Science - NRC Approves Gen IV Nuclear Reactor Design

Ceramic solid state battery to ship to car makers at end of year

 

Porsche’s new solid-state battery will let its electric models travel a mind-blowing 800 miles before having to recharge

 

https://scitechdaily.com/igniting-p...les-charging-speeds-in-solid-state-batteries/

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have doubled the charging speed of solid-state batteries by altering the pressing process of the solid electrolyte, resulting in a safer, more efficient, and industrially scalable battery technology.

 

Batteries seem to get better almost every year. With the amount of people working on this I suspect it will continue but is there a limit to how much it can improve.

 

I’d say 1000 mile to a recharge is plenty good enough! The other advancement is reducing the footprint and weight and if you live in a home partly powered by solar a battery will be gold.

 

I agree but I think lifetime is important as well. At a thousand miles between charging they would need to recharge 300 times maybe but for a home it may need to charge almost daily.

 

That should help AI take over that much faster

 

This sounds brilliant.

‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power

In the early 20th century, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla dreamed of pulling limitless free electricity from the air around us. Ever ambitious, Tesla was thinking on a vast scale, effectively looking at the Earth and upper atmosphere as two ends of an enormous battery. Needless to say, his dreams were never realised, but the promise of air-derived electricity – hygroelectricity – is now capturing researchers’ imaginations again. The difference: they’re not thinking big, but very, very small.

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In May, a team at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. It’s a claim that will probably raise a few eyebrows, and when the team made the discovery that inspired this new research in 2018, it did.

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They’ve come a long way since then, with Catcher and related projects receiving nearly €5.5m (£4.7m) in funding from the European Innovation Council. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5in) across.According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of power a day – roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024.

A device that can generate usable electricity from thin (or somewhat muggy) air may sound too good to be true, but Peter Dobson, emeritus professor of engineering science at Oxford University, has been following both the UMass Amherst and Catcher teams’ research, and he’s optimistic.

 

I could have invented a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5 in) across. In fact, for $4 million, I'll invent a thin grey disc measuring 3cm across. I've always regretted not going into the thin grey disc business. It seems very profitable.

 

Sorry nuts and bolts were invented in the 1400’s I think washers followed soon after.

 

All sprockets these days

 

But can it cure cancer??

 

Mineral discovery could meet global battery and solar panel demand for next 100 years

 

Wow the average UK household only uses 10kW a day?
My house uses about 100kW a day in the summer.
That’s with solar h2o, gas dryer and range, double pane low e impact window and a metal roof.
Seems really low.

 

The issue with solid state batteries is longevity. If it's just cost you'd see it in high end vehicles already.

 

Smart people, what’s up with gravitational waves? What should dumb people like me take from this? Katie Mack editorial


Lying in bed on the night I heard about this breakthrough, I thought about the inescapable ripples in space altering me on a subatomic level. I thought I would never again feel I was on truly solid ground.

Then in June, for the first time, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) revealed that astronomers had picked up traces of a background hum of low-frequency gravitational waves. By monitoring dozens of pulsars, astronomers had hunted for correlations in timing errors from millisecond pulsars, the spinning remnants of dead massive stars. These timing errors are a smoking gun of passing gravitational waves. And that’s just what they found.


ColumnI’m a physicist, and last week’s gravitational waves news sent me reeling
ColumnI’m a physicist, and last week’s gravitational waves news sent me reeling - Tampa Bay Times

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https://phys.org/news/2023-07-korean-team-room-temperature-ambient-pressure-superconductor.html

 

Room temperature superconductor patented