Northeast India to produce electricity from bamboo

NEW DELHI, INDIA A bamboo-fuelled eco-friendly power station is to come up in Mizoram to help meet the energy needs of India's northeast, according to the Indo-Asian News Service.

The power station will be set up in a village at an estimated cost of 28.5 million Rupees (0.62 million U.S. dollars).

"This cost-effective project has been conceived by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, along with the Ankur Scientific Energy Technologies, a private enterprise," said Benjamin L. Tlumtea, project coordinator of the Zoram Energy Development Agency (ZEDA).

Bamboo would be first harvested and then dried before it is processed for feedstock to produce gas, which would finally get converted to electricity.

An estimated 9,000 sq km area is under bamboo cultivation in Mizoram. The area produces annually 3.2 million tonnes of bamboo, which has never been tapped to generate electricity.

India, the world's largest producer of bamboo after China, grows about 80 million tonnes each year, more than half of it in the northeast.


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Coming Soon Mobile Broadband Internet

In a move that could well be the beginning of Internet access through mobile Broadband, Hutchison Whampoa has forged a group of global Internet companies, and handset makers - Nokia and Sony Ericsson, to globally launch Broadband mobile Internet access on the same flat fee model as fixed Broadband Internet.

Titled "X-Series from 3," the service will include free Skype calling, unlimited Web browsing, and instant messaging from mobile handsets.

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THERMOPHOTOVOLTAIC ELECTRIC POWER GENERATION USING EXHAUST HEAT

Furnaces in the glass, metalcasting, and steel industries operate at very high
temperatures and lose tremendous amounts of energy in their exhaust streams.
With the emissions-reducing shift to gas-oxy furnaces in these industries,
exhaust temperatures are climbing even higher. Waste heat from furnaces in
the glass, metalcasting, and steel industries is usually vented to the atmosphere.
In some facilities, it must be diluted with cool air to reduce its temperature prior
to venting. Until now, the venting of this waste heat has represented the loss of
a valuable resource.
A new technology adds value to this waste stream by using exhaust heat to
generate hundreds of kilowatts of electricity. This unique innovation uses new
infrared-sensitive photovoltaic cells mounted inside ceramic tubes. These tubes
are heated in the exhaust stream of an industrial process and radiate energy
inward to the photovoltaic cells to generate electricity directly from the waste
heat. The energy density in these systems is over 100 times that of solar energy,
producing over 100 times the energy of conventional photovoltaic or solar cells.

Economics and Commercial Potential
Exhaust heat offers an attractive energy alternative to the glass, metalcasting, and steel
industries. In particular, JX Crystals, Inc., has targeted the glass industry because of
an estimated 67 MW of year-round electrical generation available in this industry alone.
The technology has already attracted the partnership of a major glass-industry player
interested in demonstrating the technology on a glass furnace.
Given additional investment in the business and a market volume well over 10 MW per
year, JX Crystals, Inc., estimates the thermophotovoltaic circuit to cost approximately
$0.20 per watt. Balance of system costs are estimated to be $0.50 per watt. Assuming
a price of $1 per watt, utility rates of $0.05 per kWh, and a duty cycle of 90%, the
payback period should be less than 3 years.
This technology could save 27 billion Btu of electricity per installed unit each year. First
sales for the technology are expected by 2004. Based on 25% market penetration by
2010, annual savings could be 0.5 trillion Btu with 18 units installed, each containing 200
5-kW tubes. Market penetration of 50% by 2020 could save 1.0 trillion Btu from the
operation of 37 units by the glass industry.

Arc quenching in Circuit Breakers- Video

Prototype DNA computer ( MAYA-II)

Researchers say that they have developed a DNA-based computer that could lead to faster, more accurate tests for diagnosing West Nile Virus and bird flu. Representing the first “medium-scale integrated molecular circuit,” it is the most powerful computing device of its type to date, they say.

The new technology could be used in the future, perhaps in 5 to 10 years, to develop instruments that can simultaneously diagnose and treat cancer, diabetes or other diseases, according to a team of scientists at Columbia University Medical Center in New York and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Their study is scheduled to appear in the November issue of the American Chemical Society’s Nano Letters, a monthly peer-reviewed journal.

