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News
The battery packs going into drone submarines now have no box around them, no oil and no compensator bladder, just cells cast into polymer and dropped into water pushing 8,700 pounds on every square inch
3+ hour, 10+ min ago (1258+ words) Every battery pack you have ever seen has a box around it. Your phone, your laptop, the slab bolted under an electric crossover, all of it sits inside something rigid whose entire job is keeping the outside world out. On…...
A robot started at the bottom of a 182-ton reactor plug 36 feet tall, the end that had sat closest to the core, and worked upward until the readings dropped far enough for people to come in with a thermal lance
1+ hour, 40+ min ago (1087+ words) Sodium-cooled reactors are back in the American conversation. TerraPower started nuclear construction on one in Wyoming in April, Oklo has a smaller one going up at Idaho National Laboratory, and the pitch behind both runs the same way: drop the…...
A 174-foot tower in the New Mexico desert takes 175 mirrors aimed at its face and drops a curtain of ceramic beads 33 feet wide and two and a half inches thick straight through the beam, coming out at 1,472 degrees
9+ hour, 10+ min ago (1257+ words) Molten salt is the standard answer to the oldest problem in solar power, which is that the sun goes down. Mirrors heat the salt all day, the hot salt sits in a tank, and a turbine runs off it after…...
A 7.2-ton Swedish underwater drone carries a sidescan sonar, a flank array and a deliberately empty room in the middle of it, with spare weight allowance built in for whatever eventually gets dropped out on the seabed
10+ hour, 39+ min ago (1303+ words) Anyone who has ever bought a couch knows the rule: measure the doorway before you buy the furniture. Saab followed it to the letter. The Swedish defense company has built a 6.5-ton underwater robot whose length and diameter were set…...
An American seabed drone with no cable running back to shore heard submarine drones come through a channel and put them on a Navy screen within seconds, during a six-week exercise across two continents
3+ day, 3+ hour ago (1367+ words) Underwater listening arrays have worked more or less the same way since the Cold War. A hydrophone sits on the seafloor, a cable runs from it back to a building on shore, and somebody in that building watches a screen....
A solar panel spent 42 straight days at 185 degrees and 85 percent humidity, took 200 round trips down to minus 40, and got soaked in hot wet air and frozen ten times so any water inside could turn to ice and split it open
3+ day, 4+ hour ago (950+ words) Solar efficiency records have gotten routine. Every few months a lab somewhere adds a few tenths of a percent, a press release goes out, and nothing on anyone’s roof changes. China’s LONGi renewed the tradition on July 14 with a 35.5% perovskite-silicon…...
CERN just craned a 2,200-pound box onto a truck over three hours, drove it six miles at 29 miles an hour and plugged it back in with all 92 antiprotons still alive, the first time anyone has moved antimatter and brought it home
3+ day, 6+ hour ago (682+ words) Hauling dangerous cargo is mostly a solved problem. We send rocket fuel down public highways, fly lithium batteries across oceans and roll spent nuclear fuel around in casks built to shrug off a train crash. Every one of those loads…...
An aquarium pump on the shore of an Ontario pond blew bubbles under 40 floating solar panels all winter and kept the ice off them for 1.9 kilowatt-hours, less than a fiftieth of a percent of what they generated
3+ day, 7+ hour ago (770+ words) The results landed this June in the journal Applied Energy, and they fill a real gap. Floating solar had barely been studied in freezing climates at all, the authors note, which left an obvious question hanging over every icy pond…...
While an Alaskan startup gets ready to test a tidal prototype in a Massachusetts canal, the same turbine family America wants to install has been certified and feeding Japan's national grid for over a year
3+ day, 10+ hour ago (921+ words) Tidal power has a coverage problem, and it is not the machines. A turbine gets lowered into some furious channel, the drone footage makes the rounds for a day, and then the story goes dark before anyone learns whether the…...
A volcano the size of Rhode Island in central Oregon holds rock at 629 degrees just 9,800 feet down, and a Texas company cracked it open with two wells and pumped water through the gap at 100 feet an hour
4+ day, 1+ hour ago (573+ words) Geothermal has a geography problem in the American imagination. Say the word and most people picture Iceland, the country that once drilled into a magma chamber by accident and liked the results enough to plan a return trip. Volcanic superheat…...