A new type of natural-gas electric power plant proposed by MIT researchers could provide electricity with zero carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, at costs comparable to or less than conventional natural-gas plants, and even to coal-burning plants. But that can only come about if and when a price is set on the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — a step the U.S. Congress and other governments are considering as a way to halt climate change.
postdoctoral associate Thomas Adams and Paul I. Barton, the Lammot du Pont Professor of Chemical Engineering, propose a system that uses solid-oxide fuel cells, which can produce power from fuel without burning it. The system would not require any new technology, but would rather combine existing components, or ones that are already well under development, in a novel configuration (for which they have applied for a patent). The system would also have the advantage of running on natural gas, a relatively plentiful fuel source — proven global reserves of natural gas are expected to last about 60 years at current consumption rates — that is considered more environmentally friendly than coal or oil. (Present natural-gas power plants produce an average of 1,135 pounds of carbon dioxide for every megawatt-hour of electricity produced — half to one-third the emissions from coal plants, depending on the type of coal.)
Natural gas already accounts for 22 percent of all U.S. electricity production, and that percentage is likely to rise in coming years if carbon prices are put into effect. For these and other reasons, a system that can produce electricity from natural gas at a competitive price with zero greenhouse gas emissions could prove to be an attractive alternative to conventional power plants that use fossil fuels.
The system proposed by Adams and Barton would not emit into the air any carbon dioxide or other gases believed responsible for global warming, but would instead produce a stream of mostly pure carbon dioxide. This stream could be harnessed and stored underground relatively easily, a process known as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). One additional advantage of the proposed system is that, unlike a conventional natural gas plant with CCS that would consume significant amounts of water, the fuel-cell based system actually produces clean water that could easily be treated to provide potable water as a side benefit, Adams says.
Although no full-scale plants using such systems have yet been built, the basic principles have been demonstrated in a number of smaller units including a 250-kilowatt plant, and prototype megawatt-scale plants are planned for completion around 2012. Actual utility-scale power plants would likely be on the order of 500 megawatts, Adams says. And because fuel cells, unlike conventional turbine-based generators, are inherently modular, once the system has been proved at small size it can easily be scaled up. “You don’t need one large unit,” Adams explains. “You can do hundreds or thousands of small ones, run in parallel.”
Adams says practical application of such systems is “not very far away at all,” and could probably be ready for commercialization within a few years. “This is near-horizon technology,” he says.
Costs and benefits
Adams and Barton, with funding from the BP-MIT Conversion Research Program, used computer simulations to analyze the relative costs and performance of this system versus other existing or proposed generating systems, including natural gas or coal-powered systems incorporating carbon capture technologies.
Combined-cycle natural gas plants — the most efficient type of fossil-fuel power plants in use today — could be retrofitted with a carbon-capture system to reduce the output of greenhouse gases by 90 percent. But the MIT researchers’ study found that their proposed system could eliminate virtually 100 percent of these emissions, at a comparable cost for the electricity produced, and with even a higher efficiency (in terms of the amount of electricity produced from a given amount of fuel). Jack Brouwer, associate director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, says that the high efficiency and the carbon separation capabilities of solid-oxide fuel cell technology “are indeed impressive.”
Absent any price for carbon emissions, Adams says, when it comes to generating electricity “the cheapest fuel will always be pulverized coal.” But as soon as there is some form of carbon pricing — which attempts to take into account the true price exacted on the environment by greenhouse gas emissions — “ours is the lowest price option,” he says, as long as the pricing is more than about $15 per metric ton of emitted carbon dioxide. Such a pricing mechanism would be put in place, for example, by the Waxman-Markey “American Clean Energy and Security Act” that was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in July, through its “cap and trade” provisions. (A corresponding bill has not yet reached the floor of the U.S. Senate.) If the program becomes law, the actual price per ton of carbon would vary, being determined through the free market.
CCS is considered the only practical way of meeting reduced emissions targets under a cap-and-trade program, because alternatives to the use of fossil fuels are not far enough advanced to be able to quickly replace them at reasonable cost. CCS involves separating out the carbon dioxide from other gases in the plant’s exhaust, and then injecting them into deep geological formations (for example, in depleted oil wells) to keep them from going into the atmosphere. Most approaches to capturing the carbon dioxide emissions from a fossil-fuel power plant require the use of a chemical solvent that absorbs the carbon dioxide from a mixture of gases — a process that is inherently inefficient and adds significantly to the cost of the power produced. Adams and Barton’s system eliminates this inefficient separation step.
