News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Robotic legs that mimic flightless running birds like emus and use just two motors per leg can run more efficiently than more complex devices Technology 16 March 2022 By Matthew Sparkes Robotic legs with an unconventional design inspired by emus can run 300 per cent more efficiently than the same device would if designed traditionally. … Read more
Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant and all the facilities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone have been completely disconnected and are now without electricity, Ukraine’s state energy company has announced. Russian forces attacked the defunct nuclear facility on the very first day of the invasion (Feb. 24), seizing it after heavy fighting and taking its roughly 210 staff hostage, Live Science … Read more
Sharks benefit from some shuteye, and biologists in Australia and New Zealand think they’ve begun to understand why. Their experiments suggest sharks sleep to save energy between meals. The discovery might lead to a clearer model of how sleep evolved and developed among vertebrate animals. There is plenty of evidence of sleep in vertebrate animals, … Read more
The European Union outlined an ambitious strategy to accelerate its clean energy transition yesterday in the face of spiking oil and gas prices and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The plan could potentially cut Europe’s reliance on Russian gas imports by two-thirds by the end of the year through a mixture of buying gas from other … Read more
Since its launch in 2020, a pioneering energy company called Quaise has attracted some serious attention for its audacious goal of diving further into Earth’s crust than anybody has dug before. Following the closure of first round venture capital funding, the MIT spin-off has now raised a total of US$63 million: a respectable start … Read more
Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by 6 percent in 2021 to a record 36.3 billion metric tons, their highest ever level, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday. “The increase in global CO2 emissions of over 2 billion metric tons was the largest in history in absolute terms, more than offsetting the previous year’s … Read more
The EU launched a new energy strategy to reduce the use of Russian gas imports just as the UK announced it would phase out such imports, and the US imposed a ban as well Environment 8 March 2022 By Adam Vaughan Pipes at a gas treatment facility in Russia Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images The … Read more
By Adam Vaughan The Keadby 2 gas power station in Lincolnshire, UK david soulsby/Alamy Climb the stairs to the roof of the cooling tower at Keadby 2, a new gas power plant in the east of England, and you are rewarded with a story of the UK’s energy past, present and possible future. Straight ahead … Read more
Republicans are calling for more oil drilling. Europe says it’s doubling down on clean energy. But as the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues into its second week, President Biden has stayed mum about how tectonic shifts in global markets should affect the future of U.S. energy. Gasoline prices have remained Biden’s consistent focus. He expressed … Read more
There was a time, not so long ago, when computers were so large, they occupied entire rooms. Today, some processing units can come as small as a few specks of dust. Even next to a grain of rice, these stacks of micrometer-sized chips look infinitesimal. Shrinking computer batteries to fit that size, however, has proved … Read more