“The storm may be over, but our work is far from done,” said Gail McGovern, Red Cross president and CEO. “We expect this disaster relief operation to be a very large operation that will continue for several weeks.”

The Red Cross is urging immediate blood and platelet donations in areas that were not affected by this storm, and is also asking community members in affected areas to consider donating blood once it is safe to go out. If people want to schedule an appointment, they can go online at www.redcrossblood.org or call 1-800-RED CROSS.

Those who want to help can click or text to support American Red Cross Disaster Relief. Donations can be made by visiting www.redcross.org, calling 1-800-REDCROSS, or texting the word REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation. Contributions can also be sent to local Red Cross chapters or mailed to the American Red Cross, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013.

The Taylors are known worldwide for their Fuel Academy, where they travel the world educating motorists on ways to drive more effectively and efficiently. With 42 fuel efficiency records, they are known as the world’s most fuel efficient couple.

“By setting out for another fuel economy record using practical tips, we’re excited to show everyday motorists how they can become more fuel efficient drivers through the Shell Smarter Driving program,” said Helen Taylor. “Since 1982, we’ve been educating others about how to drive more efficiently and how drivers can reduce their fuel consumption and maximize efficiency by using high quality fuels such as Shell Nitrogen Enriched Gasolines. We are confident that we’ll set another record on this tour while offering consumers easy tips to save money on the road and at the pump.”

Along their route, the Taylors are sharing what they’ve learned and tips on how anyone can use fuel more efficiently through proper vehicle maintenance, changing simple driving behaviors and saving money on high-quality products.

The Taylors believe that everyone can make a difference and push the boundaries of fuel efficiency by following a simple “MAP” to smarter Driving, which includes:

Maintenance: Keep your engine well tuned and repair any problems immediately. If your car has failed an emissions test or is noticeably out of tune, repairing the problem could improve your gasoline mileage by 4 percent on average.*

Actions: Practice smart behaviors or actions while you’re behind the wheel. Speeding, rapid acceleration and braking can lower your gasoline mileage by 5 percent at lower speeds around town and by 33 percent at highway speeds.*

Products: Purchase smart products and services at the right price without sacrificing quality. Lower-quality gasolines can leave harmful carbon deposits or “gunk,” which can build up on intake valves and fuel injectors negatively impacting engine performance, vehicle responsiveness and reduction of fuel flow – all potentially leading to reduced fuel economy.

The Taylors will end their odyssey in Las Vegas later this month. Along their journey, the Taylors are recording official stops at Shell stations to fill their tank and hold on-site consumer education activities, including tips to save money on fuel by leveraging grocer loyalty reward programs in select markets and using payment options that can offer significant discounts.

CBI Polymers has donated DeconGel nuclear decontaminant and the manpower to apply the blue gel to affected areas of the Little Lamb Kindergarten. Once dry, the gel is peeled away, taking harmful radiation with it.

DeconGel nuclear decontaminant is unique compared to traditional decontamination solutions, which mostly consist of soap and water. Multiple laboratory tests and customer field deployments have demonstrated near-100% decontamination of hazardous materials ranging from uranium and cesium to PCB oils and beryllium. DeconGel allows for waterless remediation, eliminating the environmental impact of liquid runoff and significantly reducing waste volume and disposal costs by up to 90 percent.

Little Lamb Kindergarten headmistress Tamiko Kokubo was uncomfortable allowing her students to play outside for the past four and a half months because of the fear of radiation exposure from the fallout generated by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which suffered a catastrophic breach of its containment facilities after the March 11th earthquake and subsequent tsunami. The release of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere contaminated much of the surrounding area.

To protect her students from exposure to radioactive particles, Headmistress Kokubo chose not to open the playground and outdoor surfaces to the children. While necessary for safety reasons, this closure of the outdoor facilities deprived the school’s pre-school children and elementary level students of all outdoor activities, which are important to their physical development, as well as being one of the most enjoyable parts of their day.

CBI Polymers initially provided assistance to the Fukushima disaster relief with a donation of product and technical services. But individual stories, such as the plight of the Little Lamb Kindergarten, encouraged the company to become directly involved.

One of the challenges facing new technologies in the highly competitive and infrastructure-intense industry of clean energy is the lack of connectivity between top-level solutions and the test beds that can prove and adopt them. Leveraging the Department of Defense’s long history as a proving ground for innovation, the Defense Energy Technology Challenge will bring together technology companies with the military partners seeking new clean energy solutions.

“While ample prospects exist for interaction between the United States government and start-up companies, navigating a way into them can be challenging for both,” said Patricia Glaza, CEO of CTSI. “We hope this program will create a new bridge between innovative companies and the U.S. military.”

Key solution areas for this year’s challenge include: biofuels, energy efficiency, smart grid and renewable energy; however, all clean technology companies are invited to enter. Companies participating in the Defense Energy Technology Challenge will have their solutions reviewed by a defense/governmental/expert group. Organizations with the top solutions will present to a panel with officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Army Corp of Engineers on September 13th during the Asia Pacific Clean Energy Summit. (http://ct-si.org/events/APCE2011/).

