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New approach offers more pleasant light of traditional bulbs without the energy guilt Thanks to a bit of ingenuity, Chunlei Guo, associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester, and his assistant Anatoliy Vorobyev have been able to squeeze out fluorescent-like energy performance from an incandescent light bulb. The breakthrough boils down to a laser treatment of the bulb's tungsten filament, a processing step which could one day become a standard in the light bulb industry. Traditionally, incandescent light bulbs provide more pleasant light, however they lack the efficiency of fluorescent designs. The new bulb offers the brightness and...
Published on Sunday 1st of August 2010 01:02:14 AM
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Posted by admin! / Under Efficient Consumer Response
This time, a high mile per gallon number was recorded in Europe and not with a Peugeot. A group of German motor journalists managed to get 3.2 l/100 km (73 mpg U.S.) in a Skoda Fabia TDI Greenline. The car had a 1.4 TDI (diesel) engine good for 80 HP. The thirty-six journalists (we're guessing not all of them at the same time) drove the Czech subcompact for 124 km (about 80 miles), using normal highways between Austria and Germany and never going below 60 km/h (40 mph). The only "trick" they used was maintaining as constant a speed as...
Published on Sunday 1st of August 2010 01:02:14 AM
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Posted by admin! / Under Efficient Consumer Response
WASHINGTON - With gasoline hitting $3 per gallon, scientists have just found the most energy-efficient engines in the universe — black holes, those whirling super-dense centers of galaxies that suck in nearly everything. The jets of energy spurting out of older ultra-efficient black holes also seem to be playing a crucial role as zoning cops in large galaxies, preventing too many stars from sprouting. That explains why there aren't as many burgeoning galaxies chock full of stars as previously expected, said scientists citing results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory that were released Monday. For the first time, scientists measured both...
Published on Sunday 1st of August 2010 01:02:14 AM
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President Bush says the nation needs advanced nuclear-power plants, calling them a clean, "renewable" energy source for the future... New Mexico Republican Pete V. Domenici... said he welcomed Mr. Bush's remarks. "Without any question," he said, the long-term electricity-generating alternative to the nation's dwindling supplies of natural gas "will have to be nuclear power. If America is afraid of it, the world will use" advanced nuclear technology. Sen. Domenici is expected to offer an energy bill that will include financial incentives for the first new nuclear-power plants. Nuclear power now supplies 20% of the nation's electricity, according to the U.S....
Published on Sunday 1st of August 2010 01:02:14 AM
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Posted by admin! / Under Efficient Consumer Response
WASHINGTON - Richard Clarke, the man who threw elbows and banged heads together to get things done under four American presidents, is the last person friends and colleagues expected to go public. For decades he was the ultimate inside operator, the person who knew how to tackle the toughest national security problems and overcome bureaucratic inertia with behind-the-scenes guts, arrogance, smarts and hard work. But writing a book and testifying to an official commission with scathing tales of miscalculations, failures and infighting at the highest levels of government? No way. "This really isn't Dick," said Steven Simon, who worked with...
Published on Sunday 1st of August 2010 01:02:14 AM
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Posted by admin! / Under Efficient Consumer Response
Every experienced journalist knows that there are two sources of information about obscure and distant countries: the taxi-drivers who take him from the airport to the country’s one luxury hotel, and the journalists who are already sitting at the bar of that hotel. Of the two sources, the taxi-drivers are incomparably the more reliable, intelligent and well informed. Taxi-drivers have a profound knowledge of human nature: besides the opportunity inherent in their job for meeting every class and condition of human being, a keen interest in human nature is a matter of survival for them, and necessity is the mother...
Published on Sunday 1st of August 2010 01:02:14 AM
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Posted by admin! / Under Efficient Consumer Response
BERKELEY, CA — Researchers in the Materials Sciences Division (MSD) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with crystal-growing teams at Cornell University and Japan's Ritsumeikan University, have learned that the band gap of the semiconductor indium nitride is not 2 electron volts (2 eV) as previously thought, but instead is a much lower 0.7 eV. The serendipitous discovery means that a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight -- from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet -- to electrical current. "It's as if nature designed this material on purpose...
Published on Sunday 1st of August 2010 01:02:14 AM
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