The World's Largest Battery

Very early this year, the world's largest battery was finished. Capable of storing 36 megawatt-hours of electricity, it is a battery of previously unseen size and power. The home of this battery isn't very surprising, Hebei Province, China.

The world's largest battery is about the dimensions of a football field

The battery has enough juice to power something like 12,000 homes for 1 hour in the case of a total blackout. That's some serious power. Ideally, however, this battery will soak up power during times of little power usage and supplement the power supply when demand is high. It has been tied into the smart grid so that power is never reduced to any home.

Basic idea of a smart grid

This facility cost a hefty $500 million to finally finish. It was only possible as a joint project between the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) and and BYD, an electric car company that was in it to find a way of making electric cars more practical. The battery is fed 140 megawatts from both a wind farm and a solar panel array. This battery is a big leap in green technology. We now have a place to store all the energy gained from green energy solutions.

Aside from being really cool, this battery is a very encouraging site for the future of technology everywhere. Who knows what'll be next?

Radon

Of all the diseases out there, I would have to say that cancer is probably the scariest. Your cells go crazy and start reproducing uncontrollably, in many cases causing death. But more than that, it is a disease for which we do not have a cure. Now, we all know that activities like smoking can lead to cancer, specifically lung cancer, but there is also an invisible cause of this horrible disease, radiation. Sunscreen serves a double purpose, it not only protects you from getting burned by too much sun exposure, it also protects you from harmful radiation that can cause skin cancer. But I'm not here to talk about sunscreen or ultraviolet radiation, no, what I'm here to talk about cannot be blocked out with a mere topical cream. Radon, the silent, odorless, colorless killer.

Radon, a radioactive gas

Radon is an unstable noble gas, meaning that not only does it not have color or smell, but it also decays into smaller particles, releasing harmful radiation in the process. What's unique about this gas is that it occurs naturally in large enough quantities to be a significant threat to the average person. Just so you know how big of a threat, radon is the second largest contributor to lung cancer, just behind smoking. The EPA has estimated that as many as 21,000 deaths per year in the U.S. are caused by radon. 

Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer

Being 8 times denser than air at sea level, radon tends to accumulate in under-ventilated areas, like mines, basements and attics. This means that radon levels inside a house are significantly higher than outside a house, especially if you live in Iowa or the Appalachian mountains area. Usually this gas will enter your house through the ground. Radon is a decay product of uranium and thorium which can be found in deposits underground. When these decay, the radioactive gas is produced, and it will flow into any crack it can find. On average, every square mile of soil to a depth of 6 inches (2.6 km² to a depth of 15 cm) contains 1 gram of radium (which decays to radon). That amount can vary widely by region, but radon is pretty much everywhere. Once radon finds its way out of the ground, it accumulates in poorly ventilated places and in water. The highest concentrations can be found in caves (like in mines) and in ground water because these places aren't open to the atmosphere and thus there is no where else for the radioactive gas to go.

Most mines now have radon reducing technology

Even though radon can easily get into our drinking water, we aren't in much danger from ingesting it. Radon concentrations in water tend to be fairly low, and we aren't exposed to it as often. Radon in the air, however, is a serious problem. Being one of the densest natural gases, radon gas can stick to dust particles and stick inside our lungs, exposing us to almost constant radiation. On the whole, radon concentrations in the air tend to be very low, and thus not much of a problem, but when there's an enclosed space, the radon level can get dangerous. This means that it's a good idea to test your own house for radon. The EPA recommends that an area should have a radon concentration of 4 pCi/L (picocuries per liter) or less, but lower levels can still be dangerous. Many test kits are readily available to the public so that you can test your own radon levels. Both long term tests (up to 1 year) and short term tests (2-7 days) are available, with a variety of techniques. It is best to start with a short term test, and then follow up with a long term test. If you do find that your house has high concentrations of radon gas, all you really need to solve the problem is proper ventilation. Just opening a window or turning on a fan might not work, however. Likely you'll need to instal a vent to pump the gas safely out of your house.

radon can be safely vented from a home

Whenever radioactive substances are mentioned a lot of people think of a glowing green material, just like we see in cartoons. In its gaseous state, radon does not glow, but, if you condense it down by lowering the temperature, it does begin to glow. It starts off with a yellow color and turns to darker orange-red as the temperature drops.

This is about the color of radon

I live in Iowa, where radon is in high concentrations, so I plan on devising my own way of measuring radon concentrations. If I succeed, I plan on posting my design, so stay tuned.

Planet Darwin

I found this interesting documentary on what we might expect when meeting life on another planet. In my personal opinion, we'll probably find more radically different behaviors and biologies, but I thought it was quite informative.

Iowa City High Brobotics

Today the last meeting of the Lego robotics "Brobotics" club at my school. It has been an amazing year filled with amazing people, so I thought I'd commemorate all we've done with a post.

Most of our team

We competed in Ames, Iowa winning both 5th and 4th places, a massive improvement from last year. In fact, everything this year has been an improvement. We've gone from about 5 members to nearly 18, we had so many members that we took two teams to the competition. We had much more time to work and we even managed to win the Prometheus Awards held by the Technology Association of Iowa for our participation in the HyperStream program. 

