The world's largest hybrid renewable energy project to date was recently commissioned on the rooftop of the Myers, Fletcher, & Gordon (MFG) law firm in Kingston, Jamaica. Developed by WindStream Technologies, the landmark urban installation consists of 50 WindStream SolarMill units to harness available wind and solar resources.
The SolarMill is a new distributed energy technology consisting of Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT), solar panels and proprietary "smart" electronics. The energy generated by each SolarMill can either be used off grid with a storage system or inverted for use in grid-tied applications. Occupying the roof space, about the size of a solar panel, each SolarMill provides the highest energy density currently available in the renewable market.
The installation is said to generate over 106,000 kWh of renewable energy annually, (25 kW of wind and 55 kW of solar) with a return on investment (ROI) of less than four years. Over the course of the projected 25-year life span, the energy cost savings are expected to exceed $2 million. WindStream competed for and was awarded the project for its ability to maximize energy production and ROI within the confines of limited roof space.
"This was a bold undertaking and we expect to reap rich rewards through our partnership with WindStream," says Donovan Cunningham, COO of Myers Fletcher & Gordon.
The MFG SolarMill installation is a part of a larger effort by Jamaica Public Service (JPS) to provide greater access to renewable energy solutions in a country where the cost of energy is over three times the U.S. average. JPS and WindStream also collaborated with Eaton Houghton of Caribbean ESCO as the Caribbean's lead energy efficiency auditor for the project.
"The SolarMill installation is an excellent model for other businesses to follow," says Travis Campbell, COO of WindStream Technologies. "If you are interested in energy efficiency and saving money, SolarMills are a simple, cost-effective solution."
Scientists at The Australian National University (ANU) have uncovered the secret to twisting light at will. It is the latest step in the development of photonics, the faster, more compact and less carbon-hungry successor to electronics.
A random find in the washing basket led the team to create the latest in a new breed of materials known as metamaterials. These artificial materials show extraordinary properties quite unlike natural materials.
The work is published in Nature Communications.
"Our material can put a twist into light – that is, rotate its polarisation – orders of magnitude more strongly than natural materials," said lead author Mingkai Liu, a PhD student at the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering (RSPE).
"And we can switch the effect on and off directly with light," said Mr Liu .
Electronics is estimated to account for two per cent of the global carbon footprint, a figure which photonics has the potential to reduce significantly. Already light carried by fibre optics, has replaced electricity for carrying signals over long distances. The next step is to develop photonic analogues of electronic computer chips, by actively controlling the properties of light, such as ; its polarisation.
read more at : http://phys.org/news/2014-07-material.html| ADVT. No. ISRO HQ:ICRB:04:2014 dated 17.07.2014 |
| Opening date for on-line registration | - 17.07.2014 |
| Closing date for on-line registration | - 07.08.2014 |
| Last date for payment of fee | - 08.08.2014 |
| Closing date for receiving documents as stated in para 6 above at ISRO HQ | - 14.08.2014 |
| Written test |
| 2006 - Part I | 2006 - Part II |
| 2008 - Part I | 2008 - Part II |
| 2010 - Part I | 2010 - Part II |
| 2012 |
| State | Chief Minister |
| Andhra Pradesh | N.Chandrababu Naidu |
| Arunachal Pradesh | Nabam Tuki |
| Assam | Tarun Gogoi |
| Bihar | Jitan Ram Manjhi |
| Chhattisgarh | Raman Singh |
| New Delhi | President's Rule |
| Goa | Manohar Parrikar |
| Gujarat | Anandiben Patel |
| Haryana | Bhupinder Singh Hooda |
| Himachal Pradesh | Virbhadra Singh |
| Jammu & Kashmir | Omar Abdullah |
| Jharkhand | Hemant Soren |
| Karnataka | K Siddaramaiah |
| Kerala | Oommen Chandy |
| Madhya Pradesh | Shivraj Singh Chauhan |
| Maharashtra | Prithviraj Chavan |
| Manipur | Okram Ibobi Singh |
| Meghalaya | Mukul Sangma |
| Mizoram | Pu Lalthanhawla |
| Nagaland | T.R.Zeliang |
| Odiisha | Naveen Patnaik |
| Puducherry | N.Rangaswammy |
| Punjab | Prakash Singh Badal |
| Rajasthan | Vasundhara Raje |
| Sikkim | Prakash Kumar Chamling |
| Tamil Nadu | J.Jayalalithaa |
| Telangana | K.Chandrashekar Rao |
| Tripura | Manik Sarkar |
| Uttarakhand | Harish Rawat |
| Uttar Pradesh | Akhilesh Yadav |
| West Bengal | Mamata Banerjee |
Sisoft Company in Mexico has developed a technology that can illuminate a large work space, an auditorium or an office, while providing full mobile internet to every device that comes into the range of the light spectrum.
