Tech Tuesday – Puppy Power Edition
A tragic weekend that was balanced, a bit, by getting to meet our new puppy this weekend. She’s only 4 weeks old, so we can’t take her home until Labor Day, but she snuggled right up on my chest and went right to sleep, so I think she’s a keeper. Also got to see the dam at The Dalles, in OR, which is a massive concrete structure on the Columbia with 22 turbines, a fish ladder, and a shipping lock. At this rate, visiting every dam along the Columbia is going to be a bucket list thing.
TT01 – We have moved a step closer to not needing so many organ donors. No, we aren’t printing complete organs yet, but if we can successfully print organ parts, parts we already know how to replace, then we are taking a big step towards just printing a new organ.
TT02 – Although, given how complex the liver is, that might be one of the last organs we can figure out how to print. Luckily, the liver is a highly robust organ, capable of healing itself, especially when you activate it’s stem cells.
TT03 – EcoWave Power has installed a second array of generators in Israel that hope to produce 100kW. I’ve mentioned EcoWave before, and they have a very straightforward design that uses floats and hydraulic pumps to turn generators on the shore. The design lends itself well to installation on breakwaters and the like, so you don’t need to build new infrastructure.
TT04 – Also in the world of power from water, coastal wastewater treatment plants could, very cheaply, produce enough power from the salinity gradient of their work product to power themselves, at the very least.
TT05 – This one is for JA, since it’s in TX. An Allam Cycle Natural Gas Power plane that emits no CO2.
TT06 – And, of course, should you have a power plant that uses a semi-transient source, Tesla is ready to help you store the feast for those times of famine. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of employing so much lithium towards a singular purpose, especially when so many less toxic (and prone to ignite into class Delta fires) methods exist to store power(flow batteries, pumped hydro, gravity storage, etc.), but Tesla is at least putting such system into use.
TT07 – My Alma Mater, researching Solar Winds and Plasma Burps, in the lab, with a big red ball.
TT08 – Looking at snakes for the next idea in needle free drug delivery.
TT09 – Finally, a use for facial recognition that doesn’t involve government surveillance or targeted advertising. Something that would actually benefit humanity a bit.
TT10 – Another experiment that shows that yes, life can self assemble. Well, the building blocks of life can self-assemble.
TT11 – Talk about breathing heavy metal! I’m thinking this poor planet was either captured by the star, or formed much further out and is now on a slowly degrading orbit.
TT12 – Using tiny, magnetic coils to break down microplastics in waste water streams.
TT13 – So what happens when an AI invents something?
TT14 – A new meta-material that can passively cool a building.
TT05: It emits no CO2 only if there’s some place other than the atmosphere to dump the CO2 it produces. There have been a lot of proposals made in the past to oxidize carbon such that the CO2 stream is easily captured — see, for example, solid carbon fuel cells. They fall apart when the energy and dollar costs of disposing of the CO2 are included.
TT13: Just my opinion, but the AI in question is still just a software tool. We are a long way from a piece of software capable of being credited with the actual invention.Report
There’s a clever system to turn CO2 into bananas and strawberries, similar to the recent breakthrough on better vegieburgers that feeds grain and vegetables to cows, which then convert them into tasty meat.
Anyway, their power system sounds more like what you’d have for a rocket turbopump’s preburner. Switching to pure oxygen drastically raises combustion temperatures, so they have to be run way off stoichiometric to avoid melting the turbine blades. Recirculating the CO2 to use it as an inert diluting gas would accomplish the same thing.
I recently suggested an engine cycle where the helium tank pressurant was used to dilute the O2 in the pre-burner. The CO2 and H2O are then easily separated from the helium via the extreme cold available when you’ve got a LOX tank ten feet away, and the helium can either go back in the main tanks to pressurize them (It’s original purpose) or circulated through the burner and turbines as needed.
A fixed powerplant could likely also substitute helium for recirculated CO2, but it would take a bit of math to see if that would be worthwhile.Report
Yes, you do have to have somewhere for the CO2 to go, but we have such options, especially when you already have a pure CO2 source to work with.
It’s one of those things where, if we weren’t so concerned with releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, the plant would not be economical. But because we are…Report
[TT11] of course a planet that’s literally face-melting heavy metal would be named after W.A.S.P. 😀Report
Microsoft researchers have found the Russian government is making a big push to break into the software on Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It appears that the owners never bother to change the default password in a disturbing percentage of cases. I seldom say nice things about Comcast, but the default password on their cable modems is now a fairly strong randomly generated string, unique to each device.Report
I seem to recall a number of articles quite a few years ago regarding the utter lack of security being built into IoT devices, and that no one was really interested in taking security for IoT seriously.Report
Hardly anyone in a position to matter is taking IoT security seriously today. We still struggle to get people to install anti-malware software on personal computers and keep it up to date. How many people are going to do that for their refrigerator? Or thermostat?Report