20 Watts of power was transmitted wirelessley between 2 points 98 miles apart. The resultant power at the end station was only 1000th of what was sent, but this shows the feasability of the concept. The ultimate plan is to have satellites transmit the power to stations on earth.

We have had in rapid succession a transparent water repellent coating

and Golden Shellback which water and dustproofs.

Now we have a British process to make any item ‘100% waterproof’ through ion masking. They can’t yet do electronics though they’re working on it.

A great idea in the fight against cancer: make the cancerous cells light up in a fluorescent colour, so that the surgeon knows if he’s cut out enough the first time round. Saves a lot of extraenous flesh being cut away too.

What are cars going to look like in the year 2015? Well, I’m guessing they’re going to look kind of like our cars to day, but maybe a touch more aerodynamic. But hey, what do I know? When asked the same question, Transportation Design students at Turin-based IED (istituto Europeo di Design) came up with something quite a bit different.

The concept design for BMW they came up with looks like it belongs in 2115, not 2015. The BMW ZX-6 Concept by Jai Ho Yoo and Lukas Vanek is full of crazy curves and lines, and while yes, it is more aerodynamic, I’m not sure just how practical it is. But hey, maybe by 2015 we won’t care about practical cars, instead purchasing our vehicles based solely on how crazy they look. If so, this one is a definite winner.

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When your aim is to travel across the great ice plains of Antarctica, a normal car or truck meant for highways and regular streets probably isn’t going to meet your specific needs. You need a vehicle designed for the wide expanses of ice down on the bottom of the world.

The Lotus Concept Ice Vehicle (CIV) is made for the Antarctic. Scooting around on ice runners rather than wheels and moved forward with a propeller, it’s definitely not like any car you’ve ever seen. It only seats one, but the chances are good that you won’t be bringing anyone to soccer practice in Antarctica. It runs on biofuel, which makes it nice and environmentally friendly, and it has a spiked foot that is lowered down onto the ice as a brake. If you’ve got to make it to the south pole in style, accept no substitutes.

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geothermal-power-process.jpgIn case you weren’t aware, below the surface of the earth there’s a sea of insanely hot material that’s constantly swirling around. When tapped, that heat source can be used as geothermal power. With so much down there, why aren’t we using it more? That’s a question asked in Australia, where a study determined that a mere 1% of Australia’s geothermal power potential could provide the nation with a whopping 26,000 years of energy. The trick is getting it out.

A report from the Australian Geothermal Energy Association lays out how it would work, including drilling down a whopping 2.8 miles into the surface of the earth to tap into that hot magma. In order to reach 20% of electricity demands using this system, it would require a $10.45 billion project that would take over a decade to complete. But hey, once it’s done you’ve got clean energy coming up from below. And that sounds just great to us.

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Of all the electric car designs we’ve seen, this one is the most puzzling yet. The Hinterland Project starts with the shape of an airplane fuselage and turns it into a sustainable vehicle. However, it looks more like an electric tin can with wheels to us. The idea is its aerodynamic shape and lightweight aluminum chassis will increase the vehicle’s range, solving one of the most pressing problems plaguing electric vehicles circa 2008.

Maybe the car’s Canadian designer Martin Aubé is onto something. Think of it this way: if car buyers can be conned into driving the millions of toaster-shaped rattletraps traveling the nation’s highways now, given sufficient advertising, there’s no reason why gullible consumers won’t snap up cars that look like swollen locomotives.

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The final frontier of wireless tech is upon us, with Intel showing off its electricity flying through the air with better efficiency than ever. While it’s not the first wireless power transmitting device we’ve seen, this one uses resonance rather than induction, and boasts 75% efficiency. Hey, that means if you send 100 watts across the room, 75 of those watts will actually make it to the other side.

For now, the prototype is in the form of two copper rings that resonate together at a certain frequency, magically transmitting electricity from one to the other. Of course the tinfoil hat-wearing cranks will want to know where that extra 25% of the obviously deadly radiation goes on its way from here to there, but Intel says never mind that; it’s safe for us, it’s just that the gadgets will get fried with the current tech.

