5 Years Out

3-D Printer Creates Entire Buildings From Solid Rock

Imagine a 3-d printer so large that it can spit out entire buildings made from stone.
Sounds science fiction-y, right? But that’s exactly what designer Enrico Dini created with his prototype D-Shape printer. Dini hopes to use the printer to create buildings made of stone and eventually, moon dust.

The printing [...]

Tags: 3-d printer, 3-D Printer Creates Entire Buildings, moon dust
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China To Connect Its High Speed Rail All The Way To Europe

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China already has the most advanced and extensive high speed rail line in the world, and soon that network will be connected all the way to Europe and the UK! With initial negotiations and surveys already complete, China is now making plans to connect its high speed rail line through [...]

Tags: beijing, china, high speed rail, hsr, south east asia, trains
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Cutting the clutter

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A wireless replacement for all those pesky power cables
BENEATH your correspondent’s desk is a cat’s cradle of tangled cables linking a pair of computers to numerous peripherals and laptops around the office. On the credenza opposite is another jumbled nest of wires for recharging mobile phones, cameras, netbooks, MP3 players [...]

Tags: electrical cables, gizmos, power adaptors, power cables, wireless replacement
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Mile-High Mega Kites Could Pull Giant, Floating Power Plants

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Take a huge oceanic catamaran, stick a hydroelectric turbine underneath it, and hitch it to a 6.5 million-square-foot parafoil flying nearly a mile in the air. That’s a Korean research team’s new proposal for generating gigawatts of clean energy.
As the parafoil pulls the boat, seawater would be forced through the [...]

Tags: catamaran, clean energy, hydroelectric turbine, mega-kites
Posted in 5 Years Out, Consider This, Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, Innovation Needed, Project Energy, Shape of Things to Come?, Wired.com | No Comments »

Smoothing Out the Wind

A cunning plan to store energy underwater may help fulfil the promise of wind power
THE problem with wind power is that is cannot always be relied upon. The wind—and other transient, environmental energy sources such as solar—must either be used when it is harvested or stored expensively in batteries or specially [...]

Tags: alexander slocum, environmental energy, hexagonal array, hydroelectric schemes, storage capacity, storage system, wind power
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