Faster Than Light: The final frontier
Light travels at just under 300,Versatile knives like paring blades for peeling or cutting fruits and vegetables, and a classic scissors wholesale must also be included in the collection as well.000 kilometres per second or about a billion kilometres per hour. Yet even at that nippy speed light takes about a second to reach us from the Moon, 8 minutes from the sun and a staggering 4 years to reach us from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star outside our solar system.The laws of physics as we understand them include a ban against travelling faster than light - and we have no way to reach anything close to that speed anyway. That's why fictional interstellar voyagers usually have some convenient trick to get from to from one star to the next without really covering the yawning gulf of space: a warp drive, a wormhole, some kind of quantum thingamajig or the like. Because nothing brings the story to a halt faster than a dose of realism in the interstellar travel department.
But just because realistic interstellar travel is unattractive to authors and screenwriters doesn't mean it's beyond our abilities. Despite the the mind-boggling scale of interstellar distances it is possible to contemplate ways to cross them, even with our current level of technology.We don't know how to reach the speed of light but we might, with some patience,Household scissors be able to accelerate a ship to a small fraction of it. Not with the chemical rockets we presently use to reach orbit; those are peashooters good only for puddling around our own and nearby planets. No, to reach the stars we'd have to go nuclear.
Probably the best known interstellar design is the system known as Project Orion that was seriously considered in America in the middle of last century, and occasionally pops up again in modified form. An Orion spacecraft is driven by nuclear pulse propulsion which involves setting off nuclear bombs just behind the ship - hundreds or thousands of them, in quick succession.Solar charger The explosions act on a heavy "pusher plate" at the rear of the spacecraft and accelerate it forward.Spacecraft of the Orion type or similar could reach about 1 per cent to 10 per cent the speed of light,LED bulb allowing us to reach a nearby star in a few centuries. Barring a revolution in extending the human lifespan anyone who embarked on this voyage would die along the way so the crew of an interstellar spacecraft would have to be a breeding population, a veritable space colony. Several generations would come and go in space just so their descendants could reach the destination. Ironically,Remote control light without a crew of fragile humans complicating matters the trip could probably be done within a human lifespan.
2013年2月26日星期二
Faster Than Light: The final frontier
Take In a Little Light Reading With This Book-Inspired Lamp
Take In a Little Light Reading With This Book-Inspired Lamp
Lumio is a laser-cut, accordion-folding, book-shaped lamp that packs a versatile range of functions into a stylishly compact,Solar Camping light battery-powered housing — and it owes its creation to a surprising source of inspiration.The tiny tome emits 500 lumens (equivalent to a 40 watt bulb) and can shine for eight hours on one charge of its rechargeable lithium-ion battery. It's not quite a gadget and not a typical light fixture, but its unique design has captured the imaginations of design aficionados and generated over $300,0000 in pledges on Kickstarter with more than two weeks to go.Its creator, Max Gunawan, is a former architect who had worked on high-profile projects like the Gap's flagship store in China, but after becoming increasingly frustrated by having to manage schedules instead of making structures, he quit to work on his own product designs.
"I've always been fascinated with objects or architecture that can be transformed into multiple shapes and serve multiple functions," he says. "I was inspired by this one particular project called the Folding Bridge in London by Thomas Heatherwick.Fruit knife There's something so unexpected to see, what appears to be an urban sculpture unfolding into a bridge.Vibrating feeder"His first draft was ambitious and architectural in scale. "I was developing a concept for a modular folding home that you can fit into a compact car," says Gunawan. "Unfortunately,Kashgar tours I didn't have the capital that I need to develop a working prototype for the folding house." He had read The Lean Startup and started thinking about developing a minimum viable product to test his folding theories.
It turned out the sketchbook that he was using to collect his ideas became the source of inspiration he was looking for. "It dawned on me one day that a book would be a great way to package this idea of a collapsible light fixture," says Gunawan. "It's compact, has that visceral connection with the idea of a ‘book that illuminates' and has that unexpected element of surprise."Gunawan visited his local TechShop and started prototyping. He learned how to laser-cut wood (sustainably harvested, of course) to make it flexible, embedded magnets to provide a hidden latch, and prototyped the bellows that make up the "pages" of the book and act as a lampshade.LED lamp Paired with some stunning visuals and options for a variety of eccentric uses in the Kickstarter video, the project has become a huge success, at least as far as fundraising is concerned.
MIT startup makes transparent solar panel
MIT startup makes transparent solar panel
Transparent solar panels — think about it for a moment: Sheets of transparent glass or plastic film that also generate electricity. It's almost the perfect solution for all our energy needs, generating free power from every available surface, window, and computer display.The concept of transparent solar panels isn't new, of course, but it now looks like they're finally finding their way to market: Ubiquitous Energy, a startup that was spun off from MIT last year, is developing a technology and patent portfolio and hopes to bring affordable transparent solar panels to market soon.Solar light
At this point, you might be wondering how transparent solar cells actually work — after all, if it's transparent, how can it absorb light energy? The simple answer is that light energy comes in many frequencies (colors),knife sets but as far as we humans are concerned, it is only the visible wavelengths — from blue, through green and yellow, to red — that really matter. The Sun, however, pumps out a huge amount of infrared light, and some ultraviolet light — both of which are invisible to the human eye, but which can also generate large amounts of electricity if captured by a solar cell.
The trick,Solar garden light then, is creating a solar cell that only absorbs IR and UV radiation, while letting visible light pass straight through. According to Technology Review, Ubiquitous Energy's transparent solar cell is built up from a series of organic layers on glass or a flexible film. We don't know the exact nature of the organic materials being used, but other organic solar cells generally use organic polymers that might've had their molecular makeup altered to absorb specific wavelengths of light. There are other ways of building transparent solar cells, though: As we reported last year, researchers at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara made a flexible, high-efficiency cell from a mesh of transparent,Sand washing machine photovoltaic silver nanowires.So far, as of a paper published in 2011 (linked below), it seems Ubiquitous Energy has created solar cells that are around 60% transparent, with an efficiency of 2%.For limestone jaw crusher and limestone Spring cone crusher, the working principle is plate pressing, so the percentage of stones with flaky shape, internal cracks is high. The ultimate goal, as with all bleeding-edge solar tech, is to reach 10% efficiency, which is where really exciting applications tend to emerge. To get there, Ubiquitous Energy's co-founder says his company will optimize its photovoltaic materials to capture more of the deeper infrared spectrum, and employ nanoscale engineering to create structures that capture more light.