One of the critiques most often leveled against proposals for fuel-cell power plants is that the technology has high initial costs compared to conventional combustion technologies. But the new study found that once carbon pricing is in effect, even if the cost of fuel cells remains more than double that targeted by the U.S. Department of Energy for 2010, the solid-oxide fuel cell system would be the cheapest option available in terms of lifecycle costs of electricity produced, even though the up-front capital costs could be three to four times greater than for natural gas or coal combustion systems.
In fact, the system’s predicted efficiency is so high that it beats the lifecycle cost of a combined-cycle natural gas plant, even without carbon pricing. And the study shows that a very low level of carbon tax, on the order of $5 to $10 per ton, would make this technology cheaper than coal plants, which are currently the lowest cost option for electricity generation.
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Greener Way of Getting Electricity From Natural Gas
Robots of Nature
To a robot designer like Sangbae Kim, the animal kingdom is full of inspiration.
"I always look at animals and ask why they are the way they are," says Kim, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. "As an engineer, looking at them and speculating is fascinating."
While a graduate student at Stanford,
Kim drew inspiration from the gecko to build a climbing robot, and he is now designing a running robot that mimics the movements of a cheetah. Such agile, fast-moving robots could perform military surveillance and search-and-rescue missions deemed too dangerous for humans to undertake.
His Biomimetic Robotics Lab is one of several at MIT pursuing biologically inspired engineering. A team of mechanical engineers has built robotic fish, and materials scientists have designed moisture-collecting materials that mimic a beetle's shell.
Evolution has produced finely tuned adaptations over millions of years, so it only makes sense to turn to nature for design ideas. However, while Kim seeks inspiration in nature, he's not trying to produce exact robotic copies of a particular animal. Such copying would be difficult to achieve and not necessarily the most effective design strategy.
"There are millions of things that animals have to adapt for, and it is almost impossible to compare evolution to our engineering/mathematical optimization process," says Kim. "And you have to be careful about copying other features that may not be related to the particular function you want to achieve. Therefore, extracting scientific principle is extremely important for designers like me."
Stickybot
When Kim and his colleagues at Stanford set out to build a climbing robot, at first they figured they needed to make the robot's feet sticky. However, they soon realized that very sticky feet can't detach very easily.
Their approach shifted dramatically with the 2006 discovery, by Lewis and Clark College biologist Kellar Autumn, that geckos use a phenomenon called directional adhesion to stick to walls.
"The gecko gave us a completely new perspective. Stickiness does not necessarily come from chemical composition; it can come from mechanical properties and geometry," says Kim. "The geometry enables strange phenomena such as directional adhesion, which sticks in only one direction."
The pads of a gecko's feet are covered with a forest of tiny hairs called setae, some of which are one-twentieth the width of a human hair. The setae, in turn, branch into hundreds of tiny smaller hairs called spatulae, which are about one-thousandth the width of a human hair. These hairs cling to surfaces using tiny molecular interactions known as van der Waals forces. Collectively, the forces are strong enough to support the gecko's weight as it scrambles up a vertical surface.
To demonstrate, Kim rummages around in a desk drawer in his office and pulls out a small rectangle of the gecko-inspired adhesive material, which resembles a tiny patch of blue Astroturf. A compact disc gently held against the horizontal surface attaches securely in one direction and then easily detaches in the opposite direction.
The adhesive is covered with hairs made of rubber silicone, which are thicker than those on a gecko's paw (about four times thicker than a human hair). Because thicker hairs require smoother surfaces for adhesion, Stickybot can only climb extremely smooth surfaces like glass.
Kim and his colleagues, led by Stanford professor Mark Cutkosky, first demonstrated Stickybot in 2006, and Time magazine named it one of that year's best inventions. The paper describing the robot also won the 2008 Best Paper Award for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
Potential applications for the stickybot technology include exterior repair of underwater oil pipelines and window washing. Kim also plans to start designing climbing equipment for humans using the directional adhesion technology.
