batteries
milhayser | February 23, 2014Researchers observed tiny voids forming in silicon used for solar panels; these voids provide physical evidence of the Staebler-Wronski effect, "which reduces the solar cell efficiency by up to 15 percent within the first 1000 hours."
Using an online avatar with a skin color other than your own makes you less racist in real life; playing a hero makes you less cruel, and playing a villain less benevolent.
Old mouse muscles exhibit "elevated levels of activity in a biological cascade called the p38 MAP kinase pathway" which prevents stem cells from dividing and repairing muscle damage. By…
kmcwalsh | October 3, 2011The following guest post was written by Wei-Qiang Han, a materials scientist working at Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials.
Wei-Qiang Han
With gasoline prices still hovering near $4 per gallon, scientists at Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) are helping to develop electric vehicles capable of driving hundreds of miles on a single charge. A new compound of five tin atoms and one iron atom (FeSn5) created at the CFN is another development along the road to higher capacity lithium-ion batteries for those vehicles of the future.
Compared to other…
stoat | January 15, 2011Sez the Economist:
For, according to Dr Pyykko's calculations, relativity explains why tin batteries do not work, but lead ones do.
His chain of reasoning goes like this. Lead, being heavier than tin, has more protons in its nucleus (82, against tin's 50). That means its nucleus has a stronger positive charge and that, in turn, means the electrons orbiting the nucleus are more attracted to it and travel faster, at roughly 60% of the speed of light, compared with 35% for the electrons orbiting a tin atom...
If the problem isn't immeadiately obvious to you, pause a moment before proceeding…
sastyk | January 14, 2010Get nine women who have thought a lot about peak oil and climate change together around a dining room table, and perhaps expectedly, the conversation turns umm...blue. Get them around *my* dining room table and the turn to sex is pretty inevitable, given a certain native blueness (this is a polite way of saying "dirty mindness"). The absence of gents from this affair (completely unintended) made us rather uninhibited about certain subjects. And at the end of one conversation, I realized that I've got a rather gaping hole in my body of works on how to go forward into the future - I've never…
rallain | May 5, 2009I just realized that something has been bothering me. It is this KillaCycle - the electric zoom-fast motorcycle that I posted about previously. It clearly is super fast. However there are two claims that seem iffy.
It can be recharged in 4 minutes.
It is recharged by wind power.
It may be possible that these individually could be true - but could it be recharged in 4 minutes by the wind? I am not sure. Let me do some estimations to see if this is possible. What am I starting with:
From the review on gas2.org, uses cordless drill batteries.
Uses 1200 batteries
Produces 500 bhp - not…