The Mexican group managed to transmit audio, video and Internet across the spectrum of light emitted by LED lamps. This new technology, called Li-Fi or light fidelity, is presented as an alternative to Wi-Fi because it will maximize the original provided speed of the internet to offer safer data transfer and a transfer rate of up to 10 gigabytes per second.
The Li-Fi device circulates data via LEDs that emit an intermittent flicker at a speed imperceptible to the human eye. "As Wi-Fi uses cables to spread our connections, wireless transmission Li-Fi uses LED lamps that emit high brightness light", said Arturo Campos Fentanes, CEO of Sisoft in Mexico.
read more at http://phys.org/news/2014-07-li-fi-protocol-internet.html#ajTabs
Now, researchers in the laboratory of Kerry Vahala, the Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Applied Physics at Caltech, have developed a method to stabilize microwave signals in the range of gigahertz, or billions of cycles per second—using a pair of laser beams as the reference, in lieu of a crystal.
Quartz crystals "tune" oscillators by vibrating at relatively low frequencies—those that fall at or below the range of megahertz, or millions of cycles per second, like radio waves. However, quartz crystals are so good at tuning these low frequencies that years ago, researchers were able to apply a technique called electrical frequency division that could convert higher-frequency microwave signals into lower-frequency signals, and then stabilize these with quartz.
The new technique, which Vahala and his colleagues have dubbed electro-optical frequency division, builds off of the method of optical frequency division, developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology more than a decade ago. "Our new method reverses the architecture used in standard crystal-stabilized microwave oscillators—the 'quartz' reference is replaced by optical signals much higher in frequency than the microwave signal to be stabilized," Vahala says.
read more at http://phys.org/news/2014-07-future-electronics-lasers-quartz.html
India to head 100 billion dollar BRICS Development Bank to be set up at Shanghai in China.
The capital for the bank will be split equally among the five participating countries. The bank will have its headquarters at Shanghai in China. Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff announced the creation of the bank at a Brics summit meeting in Fortaleza, Brazil yesterday. At first, the bank will start off with 50 billion dollars in initial capital.
The emergency reserve fund which was announced as a Contingency Reserve Arrangement, will also have 100 billion dollars and will help developing nations avoid short term liquidity pressures, promote further Brics cooperation, strengthen the global financial safety net and complement existing international arrangements.
The term "Moore's law" was coined around 1970 by the Caltech professor, VLSI pioneer, and entrepreneur Carver Mead in reference to a statement by Gordon E. Moore.
University of Southampton researchers have found that rainwater can penetrate below the Earth's fractured upper crust, which could have major implications for our understanding of earthquakes and the generation of valuable mineral deposits.
It had been thought that surface water could not penetrate the ductile crust - where temperatures of more than 300°C and high pressures cause rocks to flex and flow rather than fracture - but researchers, led by Southampton's Dr Catriona Menzies, have now found fluids derived from rainwater at these levels.
Fluids in the Earth's crust can weaken rocks and may help to initiate earthquakes along locked fault lines. They also concentrate valuable metals such as gold. The new findings suggest that rainwater may be responsible for controlling these important processes, even deep in the Earth.
Researchers from the University of Southampton, GNS Science (New Zealand), the University of Otago, and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre studied geothermal fluids and mineral veins from the Southern Alps of New Zealand, where the collision of two tectonic plates forces deeper layers of the earth closer to the surface.
read more at http://phys.org/news/2014-07-rainwater-depths.html
The team looked into the origin of the fluids, how hot they were and to what extent they had reacted with rocks deep within the mountain belt.
Victor R. Caivano/AP Lionel Messi can't bring the World Cup back home to Argentina after losing Sunday's final.
The discovery 30 years ago of soccer-ball-shaped carbon molecules called buckyballs helped to spur an explosion of nanotechnology research. Now, there appears to be a new ball on the pitch.