In addition to the presentation to the military panel and direct feedback they provide, selected finalists will have the opportunity to meet and network with additional potential partners and customers in attendance including Lockheed Martin, AECOM, SAIC, the Hawaiian Electric Company, Sempra Generation, and Alstom.

The submission deadline is August 5, 2011. Organizations with technologies developed at the prototype stage and beyond targeting the government for testing and adoption should apply here: http://ct-si.org/services/cleanTest/challenge.html.

About Clean Technology & Sustainable Industries Organization (CTSI):

The Clean Technology & Sustainable Industries Organization (CTSI), a 501c6 non-profit industry association, represents the organizations developing, commercializing, and implementing energy, water, and environmental technologies. Clean technologies offer much needed solutions to growing resource security and sustainability concerns and are critical to maintaining economic competitiveness. CTSI brings together global leaders for advocacy, community development, networking, and information sharing to help bring these needed technologies to market more rapidly. Visit www.ct-si.org for more information.

Media Contact:

Laura Benold
Media Relations
press@techconnect.org
(512) 800-9798

“The brain is incredible,” says Lulu Qian, a Caltech senior postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering and lead author on the paper describing this work, published in the July 21 issue of the journal Nature. “It allows us to recognize patterns of events, form memories, make decisions, and take actions. So we asked, instead of having a physically connected network of neural cells, can a soup of interacting molecules exhibit brainlike behavior?”

The answer, as the researchers show, is yes.

Consisting of four artificial neurons made from 112 distinct DNA strands, the researchers’ neural network plays a mind-reading game in which it tries to identify a mystery scientist. The researchers “trained” the neural network to “know” four scientists, whose identities are each represented by a specific, unique set of answers to four yes-or-no questions, such as whether the scientist was British.

After thinking of a scientist, a human player provides an incomplete subset of answers that partially identifies the scientist. The player then conveys those clues to the network by dropping DNA strands that correspond to those answers into the test tube. Communicating via fluorescent signals, the network then identifies which scientist the player has in mind. Or, the network can “say” that it has insufficient information to pick just one of the scientists in its memory or that the clues contradict what it has remembered. The researchers played this game with the network using 27 different ways of answering the questions (out of 81 total combinations), and it responded correctly each time.

This DNA-based neural network demonstrates the ability to take an incomplete pattern and figure out what it might represent—one of the brain’s unique features. …

This is a promising milestone on the way to developing molecular computers to function inside living cells—analyzing the molecular environment inside the cell and taking appropriate action.

Paper coauthor and Caltech professor Erik Winfree and colleague Paul W.K. Rothemund won the 2006 Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology for both the experimental work and theory categories.

The Gemasolar plant in Fuentes de Andalucía – which began operating barely a month ago – was able to keep the juice flowing using an innovative technique that stores energy in molten salt. This allows for up to 15 hours of electricity production in the absence of solar radiation, stretching the plant’s production into the night and keeping it running during heavy cloud cover.

While the plant, which can produce enough power to supply 25,000 homes, was able to pull off an around-the-clock cycle of power production, Torresol said it doesn’t expect that level of production all the time. “The high performance of the installations coincided with several days of excellent solar radiation which made it possible for the hot-salt storage tank to reach full capacity,” said Diego Ramírez, director of production at Torresol. “We’re hoping that in the next few days our supply to the network will reach an average of 20 hours a day.”

The 19.9-megwatt capacity Gemasolar plant uses a “power tower” system, with 2,650 mirrors bouncing sunlight to the top of a 140-meter tower at the center of the circle of mirrors. Torresol said a super-efficient receiver absorbs 95 percent of the radiation aimed at it, heating molten salts inside the tower to more than 500 degrees Celsius. The hot molten salts are then stored for use when the sun goes down or when clouds move in.

by Jasmine Greene, from Earth Techling

Engineers use sensors to measure the strain, or forces, exerted on materials used to build everything from airplanes to civil infrastructure. For example, these sensors can tell us how an airplane wing is performing in flight, and give maintenance authorities advance notice when the wing may be near failure. In other words, it gives you a chance to address an issue before it becomes a problem.

Historically, one flaw in such sensors is that they can break under stress. That means the sensor can no longer provide information to users, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the material they were monitoring has been irreparably harmed. And, as in the airplane example, the sensors may be inaccessible – making them difficult or impossible to replace.

“To address this problem, we’ve developed a sensor that automatically repairs itself, in the event that it is broken,” says Dr. Kara Peters, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.

The sensor can stretch and compress along with the material it monitors. An infrared (IR) light wave runs through the sensor and detects these changes in length, which tells us how much strain the material is undergoing.

The sensor contains two glass optical fibers that run through a reservoir filled with ultraviolet(UV)-curable resin. The ends of the glass fibers are aligned with each other, but separated by a small gap. Focused beams of IR and UV light run through one of the fibers. When the tightly focused UV beam hits the resin, the resin hardens, creating a thin polymer filament that connects the glass fibers – creating a closed circuit for the IR light. The rest of the resin in the reservoir remains in liquid form, surrounding the filament.

