Wireless Energy Transfer: It's Reality

Think of a world where you could charge your phone while moving on without any wires, the car you drive can be powered on the go, moving through the Galaxy and not worrying about the fuel all this futuristic things are going to get true very soon, Scientists in Japan have announced that they've successfully managed to transmit energy wirelessly with high accuracy,and this is not the invention that occurs daily this COULD CHANGE THE FUTURE of our energy need.

The researchers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced a day before yesterday that they had used microwaves to deliver 1.8 kilowatts of power - just enough to power a kettle - through the air to a receiver 55 metres away, with pinpoint accuracy, this technology had nothing to do with what we use these days to power our mobile wirelessly with the help of a magnetic field.


"This was the first time anyone has managed to send a high output of nearly two kilowatts of electric power via microwaves to a small target, using a delicate directivity control device," a spokesperson for JAXA told.

The ultimate aim of the team is to provide earth with solar energy that will be collected 36000km above earth's surface and will be transmitted to earth where it will be received by antennas. "But it could take decades before we see practical application of the technology - maybe in the 2040s or later," the spokesperson told.

"There are a number of challenges to overcome, such as how to send huge structures into space, how to construct them and how to maintain them."

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Saturn's Moon may contain sign of life

Pictorial representation of the thermal activity on Saturn's moon 

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first clear evidence that Saturn's moon Enceladus exhibits signs of present-day hydrothermal activity which may resemble that seen in the deep oceans on Earth. The implications of such activity on a world other than our planet open up unprecedented scientific possibilities.

"These findings add to the possibility that Enceladus, which contains a subsurface ocean and displays remarkable geologic activity, could contain environments suitable for living organisms," said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The locations in our solar system where extreme environments occur in which life might exist may bring us closer to answering the question: are we alone in the universe."

Hydrothermal activity occurs when seawater infiltrates and reacts with a rocky crust and emerges as a heated, mineral-laden solution, a natural occurrence in Earth's oceans. According to two science papers, the results are the first clear indications an icy moon may have similar ongoing active processes.

The first paper, published this week in the journal Nature, relates to microscopic grains of rock detected by Cassini in the Saturn system. An extensive, four-year analysis of data from the spacecraft, computer simulations and laboratory experiments led researchers to the conclusion the tiny grains most likely form when hot water containing dissolved minerals from the moon's rocky interior travels upward, coming into contact with cooler water. Temperatures required for the interactions that produce the tiny rock grains would be at least 194 degrees Fahrenheit (90 degrees Celsius).

"It's very exciting that we can use these tiny grains of rock, spewed into space by geysers, to tell us about conditions on -- and beneath -- the ocean floor of an icy moon," said the paper's lead author Sean Hsu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Cassini's cosmic dust analyzer (CDA) instrument repeatedly detected miniscule rock particles rich in silicon, even before Cassini entered Saturn's orbit in 2004. By process of elimination, the CDA team concluded these particles must be grains of silica, which is found in sand and the mineral quartz on Earth. The consistent size of the grains observed by Cassini, the largest of which were 6 to 9 nanometers, was the clue that told the researchers a specific process likely was responsible.

On Earth, the most common way to form silica grains of this size is hydrothermal activity under a specific range of conditions; namely, when slightly alkaline and salty water that is super-saturated with silica undergoes a big drop in temperature.

"We methodically searched for alternate explanations for the nanosilica grains, but every new result pointed to a single, most likely origin," said co-author Frank Postberg, a Cassini CDA team scientist at Heidelberg University in Germany.

Hsu and Postberg worked closely with colleagues at the University of Tokyo who performed the detailed laboratory experiments that validated the hydrothermal activity hypothesis. The Japanese team, led by Yasuhito Sekine, verified the conditions under which silica grains form at the same size Cassini detected. The researchers think these conditions may exist on the seafloor of Enceladus, where hot water from the interior meets the relatively cold water at the ocean bottom.

The extremely small size of the silica particles also suggests they travel upward relatively quickly from their hydrothermal origin to the near-surface sources of the moon's geysers. From seafloor to outer space, a distance of about 30 miles (50 kilometers), the grains spend a few months to a few years in transit, otherwise they would grow much larger.

The authors point out that Cassini's gravity measurements suggest Enceladus' rocky core is quite porous, which would allow water from the ocean to percolate into the interior. This would provide a h

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Compound that captures Carbon could save the environment

Global warming is a major concern which people are aware now but for the past few decades the condition was not as serious as it is now. The world is getting warmer. Whether the cause is human activity or natural variability—and the preponderance of evidence says it’s humans—thermometer readings all around the world have risen steadily since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 0.8° Celsius (1.4° Fahrenheit) since 1880. This may cause serious problems and to lower the earth temperature will ensure a safer future for our coming generation.

