They're not under common law to do anything if they're family owned small business which is what the summary specifies. I doubt google or facebook could try it.

Here would be how you calculate it..

10kwx2=20kw

1 gallon of gasoline is 33.4kwh (wikipedia)

@42% efficency, 20kw is consuming 47.6kwh/gasoline per hour

This gives 1.425 gallons per 52.6 miles per gallon, however if you assume the motors, charging system and resistance losses account for 10% efficency loss you get 47.3mpg highway at 75mph.

However, if we assume that you drive 60 instead of 75, alot of sites say you loose roughly 20-25% driving at 75. So at 60 if you gain 20% fuel economy it'd come out to ~56-7mpg, or within spitting distance of a prius.

what part of vomiting white foam is normal?

I believe the key difference here is that the soyuz space capsule hasn't killed anyone in 43 years. Which is mildly less impressive than the japanese shinkansen's no passenger fatality record. But more impressive than the shuttle's recent track record.

First off, Japan is space starved and property prices around it's population centers is staggering. Also, 80% of the country is mountainous.

Second of all, the irradiation in space is higher, about 1.3kw per square meter vs 1kw at the equator.

If you count in the fact that the sun is shining 24 hours a day 365 days a year.. versus the estimated 6 hours a day of good sunshine down on earth, you end up with roughly 5x the light per square meter of collector per hour per day averaged.

There's also no dust to mire the panels in space, or atleast not dust as we know it on earth. And if concentrating solar is used, like in the mirror design, high efficency solar panels can be used, again resulting in a 1.5x-2x boost in efficency per square meter of collector.

Cost wise though it'd probably be cheaper to fill every house's roof with solar panels, before going the space based route first. Economics is likely to be much better, unless they find a way to launch massive unfurling mylar mirrors into space, get them to play nice, and do it cheaply.

This all being said, if there's any way you could use local asteroids to start fabricating SPS's in orbit, then the economics change entirely and it's not so easy to say how it will play out.

Yeah, it may be kind of elaborate, but if it can serve as an advertising platform in a busy station that function of it may pay for the machine over the life of it.

Fascinating. So electrolysis is the main driving force of this reaction....

If they could somehow install nuclear plants capable of running a sulfur iodine cycle, they could probably achieve 50% efficency, probably enough to obviate the need for at-sea resupply.

Probably. But many thermochemical processes fail to achieve 100% efficiency. So i'm not sure how efficient this one would work. And @$0.1/kw that's probably the figure for electricity, not thermal energy. I think most chemical conversion processes use thermal energy not electrolysis.

Assuming that this process is 10% efficent let's take a look at the numbers.

Let's say you can dedicate half of the 1.1GWT (thermal) of the nimitz to aviation fuel production, if you're holding off coast.

And let's assume conservativley that the process is 20% efficent.

Diesel (pretty close to JP1) has an energy density of 35 MJ/L. This means at 20% efficency you'll be needing 175mj to create 1 liter of JP1.

At 1/2 1GWT you're looking at about 3 liters of fuel per second, or about 172,000 liters a day, or about 40,000 gallons. The nimitz has about 3 million gallons of fuel capacity so the refueling time of the entire tank from 0 would be around 2 months. According to this article here

http://large.stanford.edu/cour... (Also about marine jet fuel fabrication, provides some of the hard numbers) 3 million gallons is enough to refuel the onboard fleet about 20 times. So onboard fuel production would provide 1/3 of a full tank of gas for each aircraft onboard per day. Not terribly good, or bad.

Unless you're Australia.

If the BTC were used to purchase a lambo or tesla roadster, it would probably get someone's attention..

Perhaps somebody should create a folding at home/cancer research coin, that gives each person who dedicates CPU time a folding coin, with increasing difficulty. Once any research is commercialized with the results of the computations, a 50% share of the patent is disbursed to the coin holders. CPU calculations and GPU calculations would be separated and compensated differently. Like a CPU computation is worth 20x more than a GPU computation, because GPU computations can only solve certain problems and CPU computations are still needed.

If the bitcoin/litecoin swarm were dedicated like this to a research cause, the coins would gain inherent value once a commercialized therapy were implemented, like stocks, and would probably pay dividends, supporting a minimum price floor and adding a concrete value to the calculation based coins for the first time. No?

Heat is the input energy. It takes heat to actuate the muscle. After it cools it stops resisting the tension. My guess is that heat is applied through nichrome wire. Although being able to actuate at 130c makes me think you could use polyethylene coils to make a waste heat recovery engine via a reciprocating pull on a flywheel

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...

Here Is the wikipedia article on lithium air batteries. If not 10x then atleast gasoline equivalent energy storage is possible. Are you saying that you would need a lithium hydrogen battery to reach 10x potential? The lithium air battery doesn't carry a cathode so it can hold more charge per weight so that's why I assumed it would live up to the 5-15x claim on wikipedia.

This may on the surface be true. But the primary technological challenge with electric vehicles is battery technology, and this has been under development for a century and a half. Maybe even 2. Even still, though rechargeable batteries have gone up in capacity maybe 10x, it is still not anywhere near competing with ICE vehicles cost effectively. That will come when the air-chemistry batteries hit the market, with another 10x increase in energy storage per volume/weight due to negating the need to carry your cathode. (or is it anode?)