About a year ago I purchased a hand-crank, solar powered radio with NOAA weather band from Eton corp. It’s been a good performer and a welcome addition at the camp site in the evenings when the family wants to listen to the ball game or music.
Well, the folks over at Eton have come up with another product that should provide another alternative to listening to crappy speakers when off the grid.
I like the concept of the Volpe but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to sell very well here in America. We are so intent on having vehicles that can take us out of the city at highway speeds that something like this, that only has a top speed of 50 MPH, will not satisfy a large majority of folks.
The four energy sources is what I think appeals to people. Gasoline, electric, solar and natural gas can provide the energy needed to get this thing down the road.
You have got to be kidding me. This video talks about how certain Volkswagen models being built here in the U.S. with high mile per gallon motors are only available in Europe. Come on Man! After hearing this guy talk about why these highly efficient cars aren’t sold here really got my blood boiling. These shenanigans have to end.
Just finished up with my morning meditation session. I’ve been trying to develop the habit for the last few weeks and for the most part have been able to carve out a couple of minutes in my schedule to meditate. Good thing too because as it turns out meditation research has found yet another benefit.
Meditation (Photo credit: holisticgeek)
The article below talks about UCLA research that has found that long term meditators gain some pretty good benefits.
ScienceDaily. “Earlier evidence out of UCLA suggested that meditating for years thickens the brain (in a good way) and strengthens the connections between brain cells. Now a further report by UCLA researchers suggests yet another benefit.
Eileen Luders, an assistant professor at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and colleagues, have found that long-term meditators have larger amounts of gyrification (“folding” of the cortex, which may allow the brain to process information faster) than people who do not meditate. Further, a direct correlation was found between the amount of gyrification and the number of meditation years, possibly providing further proof of the brain’s neuroplasticity, or ability to adapt to environmental changes.
The cerebral cortex is the outermost layer of neural tissue. Among other functions, it plays a key role in memory, attention, thought and consciousness. Gyrification or cortical folding is the process by which the surface of the brain undergoes changes to create narrow furrows and folds called sulci and gyri. Their formation may promote and enhance neural processing. Presumably then, the more folding that occurs, the better the brain is at processing information, making decisions, forming memories and so forth.
“Rather than just comparing meditators and non-meditators, we wanted to see if there is a link between the amount of meditation practice and the extent of brain alteration,” said Luders. “That is, correlating the number of years of meditation with the degree of folding.”
Of the 49 recruited subjects, the researchers took MRI scans of 23 meditators and compared them to 16 control subjects matched for age, handedness and sex. (Ten participants dropped out.) The scans for the controls were obtained from an existing MRI database, while the meditators were recruited from various meditation venues. The meditators had practiced their craft on average for 20 years using a variety of meditation types — Samatha, Vipassana, Zen and more. The researchers applied a well-established and automated whole-brain approach to measure cortical gyrification at thousands of points across the surface of the brain.
They found pronounced group differences (heightened levels of gyrification in active meditation practitioners) across a wide swatch of the cortex, including the left precentral gyrus, the left and right anterior dorsal insula, the right fusiform gyrus and the right cuneus.
Perhaps most interesting, though, was the positive correlation between the number of meditation years and the amount of insular gyrification.
“The insula has been suggested to function as a hub for autonomic, affective and cognitive integration,” said Luders. “Meditators are known to be masters in introspection and awareness as well as emotional control and self-regulation, so the findings make sense that the longer someone has meditated, the higher the degree of folding in the insula.”
While Luders cautions that genetic and other environmental factors could have contributed to the effects the researchers observed, still, “The positive correlation between gyrification and the number of practice years supports the idea that meditation enhances regional gyrification.”
Other authors of the study included Florian Kurth, Emeran A. Mayer, Arthur W.Toga, and Katherine L. Narr, all of UCLA, and Christian Gaser, University of Jena, Germany. Funding was provided by several organizations, including the National Institutes of Health. The authors report no conflict of interest.”
This story gets me excited for two reasons. One whenever I hear about American ingenuity overcoming technical hurdles, that can only mean more jobs further down the road and two, any new technique or procedure that has the possibility of reducing renewable energy costs will ultimately get us closer to the day when unsustainable sources of energy are no longer needed.
ScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2012) — Scientists at USC have developed a potential pathway to cheap, stable solar cells made from nanocrystals so small they can exist as a liquid ink and be painted or printed onto clear surfaces.
The solar nanocrystals are about four nanometers in size — meaning you could fit more than 250,000,000,000 on the head of a pin — and float them in a liquid solution, so “like you print a newspaper, you can print solar cells,” said Richard L. Brutchey, assistant professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Brutchey and USC postdoctoral researcher David H. Webber developed a new surface coating for the nanocrystals, which are made of the semiconductor cadmium selenide. Their research is featured as a “hot article” this month in the international journal for inorganic chemistry Dalton Transactions.
Liquid nanocrystal solar cells are cheaper to fabricate than available single-crystal silicon wafer solar cells but are not nearly as efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. Brutchey and Webber solved one of the key problems of liquid solar cells: how to create a stable liquid that also conducts electricity.
In the past, organic ligand molecules were attached to the nanocrystals to keep them stable and to prevent them from sticking together. These molecules also insulated the crystals, making the whole thing terrible at conducting electricity.
“That has been a real challenge in this field,” Brutchey said.
Brutchey and Webber discovered a synthetic ligand that not only works well at stabilizing nanocrystals, but actually builds tiny bridges connecting the nanocrystals to help transmit current.
With a relatively low-temperature process, the researchers’ method also allows for the possibility that solar cells can be printed onto plastic instead of glass without any issues with melting — resulting in a flexible solar panel that can be shaped to fit anywhere.
As they continue their research, Brutchey said he plans to work on nanocrystals built from materials other than cadmium, which is restricted in commercial applications due to toxicity.
“While the commercialization of this technology is still years away, we see a clear path forward toward integrating this into the next generation of solar cell technologies,” Brutchey said.
