reality to turn coloring books into 3-D experience Los Angeles CA (SPX) Oct 07, 2015 - A coloring book and a box of crayons may give kids an early opportunity for creative expression but, next to TV and video games, coloring can sometimes seem unexciting. A coloring book app devised by Disney Research, however, can cause characters to leap from the page in 3-D glory with the help of augmented reality. A child colors a character, such as an elephant, on the book page normally ... more

Could candle soot power electric vehicles Amsterdam, Netherlands (SPX) Oct 08, 2015 - Burning a candle could be all it takes to make an inexpensive but powerful electric car battery, according to new research published in Electrochimica Acta. The research reveals that candle soot could be used to power the kind of lithium ion battery used in plug-in hybrid electric cars. The authors of the study, from the Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, India, say their discove ... more

Adwen and IWES sign agreement for the testing of 8MW turbine Paris, France (SPX) Oct 08, 2015 - Adwen and Fraunhofer IWES have signed an agreement to test the drivetrain for Adwen's next generation turbine of 8MW rated power, the largest offshore turbine on the market. Under the terms of the agreement, the 8MW drive train will be tested in IWES's new Dynalab (Dynamic Nacelle Testing Laboratory) site, a unique test stand located in Bremerhaven, Germany, which is to be inaugurated on O ... more

Back to the future: Science fiction turns science fact Vienna, Austria (SPX) Oct 08, 2015 - Flying cars, hoverboards and video chat - a very futuristic vision for the year 2015 was presented in the movie "Back to the Future Part II", released in 1989. Now, shortly before "Back to the Future Day" on October 21st, 2015, it is time to check whether reality has indeed kept up with the daring predictions of the 80s. One of the technological innovations presented in this film was a hug ... more

Superconductivity trained to promote magnetization Moscow, Russia (SPX) Oct 07, 2015 - Superconductivity, which is almost incompatible with magneticfield, under certain conditions is able to promote magnetization. Russian scientist Natalya Pugach from the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Lomonosov Moscow State University discovered this yet to be explained effect with her British colleagues, whose theory group headed by Professor Matthias Eschrig. They suggest that t ... more

DOE selects UC Berkeley to lead US-China energy and water consortium Berkeley CA (SPX) Oct 08, 2015 - The University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with UC Irvine and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was awarded a five-year, multi-million dollar international research consortium that tackles water-related aspects of energy production and use. Three additional UC campuses - UC Davis, UC Merced and UCLA - and Massachusetts-based Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI)-US are also part ... more

More students earning statistics degrees - but not enough Alexandria VA (SPX) Oct 07, 2015 - Statistics is one of the fastest-growing degrees in the U.S., but the growth may not be enough to satisfy the high demand for statisticians in technology, consumer products, health care, government, manufacturing and other areas of the economy, an analysis conducted by the American Statistical Association (ASA) finds. Data recently released by the National Center for Education Statistics s ... more

Crucial hurdle overcome in quantum computing Sydney, Australia (SPX) Oct 07, 2015 - The significant advance, by a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney appears in the international journal Nature. "What we have is a game changer," said team leader Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW. "We've demonstrated a two-qubit logic gate - the central building block of a quantum computer - and, si ... more

An accessible approach to making a mini-brain Providence RI (SPX) Oct 07, 2015 - If you need a working miniature brain - say for drug testing, to test neural tissue transplants, or to experiment with how stem cells work - a new paper describes how to build one with what the Brown University authors say is relative ease and low expense. The little balls of brain aren't performing any cogitation, but they produce electrical signals and form their own neural connections - synap ... more

Faster design - better catalysts Munich, Germany (SPX) Oct 09, 2015 - While the cleaning of car exhausts is among the best known applications of catalytic processes, it is only the tip of the iceberg. Practically the entire chemical industry relies on catalytic reactions. Therefore, catalyst design plays a key role in improving these processes. An international team of scientists has now developed a concept, that elegantly correlates geometric and adsorption prope ... more

New design rule brings nature-inspired nanostructures one step closer Berkeley CA (SPX) Oct 08, 2015 - Scientists aspire to build nanostructures that mimic the complexity and function of nature's proteins, but are made of durable and synthetic materials. These microscopic widgets could be customized into incredibly sensitive chemical detectors or long-lasting catalysts, to name a few possible applications. But as with any craft that requires extreme precision, researchers must first learn h ... more

Molecular nanoribbons as electronic highways Umea, Sweden (SPX) Oct 07, 2015 - Physicists at Umea University have, together with researchers at UC Berkeley, USA, developed a method to synthesise a unique and novel type of material which resembles a graphene nanoribbon but in molecular form. This material could be important for the further development of organic solar cells. The results have been published in the scientific journal ACS Nano. The nanoribbons are compri ... more

Russia's Rosatom Hopes Cooperation With Turkey Unaffected by Politics Moscow (Sputnik) Oct 09, 2015 - Russia's Rosatom state nuclear corporation said Thursday it hoped that its cooperation with Turkey would develop despite political circumstances. According to the company's press service statement, Rosatom highly values the bilateral relations with Turkey, and expresses its sincere hope that these relations will continue developing accordingly to the plans the Russian and Turkish authoriti ... more

A quantum simulator of impossible physics Basque Country, Spain (SPX) Oct 09, 2015 - The researchers in the two groups have succeeded in getting a trapped atom to imitate behaviours that contradict its own fundamental laws, thus taking elements of science fiction to the microscopic world. "We have managed to get an atom to act as if it were infringing the nature of atomic systems, in other words, quantum physics and the theory of relativity. It is just like what happens in ... more

Psychic robot will know what you really meant to do Chicago IL (SPX) Oct 08, 2015 - What if software could steer a car back on track if the driver swerves on ice? Or guide a prosthesis to help a shaky stroke patient smoothly lift a cup? Bioengineers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have developed a mathematical algorithm that can "see" your intention while performing an ordinary action like reaching for a cup or driving straight up a road - even if the action is interru ... more

More-flexible machine learning Boston MA (SPX) Oct 07, 2015 - Machine learning, which is the basis for most commercial artificial-intelligence systems, is intrinsically probabilistic. An object-recognition algorithm asked to classify a particular image, for instance, might conclude that it has a 60 percent chance of depicting a dog, but a 30 percent chance of depicting a cat. At the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in Decemb ... more

Bio-inspired robotic finger looks, feels and works like the real thing Boca Raton FL (SPX) Oct 09, 2015 - Most robotic parts used today are rigid, have a limited range of motion and don't really look lifelike. Inspired by both nature and biology, a scientist from Florida Atlantic University has designed a novel robotic finger that looks and feels like the real thing. In an article recently published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, Erik Engeberg, Ph.D., assistant professor in the ... more