Чек дис аут луѓе... многу интересен проект!

A £5bn solar power plan, backed by a Jordanian prince, could provide the EU with a sixth of its electricity needs - and cut carbon emissions

• Robin McKie, science editor
• The Observer
• Sunday December 2 2007

Solar panels like these near Munich could capture heat in areas of the Mediterranean under the plan proposed by Prince Hassan bin Talal. Photograph: Alamy Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5bn on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East.

More than a hundred of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.

Billions of watts of power could be generated this way, enough to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions. At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.

Last week Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan presented details of the scheme - named Desertec - to the European Parliament. 'Countries with deserts, countries with high energy demand, and countries with technology competence must co-operate,' he told MEPs.

The project has been developed by the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Corporation and is supported by engineers and politicians in Europe as well as Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Jordan and other nations in the Middle East and Africa.

Europe would provide initial funds for developing the solar technology that will be needed to run plants as well as money for constructing prototype stations. After that, banks and financial institutions, as well as national governments, would take over the construction programme, which could cost more than £200bn over the next 30 years.

'We don't make enough use of deserts,' said physicist Gerhard Knies, co-founder of the scheme. 'The sun beats down on them mercilessly during the day and heats the ground to tremendous temperatures. Then at night that heat is radiated back into the atmosphere. In other words, it is completely wasted. We need to stop that waste and exploit the vast amounts of energy that the sun beams down to us.'

Scientists estimate that sunlight could provide 10,000 times the amount of energy needed to fulfil humanity's current energy needs. Transforming that solar radiation into a form to be exploited by humanity is difficult, however.

One solution proposed by the scheme's engineers is to use large areas of land on which to construct their solar plants. In Europe, land is costly. But in nations such as Morocco, Algeria, and Libya it is cheap, mainly because they are scorched by the sun. The project aims to exploit that cheap land by use of a technique known as 'concentrating solar power'.

A CSP station consists of banks of several hundred giant mirrors that cover large areas of land, around a square kilometre. Each mirror's position can be carefully controlled to focus the sun's rays onto a central metal pillar that is filled with water. Prototype stations using this technique have already been tested in Spain and Algeria.

Once the sun's rays are focused on the pillar, temperatures inside start to soar to 800C. The water inside the pillar is vaporised into superhot steam which is channelled off and used to drive turbines which in turn generate electricity. 'It is proven technology,' added Knies. 'We have shown it works in our test plants.'

Only small stations have been tested, but soon plants capable of generating 100 megawatts of power could be built, enough to provide the needs of a town. The Desertec project envisages a ring of a thousand of these stations being built along the coast of northern Africa and round into the Mediterranean coast of the Middle East. In this way up to 100 billion watts of power could be generated: two thirds of it would be kept for local needs, the rest - around 30 billion watts - would be exported to Europe.

An idea of how much power this represents is revealed through Britain's electricity generating capacity, which totals 12 billion watts.

But there is an added twist to the system. The superheated steam, after it has driven the plant's turbines, would then be piped through tanks of sea water which would boil and evaporate. Steam from the sea water would piped away and condensed and stored as fresh water.

'Essentially you get electricity and fresh water,' said Knies. 'The latter is going to be crucial for developing countries round the southern Mediterranean and in north Africa. Their populations are rising rapidly, but they have limited supplies of fresh water. Our solar power plants will not only generate electricity that they can sell to Europe, they will supply drinkable water that will sustain their thirsty populations.'

There are drawbacks, however. At present electricity generated this way would cost around 15-20 eurocents (11 to 14p) a kilowatt-hour - almost twice the cost of power generated by coal. At such prices, few nations would be tempted to switch to solar. 'Unless it is extremely cheap, it won't stop people using easy-to-get fossil fuels,' John Gibbins, an energy engineer at Imperial College London, told Nature magazine last week.

However, Desertec's backers say improvements over the next decade should bring the cost of power from its plants to less than 10 eurocents a kilowatt-hour, making it competitive with traditionally generated power.

Other critics say the the plants would be built in several unstable states which could cut their supplies to Europe. Again, Knies dismisses the danger. 'It's not like oil. Solar power is gone once it hits your mirrors. It would simply be lost income.' The European Parliament has asked Desertec to propose short-term demonstration projects.

Start-Up Sells Solar Panels at Lower-Than-Usual Cost

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Nanosolar, a heavily financed Silicon Valley start-up whose backers include Google’s co-founders, plans to announce Tuesday that it has begun selling its innovative solar panels, which are made using a technique that is being held out as the future of solar power manufacturing.

The company, which has raised $150 million and built a 200,000-square-foot factory here, is developing a new manufacturing process that “prints” photovoltaic material on aluminum backing, a process the company says will reduce the manufacturing cost of the basic photovoltaic module by more than 80 percent.

Nanosolar, which recently hired a top manufacturing executive from I.B.M., said that it had orders for its first 18 months of manufacturing capacity. The photovoltaic panels will be made in Silicon Valley and in a second plant in Germany.

While many photovoltaic start-up companies are concentrating on increasing the efficiency with which their systems convert sunlight, Nanosolar has focused on lowering the manufacturing cost. Its process is akin to a large printing press, rather than the usual semiconductor manufacturing techniques that deposit thin films on silicon wafers.