“These DNA computers won’t compete with silicon computing in terms of speed, but their advantage is that they can be used in fluids, such as a sample of blood or in the body, and make decisions at the level of a single cell,” says the researcher, whose work is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Composed of more than 100 DNA circuits, MAYA-II is quadruple the size of its predecessor, MAYA-I, a similar DNA-based computer developed by the research team three-years ago. With limited moves, the first MAYA could only play an incomplete game of tic-tac-toe, the researcher says.

The experimental device looks nothing like today’s high-tech gaming consoles. MAYA-II consists of nine cell-culture wells arranged in a pattern that resembles a tic-tac-toe grid. Each well contains a solution of DNA material that is coded with “red” or “green” fluorescent dye.

The computer always makes the first move by activating the center well. Instead of using buttons or joysticks, a human player makes a “move” by adding a DNA sequence corresponding to their move in the eight remaining wells. The well chosen for the move by the human player responds by fluorescing green, indicating a match to the player’s DNA input. The move also triggers the computer to make a strategic counter-move in one of the remaining wells, which fluoresces red. The game play continues until the computer eventually wins, as it is pre-programmed to do, Macdonald says. Each move takes about 30 minutes, she says.

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Phase-change Random Access Memory (PRAM)

The Phase-change Random Access Memory (PRAM) is more scalable than any other memory architecture being researched and features the fast processing speed of RAM for its operating functions combined with the non-volatile features of flash memory for storage.


A key advantage in PRAM is its extremely fast performance. Because PRAM can rewrite data without having to first erase data previously accumulated, it is effectively 30-times faster than conventional flash memory. Incredibly durable, PRAM is also expected to have at least 10-times the life span of flash memory.


PRAM will be a highly competitive choice over NOR flash, available beginning sometime in 2008. Samsung designed the cell size of its PRAM to be only half the size of NOR flash. Moreover, it requires 20 percent fewer process steps to produce than those used in the manufacturing of NOR flash memory.

Samsung’s new PRAM was developed by adopting the use of vertical diodes with the three–dimensional transistor structure that it now uses to produce DRAM. The new PRAM has the smallest 0.0467um 2 cell size of any working memory that is free of inter-cell noise, allowing virtually unlimited scalability.


The Korean company announced that it has completed the first working prototype of what is expected to be the main memory device to replace high density NOR flash within the next decade. Adoption of PRAM is expected to be especially popular in the future designs of multi-function handsets and for other mobile applications, where faster speeds translate into immediately noticeable boosts in performance. High-density versions will be produced first, starting with 512 Mb.


Source

Magnetoresistive RAM - MRAM

Semiconductor giant Freescale has started selling the next generation of memory, called MRAM, becoming the first company to produce the technology with potential useability in many of today's upcoming devices.

MRAM stands for magnetoresistive random access memory and it differs from conventional RAM in that information is stored using magnetic properties, instead of an electronic charge. This means the chips can store information once the power has been switched off.

The RAM is capable of read/write times of only 35-nanoseconds as opposed to 50-70-ns offered by DRAM. Freescale are currently only selling the units in 4Mbit capacities, though now the ice has been broken the technology should flourish and larger capacities will hopefully soon be on the way.

Analyst Will Strauss from the research firm Forward Concepts said: "This is radically new technology. People have been dabbling in this for years, but nobody has been able to make it in volume."

"This is the most significant memory introduction in this decade."

The technology can challenge both conventional RAM as well as flash memory, a market that has only taken-off over the last few years as more and more people buy memory sticks, MP3 players and portable storage cards. Unlike flash memory MRAM doesn't degrade over time, and has faster read/write times.

Experts also predict that MRAM could one day be used to store whole operating systems, boosting the start-up times of tomorrow's PCs. It seems the perfect candidate to replace today's technology as it is smaller, cheaper and faster than anything on the market at present.

The 4Mbit chips will go on sale for $25 each, and Freescale has announced it already has (unnamed) customers.