The remaining liquid resin is important. If the polymer filament breaks under stress, more liquid resin rushes into the gap, comes into contact with the UV beam and hardens – repairing the sensor automatically.

“Events that can break a sensor, but don’t break the structure being monitored, are important,” Peters says. “These events could be bird strikes to an airplane wing or earthquake damage to a building. Collecting data on what has happened to these structures can help us make informed decisions about what is safe and what is not. But if those sensors are broken, that data isn’t available. Hopefully, this new sensor design will help us collect this sort of data in the future.”

Source: Press release from North Carolina State University

You can hardly find a consumer electronics user who would not be irritated by problems with power supply. The batteries run out quickly and require continuous replacements or take a long time charging. Fuel cells could significantly improve the comfort of using electronic devices. Their commercialization, however, is hampered by many technological problems. A new catalyst developed at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw represents a substantial milestone on the way to dissemination of cheap, durable, light and environment friendly fuel cells powered by formic acid.

Fuel cell is a device converting chemical energy into electric power. The current is generated directly due to fuel combustion in the presence of catalysts used on the anode and the cathode of the fuel cell. “Theoretical efficiency of conversion of chemical energy into electric power in the cells can reach even one hundred percent. The best present fuel cells, powered by hydrogen, reach up to 60% in real life. For comparison, the efficiency of low-compression engines is as low as 20%,” says Dr Andrzej Borodziński from the IPC PAS.

The biggest obstacle to dissemination of hydrogen fuels is the storage of hydrogen. The issue turned out to be extremely technologically challenging and still is waiting for satisfactory solutions. An alternative to fuel cells powered by pure hydrogen is the methanol fuel cell technology. Methanol, however, is toxic and the methanol powered fuel cells must be produced with expensive platinum based catalysts. Moreover, methanol fuel cells have low power and are operated at a relatively high and so potentially hazardous temperature (approximately 90°C).

An alternative solution is formic acid fuel cells. In this case, the reactions occur at room temperature, and the efficiency and power of these fuel cells are clearly higher than those for methanol ones. In addition, formic acid is easy to store and transport. To have, however, formic acid fuel cell stable in operation you need an efficient and durable catalyst.

“The catalyst developed by us has initially lower activity then the existing catalysts made of pure palladium. The difference disappears, however, already after two hours of operation. And further it is only better. Our catalyst is stable in operation, whereas the activity of a pure palladium-based catalyst decreases in time,” says Dr Borodziński.

An advantage of the catalyst developed in the IPC PAS, particularly important from the economic point of view, is that it preserves its properties while operated in formic acid of low purity. Such formic acid can be easily produced in large quantities, also from biomass, so the fuel for new fuel cells would be very cheap.

Formic acid produced from biomass would be a fully environment friendly fuel. The reactions involving formic acid in fuel cells generate as products water and carbon dioxide. The latter is, as a matter of fact, a greenhouse gas, but the biomass is obtained from plants which use carbon dioxide for their growth. As a result, formic acid produced from biomass and consumed in fuel cells would not change the content of carbon dioxide in atmospheric air. The risk of natural environment contamination by formic acid is also low.

Formic acid fuel cells would find numerous applications. They would be particularly suitable in portable electronic devices — mobile phones, laptops or GPS-based devices. They could also be installed as power supply sources in vehicles, from wheelchairs through electric bicycles up to yachts.

At the IPC PAS the research is being undertaken on the first batteries based on formic acid fuel cells. The researchers expect that a prototype of a commercial device should be ready within a couple of years.

Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (2011, June 15). New catalyst will allow commercialization of revolutionary fuel cells. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 28, 2011, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2011/06/110615062237.htm

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Wind Turbine Design and Construction:

• August 1-6, Brownstown, Indiana; Registration now open!
• September 17-18, 2011 — Fort Collins, Colorado, at the Rocky Mountain Sustainable Fair. Registration not yet open.
• October 3-8, 2011 — Fort Collins, Colorado. Registration opening soon!”

Off-Grid Power Systems for Remote Locations:

• July 1-8, 2011 — Smithers, BC, Canada. Registration is now open!
• August 22-24, 2011 — Fort Collins, Colorado. Registration is now open!
• October 21-28, 2011? — Smithers, BC Canada
• November 5, 2011 — Fort Collins, Colorado. Registration opening soon!

Wind Power Reality — an Introduction to Small Wind:

• August 25, 2011 — Fort Collins, Colorado. Registration opening soon!
• September 17, 18, 2011 — Fort Collins, Colorado, at the Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Fair. Registration not yet open.
• November 12, 2011 — Fort Collins, Colorado. Registration opening soon!

PV Systems and Firefighter Safety:

• October 8, 2011 — Fort Collins, Colorado. Registration opening soon! See: Fort Collins Coloradoan Newspaper article about this class.
• Please Contact Us if your local fire department or AHJ would like to book this seminar, or if you are a professional renewable energy installer who has been requested to train your local fire department.