 A new mechanism for highly efficient CO2 uptake in carbon-capturing materials has been discovered by an international collaboration from EPFL’s Energy Center. The novel mechanism, published in Nature, offers an energy-efficient route to carbon capture. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous crystal structures made from metal nodes that are connected through organic linkers. MOFs are at the center of carbon-capturing efforts, as they are chemically tunable and can adsorb(to make something staggered on or below the surface) carbon with high efficiency.

MOFs can be used to remove the carbon form the atmosphere to the factories where various forms of carbon like Co2, CH4 gases are produced. scientists have found that inserting CO2 in a metal-amine bond of MOFs can trigger a highly efficient chain reaction of CO2 uptake. The researchers took advantage of the chemical versatility of MOFs, and were able to optimize the conditions of the chain reaction by altering the metal atoms at the nodes of the MOF’s structure.

As a result of this, the MOFs can achieve large capacities in separating CO2 from the atmosphere with only small temperature changes. Meanwhile, the energy required to regenerate MOFs following release of captured CO2 was lower than even state-of-the-art liquid amine solutions. The two most promising MOFs were based on magnesium and manganese, and were able to operate at high temperatures.

The results provide a template for designing highly efficient adsorbent materials that can remove CO2 from various gas mixtures. Compared to available technologies, this design offers advantages in terms of reduced sorbent regeneration energy and reduced materials and system costs.

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Material that changes color like chameleons

The nature is the best creator and teacher it has teaches us many things the latest what scientists are able to get the idea from nature and implement it is that a new material skin has been prepared for the first time that changes its color on various occasion just the similar way a chameleon does.

This is the first time anybody has made a flexible chameleon-like skin that can change color simply by flexing it," said Connie J. Chang-Hasnain, a member of the Berkeley team and co-author on a paper published today in Optica, The Optical Society's (OSA) new high-impact journal.

Everything around us is visible to us by the fact it reflects a certain wavelength of the light falling on it and absorbing all other in it, and it is true that we cannot know the true color of any object because till date it is not possible to know what color wavelength has been absorbed by the object. But despite this we can see any color that falls in the visible range spectrum ranging from high wavelength of red to low wavelength violet.

It is possible to make a specific color reflect from the object in two ways one of which includes changing the chemical composition of the object and the other which is used by the scientists is that to make the surface in such a way that it reflects a certain wavelength of light. The authors of the Optica paper applied a similar principle, though with a radically different design, to achieve the color control they were looking for. In place of slits cut into a film they instead etched rows of ridges onto a single, thin layer of silicon. Rather than spreading the light into a complete rainbow, however, these ridges -- or bars -- reflect a very specific wavelength of light. By "tuning" the spaces between the bars, it's possible to select the specific color to be reflected. Unlike the slits in a diffraction grating, however, the silicon bars were extremely efficient and readily reflected the frequency of light they were tuned to.

"The next step is to make this larger-scale and there are facilities already that could do so," said Chang-Hasnain. "At that point, we hope to be able to find applications in entertainment, security, and monitoring." Even high levels of camouflage may be achieved with this or the materials that changes color with the change in stresses in them, in future gadgets or any other unknown features.

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Light travelling at less than the speed of light.

It's a challenge for the classical physics and our knowledge of science. In all of our text books we have read that light velocity depends on the medium in which it travels and is maximum in air or vacuum that is approximately 3*10^8 meter per second. 

But a new research paper published from University of Glasgow and Heriot-Watt University describe how they have managed to slow photons(light carrier) in free space for the first time, and they are able to do this by applying a mask to the optical beam which provided the photons for the experiment. The mask forced the photon to change its shape and travel slower than the speed of light.

In the experiment the scientists took two beams of light emitting photons to race together one was normal and the other beam was masked which changed the shape of the photons passing through it, this was one of the proof that light is of dual nature that is wave and particle, as only shape of waves can be changed. And when the photon after passing through mask was again in free air it took a very very small time to complete the 1 meter long race with the normal photon. This shows that once pattern has been imposed - even now the light is no longer in the mask, it's just propagating in free space - the speed is still slow. 

Professor Padgett the Scientists associated with the experiment added: “It might seem surprising that light can be made to travel more slowly like this, but the effect has a solid theoretical foundation and we’re confident that our observations are correct.

“The results give us a new way to think about the properties of light and we’re keen to continue exploring the potential of this discovery in future applications. We expect that the effect will be applicable to any wave theory, so a similar slowing could well be created in sound waves, for example". 

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