Latest Scientific research and innovations

Adelaide creates world’s first solar-powered public transport system


Many local communities are looking at ways that they can incorporate green technology into their city’s municipal infrastructure. One impressive success story is the Tindo electric bus in Adelaide. Although many cities have experimented with using hybrid or electric technology in their public transport systems, this vehicle is the world’s first 100% solar-powered electric bus; and not only is it powered by the sun, but this service is also offered free of charge.

Named after an Aboriginal word for “sun”, the Tindo was designed to be part of the Adelaide Connector Bus service, a free service run by the City Council. What makes the bus unique from other solar-powered vehicles is that there aren’t any solar panels physically on the vehicle. Instead, the car received electric power from solar panels located on the city’s central bus station.
These provide enough energy to allow the bus to run freely from the city centre and the North Adelaide, and will also offer air conditioning and WiFi to its 40 passengers.
The Council commissioned this bus from a New Zealand company called Designline International, as part of a wider green initiative.
Adelaide residents have shown a keen interest in reducing emissions, with many seeking out hybrid cars like the MitsMirubishi age, or choosing to go electric, while many residents already choose to carpool or bicycle on their commute as well. In the City Council’s Strategy Plan for 2012-2016, further plans to make the streets more sustainable are outlined. This includes a more comprehensive network of footpaths and bike trails to enable commuters to get around without a car.
The latest figures from 2010 showed that 36% of the city’s carbon emissions came from transportation. Although residents are turning to hybrids like new Ssangyong cars and the ever-popular Prius to reduce personal emissions, the city’s public transportation network has helped further reduce emissions. The Tindo has no combustion engine, which makes it a zero emissions vehicle. Its regenerative braking system also saves an additional 30% of energy consumption. In its first year alone it’s estimated that the solar-powered bus saved over 70,000 kg of carbon emissions and 14,000 litres of diesel.
Due to its unique solar photovoltaic charging system and ability to travel over 200 kilometres between recharges, this vehicle has received a great deal of attention from the wider green community. It’s been featured in the Solar City Convention Spirit Festival, Global Green Challenge, and Heritage Bus Tour. Although solar busses can be found in Austria, China, Wales, and India, they have yet to become a widespread public transport solution. Of these various solar busses, the Tindo is still the only one which is completely powered by the sun.


One step closer to teleportation


A team of University of Queensland physicists has transmitted an atom from one location to another inside an electronic chip. The team, which includes Dr Arkady Fedorov and Dr Matthias Baur from UQ's ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems and the School of Mathematics and Physics, published its findings in Nature. 

Dr Fedorov said the team had achieved quantum teleportation for the first time, which could lead to larger electronic networks and more functional electronic chips. “This is a process by which quantum information can be transmitted from one place to another without sending a physical carrier of information,” Dr Fedorov said. “In this process the information just appears at the destination, almost like teleportation used in the famous science fiction series Star Trek.” Dr Fedorov said the key resource of quantum teleportation was a special type of correlation, called entanglement, shared between a sender and a receiver. “Once entanglement is created, this ‘impossible' information transfer becomes in fact possible thanks to laws of quantum mechanics,” Dr Fedorov said. 
“For the first time, the stunning process of quantum teleportation has now been used in a circuit to relay information from one corner of the sample to the other. “What makes our work interesting is the system uses a circuit, much like modern computer chips. “In our system the quantum information is stored in artificial structures called quantum bits, and you can even see them with your bare eyes. “This is surprising because people typically expect quantum only at atomic scales, not even visible with electronic microscopes. 
“This quantum information allows us to do teleportation with impressive speed and accuracy above what has been achievable to date.” “In our Superconducting Quantum Devices laboratory at UQ we are using this technology to further enhance our knowledge about the quantum nature,” Dr Fedorov said. 
“Eventually this technology will be used to create more powerful devices.” 

This research indicates that questions relating to the physics of quantum communication can be addressed using electronic circuits at microwave frequencies. 
“One may even foresee future experiments in which quantum information will be distributed over larger distances directly by microwave to optical interfaces for quantum communication,” Dr Fedorov said. 
Teleportation is expected to find applications in secure communication and in more efficient information processing based on the laws of quantum physics. 
Dr Arkady Fedorov and Dr Matthias Baur moved from ETH Zurich where the research was conducted to UQ in January this year. 

Dr Fedorov is a Chief Investigator in the Australia Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (EQuS). EQuS aims to initiate the Quantum Era in the 21st century by engineering designer quantum systems. Through focused and visionary research, EQuS will deliver new scientific insights and fundamentally new technical capabilities across a range of disciplines. Impacts of this work will improve the lives of Australians and people all over the world by producing breakthroughs in physics, engineering, chemistry, biology and medicine. 

Paper: L. Steffen, Y. Salathe, M. Oppliger, P. Kurpiers, M. Baur, C. Lang, G. Puebla-Hellmann, A. Fedorov, and Andreas Wallraff (2013) Deterministic quantum teleportation with feed-forward in a solid state system. Nature 500, 319-322. 