Need for speed
Kim, who arrived at MIT as an assistant professor in June, is now turning his attention to a speedier robot, inspired by the cheetah. Four graduate students have just begun working on the cheetah project, and within the next two years Kim hopes to have a prototype that can run 35 miles per hour.
Though his design incorporates principles from a variety of running animals, including horses and dogs, Kim zeroed in on the cheetah because of its special adaptations for speed. One feature he plans to mimic is the flexibility of the cheetah's backbone, which gives extra speed or force to its running motion.
To demonstrate how extra joints can add force and speed, Kim leans back in his chair and mimics throwing a baseball, in slow motion — first the shoulder, then the elbow, then the wrist bend. The force imparted by each of those joints adds up, allowing a pitcher to throw a faster pitch. In the same way, the joints of the cheetah's leg — hip, knee and ankle — are aided by the extra speed generated by its bending backbone, which is much more flexible than that of other running mammals.
Kim and his students plan to start building and testing prototypes within the next 18 months, after using a computer model to calculate the optimal limb length and weight, gait and torque of the hip and knee joints.
He expects that the biggest challenge will be getting enough power out of the motor to furnish the desired speed. To that end, he plans to build the robot out of lightweight carbon fiber-foam composite, so less power is needed to propel it.
Another difficult problem is coordinating the control of three joints in four legs. Those 12 joints each have to move in concert with the others, and they need to be able to react smoothly to disturbances in the gait, such as tripping over a rock, and regain balance.
Kim believes his robots could be a significant improvement over current wheeled robots used for scouting and search and rescue, which are efficient but slow. "It's going to be very exciting to see how fast we can go and how rough a terrain we can navigate."
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Building Block of Life in Laboratory
NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life.
Pyrimidine is a ring-shaped molecule made up of carbon and nitrogen and is the basic structure for uracil, part of a genetic code found in ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA is central to protein synthesis, but has many other roles.
"We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in space," said
Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "We are showing that these laboratory processes, which simulate occurrences in outer space, can make a fundamental building block used by living organisms on Earth."
Nuevo is the lead author of a research paper titled “Formation of Uracil from the Ultraviolet Photo-Irradiation of Pyrimidine in Pure Water Ices,” Astrobiology vol. 9 no. 7, published Oct. 1, 2009.
Pyrimidine also is found in meteorites, although scientists still do not know its origin. It may be similar to the carbon-rich PAHs, in that it may be produced in the final outbursts of dying, giant red stars, or formed in dense clouds of interstellar gas and dust.
“Molecules like pyrimidine have nitrogen atoms in their ring structures, which makes them somewhat whimpy. As a less stable molecule, it is more susceptible to destruction by radiation, compared to its counterparts that don’t have nitrogen,” said Scott Sandford, a space science researcher at Ames. “We wanted to test whether pyrimidine can survive in space, and whether it can undergo reactions that turn it into more complicated organic species, such as the nucleobase uracil.”
In theory, the researchers thought that if molecules of pyrimidine could survive long enough to migrate into interstellar dust clouds, they might be able to shield themselves from radiation destruction. Once in the clouds, most molecules freeze onto dust grains (much like moisture in your breath condenses on a cold window during winter).
These clouds are dense enough to screen out much of the surrounding outside radiation of space, thereby providing some protection to the molecules inside the clouds.
Scientists tested their hypotheses in the Ames Astrochemistry Laboratory. During their experiment, they exposed the ice sample containing pyrimidine to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions, including a very high vacuum, extremely low temperatures (approximately - 340 degrees Fahrenheit), and harsh radiation.
They found that when pyrimidine is frozen in water ice, it is much less vulnerable to destruction by radiation. Instead of being destroyed, many of the molecules took on new forms, such as the RNA component uracil, which is found in the genetic make-up of all living organisms on Earth.
“We are trying to address the mechanisms in space that are forming these molecules. Considering what we produced in the laboratory, the chemistry of ice exposed to ultraviolet radiation may be an important linking step between what goes on in space and what fell to Earth early in its development,” said Stefanie Milam, a researcher at NASA Ames and a co-author of the research paper.
“Nobody really understands how life got started on Earth. Our experiments demonstrate that once the Earth formed, many of the building blocks of life were likely present from the beginning. Since we are simulating universal astrophysical conditions, the same is likely wherever planets are formed,” explained Sandford.
