“Land need to cultivate deeply, knowing – continually improve.”

Chinese wisdom

Do you know, that…

• Electricity travels at the speed of light – more than 186,000 miles per second !!!
• Thomas Edison didn’t invent the first light bulb – but he did invent one that stayed lit for more than a few seconds.
• Benjamin Franklin didn’t discover electricity – but he did prove that lightning is a form of electrical energy.
• Electricity always tries to find the easiest path to the ground.
• A bolt of lightning can measure up to three million (3,000,000) volts – and it lasts less than one second!
• Electricity can be made from wind, water, the sun and even animal manure.
• A battery produces electricity using two different metals in a chemical solution. A chemical reaction between the metals and the chemicals frees more electrons in one metal than in the other. If the battery is discharged, and you desperately need a working device, lightly tap the battery with a hammer and it will still serve little.
• In the late-1800s, Nikola Tesla pioneered the generation, transmission, and use of alternating current (AC) electricity, which can be transmitted over much greater distances than direct current. Tesla’s inventions used electricity to bring indoor lighting to our homes and to power industrial machines.
• In 1791 Luigi Galvani published his discovery of bioelectricity, demonstrating that electricity was the medium by which nerve cells passed signals to the muscles.
• A spark of static electricity can measure up to three thousand (3,000) volts.
• The energy produced by the atom-splitting of one kilogram of uranium is equivalent to the burning of 1.3 million kilograms of coal or 1.35 million litres of oil.

 


iPhone Uses More Power Than a Fridge

Is your iPhone running? Better shut it off, because that device is using more energy than your refrigerator. A new report says that a fridge uses just 322 kWh per year, compared with the 361 kWh for an iPhone, if you include its wireless connections, data usage, and battery charges, the Breakthrough Institute reports. But that’s nothing compared to information and communications technology worldwide, which uses 10% of global electricity—and that’s a low estimate. New trends like wireless broadband could make the figure even higher.

The information sector relies heavily on coal power, and differs from other energy leeches because the cloud is never turned off, making it hard to reduce electricity use and carbon emissions. The study, sponsored by the coal and mining industry, notes that change is unlikely in the near future. But the Breakthrough Institute notes we badly need cleaner alternatives, and Bryan Walsh at Time agrees: “We already have a gigantic digital cloud, and it’s only going to get bigger,” he writes. “What we need is a cleaner one.”

Source www.newser.com

 


Flowers Use Electricity to Talk With Bees

“Say it with flowers,” went the old advertising slogan, but who knew flowers were this talkative? It turns out flowers give off electrical signals that bees can pick up on, telling potential pollinators whether a flower has plenty of nectar or has recently been tapped, reports NPR. According to scientists at the University of Bristol, flowers have slight negative charges, while bees have positive charges in flight; the presence of a bee changes the flower’s charge, a change that lasts for about 100 seconds after the bee leaves.

“This is a magnificent interaction where you have an animal and a plant, and they both want this to go as well as possible,” says one of the researchers. Flowers also use color and scent to attract bees, of course, but those characteristics are much harder to change than a slight electric field, so are less useful for informing pollinators whether a flower is full of nectar or running empty. It’s not known yet how a bumblebee detects the flower’s charge, but scientists suspect the electrostatic charge affects the bee’s body hairs. Click to read the University of Bristol’s original press release about the discovery.

Source www.newser.com

 


Singapore Scientists Invent Remarkable Toilet

Imagine if every time you went the bathroom you did a little good for the planet. That green dream could soon be entirely possible, thanks to a new invention out of Singapore: a toilet system that transforms human droppings into electricity and fertilizer and uses 90% less water per flush along the way. The “No-Mix Vacuum Toilet” relies on vacuum suction technology (like on an airplane) that allows it to use just 6.7 ounces of water to drain the toilet of pee; disposing of No. 2 takes about a quart, reports ScienceDaily.

The toilet’s two chambers help enable its other feats: Liquid waste is separated and transported to a facility equipped to process its nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium—all fertilizer ingredients. Solid excrement is piped to a bioreactor where the methane inside is released; it can then be converted to electricity or slightly less appetizingly used to replace natural gas in cooking stoves. The goal, says the head of the project, is to covert all waste into resources. The toilet is about to be tested in two bathrooms at the university where it was invented; it could be ready for a larger audience in three years.

Source www.newser.com

 


6 Things You’d Never Guess About Google’s Energy Use

Google has ended a long silence about how much energy the company needs to operate, and how much power many of its popular services consume. Thanks to a new website, a pair of blog posts and a story in the New York Times, we’ve now got a treasure trove of data on the amount of energy it takes to run Google.

Here are some fun facts on Google’s energy use:

Google uses enough energy to continuously power 200,000 homes

Google’s many data centers around the world burn through 260 million watts—one quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant—the New York Times reports. The company had been cagey about revealing energy usage stats in the past, probably because it didn’t want to reveal to competitors how quickly its data centers were growing. It’s no longer a secret that Google needs a crazy amount of data centers to keep things running smoothly.

Google accounts for roughly 0.013 percent of the world’s energy use

Data centers in general are responsible for 1.3 percent of the world’s electricity consumption, according to one estimate, and Google says it accounts for a mere one-hundredth of that statistic. Do the math. The company claims that its data centers are twice as energy-efficient as most others.

One Google search is equal to turning on a 60W light bulb for 17 seconds

Google says it spends about 0.0003 kWh of energy on an average search query, translating to roughly 0.2g of carbon dioxide. Related fact: searching the web 100 times is equivalent to drinking 1.5 tablespoons of orange juice, Google says. That’s hard work!

YouTube can stream for three days on the energy it takes to make a DVD

That stat includes manufacturing, packaging and delivery of the DVD, Google says. One minute of streaming YouTube video consumes 0.0002 kWh of energy, which is about the same amount of energy your body uses in eight seconds.

One year of Gmail is as efficient as a message in a bottle

Google’s just getting silly with this statistic. With the 2.2 kWh that each Gmail user demands per year, Google says you could chug a 750 mL bottle of wine, stuff a letter into it and toss it into the ocean (trip to remote island not included).

Google’s carbon footprint is zero (after offsets)

No, Google doesn’t get all of its energy from wind farms and solar panels. But to make up for the 1.46 million metric tons of carbon dioxide that Google emits every year—mostly from purchased energy to power its data centers—the company buys and generates its own renewable energy or purchases carbon offsets (essentially, funding green efforts elsewhere). The company invests in enough renewable energy to power more than 350,000 homes.

Source www.techland.time.com