Nanosolar’s founder and chief executive, Martin Roscheisen, claims to be the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to profitably sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt. That is the price at which solar energy becomes less expensive than coal.

“With a $1-per-watt panel,” he said, “it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems.”

According to the Energy Department, building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said.

The first Nanosolar panels are destined for a one-megawatt solar plant to be installed in Germany on a former landfill owned by a waste management company. The plant, being developed by Beck Energy, is expected to initially supply electrical power for about 400 homes.

The company chose to build its plant in southern San Jose, news that was cheered by local development officials. Much of the microelectronics industry created here has moved to Asia and new factories are a rare commodity in Silicon Valley.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/technology/18solar.html?ei=5088&en=091b06819623f9d0&ex=1355634000&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1198605974-PCWsjcvwSNmJiT9k6WPReQ&pagewanted=print

Интересното кај оваа команија е што хај-профајл луѓе стојат зад неа. Не станува збор за некоја заебанција или празни ветувања. 

Постирајте тука интересни работи од областа на науката и технологијата. 

Edited by pbanks - 02-Jan-2008 at 16:04

Многу често слушаме за таа работа глобално затоплување по телевизии и интернет, а многу малку слушаме за анти-тезите на оваа теорија. Оваа теорија стана толку распространета, набиена во секоја пора од општеството, што понекогаш си мислам дека е малце исфорсирана, ако не и само наметнато размислување. На еден многу интересен сајт, HowStuffworks.com-самото име ви кажува се за сајтот-наидов на овие анти-тези за глобалното затоплување, кое некои научници го сметаат за нормална природна појава која била регистрирана низ исторјата повеќе пати. Наведуваат и други причини кои довеле до овој начин на размислување, навистина вреди да се прочита и да се погледне на овој проблем од друга страна.

Global Warming Skeptics' Arguments Since global warming became a major issue, climatology has become a hot-button scientific field. Weather stations throughout the world collect data to help scientists create computer models that help them track global climate change. Peter Essick/Aurora/Getty Images Weather stations, like this one, collect information throughout the world. But are some more reliable than others? These models form the basis of much of the IPCC's reports, which warn of global climate change. But climate skeptics take issue with this process. Some people simply don't believe that the Earth is undergoing a global warming trend or climate change. Others believe in global warming and climate change, but don't believe that people are responsible. The skeptics who don't believe in global warming at all are the ones who most vehemently attack weather data, the analysis of the climatologists and the predictions of the models. Anti-global warming skeptics say the placement of some weather stations in urban areas may produce inaccurate measurements. According to them, the data are being corrupted by the urban heat island, an effect produced by cities' transportation, large amounts of heat-absorbing asphalt, and high concentrations of carbon dioxide coming from the many homes and businesses in high-population areas. Global warming skeptics also believe the models used to predict Earth's future under global warming are unreliable. They feel that while the sun, clouds, gases, glaciers and oceans are responsible for weather, so, too, are other factors, including some we don't currently understand. According to global warming skeptics, computer models are merely a guess at what will happen on Earth in the future -- something climatologists don't deny -- and an arguably poor guess at that. After all, if we can't accurately predict the weather a week from now, how can we predict the global climate in 100 years? Others don't believe we're experiencing a global warming trend at all. The annual temperature between 1998 and 2007 actually decreased, despite the 4 percent increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during that same period. They also point out that, while the Northern Hemisphere has warmed, the Southern Hemisphere has actually cooled. "Global warming was supposed to actually be global, not hemispheric," says skeptic -- and Executive Director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project -- Tom Harris [source: Canada Free Press]. These same skeptics find fault in the historical data used to graph things like glacial loss and hurricane frequency. Although weather data, like temperature, have been actively collected since 1850, it wasn't until the relatively recent access to detailed weather satellite photography that scientists were able to see changes in the Greenland ice shelf that global warming believers say is in such danger. Skeptics ask: How can we know how long it's been receding? Perhaps the meteorological event most often used by global warming skeptics as a counterargument is the Medieval Warm Period. Around the 9th to 14th centuries, regions around the world experienced an increase in temperatures, similar to what we see today [source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]. Following this period, the Earth experienced a Little Ice Age where global temperatures cooled. It is conceivable that the Earth is currently experiencing something similar to this, skeptics say. Their point is, we simply don't know enough about long-term weather systems to say for certain one way or the other. The skeptics of human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming don't dismiss global warming outright, they just don't believe that human activity is responsible. Learn more about their beliefs on the next page.

Целата статија

http://science.howstuffworks.com/climate-skeptic.htm


Edited by La Linea - 06-Jan-2008 at 18:34

Let a thousand genomes bloom
Posted: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 9:18 AM by Alan Boyle

Genetic researchers in China, Britain and the United States are teaming up to unravel the full genetic code of at least 1,000 people around the world - an unprecedented scientific project that could cost tens of millions of dollars and eventually reveal the roots of hundreds of diseases.

