Tag Archives: solar

NASA’s ShadowCam Hitches Ride to Moon on Korean Craft

Image courtesy Arizona State University / Malin Space Science Systems

NASA plans to send a new, light-sensitive camera to explore the moon’s most shadowed regions. ShadowCam will look for evidence of water ice in the permanently shadowed regions of the moon.

Lunar areas that never receive sunlight – frigid craters and mountain shadows – could conceal a treasure trove of water ice, especially near the poles.

Read/listen to my full story at KJZZ’s Arizona Science Desk:
Shadow-Piercing NASA Camera Rides To Moon Aboard Korean Craft

Tesla’s Powerwall: Reading the Meter

Image of Tesla Powerwall battery.
Photo by Tesla Energy.

April 2015 saw Tesla Motors’ entry into the home and industrial battery market. Thousands of pre-orders – and more than a little hype – attended the announcement, and it’s easy to see why: The promise of a cost-effective home battery, one that could make self-storage an equal or better option for solar customers than the prevailing sell-and-buyback model, could revolutionize the solar industry.

Yet some experts argue that the battery is not all it’s cracked up to be, while harsher critics accuse Tesla of using the storage cells as big green stalking horses, part of a plan to bilk taxpayers into subsidizing the company’s massive battery factory and R&D facility in Nevada. Read on as I make the connections in …

How the Tesla Powerwall Works

It’s like Dazzler and Tesla had a baby, and it was a t-shirt

Orange Sound Charge T-Shirt
Photo courtesy Orange

The pages of ThinkGeek teem with techno-tees fitted with LEDs, speakers, DIY artwork, virtual instruments and WiFi meters. Meanwhile, companies vie to gin up greener charging methods for cell phones.

Is it time for a mashup? A cellphone-charging tee? Maybe – but good luck wearing one through airport security.

Can a T-shirt turn sound into electricity?

Putting the green in nanomachines

Carbon nanotubes
Carbon nanotubes. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

We tend to think of nanotechnology as the stuff of the future, but it’s already here, in hundreds of consumer products and industrial applications. As progress in this minuscule world has accelerated, concern for the environment and for public health has led to a call for green nanotechnology—approaches that accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. In this article, we’ll take a tour of how these many approaches are playing out.

How is green nanotechnology being used?