First Up, a new material that can:
By engineering a metamaterial with such properties, we are opening the door to such unusual—but potentially useful—phenomena as superlensing (high-resolution imaging past the diffraction limit), invisibility cloaking, and the synthesis of materials index-matched to air, for potential enhancement of light collection in solar cells…
Also, it seems that if we pressure cook algae, we can get oil. Might make it easier to produce bio-oil.
Bio-Diesel and gasoline from algae sound great. Will the algae production scale up to provide reliable, economically feasable yields?
“Pressure Cooking” as well as cracking and other refining is all energy intensive.
Are they going to build a un-PC nuclear fission plant next the bio-oil refining plant to provide “clean” energy for the processes? (Not while zero is ‘resident in the White House!)
It’s early to get excited about this. I’ve seen many seemingly promising energy breakthroughs fall flat or silently vanish in the wasteland of the main stream media and government regulation. I’m sure petro-dollars of oil companies in politians pockets had nothing to do with anything like that…
Yep, it all is, yet the petro companies make a profit doing it. Growing the algae requires very little energy and a very simple infrastructure. I’ve seen a couple different set-ups that could scale and still be economical, but the price of oil is still too low for it to be worth the money to retire the existing infrastructure. And I bet the pressure cooking could be done very efficiently. Thus a processing plant & refinery could produce a considerable net energy surplus.
I think it’s just neat.