The annual Mileage Marathon Challenge near Leicester, England gathered a group of students from several schools and universities this year. The surprising thing is they weren't the ones cheering in the stands, as you may imagine â€Ã¢â‚¬Å“ they were actually the ones driving the models they had designed in class!
With much of the world still lacking access to safe drinking water, the need for more efficient filtration systems is higher than ever. Wei Gao, from Rice University in Texas, has however invented a graphite-coated type of sand that is cheap to produce and much more effective at filtering water.
A recent study performed by two Finnish researchers from Aalto University reveals that people living in the countryside pollute just as much as city dwellers. They used a different approach to fund their study's conclusion, placing the source of CO2 at the consumer site rather than at the production site, like it's been done before.
A new solar cell efficiency record has been achieved by a startup CA-based company called Alta Devices. Previously unknown, the Santa Clara firm brags an efficiency of 28.2 percent for their gallium-arsenide solar cell, a number 2 percent higher than last year's previous record, and could eventually bring down the costs of solar power to make it compete with coal and gas.
The UK has officially opened their largest solar energy farm at the Howberry business park in Oxfordshire. Being the first large ground system connected to the national grid, this solar park is capable of generating about 683 MWh of solar energy annually.
A solar cell developed at the Unversity of Toronto, Canada, is able to harvest both visible and infrared light and can theoretically achieve efficiencies of up to 42 percent. Their tandem solar cell is based on colloidal quantum dots (CQD), and the team has been led by Professor Ted Sargent, a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
A team of researchers at the University of Minnesota has discovered a new alloy that can transform heat into electricity. The approach is new and uses a coil to transform the magnetic field generated by the alloy.
Since 2009, Prologis, a leading global provider of industrial real estate, has been installing solar photovoltaic cells on the roofs of their own properties. Now they come up with a project, named Project Amp, that aims to install solar panels on the rooftops of 750 buildings across the US to produce 733MW of clean power.
I've been writing about Nokia testing a solar powered version of one of their cellphones just the other day, and thought it's a pretty stupid idea to apply solar cells on phones since they're kept mostly inside pockets, and they aren't transparent. Today I found out that a company called Voltaic is releasing a solar powered carrying case for tablets - the Spark.
Tesla Roadster was for many the car that brought back the electric car dream that set with the crushing of GM's EV1 back in 2003. Now, the production of Roadsters is seemingly coming to an end, as Tesla Motors announced they'll be focusing more on the future Model S sedan and Model X crossover they've been bragging with for the past few months.
