This week’s Top 5 engineering technology articles offer up new ways of looking at old problems and old ways of looking at new problems.
- India Says The Cost Of Solar Power Is Now Cheaper Than Coal
- Team Builds First Quantum Cascade Laser On Silicon
- First Blood Test For Parkinson’s Detects Disease Much Sooner
- To Find ET, Look At Who’s (Maybe) Looking At Us
- Google Is Working On Beaming High-Speed Wireless Internet Into Your Home
India Says The Cost Of Solar Power Is Now Cheaper Than Coal
Science Alert
“I’ve seen the future and it will be. I’ve seen the future and it works.”
Our planet has gone from the point in the industrial age where the discovery of fossil fuels have powered everything from A to Z to where the reliance on fossil fuels is a trend waiting to be broken. And now India is trying to lead that charge by working on solar powered infrastructure within the country.
Among their projects are a 100% solar powered airport and the largest solar power station. And these projects have allowed India to say that building a coal plant would now be a costlier option than a solar plant. At the pace that India is growing their solar projects, by 2020, coal power could be as much as 10 percent higher.
Solar power as part of a national initiative will help the population of over 300 million people can access to a more consistent source of electricity as well as helping to ease the pollution in a lot of the major metropolitan areas.
Team Builds First Quantum Cascade Laser On Silicon
Phys.org
“Everybody needs a thrill. Pop life. We all got a space 2 fill.”
Building a quantum cascade laser on silicon sounds easy enough, right? How about at the computer chip level? A powerhouse team of researchers from all over the U.S. have gathered at the University of California Santa Barbara to do just that.
And, if successful, this endeavor can have impact on astronomy, communications, chemical spectroscopy, and computing of course. By integrating the lasers directly onto the chip, they overcome a set of obstacles in trying to couple external laser light to the chips, but it enters a whole new set of challenges.
Heat dissipation is one of the new challenges that the team is working on solving. This should lead to higher powers and efficiency within the chip itself.
First Blood Test For Parkinson’s Detects Disease Much Sooner
Popular Science
“A skinny man died of a big disease with a little name.”
Currently there are more than 10 million people living with Parkinson’s disease. And, for a large percentage of these folks their diagnosis was inconclusive, took multiple testing rounds to finalize, or was just incorrect initially.
Now a university in Australia may have developed a diagnostic blood test that will help detect the disease faster and more accurately. This will give doctors the opportunity to help intervene and hopefully slow the progression of the debilitating disease.
And with a grant from the Michael J. Fox Foundation, they hope to take the positive results they are seeing with the tests and use an earlier accurate diagnosis to broaden the treatments for Parkinson’s. Since there are no treatments that slow the disease, these earlier indicators can help broaden that research in hopes for inhibiting the disease or perhaps curing the disease altogether.
To Find ET, Look At Who’s (Maybe) Looking At Us
Science News
“They could contemplate the entire universe, or just one star.”
I sit near a bank of windows approximately five feet from a sidewalk adjoining the parking lot. During the later afternoon period as folks head back from lunch or earlier starting colleagues start heading home, I get a shadow effect as they pass.
That same simple mechanism for alerting me to their presence may be how alien life forms are able to detect our tiny little planet of Earth. When we make our annual trip around the sun, we cast a shadow into the galaxy. This periodic dip in the cast light of the sun might be what curious extraterrestrials of any of the 82 known stars closest to us might use to find us and say hello.
And, even though they are probably looking for intelligent life, since they are finding us using our shadow, I really have the need to cast shadow puppets. I guess I’m not completely cut out for interstellar diplomacy.
Google Is Working On Beaming High-Speed Wireless Internet Into Your Home
Science Alert
“It don’t compute Mama, somethin’ don’t compute.”
For everyone who has looked at a telecom company and lamented their abject lack of choices in internet providers and service, Google may soon be riding to the rescue.
Their fiber broadband service across select cities has been a wonderful success and forced new life into stagnant pricing structures. Now they are bypassing the whole earthbound solution and going straight to beaming wireless broadband into homes across the U.S.
This can eliminate multiple headaches in terms of infrastructure placement, upgrades, upkeep, etc. And the connectivity speeds regardless of location would be of massive benefit to the country’s population.
Though critics have tried to downplay the potential outcomes citing the amount of new technology that would have to potentially be developed, let’s not lose sight of the fact that we are talking about Google.
So, that’s all for me this week. Keep your eyes open and ready for new technology within engineering to appear.
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