A 1,476-foot tower equipped with its very own cloaking device



The South Korean government has granted approval to begin construction on what will be the world's first "invisible" tower. Called the Infinity Tower, it will be equipped with an LED facade system and optical cameras to give it a reflective skin — and a striking translucent appearance.
All images via GDS Architects.

There are so many imaginative visions of what future cities, skyscrapers, and towers will look like — but who would have imagined invisible structures? Designed by GDS Architects, the Infinity Tower will be just that. The LED system will utilize a series of cameras that will transmit realtime images to the building's reflective surface. When fully activated, the tower should blend in with the skyline.



The system at 0%, 30% and 100% activation.

The glass-encased tower will feature the third highest observation deck in the world.


Researchers Read the Coffee Grounds and Find a Promising Energy Resource For the Future

Yang Liu, a graduate student in environmental engineering in UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS), presents a summary of early-but-promising discoveries on his team’s research at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) 246th National Meeting & Exposition this week in Indianapolis.

Liu and fellow researchers Qingshi Tu, a UC doctoral student in environmental engineering, and Mingming Lu, a UC associate professor of environmental engineering, used a three-pronged approach to converting waste coffee grounds into energy sources including biodiesel and activated carbon by: 

Extracting oil from the waste.
Drying the waste coffee grounds after oil removal to filter impurities in biodiesel production.
Burning what was left as an alternative energy source for electricity, similar to using biomass.

The researchers launched the project in 2010, gathering waste coffee grounds in a five-gallon bucket from a Starbucks store on UC’s campus. After collection, they removed the oil from the waste coffee grounds and converted triglycerides (oil) into biodiesel and the byproduct, glycerin. The coffee grounds were then dried and used to purify the biodiesel they derived from the waste coffee grounds. 

The preliminary results showed that the oil content in the waste coffee grounds was between 8.37-19.63 percent, and biodiesel made from coffee oil meets the ASTM International D6751 standard. The efficiency of using the waste coffee grounds as a purification material to remove the impurities in crude biodiesel, such as methanol and residual glycerin, was slightly lower compared with commercial purification products. However, the researchers report that results still indicate a promising alternative, considering the cost of purification products. Future research will continue to focus on improving the purification efficiency of waste coffee grounds-derived activated carbon.

Compared with petroleum diesel, the cleaner-burning biodiesel reduces the emission of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and particular matters (PM). 

Waste coffee grounds that result from brewing one of the world’s most popular beverages is estimated to result in more than one million tons per year in the U.S. alone, with the majority of that waste getting dumped into landfills. 


New Vaccine Clears AIDS-Causing Virus in Monkeys

A newly developed vaccine has the ability to completely kill simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in non-human primates, according to scientists at Oregon Health & Science University’s Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute. Particles of simian immunodeficiency virus. Image credit: Tom Goddard / University of California, San Francisco.

Following further development, it is hoped an HIV-form of the vaccine can soon be tested in humans.
“To date, HIV infection has only been cured in a very small number of highly-publicized but unusual clinical cases in which HIV-infected individuals were treated with anti-viral medicines very early after the onset of infection or received a stem cell transplant to combat cancer,” said Dr Louis Picker, who is a senior author of the study published online in the journal Nature.

“This latest research suggests that certain immune responses elicited by a new vaccine may also have the ability to completely remove HIV from the body.”

The new approach involves the use of cytomegalovirus, or CMV, a common virus already carried by a large percentage of the population. Dr Picker and his colleagues discovered that pairing CMV with SIV had a unique effect.

They found that a modified version of CMV engineered to express SIV proteins generates and indefinitely maintains so-called ‘effector memory’ T-cells that are capable of searching out and destroying SIV-infected cells.

T-cells are a key component of the body’s immune system, which fights off disease, but T-cells elicited by conventional vaccines of SIV itself are not able to eliminate the virus. The SIV-specific T-cells elicited by the modified CMV were different. About 50 percent of monkeys given highly pathogenic SIV after being vaccinated with this vaccine became infected with SIV but over time eliminated all trace of SIV from the body.

In effect, the hunters of the body were provided with a much better targeting system and better weapons to help them find and destroy an elusive enemy.
“Through this method we were able to teach the monkey’s body to better ‘prepare its defenses’ to combat the disease,” Dr Picker said.

“Our vaccine mobilized a T-cell response that was able to overtake the SIV invaders in 50 percent of the cases treated. Moreover, in those cases with a positive response, our testing suggests SIV was banished from the host. We are hopeful that pairing our modified CMV vector with HIV will lead to a similar result in humans.”

Share on Google Plus

About Unknown

This is a short description in the author block about the author. You edit it by entering text in the "Biographical Info" field in the user admin panel.
    Blogger Comment
    Facebook Comment

0 comments:

Post a Comment