Fuel cells are usually expensive because they use platinum as a catalyst. To make them more appealing to the market, researchers from the DOE's National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Houston, have created a new type of platinum catalyst, reducing the use of the pure metal down to 80 or even 70 percent, thus reducing the overall cost.
Intemper Espanola, a Spanish company, in a partnership with an undisclosed German company, developed a virtually "invisible" flexible solar film in a EUREKA project.
Indonesia, the world's third greenhouse gas contributor, wants to diversify its clean energy production potential by using the active volcanoes in the archipelago of 17,000 islands. If finished, this would be the world's biggest geothermal energy project, adding another 4,000 MegaWatts of geothermal capacity to the existing 1,189 MW... all of this by 2014.
Magnetocaloric materials have been the most advanced in this field by now. The researchers' new material also produces a caloric effect under hydrostatic pressure. For developing their discovery, they worked on a high-pressure system developed by the UPC.
The Australian Antarctic Division performed a research in this area, and found out that the whale poo is very rich in iron - about some 10 million times richer than sea water, as Steve Nicol, one of the scientists, said: "The plants love it and it actually becomes a way of taking carbon out of the atmosphere."
An inventor from Turkey, Muammer Yildiz, as Overunity.com and Pesn.com report, has just demonstrated his own version of a magnetic motor at the University of Delft, in the Netherlands, in front of an audience made of university staff and students. His device ran for more than 10 minutes, rotating a fan. The wind speed was measured and it has been concluded that the power of Yildiz's magnetic motor is about 250 W.
Supercapacitors are energy storage devices that can be recharged for virtually unlimited times, but the amount of energy they store is limited. Their working principle is not based on chemical reactions, but rather on transferring surface charges.
Caltech researchers have just discovered a metamaterial with a particular three-dimensional structure that exhibits a negative index of refraction for the light entering it. It simply bends the light in another angle than it would normally be expected, no matter what angle the incident light had.
This DIY presents a device capable of detecting the stand-by mode of low-consuming electronics in your home (like plugged-in phone chargers, without the phones attached) etc. The metering starts when the devices enter stand-by and stop when they start consuming in large amounts.
Vitalij Pecharsky, a researcher from the U.S. DOE - Ames Laboratory, along with his team, studies the possibility of storing hydrogen at room temperatures, in a recyclable container - just like your car's reservoir.
