Solutions

Image: Petra is thrilled to be surrounded by gold medal tomatoes, tome verde tomatillos and black beauty eggplant: all are adapting well to the Finger Lakes!

fruitionseeds.wordpress.com - June 13th, 2013

Each seed tells the story of its entire life history, millions of years in the making.  A few seeds, in a single generation, may travel the globe.  Most will stay within their watershed and most likely, their microclimate.  In this way, seeds become profoundly adapted to place.

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The graphic illustrates a high power battery technology from the University of Illinois.  Ions flow between three-dimensional micro-electrodes in a lithium ion battery.  Image - Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology

submitted by Albert Gomez

news.illinois.edu - by Liz Ahlberg - April 16, 2013

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Though they be but little, they are fierce. The most powerful batteries on the planet are only a few millimeters in size, yet they pack such a punch that a driver could use a cellphone powered by these batteries to jump-start a dead car battery – and then recharge the phone in the blink of an eye.

Developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the new microbatteries out-power even the best supercapacitors and could drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics.

Led by William P. King, the Bliss Professor of mechanical science and engineering, the researchers published their results in the April 16 issue of Nature Communications.

Dear all,

Yesterday was a great pleasure for me, thank you all for the inspirations and very nice atmosphere.

Instead of writing a decent summary, I have summarised some notes in the way of formulating questions that could be of interest for the project. (Or, at least to myself.) I think it could also be very useful to write a paper to help structuring all ideas.

Image: Graph of All-in Module Cost

juancole.com - May 3rd, 2013 - Juan Cole

Rob Wile uses a graph to point out the obvious, the dramatic fall in the cost of solar power generation. In many countries– Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal — and in parts of the US such as the Southwest, solar is at grid parity. That means it is as inexpensive to build a solar plant as a gas or coal one.

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