Tag: storage

bookmark_borderThe Costs of Solar Energy

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A lot of the environmental costs of solar depend on how the panels and batteries are produced, transported and disposed of… and most importantly how the energy is stored. As renewable energy grows, storage will become a greater problem. In general, we would be better off producing energy like the sun (fusion) than trying to capture the sun’s energy. http://news.stanford.edu/…/store-electric-grid-030513.html

The fossil fuel required to build grid-scale batteries…
  • Fusion does not produce any toxic waste, either — http://news.yahoo.com/solar-industry-grapples-hazardous…

    SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Homeowners on the hunt…
    news.yahoo.com|By JASON DEAREN
  • One of my main concerns with solar is the cost to the environment if they are not put on already existing impervious surfaces. Solar panel farms have many negative impacts on plants and wildlife, not to mention, robbing the Earth’s surface of the energy being harvested by the panels.

Other than fusion, the only other method to create clean energy has to do with solar and turning water into electricity — The Economics of Turning Water into Electricity.

bookmark_borderThe World’s Smallest Movie

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The star of the new movie made by IBM is 1/25,000,000 inch tall.

The ability to move single atoms, one of the smallest particles of any element in the universe, is crucial to IBM’s research in the field of atomic-scale memory. In 2012, IBM scientists announced the creation of the world’s smallest magnetic memory bit, made of just 12 atoms. This breakthrough could transform computing by providing the world with devices that have access to unprecedented levels of data storage. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun. In that spirit, the scientists moved atoms by using their scanning tunneling microscope to make … a movie, which has been verified by Guinness World Records™ as The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film.

Exploring the limits of storage … and moviemaking

Today, it takes roughly one million atoms to store a single bit of data on a computer or electronic device. A bit is the basic unit of information in computing that can have only one of two values, one or zero. Eight bits form a byte. Recently, IBM Research announced it can now store that same bit of information in just 12 atoms.

From 1,000,000 to 12 — that’s a dramatic breakthrough that not only has the potential to make our computers and devices smaller and more powerful, but also holds enormous implications for the way entire industries operate.