 We won an X-Box and Kinect

 Like good engineers we fooled around a lot and built some pretty cool things, supposedly in preparation for the competition.

 This bladed top spins when run across the ground

 This is a remote controlled motorcycle we built

The bike actually works

 As a part of a community service project we did, we got the great pleasure of visiting our local elementary school and getting the younger children there excited about engineering and all the possibilities that they'll have as they move up through their education. I sincerely hope that we had a lasting impact on them.

 We went to Hoover Elementary

 We told them all about what our club does

 Then we let them play around with our kits

This is just a small taste of our antics, and as good as this year has been, next year can only get better. 

Eridanus Supervoid

Eridanus is a constellation with interesting properties of its own, however, an anomaly within the constellation is what I want to talk about. Being close to ten billion light years away, this anomaly is rightfully called the "Eridanus Supervoid" and it is as cool as its name would suggest.

Eridanus constellation

The Eridanus supervoid is a void, a complete absence of matter, or more specifically, and absence of galaxies. Because of how matter coalesced and dispersed in the early days of the universe, there are many voids around today between galaxies and galactic clusters, but the Eridanus supervoid is unique because of its massive size. This supervoid happens to be around one billion light years across. It's massive. In 2007 it was deemed the largest void, and it still holds that title.

Because it is so phenomenally large, a few crazy ideas have been thrown around about the origin and nature of this supervoid, on of the more notable being that it was created by quantum entanglement between our galaxy and another. Now, I won't say that I believe such theories, but it's still an intriguing idea.

Another theory states that the Eridanus supervoid, and other supervoids like it are created by super massive black holes. These black holes would have to have the mass of many galaxies, I've even heard the phrase "universe-in-mass" being thrown about. I find this theory even harder to swallow, but I can't say that I wouldn't be excited to find out it's actually true.

It is possible that the supervoid is actually a massive black hole.

Solar Eclipse: 5/20/12

On Sunday there was a solar eclipse visible in the United States and around the world. I hope all of you managed to get a look at it, I know I did.
This was the first time in my life that I actually witnessed a solar eclipse for my self, and while amazing, it wasn't nearly as spectacular here in Iowa as it was elsewhere in the world. I still took pictures though.

The best picture of the solar eclipse that I could get through eclipse glasses.

 Sun without eclipse glasses

In Iowa City, the eclipse was partial, so it was still extremely bright and getting a quality photo was difficult. Others did a far better job than I.

Eclipse over Yokohama near Tokyo. Taken by Koji Sasahara.

Eclipse over Gardnerville, Nevada. Taken by Cathleen Allison.

 Eclipse over Irving, Texas. Taken by Tony Gutierrez.

In comparison, my pictures are mediocre at best. All in all though, I'm glad I got the chance to be a part of this.

With any partial eclipse, there is still too much light getting in from the sun to make it safe to look at directly, so inventive measures must be taken in order to even get a glimpse of the event. In pictures like the one from Texas, the sun has already begun to set, which means that there is enough atmosphere between the sun and the observer to allow pictures to be taken. Like the picture from Nevada, it is also possible to view the eclipse through a storm cloud without injury, but how can we view the eclipse if we aren't fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time? It's actually fairly easy, you can buy special glasses, or use the "pinhole" technique.

There exist special "eclipse glasses" that are heavily tinted to allow the user to safely view the sun. Normal sunglasses aren't strong enough to keep an observer safe, in fact, very few things are. Even minimal exposure to intense sunlight can cause permanent blindness. Because of this, eclipse glasses are so opaque that the only thing you can see through them is the sun.

One of the few safe ways to directly view the sun.

The other common technique for viewing solar eclipses is indirect. It is called the "pinhole" technique. Basically, you can look at the sun through an extremely small hole because not enough light will get through to obscure the image or cause any damage. Usually pictures are taken through something called a pinhole lens that uses this method, the pinholes are often too small for humans to see through. If we aren't taking a picture of the sun, then light can be shown through the pinhole onto a piece of paper to get a "shadow" of the eclipse.

 What a pinhole eclipse "shadow" can look like.

 What it the pinhole shadow looked like when I tried it.

The Great Attractor

Somewhere between 150 and 250 light years from our galaxy exists a fascinating phenomenon known as "the Great Attractor". Sadly, however, there isn't much to tell about it, for we still don't know much about it.

Map of our local super clusters

It turns out that our galaxy, along with several local galaxy clusters, are all accelerating towards some central point in the direction of the constellations Hydra and Centaurus which has been dubbed "the Great Attractor" at about 600 km/s. The mass necessary for such a pull would have to be something on the order of 10s to 1000s of milky way galaxies, or ~10¹⁶ solar masses. As massive as this anomaly would have to be, you'd think we'd know more about it, but it happens to be past the Zone of Avoidance, an area that is obscured by the Milky Way galaxy. From what we can see, it looks like most of the mass of the Great Attractor is found in a cluster of galaxies called Abell 3627. The relatively recent Clusters in the Zone of Avoidance (CIZA) project suggests that the Great Attractor is only 1/10 of the mass pulling us.

Milky Way

 Abell 3627