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Solar Roads Could Power An Entire Country

May 12 2014 by Justine Alford

A small US-based company called Solar Roadways are developing a solar road surface that, if installed nationwide, has the potential to produce more renewable energy than the entire country uses. In fact, they’ve actually already developed a working prototype that’s been installed in a parking lot, and they’re now crowdsourcing funds in order to tweak the design and move towards production.

Solar Roadways, which was started by Scott and Julie Brusaw in 2006, designed and developed hexagonal glass solar panels studded with LED lights that could be installed on a variety of surfaces such as roads, pavements and playgrounds. These panels would more than pay for themselves and would benefit both businesses and homeowners as the energy generated from driveways and parking lots could be used to power buildings, and any excess can be sold back to the grid.

The panels also contain heating elements to melt ice and snow so are ideal in winter conditions, and LEDs to make road lines and signs which have been previously shown to reduce night time accidents. The surface could also be used to charge electric vehicles as oppose to fossil fuels, and future technology could even allow for charging whilst driving via mutual induction panels. Amazingly, the team also found that car headlights can produce energy in the panels, so cars driving around at night would be producing some electricity.

Snow test: the powered row of panels are free of snow/ice. Image credit: Solar Roadways.

A glass surface may sound fragile, but the prototypes have been extensively tested and were found to be able to withstand even the heaviest trucks. Recycled materials can also be used to produce the panels; the prototypes were constructed using 10% recycled glass.

All of the panels will be wired up, so faults can be easily detected and repaired. They team have also designed a place to stash power cables, called “Cable Corridors”, which would allow easy access by utility workers. Furthermore, they also believe that these corridors could be used to house fiber optic cables for high-speed internet.

The team have done some calculations; there’s approximately 31,000 square miles of usable surfaces in the US, and if all of these were covered the Solar Roadways system could produce over three times the electricity that is used by the entire country. That’s an incredible potential that could lead to a huge decrease in dependence on foreign oil. It would also cut CO2 emissions by a considerable amount. 

Obviously, this project isn’t going to be cheap. Solar Roadways are hoping to raise $1 million on their indiegogo page so that they can hire engineers to make final modifications and move from prototype to production. They think that if they reach their target they should be able to begin installing projects at the end of the year, but a significantly larger amount of money would be required if they were to try to cover all the roads in the US! 

New Technology: The Bruise Suit

Here’s an interesting new product. It’s called the “bruise suit”, and it was designed by some students at the Imperial College of London. The purpose of the suit is to visually indicate that enough force has been applied to potentially cause injuries.

It was initially designed to help Paralympic athletes detect when they’ve encountered enough force to cause injuries that they are unable to feel. It uses a pressure-sensitive industrial film developed by Fuji that changes color based on the compressive force applied. It gets darker as the force increases. 

Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya (CNN) At first glance, Sudan looks like any other northern white rhino: stout and agile, with square lips.

He grazes under the hot sun, his massive head lowered to the ground, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in central Kenya.

Mountain gorilla genome provides hope for animal’s future

Lab-grown meat is here! Vegetarians, will you change your mind?

I recently came across this article about how researchers have successfully lowered the cost of in vitro meat (i.e. artificially grown from stem cells) from $325,000 in 2013 to an affordable $11 per burger. That’s a huge improvement! This means that lab-grown meat will be realistically available in consumer market very soon.

As some of you may know, I’m vegetarian. Why would I be excited about this?

I became a vegetarian because I don’t want to be a part of how animals are raised for food (the living condition in non-organic farms), as well as how water and grains used to raise farm animals could be used to help the world hunger problem, and how animal farming create a lot of toxic waste.

If no real animal were involved in creating in vitro meat (except for getting some stem cells), would people who are vegetarian for moral reason change their minds? I’d consider it an option if they can make lab-grown sashimi. Would you?

Expert psychologist suggests the era of genius scientists is over

Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, has published a comment piece in the journal Nature, where he argues that it’s unlikely mankind will ever produce another Einstein, Newton, Darwin, etc. This is because, he says, we’ve already discovered all the most basic ideas that describe how the natural world works. Any new work, will involve little more than adding to our knowledge base.

