Some technological breakthroughs worth mentioning

There are so many breakthroughs in technology out there but I have selected from those that I am aware of currently to give you some of my bookmarked choices.

If you want to unplug entirely from the national electricity grid, your main realistic option, among many others, is to go with solar power and pay the price associated with it.

That price is not so much these days, I hear. For a practical idea of what's in store for potential users of renewable energy, below is an excerpt from the link above.

[.....A 2-square-metre panel rated to give 1 kW per square metre in peak conditions could provide up to 1500 kWh per year in the UK. In more southerly and reliably sunny latitudes - somewhere like Texas, say - it would probably provide 2000 kWh per year........Engineers are working on reducing the size and cost of renewable-energy installations, while fuel-cell and battery manufacturers are trying to increase power output and storage life. The cost of generating and storing your own energy will fall as the commercial and domestic generation market grows and as new technologies emerge: thin-film PV panels, for instance, are cheaper to make than existing PV cells, which use crystalline silicon......]

But first, you must know exactly how much electricity you use per month and use that trend to find out the rating of the solar photovoltaic (PV) panel kit that would practically meet your needs for power and/or heating.

Once 3D scanners become cheap and fast, the debate in computer vision between the superiority and ease of security checks using images from 3D scanners, normal 2D pictures, finger prints, and human eye iris-scans, would have been put to rest.

Some relevant excerpts of the above development in facial recognition: ".....3D laser scans could be a more robust option in tricky real-world conditions.....Facial recognition accuracy is gauged by a figure called "equal error rate" - the point at which false positives equal false negatives. The 3D scans achieved a figure of 1%, which is considered good for facial recognition systems....But their weakness is that subjects have to cooperate, whereas photos can easily be taken and compared covertly......"

Would you be surprised by laser aircraft refueling? How's that? My mind went initially to a vision of aviation fuel being beamed up to a flying aircraft, which then goes ka-boom as the operator directs the fuel to the wrong hole due to some error of some kind - quite scary, if you were a pilot and/or crew and passengers on that airplane of the future.

However, the following excerpt about airborne laser refueling gives the true picture of what to expect with aircraft in-flight refueling in the future:

[....refuelling aircraft using a high-powered laser to recharge on-board batteries.....the aircraft would be fitted with panels capable of converting up to 60% of the laser light that hits them into electricity. A single ground-based laser could then keep numerous aircraft airborne indefinitely.....a similar idea could be used to refuel spacecraft, but only if a way could be found to dissipate the excess heat that the light-converting panels would generate - not an easy problem in space where there is no atmosphere to carry it away.....]


Hmmmm.....Perhaps, that's the lesson that the Chinese satellite builders are yet to learn - why the very expensive NigeriaSatellite1 (NIGSAT1) failed when its solar panels malfunctioned.

Since it was orbiting in space and using solar panels with batteries for storing energy, maybe the heat generated from the battery or by an electrical process had no heat sink in space to absorb it?

On the other hand, if the Chinese company scientists knew about the problem and failed to inform their relatively novice clients, then that's fraudulent, in my humble opinion!