As soon as this is perfected, we’ll be in for a techno treat. Imagine wirelessly charging up your cell phone, or quickly installing some truly wireless speakers, or placing a wireless toaster on your kitchen table. The possibilities are endless. But in this era of energy price hikes, do we really want to throw away 25% of the power just for the sake of convenience?

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What do you get when you bring together a pizza oven, some nail polish and inkjet printers? Solar cells. You and I may be scratching our heads, but the woman behind the process known as iJet, Nicole Kuepper, won two Australian Museum Eureka Prizes — Australia’s top science awards. The real beauty of Ms. Kuepper’s accomplishment — beyond the simple recipe — is that a low-heat process like this is both cost effective and easily replicated, meaning that developing countries could get everything they need for cheap, renewable energy using junk you could find at a garage sale.

How does it work? We don’t know, and probably won’t be able to find out as it has just been recently patented, but it feels like a better world already.

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Iran has just launched a satellite into space using it’s own rocket.

The coating causes water to bead up into drops and roll or bounce off a surface, can be applied by spraying, spinning or dipping and allows you to determine the path which the droplets take when they roll off.
This is extremely usefull to prevent icing on aircraft (which is extremely dangerous) but also to collect water in arid areas such as deserts for drinking.

Nope – that’s when the Large Hadron Collider finally gets fired up!

The Dutch town of Hengelo will be trying out concrete that binds nitrogen oxide particles and using an additive turns these into harmless nitrates which are washed clean by the rain. Hengelo is testing this in one half of the new roads and measuring the effecacity by next summer.

The NASA Mars lander has found water and has sampled it. It hasn’t found anything organic in the water yet, but the mission is being extended by 90 days in the hopes of finding more.

Featured Article – A new way to weigh giant black holes

Professors in the US are using TV voting machines (called ‘clickers’) to test students’ knowledge of the subject being taught during lectures. As they vote, bar graphs go up in real time allowing people to see how the voting is going.

Even though the students are not forced to participate in the clicking, 90% generally do. If you add an incentive, 98% do.

The energy is stored at the edges of the windows themselves. The big difficulty in doing this has been getting the energy away from the centre of the window. Not only does this work on windows, but it’ll increase the efficiency of existing solar panels by 40 times.

That’s one to remember! Eating watermelons has around the same effect as popping the little blue pills does!

The EWG tested close to 1000 sunscreens, and it turns out that they can only reccomend 143 of them. 314 they urge caution and 495 (!), which include common, well known brands are basically downright dangerous to assume they’re sunscreen.

Most fysiologists and psychologists know that movements are initiated by the brain some time before the conscious mind thinks about them and ‘decides’ to initiate them.

This article rounds up a little on desicion making in general, showing that the time could be up to 30 seconds before determination when making mistakes and 10 seconds when picking ‘random’ events. Amazingly, ‘random’ desicions can be predicted accurately around 70% of the time!

So, if you were upset that ESA was hiring astronauts because you’re not a European and couldn’t make it, no problem!

The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center is seeking an astronaut to support the ISS program./a>

‘Skin-tenna’ wireless signals creep over human skin allowing you to connect medical equipment or gadgets.

These remind me of the Human Area Networks and Redtacton skin networks

It was the X-Prize that Burt Rutan’s Spaceship 1 took when it launched into space and recovered.

Google is offering the Lunar X-Prize together with the X-Prize foundation for the first team that lands on the moon and transmits back to earth.

The N-Prize is for a microsat launched into space for a price of under GBP 999,-. The winner will receive GBP 9,999.99 as long as the sat stays up for more than 9 orbits.

In part it’s about pushing boundaries in a bit of a crazy way with some degree of (financial) motivation behind it.

This is an interview with the founder of the prize

Origo Industries has developed a system that captures the CO2 from your vehicle’s engine and then allows you to turn these emissions into fuel at your own home to re-power your car. The same fuel could also be used to power your house.

The system uses a revolutionary new approach where CO2 is regenerated through algae in a home unit, allowing the user to produce bio-oil (up to 2500 litres per year tax-free).

Origo Industries: Capture your car’s CO2 and use it to re-power your vehicle – and your home

Let’s hope it’s true!

In 2006 a second red spot was observed which now rivals the first in storm furiousness and also almost in size. The third red spot, recently discovered is the same size as the Earth and is growing rapidly.