Sunlight to Petrol January 6, 2008
Posted by Cobus in Energy, Environment, Future, Science, Technology.add a comment
As the quest for finding alternative sources of energy and ways to combat global warming mounts, a research team from Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico is building a prototype device intended to chemically “reenergise” carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide using concentrated solar energy to reverse combustion.
The carbon monoxide could then be used to make hydrogen or serve as a building block to synthesise a liquid combustible fuel, such as methanol or even gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
The prototype device, called the Counter Rotating Ring Receiver Reactor Recuperator (CR5, for short), will break a carbon-oxygen bond in the carbon dioxide to form carbon monoxide and oxygen in two distinct steps. It is a major piece of an approach to converting carbon dioxide into fuel from sunlight.
The Sandia scientists calls this approach “Sunshine to Petrol” (S2P). “Liquid Solar Fuel” is the end product — the methanol, gasoline, or other liquid fuel made from water and the carbon monoxide produced using solar energy.
Laboratory experiments have proved that the process works, and they hope to finish the prototype by April. Although the ideas are not economically viable yet and 15 to 20 years from viability on an industrial scale, it is a project of great significance, contributory in the proactive sense, to major challenges facing life on our planet.
Sources:
(1) http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/S2P
(2) http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/sunshine.html
Future View: The Age of Distraction December 6, 2007
Posted by Cobus in Future, Trends.add a comment
Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism at Iowa State University argues that academia is failing to inform future generations about social problems that require critical thinking and interpersonal intelligence because of its reliance on technology and the media’s overemphasis on trivia.
In his article “The Age of Distraction: The Professor or the Processor,” Bugeja says that the new technologies that now keep people constantly connected also keep them constantly distracted. Educators know that wireless technology has disrupted the classroom, with students browsing (and even buying) online during lectures.
However, Bugeja argues, the new challenge is the pervasive unwillingness to do anything about it. Digital distractions now keep us from addressing the real issues of the day. Each of us daily consumes an average of nine hours of media through myriad technological platforms.
As a journalism professor, he is especially sensitive to this emerging state of constant distraction and its effects on what people watch and read. This is not the Age of Information, he says, but rather the Age of Distraction. And distraction in academia is deadly because it undermines critical thinking. Something that impacts all of us — and the future.
Bugeja states that without critical thinking, we create trivia. We dismantle scientific models and replace them with trendy or wishful ones that are neither transferable nor testable. We have witnessed this with such issues as global warming, worldwide pandemics, and natural selection. Thus, he theorizes that standards of higher education have been lowered, not raised, because of new information and consumer technology.
He believes that if we do not recommit to critical thinking in the classroom, the future is in jeopardy. Moreover, if we don’t practice interpersonal intelligence at home, school, and work, we cannot set the standards for the emerging generation…
Makes you think, doesn’t it?…
Read the full article “The Age of Disctraction: The Professor or the Processor?” by Michael Bugeja at The Futurist.