Additional team members who helped perform the research and co-author the paper are Jason Dworkin and Jamie Elsila, two NASA scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
The research was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) and the NASA Origins of Solar Systems Program. NAI is a virtual, distributed organization of competitively-selected teams that integrates and funds astrobiology research and training programs in concert with the national and international science communities.
For more information about the NASA Ames Astrochemistry Laboratory, visit:
http://www.astrochemistry.org/
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The First Hotel in Space to be Scheduled, 2012
Barcelona, Spain: The company behind plans to open the first hotel in space says they are still on target to accept the first paying guests in 2012.
The Barcelona-based architects of Galactic Suite say the space hotel will be the most expensive in the galaxy, costing €3 million, or $4.5 million, for a three-night stay. During that time guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and travel around the world every 90 minutes.
Galactic Suite's CEO said the project will put them at the forefront of an infant industry with a huge future ahead of it. Company Director Xavier Claramunt believes that within a few years space travel will become a common occurrence.
"It is very normal to think that your children, possibly within 15 years, could spend a weekend in space," he added.
A nascent space industry is beginning to take shape with construction underway in New Mexico of Spaceport America, the world's first facility built specifically for space-bound commercial customers and fee-paying passengers.
British tycoon Richard Branson's Space tours firm, Virgin Galactic, will use the facility to propel tourists into suborbital space at a cost of $200,000 a ride.
Galactic Suite hopes to start its project with a single pod in orbit 450 km above the earth, travelling at 28,000 km per hour. It will take a day-and-a-half to reach the pod - which Claramunt compared to a mountain retreat - with no staff or receptionist to greet the traveller.
"When the passengers arrive in the rocket, they will join it for three days, rocket and capsule. With this we create in the tourist a confidence that he has not been abandoned. After three days the passenger returns to the transport rocket and returns to earth," a statement from Galactic Suite read.
More than 200 people expressed an interest in travelling to the space hotel and at least 43 people have already made reservations.
The numbers are similar for Branson's Virgin Galactic with 300 people already having paid up or signed up for the trip. But unlike Branson, representatives of Galactic Suite say they will use Russian rockets to transport their guests into space.
They say the space dream is near and say their first launch in 2012 will herald the start of space as tourist destination, not just for the super-rich.
TRIP TO SPACE: A trip to the hotel will costs three million euros for a three-night stay in space.
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Biophotonic Scanner
Why get tested?
Scientists from around the world are talking about a brand new invention that is on the verge of changing the way people think about health – the Pharmanex® BioPhotonic Scanner. This revolutionary tool enables us, for the first time, to measure our level of carotenoid antioxidant protection quickly.
Antioxidants are our frontline defense against the free radicals that constantly affect our cells. Over 30,000 scientific papers have been written about free radicals and antioxidants in the last 20 years. With the Pharmanex® BioPhotonic Scanner we can now obtain an accurate reading of your personal antioxidant score.
How does it work?
Sir C. V. Raman discovered the technology on which the scanner is based in the 1920’s. Sir Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Raman Spectroscopy in 1930.
That was in the 1920's, but until the onset of the computer, optical and laser technology reached its current sophistication, the concept was not really practical.
Raman’s discovery proved that there are certain molecules, like carotenoids, that can be excited with a certain wavelength of laser light. The molecules then begin to resonate in very particular ways, releasing a very specific light signal of an altered wavelength that then can be measured. This discovery was revolutionary at the time, but computer and laser technologies could not fully apply it until recently. In just the last ten years, researchers at a major university, led by Dr. Werner Gellerman, actually started putting all these pieces of technology together.
The scanner technology is a tremendous scientific breakthrough. Scientists realized that the concentration of carotenoids in the eye is related to eye health. Because carotenoids are found throughout the body as part of the body’s antioxidant network, scientists believed this same technology could be used to measure carotenoid levels in human tissue. That’s when the scientists at Pharmanex® collaborated with Dr. Gellerman to develop the Pharmanex® BioPhotonic Scanner.
By simply placing the palm of your hand in front of a safe, low-energy blue light laser, you obtain an immediate reading of your carotenoid antioxidant activity—your antioxidant Score.
New Worlds Might Scale Robot Armada
An armada of robots may one day fly above the mountain tops of Saturn's moon Titan, cross its vast dunes and sail in its liquid lakes.
Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says we are on the brink of a great paradigm shift in planetary exploration, and the next round of robotic explorers will be nothing like what we see today.
"The way we explore tomorrow will be unlike any cup of tea we've ever tasted," said Fink, who was recently appointed as the Edward and Maria Keonjian Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "We are departing from traditional approaches of a single robotic spacecraft with no redundancy that is Earth-commanded to one that allows for having multiple, expendable low-cost robots that can command themselves or other robots at various locations at the same time."
Fink and his team members at Caltech, the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Arizona are developing autonomous software and have built a robotic test bed that can mimic a field geologist or astronaut, capable of working independently and as part of a larger team. This software will allow a robot to think on its own, identify problems and possible hazards, determine areas of interest and prioritize targets for a close-up look.
The way things work now, engineers command a rover or spacecraft to carry out certain tasks and then wait for them to be executed. They have little or no flexibility in changing their game plan as events unfold; for example, to image a landslide or cryovolcanic eruption as it happens, or investigate a methane outgassing event.
"In the future, multiple robots will be in the driver's seat," Fink said. These robots would share information in almost real time. This type of exploration may one day be used on a mission to Titan, Mars and other planetary bodies. Current proposals for Titan would use an orbiter, an air balloon and rovers or lake landers.
In this mission scenario, an orbiter would circle Titan with a global view of the moon, with an air balloon or airship floating overhead to provide a birds-eye view of mountain ranges, lakes and canyons. On the ground, a rover or lake lander would explore the moon's nooks and crannies. The orbiter would "speak" directly to the air balloon and command it to fly over a certain region for a closer look. This aerial balloon would be in contact with several small rovers on the ground and command them to move to areas identified from overhead.
"This type of exploration is referred to as tier-scalable reconnaissance," said Fink. "It's sort of like commanding a small army of robots operating in space, in the air and on the ground simultaneously."
A rover might report that it's seeing smooth rocks in the local vicinity, while the airship or orbiter could confirm that indeed the rover is in a dry riverbed - unlike current missions, which focus only on a global view from far above but can't provide information on a local scale to tell the rover that indeed it is sitting in the middle of dry riverbed.
A current example of this type of exploration can best be seen at Mars with the communications relay between the rovers and orbiting spacecraft like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. However, that information is just relayed and not shared amongst the spacecraft or used to directly control them.
"We are basically heading toward making robots that command other robots," said Fink, who is director of Caltech's Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory, where this work has taken place.
"One day an entire fleet of robots will be autonomously commanded at once. This armada of robots will be our eyes, ears, arms and legs in space, in the air, and on the ground, capable of responding to their environment without us, to explore and embrace the unknown," he added.
Papers describing this new exploration are published in the journal "Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine" and in the Proceedings of the SPIE.
For more information on this work, visit http://autonomy.caltech.edu . More information on JPL missions is at http:/www.jpl.nasa.gov/ .
JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology.
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Cyborg Legs by Honda
The first one is Robo-Legs
Honda’s first foray into robotizing old peoples’ haunches looked pretty tame, but this new one, on which geriatrics are supposed to mount like some sort of meat trophy, feels like a glimpse into a horrible, dystopian future where up is down, right is wrong and grandmas and grandpas amble through Sears on mechanized rectal steeds instead of walkers. The machine, which I’m 90% sure is just the missing half of this Battle Droid from Attack of the Clones, is more a passive support device than it is a set of active robot limbs, though it does have a small electric motor.
Details are a bit sparse for the time being, but Honda claims that the legs transparently reduce the strains of walking, standing and crouching, and should be “as easy to use as a bicycle.” The AP reporter who got to test the robo-legs had this to say about them:
The second one is Walking Assist Device
Honda has developed a gadget that they say could make walking easier for the elderly and others with weak leg muscles. The aptly named Walking Assist Device is a 6 lb. motorized belt with hip sensors that gauge how much help the wearer will need. The motor then gives the wearer an appropriate boost, lengthening his or her stride enough to make walking easier on the legs.
The device’s lithium-ion battery only last two hours on a charge, so don’t expect Grandma to run a full marathon, but some time moseying around the retirement village while looking all cyberpunk will surely make her coolest geriatric in Del Boca Vista.
