Ocean Spiral
They have built terminal 3 of Singapore’s airport and the The Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line aka Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway. Aqualine is a bridge–tunnel combination across Tokyo Bay in Japan. It connects the city of Kawasaki in Kanagawa Prefecture with the city of Kisarazu in Chiba Prefecture, and forms part of National Route 409. With an overall length of 14 km, it includes a 4.4 km bridge and 9.6 km tunnel underneath the bay—the fourth-longest underwater tunnel in the world.
It’s hard to wait for the future to get here and give us all the amazing things we’ve dreamed up in our countless sci-fi books and movies (I’m still waiting for the hover-boards Back to the Future promised me). Though much of what we’ve seen on the big screen is still decades or millennia away… or straight up impossible by our current understanding of the universe, there are several sci-fi level technological and scientific advances we’re likely to see in just the next decade.
Blogger Jordan Lejuwaan over at High Existence has compiled a list of ten such advances to look forward to in the not-to-distant future:
Continue reading… “10 Ways the Next 10 Years will be Awesome!”
The birthplace of graphene – the one-atom-thick carbon – is Manchester University, where it was created by two physicists. But Cambridge could become the adopted home of the so-called wonder-material.
A vast new facility that can make up to five tons of the ultra-valuable black dust each year is being built in the city and is due to open in 2015.
Cambridge Nanosystems, a university spin-out, led by chief scientist Catharina Paukner, 30, has built the factory with the help of a £500,000 grant from the Technology Strategy Board.
Continue reading… “The First Lady of Graphene”
George Bye at the DaVinci Institute’s “Night with a Futurist” talking about the future of solar powered UAVs
George Bye is the founder of Bye Aerospace, a Colorado company involved in the design of a unique solar-electric powered aircraft that use solar electric energy, stored in batteries, to drive a propeller to both fly and stay aloft for long periods of time. A special combination of technologies and design will enable the current small UAVs to maintain station, with flight endurance of 8 to 12 hours at a time – several multiples of typical aviation gasoline fuel engine UAVs. A more extreme version of this capability will be engineered into Bye’s future aircraft (both civil and defense).
Continue reading… “How solar powered drones are about to transform your life”
Apple’s splash into home automation with addition of HomeKit to iOS 8 is expected to have a huge impact on sales of smart home devices in 2015 according to a Park Associates report that found 37% of U.S. Households plan to purchase one or more devices next year.
Continue reading… “Which Smart Home Device will be Under your Tree this Year?”
Toronto’s Illan Kramer, Inventor of Spray-on Solar
Illan Kramer, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, and IBM Canada’s Research and Development Center has invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using minuscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs)—a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.
“My dream is that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof,” says Kramer.
Continue reading… “Spray-On Solar”
Costs for home energy storage are dropping fast.
A few years ago, most people didn’t have any idea the home solar PV market would grow so fast. But it has, and there’s no stopping its momentum now. Similarly, there aren’t many people that realize how fast the home storage market is going to grow.
Continue reading… “Home energy storage market set to grow 10 times over by 2018”
The latest breakthrough in the search for lighter, more potent batteries is small battery made up of a billion nanopores, or microscopic holes capable of producing electric current.
Nanosize batteries that are 80,000 times thinner than a human hair could revolutionize green energy. They could advance the use of electric vehicles, now limited by short driving ranges, and of renewable energy, which needs storage for times when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.
Continue reading… “Nanosize batteries could revolutionize green energy”
A battery module built at Aquion’s plant in Pennsylvania.
A new kind of battery that stores energy from solar and wind power cheaply and cleanly has hit the market. It is by far the cheapest of a new generation of large, long-lived batteries that could make it possible to rely heavily on intermittent, renewable energy sources.
Continue reading… “Aquion Energy’s battery helps solar and wind power operate in remote locations”
We all want to find an alternative to fossil fuels as soon as possible. The most viable answer to the planet’s energy needs is visible to us any time we look upward. The amount of solar energy that hits just 1 square mile of this planet over the course of a year is equal to 4 million barrels of oil, and the energy that hits the Earth in a mere 40 minutes can fuel all of humanity’s energy needs for a year. Isn’t that incredible? (Infographic)
Continue reading… “Could we run the entire world on solar power?”
Alan Shaw, CEO Calysta, right and Josh Silverman, the chief scientific officer.
Methane, the primary component of natural gas, can be gobbled up by protein-producing microbes. The protein biomass is converted into things like food for farmed salmon or chemicals or other products, according to Ian Shaw, CEO of Calysta Inc., and Josh Silverman, the chief scientific officer. That salmon, of course, is an important source of protein that could serve a growing human population.
Continue reading… “Calysta, Inc. believes natural gas can feed the world”
How electrolysis could produce hydrogen as a way to store renewable energy.
There isn’t a cost-effective way to store large-scale solar energy. But researchers at Stanford have developed a solution by using electrolysis to turn tanks of water and hydrogen into batteries. During the day, electricity from solar cells could be used to break apart water into hydrogen and oxygen. Recombining these gases would generate electricity for use at night.
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.