Advanced Invention

A new energy concept called a solar tower could generate enough electricity for 200,000 homes. Looking like a giant smokestack, it would release no noxious fumes — just sun-heated air.

Demonstrated more than 20 years ago, the basic design calls for solar collectors to warm the air near Earth’s surface and then channel it up the tall central tower. Turbines placed at the bottom make electricity from the updraft.

“It’s a combination chimney, windmill, greenhouse,” said Kim Forté of EnviroMission Limited in South Melbourne, Australia.

EnviroMission has designed a kilometer-high solar tower (0.62 miles) and is now looking at possible sites in the southwestern United States.

Solar-stack
The solar tower is an updated version of a solar chimney — a centuries-old technique for providing ventilation to a home by creating a natural updraft from sun-heated air.

KITCHEN SINK HELIOSPHERE: If the solar wind is like a stream of water spreading out on a flat sink bottom, then the boundary where the flow breaks against onrushing soapy water (interstellar gas) is the termination shock (recently encountered by the spacecraft Voyager 2) and the region of slower-moving water beyond it is the heliosheath.
Courtesy of J.R. Jokipii

Hurtling through space 31 years after its launch, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has sent back the most detailed view yet of the shock wave that marks the thinning of the solar wind, the charged particles streaming from the sun.

Researchers say the crossing confirms that the heliosphere—the region swept out by the solar wind—is actually lopsided, perhaps due to a tilted magnetic field in local interstellar space.

The shock wave, or heliospheric termination shock, occurs when the supersonic wind thins to the point that it can no longer rebuff the denser haze of charged particles flowing through interstellar space. Instead, the solar wind suddenly collapses in on itself.

A growing cloud of trash threatens space tourism and has experts scrambling to clear the mess

Robots could gain momentum to change orbit by swinging weighted tethers like a discus thrower does. This would move them to large pieces of old debris, to which they would attach Terminator Tethers

Along with satellites and space stations, Earth is surrounded by tens of millions of pieces of floating space debris. Like any landfill, the trash is diverse, ranging from dead satellites to castaway rocket parts to flecks of paint. On average, over the past 40 years, one piece of space junk has fallen to Earth every day.

The ICT Graphics Lab at USC has created a low-cost volumetric 3-D display, which is really impressive. Apparently the process requires spinning mirrors, high-speed DLP Projections, and very precise calculations that figures out the correct axial perspective needed for a 360-degree image. The process even takes into account a viewer’s positioning. Small viewing areas, high costs and the viewer disconnect with blurry optical illusions, have bogged down earlier attempts by several companies. But the USC project is different and…

The ICT Graphics Lab at USC has created a low-cost volumetric 3-D display, which is really impressive. Apparently the process requires spinning mirrors, high-speed DLP Projections, and very precise calculations that figures out the correct axial perspective needed for a 360-degree image. The process even takes into account a viewer’s positioning. Small viewing areas, high costs and the viewer disconnect with blurry optical illusions, have bogged down earlier attempts by several companies. But the USC project is different and quite realistic. When projecting video frames into a rapidly spinning mirror, close to 5,000 individual images are reflected every second within the surface area and come together to create a real-space three-dimensional object. Because the images projected from the mirror jump out “toward multiple viewpoints in space,” the USC team created a formula that renders individual projections at different heights and traces each projected beam back to the display area to find the correct position of the viewer.

Via Newlaunches