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MacBook Touch
Some people were born just for the sake of it. But others are born to create wonders of the world. This “thing” I’m gonna show you is so cool that they could easily named it OMFG.
Designed by Tommaso Gecchelin, MacBook (future - let’s all pray to God - to be released) Touch will be the reason for Apple to build a small but flexible fine piece of machinery. Flexible OLED technology may be the key because it can provide the rich color and resolution density needed for a smaller screen without being a power hog and resists damage by its malleable nature. The thinnest screens now are barely 8mm thick and can fold like a piece of paper.
The core of this concept is a technology he calls iSpine. Like the spine of a book, the tech avoid excessive compression on the screen, yet allows the laptop to sit in multiple viewing positions. Go from a normal laptop with screen and touchscreen board - to a large widescreen canvas for drawing, presentation or movie watching. To keep everything minimal, ports like power, the mini display, and additional USB are externalized on a “Magic Dock” to keep most of the laptop slim and clean of an array of holes and plugs.
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PSP Console
This game console was designed by a fan of PSP and you have to admit that it far more cooler than any existing PSP right now. It’s got a big beautiful screen and an iPhone-like home button on the front, but when it’s slid open it reveals all the necessary buttons for gaming bliss. I think it’s so cool that it makes any other portable game console blush.
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4G iPhone, The Next Phone
Though it’s not known if this is how it will look, this photo was recently released and I have to say that not only that it’s thinner but it has apparently a bigger screen and a silent toggle switch moved. As for the specs rumors … well it will be , probably, the best phone - again - on the market.
Anyway, we have to keep in mind that until it’s official release, all this are simply speculations.
Yes, that’s right folks, in my opinion, these are the greatest future technology inventions which are going to make our life - if not beautiful - at least easier. I chose the 4G iPhone No. 1 because I think that this piece of machinery changed the notion of gadget itself. We are now taking as a usual thing a touch screen device. Three years ago this feature was available only on the most-expensive-top-notch-state-of-the-art equipment. Nowadays it’s as usual as the coffee in the morning. Which I love, by the way!
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Microsoft's Future Technology
This is Microsoft's look into the future. I'd love to hear your comments, especially as it relates to the future of publishing and books.
Remember only a few short years ago we didn't have MP3 players, IPODs or BlackBerrys. Look at how that technology blossomed almost overnight.
My personal opinion? We'll always have books, just like we continue to have CDs, cassettes, and horror of all horrors, vinyl records.
But...I do think we would be foolish to stick our heads in the sand, and pretend that it won't have an affect on the publishing world.
Okay, that's my two cents worth. Now I want yours.
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IBM Sequoia Supercomputer to be the Fastest Ever
In the world of supercomputers, IBM is easily the number one manufacturer. Last year, we wrote about the RoadRunner supercomputer which topped the charts as the fastest machine available for scientific computation housed at the Los Alamos Laboratory and most notably running PetaVision a piece of software used to simulate the human visual cortex. A couple of days ago, IBM funded by the US department of energy announced that they are building a new supercomputer that will be more 15-20 times faster than any other supercomputer in use today. Sequoia is slated to become the new king among the list of the top 500 supercomputers in use today throughout the world. The new computer will be housed at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The supercomputer named Sequoia will go online in 2012; yes, it takes a long time to build these computers. As it is commonly done, Sequoia will be constructed using thousands of CPUs connected together and working collectively to solve large scientific problems. According to information scattered around the Web, Sequoia will have some 1.6 million processors and the computational capacity of 20 petaflops that is 20 quadrillion calculations per second. When finished, the computer will occupy 3,422 square feet of space and require 6 megawatts of energy to operate (this apparently is far less than what supercomputers require today when measured with respect to the number of calculations performed against the energy used.) The actual cost of the computer has not been disclosed.
The computer will be used run massive simulations to keep track of the health of the country's nuclear stock; moreover, meteorologists will use Sequoia to more accurately predict the weather (maybe for once we can get some accurate forecasts,) study the cosmos and the human genome.
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Virtually Waterless Washing Machine
The researchers at University of Leeds have come up with a way to wash clothes that uses less than two percents of water and energy. The washing machine, Xeros, can also remove virtually all types of stains. The clothes come out of this washer are almost dry, thus reduce the need for dryer usage.
Xeros uses as little as one cup of water for each washing cycle!
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