Soccer Ball Generates Electricity

Soccer Ball Generates Electricity

The ball is the brainchild of four girls from Harvard, who wanted to improve the lives of people in parts of the world where electricity is scarce — including African countries where 95% of the population is living with no access to electricity. The World Bank estimates that breathing the fumes created from burning kerosene indoors (the energy source many use there) equals the harmful effects of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

Enough energy can be generated to power a lamp for three hours after playing soccer with this ball for just 15 minutes.

More @ FitPerez.com

Jelly Fish Into Solar Cells?

Jelly Fish Into Solar Cells

While there are a lot easier ways to make solar cells, there’s not as many as bizarre as this one: squishing up jelly fish. Out of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, researchers have discovered a way to use a protein from a common jellyfish to create a solar cell.

The research looks at how green fluorescent protein in this jelly fish, Aequorea victoria, can coax electrons from sunlight. It turns out, the protein, can self-assemble and produce electrons when it’s placed between two layers of aluminum electrodes and exposed to ultraviolet light.

More @ Cleantech News

Soybeans Enzyme Turns Air Into Propane!

Gasoline from Thin Air?

An enzyme found in the roots of soybeans could be the key to cars that run on air.

Vanadium nitrogenase, an enzyme that normally produces ammonia from nitrogen gas, can also convert carbon monoxide (CO), a common industrial byproduct, into propane, the blue-flamed gas found on stoves across America.

While scientists caution the research is still at an early stage, they say that this study could eventually lead to new, environmentally friendly ways to produce fuel -- and eventually gasoline -- from thin air.

"This organism is a very common soil bacteria that is very well understood and has been studied for a long time," said Markus Ribbe, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and a co-author of the new paper that appears in the journal Science.

"But while we were studying it, we realized that the enzyme has some unusual behavior," he added.

(...)

Ribbe and his co-authors isolated one particular enzyme, vanadium nitrogenase, to convert nitrogen into ammonia. Then the California scientists removed the nitrogen and oxygen the enzyme is used to and filled the remaining space with CO.

Without oxygen and nitrogen, the enzyme began to to turn the CO into short chains of carbon two and three atoms long. A three-carbon chain is more commonly referred to as propane....

Discovery News

Should You Blame Your Bed and TV?

Left-Sided Cancer--Should You Blame Your Bed and TV?

Curiously, the cancer rate is 10 percent higher in the left breast than in the right. This left-side bias holds true for both men and women and it also applies to the skin cancer melanoma. Researchers Orjan Hallberg of Hallberg Independent Research in Sweden and Ollie Johansson of The Karolinska Institute in Sweden, writing in the June issue of the journal Pathophysiology, suggest a surprising explanation that not only points to a common cause for both cancers, it may change your sleeping habits.

(...)

Electromagnetic waves resonate on a half-wavelength antenna to create a standing wave with a peak at the middle of the antenna and a node at each end, just as when a string stretched between two points is plucked at the center. In the U.S. bed frames and box springs are made of metal, and the length of a bed is half the wavelength of FM and TV transmissions that have been broadcasting since the late 1940s. In Japan most beds are not made of metal, and the TV broadcast system does not use the 87- to 108-megahertz frequency used in Western countries.

Thus, as we sleep on our coil-spring mattresses, we are in effect sleeping on an antenna that amplifies the intensity of the broadcast FM/TV radiation. Asleep on these antennas, our bodies are exposed to the amplified electromagnetic radiation for a third of our life spans. As we slumber on a metal coil-spring mattress, a wave of electromagnetic radiation envelops our bodies so that the maximum strength of the field develops 75 centimeters above the mattress in the middle of our bodies. When sleeping on the right side, the body's left side will thereby be exposed to field strength about twice as strong as what the right side absorbs.

More from Dr. Douglas Fields

Solar power finally becomes cheaper than nuclear

Study: Solar power is cheaper than nuclear | The Energy Collective

The Holy Grail of the solar industry — reaching grid parity — may no longer be a distant dream. Solar may have already reached that point, at least when compared to nuclear power, according to a new study by two researchers at Duke University.

[...]

The result of these trends: “In the past year, the lines have crossed in North Carolina,” say study authors John Blackburn and Sam Cunningham. “Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants.”

If the data analysis is correct, the pricing would represent the “Historic Crossover” claimed in the study’s title...

More @ The Energy Collective

Coolest Tree House Ever -- Panchoran Retreat

Panchoran Retreat | Ubud, Bali

German company sells 'liquid wood'

German company sells 'liquid wood'

Several products made of Arboform have been revealed, including baby toys, furniture, castings for watches, designer loudspeakers (Arboform has wood-like acoustic qualities), golf tees that degrade on the course and even coffins.

"How about a renewable plastic that has wood-like qualities but can be cast by a machine? A group of scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology in Pfinztal near Karlsruhe invented just that in the late 1990s."

More @ Space Mart