Jan

31

Making Fungus Make New Biofuels

January 31, 2011 | 5 Comments

Sandia National Laboratories’ biochemist Masood Hadi says the beauty of the endophytic fungi is there is no need for the cost-intensive industrial processes that are typically required to break down biomass. “These things can turn crystalline cellulosic material directly into fuel-type hydrocarbons without any mechanical breakdown.”  If this can be made to work and grown [...]

Jan

28

A Fresh and Salt Water Algae Discovered

January 28, 2011 | 1 Comment

Researchers of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), along with collaborators at Dalhousie University and the Natural History Museum (NHM), London have discovered an entirely new group of algae living in a wide variety of marine and freshwater environments by following up on an unexpected DNA sequence listed in a research paper from the [...]

Jan

27

Cool Energy Makes Home Heat and Electricity

January 27, 2011 | 3 Comments

Cool Energy is saying their SolarFlow® System in an average size US home can provide up to 80% of heat, 100% of hot water and 60% of the electricity needed. Using a logical controller the system uses weather, ambient temperature, building temperature, and sunlight data to determine the device’s most effective usefulness for a given [...]

Jan

26

Simple & Common Materials For Record Breaking Thermoelectric

January 26, 2011 | 1 Comment

Northwestern University researchers have placed nanocrystals of rock salt into lead telluride, creating a thermoelectric material that can harness electricity from heat sources. The material exhibits a high thermoelectric figure of merit that is expected to enable 14 percent of heat waste converted to electricity, a new scientific record.  Chemists, physicists and material scientists at [...]

Jan

25

Cold Fusion From Italy Updated

January 25, 2011 | 12 Comments

Prof. Giuseppe Levi and Dr. David Bianchini, of Bologna University have issued their preliminary reports about the Rossi/Focardi January 14th and 16th cold fusion experiment in a pdf running 12 pages. The report describes the heat production during the preliminary tests on the Rossi “Ni-H” reactor. While ‘cold fusion’ works for a headline as an [...]

Jan

24

Can Methanol Get Back in the Alt Fuel Starting Block?

January 24, 2011 | 4 Comments

Leslie Bromberg of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and Wai K. Cheng of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory authored a white paper assessing the prospects for methanol as an alternative transportation fuel in the U.S. The pair states that methanol is a safe and viable transportation fuel, although it not as good as ethanol in [...]

Jan

21

Skutterudites Boost Thermoelectric Output

January 21, 2011 | 8 Comments

Researchers at the University of Michigan are taking a step towards more efficient recycling of waste heat into energy by using skutterudites in their new thermoelectric device experiments. The UM press release explains with an offering from Massoud Kaviany, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, “Today’s state-of-the-art thermoelectric materials are only five percent efficient. [...]

Jan

20

Making Fuel With CO2 and Sunlight

January 20, 2011 | 3 Comments

A collaborative research team from ETH Zurich, the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), and Caltech has built a solar reactor to make syngas – a precursor for hydrocarbon fuels (You may need to click the ‘translating’ link for completion.) uses only CO2, water and sunlight. The device is a solar cavity-receiver reactor that can thermochemically split [...]

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