This is like the next step up from knitting machines a really big step! The new clothing store – select fashion design patterns online, place order, pick up at store.
Three-dimensional printing may have little in common with sustainability—at first blush, anyway—but the rapid-prototyping process has a litany of surprisingly green benefits. The emerging technology, which uses ultraviolet beams to fuse layers of powdered, recyclable thermoplastic into shape, leaves behind virtually no waste. Its localized production and one-size-fits-all approach also racks up markedly fewer travel miles, requires less labor, and compresses fabrication time to a matter of hours, rather than weeks or months.
Some well placed cash and lets hope they get a breakthrough soon.
Washington, D.C. – As part of a broad effort to achieve breakthrough innovations in energy production, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman today announced an award of up to $122 million over five years to a multidisciplinary team of top scientists to establish an Energy Innovation Hub aimed at developing revolutionary methods to generate fuels directly from sunlight.
Most of us are always in motion in out daily lives, what you could use that motion to generate electricity?
A Japanese electronics firm has shown off a vibration-harvesting generator that could replace standard batteries.
The Vibration Energy Cell batteries deliver power after a vigorous shake
Brother Industries, better known for its line of printers, claims the devices could be used in place of AA or AAA batteries for some applications. Continue Reading »
So you think rubber is a recent invention? Think again…
Ancient civilizations in much of Mexico and Central America were making different grades of rubber 3,000 years before Charles Goodyear “stabilized” the stuff in the mid-19th century, new research suggests.
The Aztec, Olmec, and Maya of Mesoamerica are known to have made rubber using natural latex—a milky, sap-like fluid found in some plants. Mesoamerica extends roughly from central Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua
What’s better than a pair of bifocal eyeglasses? How about self adjusting electrified bifocal eyeglasses?
Watch out Ben, the future is upon us!
The spectacles, which are due to be launched in the US this year and the UK next year, use lenses that change their strength when a small electrical current passes through them. Continue Reading »
Can your fibers Sing, Hear, and generate Electricity? These can…
Research scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are singing a new tune with a new type of interactive fiber that has the ability to detect and create sound. For associate professor Yoel Fink and his team at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, the threads used in textiles and even optical fibers are too passive to be truly useful. It may have taken a decade, but the researchers have finally developed a far more sophisticated version, one that enables fabrics to interact with their environment. Continue Reading »
This seems like a simple idea and as is always the case will the benefits outweigh the costs? But can we afford to not do everything we can, no what the cost to protect our environment?
The flow-thru filter is easily attached to the tailpipe of the vehicle. The filter matrix is treated with a basic chemical compound. The vehicle exhaust is then diverted into the carbon-capture filter, which traps CO2 in a flow-by chemical reaction. The filter matrix acts as a carbon sink, capturing harmful CO2. Once the filter is saturated with carbon, after approximately 3500 miles, it can be easily removed from the device and exchanged with a new filter.
The captured CO2 from the saturated filter is water-soluble and can then be safely converted into a useful industrial solid. This process provides a safe method of carbon storage.
The CO2 filter is positioned within the stainless steel housing to absorb the engine CO2 waste content by impulse collisions within the filter media. The impulse is equal to the change in momentum at points along the length of the filter. The impulse advantage is the product of the force of exhaust acting on the filter at impact points and the time the action takes place. The flow-by reaction in effect is a mild alkaline pH reacting with dilute acetic CO2 in the exhaust. Eventually the base solution becomes acetic when the filter is saturated with CO2.
Two German scientists invented “liquid wood,” which has the potential to save significant fossil fuel and natural resources.
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.
Scientists could use the technique to reconstruct almost any intricate bone shape in the lab, using digital images as a model
Figuring out a good bone replacement for limbs has proved a problem since the days of the wooden peg leg. Yet scientists have now grown two small bones based on digital images and a 3-D scaffolding, the New York Times reports.
