Carbon Dioxide as an Energy Source?

Just the other day, I stumbled across this nice little article that caught my eye in a big way. http://scienceblog.com/64775/harvesting-electricity-from-the-greenhouse-gas-carbon-dioxide/#E7V2UYdfvXcmA0TT.99

Original publication: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ez4000059

What we have here is a proposed way of making carbon dioxide useful. All that gas exhumed from the factories, coal processing plants and residential areas that is all harmful to our environment is now being considered a possible source of energy. Who would've ever thought? Well, let's take a look into this, shall we?

Bert Hamelers, Ph.D. looks to be the project lead for this research. According to Dr. Hamelers and his colleagues, dozens of tons of CO2 is wasted from electric-generating infrastructure and heating in both residential and business locations. What they describe is a technology that would take this CO2 gas and react it with liquids and with further processing to generate electrical current. In Dr. Hamelers abstract of his paper on this research, he describes the simplified process proposed to harvest this energy current resultant, using "pairs of porous electrodes, one selective for anions and the other selective for cations." (Hamelers). The result was a positive gain of energy when the solution was passed through these porous electrodes.

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Now, there are many implications to this sort of technology. For one instance (and being the most obvious one), processing plants with this technology are placed at every electric-generating facility and tap right into their exhaust lines, process the CO2 out, process it into a solution to generate electricity, and then send that electricity into the main grid for additional power. Another use would be to maybe have a miniaturized version of this technology equipped to cars, where it again taps into the exhaust line and gives the car additional electricity, possibly creating a better, more efficient hybrid.

Not only would we be utilizing one of the biggest by-products of humanity, but we would also be cutting down our environmental impact tremendously. The key here is what is with most new technologies of this magnitude; scalability. Right now, this seems to be working in the lab, which is the first step. Now, they must work towards scaling this up to a larger size, and then an even large size from that. If this becomes viable, then this will shake up the entire energy sector of the world, and might even become a disruptive technology that could see some serious opposition from the big industry. I for one hope to see this become a reality.

Warp Drive Technology

I'd like to start of the 1st official science related post (actually 2nd post) with the relatively recent talks about warp travel, more specifically the Alcubierre Drive. http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive

First, I'd like to say that this does seem very unlikely, going from chemical booster rockets to warp travel. Now that that's in our sights, let's take a look at this with some background info.

So, you got a bunch of astrophysicists and whatnot sitting around a table in a room, and one of them pipes up and says "Hey, let's get us moving out of our boring solar system in the next hundred years!" Applause is had, cheers all around and so the 100 Year Starship Project is born...Ok, that's not how it actually happened, but that just about sums it up.

The 100 Year Starship Project (100YSS) was started back in 2011 in a joint venture by DARPA and NASA to work towards achieving interstellar travel. During the 2011 100YSS Symposium, a fellow by the name of Harold White announced that him and his team were in the beginning of developing a faster-than-light (FTL) warp drive. His foundation comes from the work of another fellow by the name of Miguel Alcubierre. In "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity," Alcubierre suggests a device that, in compliance with Albert Einstein's law of General Relativity, can move a spacecraft faster than light by warping space both in front and behind it.

The Alcubierre Drive model developed by White originally, by the math, required about 1.9x10^27 kilograms of energy in order to function, which is about equal to the mass of Jupiter, or roughly 317 Earths. Now, that's a scary amount of energy, right? Well, White got a little creative right before the 100YSS Symposium. After essentially playing with the geometry of the drive itself by changing the negative vacuum energy ring from circular to an oval-like shape, the amount of energy needed to have the drive function dropped immensely! From the mass of Jupiter to about 1,600 pounds. That's the weight of a Smart Car! If you don't think that's a drastic change, then I don't know what to tell you. This has suddenly made the warp drive seem possible.

Currently, tests are being done in a micro lab by White and his crack-team of physicists. Now we must wait to see if these micro tests are successful. If they are, they will be the "Chicago-Pile Moment" of this grand discovery. We'll see how this is doing and where it is in progress in the coming months.

New Blog!

Hello everyone! I'm making this blog to keep track of the scientific announcements and discoveries that interest me, and to see where they are as time moves forward. Usually we hear about these scientific stories, or as my father dubbed them, the big splashes and then nothing more. That is the main reason why I am creating this blog. To keep up with these announcements, stories and discoveries. See where they lead, and what they may open doors to. Welcome to Science and Our Daily Lives.