"The 1000 Genomes Project will examine the human genome at a level of detail that no one has done before," Richard Durbin of Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who is the project consortium's co chair, said in today's announcement. "Such a project would have been unthinkable two years ago. Today, thanks to amazing strides in sequencing technology, bioinformatics and population genomics, it is now within our grasp."

The project will build on the foundation created for HapMap, a similarly international gene-decoding effort. HapMap charted genetic differences between various geographical populations by looking at variations in "letters" of genetic code, known as single nucleotide polymorphism or SNPs. This time, researchers will analyze the full volume of human genetic information - which runs to a length of 3 billion letters, or roughly the entire English-language content of Wikipedia.

Using HapMap and other genetic databases, researchers already have identified about 100 regions of the genome that are associated with increased risk for diseases ranging from cancer and diabetes to cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease. But in order to track down exactly what goes wrong and how to fix it, researchers generally have to go through another circuitous round of genetic sequencing.

Taking the shortcut
The 1000 Genomes Project is aimed at providing a shortcut: The organizers of the effort figure that by mapping at least 1,000 full human genomes, they should be able to catalog the variants that appear in 1 percent or more of the global population across most of the genome. Within specific genes, the precision should be even better, catching variations down to the 0.5 percent level.

That would improve the sensitivity of disease discovery efforts by a factor of five for the full genome, and by a factor of 10 or more within gene regions, said Francis Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project and is now director of the federally funded National Human Genome Research Institute.

Once the project's database is filled out, researchers could use genome-wide association studies to narrow down an area that appeared to be associated with a disease. Then they could consult the catalog for the assorted variations within that region. Finally, they could run studies to figure out whether - and exactly how - particular variations contribute to the disease in question.

The data will be made freely available to researchers around the world, starting in 2011 or so, via the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen.

Who's involved?
The first samples for the 1000 Genomes Project will be coming from specimens already collected for the HapMap project and the extended HapMap set. The DNA is not linked to personal medical data, but rather to ethnic/geographical populations: Yoruba in Nigeria, Japanese in Tokyo, Chinese in Beijing, Utah residents with northern European ancestry, Luhya and Maasai in Kenya, Toscani in Italy, Gujarat Indians in Houston, Chinese in metropolitan Denver, Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles and African-Americans in the Southwest.

The project is getting major support from the institutes headed by Durbin and Collins, as well as from the Beijing Genomics Institute. A variety of American institutes and universities will be working through the National Human Genome Research Institute's Large-Scale Sequencing Network - and more institutions may join the international consortium as time goes on.

Based on current rates, the cost of sequencing so many genomes would amount to at least $350 million, and perhaps more than $500 million. Earlier this month, Massachusetts-based Knome and the Beijing Genetics Institute announced that they were pairing up to do whole-genome sequencing for 20 people, with a price tag starting at $350,000 per genome. (You think that's expensive? BGI did the first Chinese personal genome last year for $1.3 million.)

Over the next three years, the 1000 Genomes Project is aiming to bring the cost down to a tenth of the current rate - for a total cost of between $30 million and $50 million - by employing new sequencing technologies with greater efficiency.

The road ahead
The first year of the international effort will be taken up with pilot projects, aimed at finding out which combination of low-resolution and high-resolution sequencing will work the best. Then, during the scheduled two-year production phase, researchers hope to churn out an average of 8.2 billion DNA bases per day - the equivalent of more than two full human genomes every 24 hours.

"When up and running at full speed, this project will generate more sequence in two days than was added to public databases for all of the past year," the University of Oxford's Gil McVean, one of the co-chairs of the consortium's analysis group, said in today's announcement.

Will the project hasten the day when your genome is an open book, revealing your predisposition to suffer deadly diseases - and perhaps to do dastardly deeds? The project's organizers say that they're deploying a phalanx of ethicists to guard against abuses, and that the privacy of genetic donors will be preserved. What do you think? Learn more about the project from the 1000 Genomes Web site, as well as this advance report from Nature, then weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 10:50 a.m ET: Nature's follow-up report says some scientists fear the project's goals are too ambitious for its budget and timeline. The report also quotes Knome's George Church as saying the project might not be ambitious enough, because the database won't link genetic variants directly with disease data. The project organizers held back from doing that due to privacy concerns - and also because they felt the medical applications were best left to follow-up studies. More food for thought...

Aman kako go gradat toa....gledav dokumentarna emisija i zborea deka so taa visina, koga ke ima siln veter, zgradata ke 'navulva' ako me razbravte, ke krivi ama nema da padne ili koj znae sto poshto ke ja izgradata na nekoj drug nacin neznam..

Не сум бил, но се надевам дека некогаш ќе бидам во можност да го видам тоа чудо. И можеби да престојувам овде :

Oва е единствениот хотел со 7 ѕвезди во светот

Edited by La Linea - 10-Feb-2008 at 14:40

Eden od slednite proekti vo Dubai.

Originally posted by gotsomekicks Дејан: колку што сум гледал по емисии за вакви supertalls, обично ставаат некое си ѓуле кое се клати спротивно од зградата кога дува ветер и на тој начин ја стабилизира. Ова е еден начин да се заштити од ветер, друг начин е и во формата на зградата.

Izgleda toa bese!