Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have come up with a way we could harvest energy from Earth by turning excess infrared radiation and waste heat into electricity we can use.

The concept involves the strange physics of quantum tunnelling, and key to the idea is a specially designed antenna that can detect waste or infrared heat as high-frequency electromagnetic waves, transforming these quadrillionth-of-a-second wave signals into a direct charge.

There’s actually a lot of energy going to waste here on Earth – most sunlight that hits the planet gets sucked up by surfaces, the oceans, and our atmosphere.

Circa 2015

For our modern, technologically-advanced society, in which technology has become the solution to a myriad of challenges, energy is critical not only for growth but also, more importantly, survival. The sun is an abundant and practically infinite source of energy, so researchers around the world are racing to create novel approaches to “harvest” clean energy from the sun or transfer that energy to other sources.

This week in the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada report a novel design for electromagnetic energy harvesting based on the “full absorption concept.” This involves the use of metamaterials that can be tailored to produce media that neither reflects nor transmits any power—enabling full absorption of incident waves at a specific range of frequencies and polarizations.

Continue reading “Harvesting energy from electromagnetic waves” »

A loophole in a result from classical electromagnetism could allow a simple device on the Earth’s surface to generate a tiny electric current from the planet’s magnetic field.

It might seem that classical electromagnetic theory would hold few surprises, but two researchers argue that one aspect of received wisdom is wrong. They show theoretically that a device, sitting passively on the Earth’s surface, can generate an electric current through its interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field. The power from the proposed device would be measured in nanowatts, but might, in principle, be scaled up.

A century-old experiment showed that if any electromagnet with cylindrical symmetry (the symmetry of a bar magnet) rotates about its long axis, its magnetic field does not rotate [1]. There is a component of the Earth’s magnetic field that is symmetric around the rotation axis (which is not aligned with the magnetic poles), so according to this old principle, the axisymmetric component does not rotate. Any stationary object on the Earth’s surface sweeps through this component of the field, which is constant at any given latitude.

Entitled “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy — With Special References to The Harnessing of The Sun’s Energy”, it was published by his friend Robert Johnson in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine for June 1900 soon after Tesla returned from Colorado Springs where he had carried out an intensive series of experiments from June 1899 until January of 1900.

The exact title of the chapter where he discusses this device is worth giving in its entirety:

Tech Armor is a tech power in Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3’s single-player and multiplayer modes.

The power generates an energy armor suit that boosts the user’s shields.

At three o’clock in the afternoon on September 4, 1882, the electrical age began. The Edison Illuminating Company switched on its Pearl Street power plant, and a network of copper wires came alive, delivering current to a few dozen buildings in the surrounding neighborhood.

Electroactive bacteria were running current through “wires” long before humans learned the trick.

The log, which is 16m long and weighs 60 tonnes, was found during excavation for a new geothermal power station near Ngāwhā Springs earlier this year.

Last week, scientists completed a radiometric analysis to reveal the kauri stood between 41,000 and 42,500 years ago – making it the only tree found anywhere in the world that was alive during a mysterious shift in the world’s magnetic field.

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences have designed and tested a prototype cathodoluminescent lamp for general lighting. The new lamp, which relies on the phenomenon of field emission, is more reliable, durable, and luminous than its analogues available worldwide. The development was reported in the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology B.

While LED lamps have become commonplace, they are not the only clean and power-saving alternative to incandescent lamps. Since the 1980s, engineers around the world have been looking into the so-called cathodoluminescent lamps as another option for general lighting purposes.

Shown in figure 1, a lamp of this kind relies on the same principle that powered TV cathode-ray tubes: A negatively charged electrode, or cathode, at one end of a vacuum tube serves as an electron gun. A potential difference of up to 10 kilovolts accelerates the emitted electrons toward a flat positively charged phosphor-coated electrode—the anode—at the opposite end of the tube. This electron bombardment results in light.

In April, clean energy provided 23% of America’s electricity compared to coal’s 20% – the first time coal has been surpassed by renewable sources.