Where Science Meets Fiction
In November 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge shook itself apart in a 42 mph wind that would not have troubled a structure half its size. The failure had nothing to do with wind force. As airflow separated around the bridge deck, it shed alternating pressure pulses – one side, then the other – at a…
At noon in June, the south-facing wall of a four-story apartment block absorbs over 100 kilowatts of solar radiation. By evening, every watt has turned into heat. The paint on that wall is doing exactly what paint has done for centuries – reflecting a color, protecting the substrate, and ignoring the energy that hits it….
In 1831, a man in London wound two coils of wire around opposite sides of an iron ring and connected one coil to a battery and the other to a galvanometer. When he switched the battery circuit on, the needle of the galvanometer twitched. When he switched it off, the needle twitched again, in the…
A person walking through a city on a clear June afternoon has roughly 1,700 square centimeters of fabric facing the sky. The jacket, the shoulders, the sleeves – all of it sitting under direct sunlight, absorbing photons and converting them to heat. Nobody designed that surface to do anything with the energy. For most of…
There is a glass building in Freiburg, Germany where the windows generate electricity. Not through silicon panels bolted to the roof, but through the glass itself, coated in a thin organic layer that absorbs light and produces current. The coating is slightly tinted. It lets diffuse light through. And it is, in most of the…
There is a roof in Freiburg that has been generating electricity since 1999. The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems installed it as a long-term performance test, and after more than two decades the panels are still producing power within a few percent of their original output. What the test confirmed is not that solar…
In the Human Performance Laboratory at Waseda University in Tokyo, researchers fitting subjects with MEMS accelerometers before a standard walking protocol generate a waveform that tells an interesting story. The sensor bonded to the mastoid bone, the hard protrusion directly behind the ear, records a clean oscillating signal at approximately 1.8 hertz whenever the subject…
Canary Wharf station in London handles around 100,000 passengers on a busy weekday. Many of them use the staircases – the long inclined runs connecting the underground platforms to street level. Each person descending pushes several hundred newtons of force into a step, holds it for a fraction of a second, transfers their weight forward,…
In the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, one of the driest places on Earth, engineers are pulling lithium from ancient salt flats using a process that takes nearly two years from brine extraction to refined metal. That metal ends up in battery cells. Those cells end up in electric vehicles, grid storage systems, and the…
At the Bieudron hydroelectric plant in the Swiss canton of Valais, water falls from a reservoir perched 1,883 metres above the turbine hall. By the time it reaches the three Pelton wheels at the base, it is moving at roughly 190 metres per second. The pressure at the nozzle tip exceeds 180 bar. Every second,…
At the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg, Germany, a test cell no larger than a postage stamp sits inside a solar simulator. A lamp tuned to replicate the spectral output of the sun switches on. Within microseconds, electrons inside the silicon wafer begin moving in a single direction, and a current flows…
Off the coast of Brittany, at the mouth of the Rance river estuary, a 750-metre concrete dam has been generating electricity since 1966. Twice a day, without fail, the Atlantic tide rises against its face. Twice a day it falls. For nearly six decades the structure has harvested that movement, producing around 540 gigawatt-hours of…
Off the northwest coast of Scotland, near a stretch of coastline called the Orkney Islands, sits one of the most wave-exposed environments in Europe. Researchers there have recorded average wave power densities of 70 kilowatts per metre of wave front. That number is not a theoretical maximum from a computer model. It is a measured…
In 2013, engineers working on the Voyager 1 power system ran calculations they already knew the answer to. The probe was 19 billion kilometers from the Sun. Solar panels were useless that far out. The only reason Voyager was still transmitting was a small device bolted to its chassis that had been converting heat into…
Inside a biogas plant in Rajasthan, India, workers feed tens of tonnes of sugarcane bagasse into sealed concrete tanks every morning. The material is not burned. It is not processed with chemicals. It simply sits in the dark, submerged in water, and within three weeks it begins to produce a combustible gas that powers a…
At the port of Yokohama, a vessel the length of two football fields sits at a demonstration berth. This is the Suiso Frontier, the world’s first purpose-built liquid hydrogen carrier, developed as part of Japan’s Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain project. A technician connects a hose from a cryogenic tank, liquid hydrogen flows into the ship’s…