Simonton’s comments are likely to draw a strong reaction, both in and out of the science world. It’s been the geniuses among us that have driven science forward for thousands of years, after all. If no more geniuses appear to offer an entirely new way of looking at things, how will the human race ever reach new heights?

Simonton has been studying geniuses and their contributions to science for more than 30 years and has even written books on them. He also writes that he hopes he is wrong in his assessment, even as he clearly doesn’t think he is. Sadly, the past several decades only offer proof. Since the time of Einstein, he says, no one has really come up with anything that would mark them as a giant in the field, to be looked up to hundreds, if not thousands of years from now. Worse perhaps, he details how the way modern science is conducted is only adding to the problem. Rather than fostering lone wolves pondering the universe in isolation, the new paradigm has researchers working together as teams, efficiently going about their way, marching towards incremental increases in knowledge. That doesn’t leave much room for true insight, which is of course, a necessary ingredient for genius level discoveries.

High-pitched sounds cause seizures in old cats

New research has found that high pitched sounds can cause violent seizures in older cats. In the event of a seizure the cat will start losing consciousness and its body will become stiff and begin to jerk, often for several minutes. The new syndrome has been termed feline audiogenic reflex seizures (FARS).

The average age of seizure onset from high pitched sounds was 15 years, with cats ranging in age from 10 to 19 years.

The most commonly reported triggers for FARS were the sound of crinkling tin foil (82 cats), a metal spoon clanging in a ceramic feeding bowl (79 cats), chinking or tapping of glass (72 cats), crinkling of paper or plastic bags (71 cats), tapping on a computer keyboard or clicking of a mouse (61), clinking of coins or keys (59), hammering of a nail (38) and even the clicking of an owner’s tongue (24). Other, less common triggers were the sound of breaking the tin foil from packaging, mobile phone texting and ringing, digital alarms, Velcro, stove igniting ticks, running water, a dog jangling its collar as it scratched, computer printer, firewood splitting, wooden blocks being knocked together, walking across a wooden floor with bare feet or squeaky shoes and, in one case, the short, sharp scream of a young child.

New Bird Species Discovered in China: Sichuan Bush Warbler

Drilling shale and blowouts

This is a classic blowout from a well drilled into a shale unit. This photo is from the Eagle Ford shale in Texas, but this could be any number of shale units around the United States and could have happened any time in the past century+.

Shale units are really tough to drill into. The first natural gas well in U.S. history was in a shale unit (see: http://on.fb.me/1yhKcYu) and supplied gas to a small city, but scaling up shale gas to industrial production has been a problem for 100+ years.

Building on the Barnett, moving to the Marcellus

The modern hydraulic fracturing boom began in the early 2000s when unconventional gas reserves in Texas’s Barnett Shale were first tapped (http://fb.me/7huKhsqWr). The newly-developed technique for hydraulically fracturing shale source rocks using high-pressure fluids and sand caused gas production from that unit to skyrocket, doubling every year in the early 2000s.

That technique stayed in the Barnett for a few years but soon it moved elsewhere. America’s first oil and gas wells were drilled in the state of Pennsylvania in the 1800s. These wells tapped oil and gas supplies produced from shales that formed in basins near the growing Appalachian mountain range and were buried as the mountains grew. Some of the oil and gas did migrate out, but much of the gas remained trapped, forming overpressured, occasionally explosive geologic units.

One of these units is the Devonian-aged Marcellus shale.

Drilling company could force Pennsylvania landowners to allow fracking under their land, even if they’re opposed. (via think-progress)

Comment #8:

“$1 million a day just being thrown into the air”

In the rush for North Dakota’s oil, companies are burning off more than a quarter of the natural gas produced. My story at NPR. 

TEA TREE OIL USES

Tea Tree Oil is often used for massages and pest control.

Tea Tree Oil is also an antibacterial disinfectant that has been used for centuries as an antiseptic. Studies show that tea tree oil treats some infections that are resistant to antibiotics, including bacterial and fungal skin ailments. It has been used to:

Treat acne

Treat laryngitis and canker sores

Treat dandruff and head lice

Eliminate bad breath

Treat a sore throat or chest congestion

Treat toenail fungus

Soothe sore muscles

Treat infant eczema