Researchers from Brown University, Shanxi University and Tsinghua University in China have shown that a cluster of 40 boron atoms forms a hollow molecular cage similar to a carbon buckyball. It's the first experimental evidence that a boron cage structure—previously only a matter of speculation—does indeed exist.
"This is the first time that a boron cage has been observed experimentally," said Lai-Sheng Wang, a professor of chemistry at Brown who led the team that made the discovery. "As a chemist, finding new molecules and structures is always exciting. The fact that boron has the capacity to form this kind of structure is very interesting."
Wang and his colleagues describe the molecule, which they've dubbed borospherene, in the journal Nature Chemistry.
Carbon buckyballs are made of 60 carbon atoms arranged in pentagons and hexagons to form a sphere—like a soccer ball. Their discovery in 1985 was soon followed by discoveries of other hollow carbon structures including carbon nanotubes. Another famous carbon nanomaterial—a one-atom-thick sheet called graphene—followed shortly after.
After buckyballs, scientists wondered if other elements might form these odd hollow structures. One candidate was boron, carbon's neighbor on the periodic table. But because boron has one less electron than carbon, it can't form the same 60-atom structure found in the buckyball. The missing electrons would cause the cluster to collapse on itself. If a boron cage existed, it would have to have a different number of atoms.
Wang and his research group have been studying boron chemistry for years. In a paper published earlier this year, Wang and his colleagues showed that clusters of 36 boron atoms form one-atom-thick disks, which might be stitched together to form an analog to graphene, dubbed borophene. Wang's preliminary work suggested that there was also something special about boron clusters with 40 atoms. They seemed to be abnormally stable compared to other boron clusters. Figuring out what that 40-atom cluster actually looks like required a combination of experimental work and modeling using high-powered supercomputers.
source and read more at
Ever wondered why the rupee quotes at 53.2 or 50 and not at Rs 20 or Rs 80 to a dollar?
It’s not much different from how the prices of your mangoes are determined, for example. Whether currency movements or prices of mangoes, the most important factor determining their price is the same – market forces of demand and supply.
If the demand for dollars increases, the value of dollar will appreciate. As the quotation for Rs/$ is a two way quote (that is, the price of one dollar is quoted in terms of how much rupees it takes to buy one dollar), an appreciation in the value of dollar would automatically mean a depreciation in Indian rupee and vice-versa.
For example, if rupee depreciates, a dollar which once cost Rs 47 would cost, say, Rs 50. In essence, the value of dollar has risen and the buying power of rupee has gone down.
Besides the primary powers of demand and supply, the rupee-dollar rates are determined by other market forces as well.
Market sentiments
During turbulent markets, investors usually prefer to park their money in safe havens such as US treasuries, Swiss franc, gold and so on to avoid losses to their portfolios. This flight to safety would lead to foreign investors redeeming their investments from India. This could increase the demand for dollar vis-à-vis Indian rupees.
Speculation
There are derivative instruments and over-the-counter currency instruments through which one can speculate/ hedge the underlying currency rates. When speculators sense improvements/ deterioration of the sentiments of the markets, they too want to benefit from such rising/ falling dollar. They then start buying/selling dollar which would further change the demand/ supply of the dollar.
RBI Intervention
When there is too much volatility in the rupee-dollar rates, the RBI prevents the rates from going out of control to protect the domestic economy. The RBI does this by buying dollars when rupee appreciates too much and by selling dollars when the rupee depreciates significantly.
Imports and Exports
Ever give thought as to why our government is trying to incentivise exports and reduce imports? There are a lot of schemes and incentives for exporters while importers are burdened with many conditions and taxes. This is to protect our economy from high rupee depreciation. Importing foreign goods requires us to make payment in dollars thus strengthening the dollar’s demand. Exports do the exact reverse.
Public Debt / Fiscal policy
Whenever our Government fails to match expenses with equivalent revenue, there is a shortage of funds. To finance this, the Government at times opts to borrow money from institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. This debt, accrued interests, and the payments made, also lead to currency fluctuations.
Interest Rates
The prevailing interest rates on the government bonds attract foreign capital to India. If the rates are high enough to cover the foreign market risk and if the foreign investor is comfortable with the fundamentals or credit ratings, money would start pouring into India and thus provide us with a supply of dollars.
read more at http://m.thehindubusinessline.com/money-wise/how-rupeedollar-rates-are-determined/article4629962.ece/
