The Netherlands has been harnessing the power of the wind to drain bodies of water, saw timber and to produce oil for centuries. Now, the country is also using it to run all its electric trains. The Dutch railways network (NS) started using wind energy generated by the turbines owned by electric company Eneco two years ago when they signed a ten-year agreement. They planned to power all of the country’s electric trains with wind-generated energy by 2018, but they’re clearly a shining example of Dutch efficiency and reached their goal a year earlier than planned.
According to Brightvibes, the country’s electric trains shuttle 600,000 people to their destinations in around 5,500 train trips per day. Those trips use up 1.2 billion kWh of energy per year, which can power all households in Amsterdam for the same time period. At this point in time, it takes an hour for a wind turbine to generate enough power to run a train for 120 miles. However, NS is looking for ways to lower their machines’ consumption by 35 percent before 2020, so they can go farther for smaller amounts of energy.
Today on In Case You Missed It: Stanford bioengineers created a centrifuge to separate blood and detect disease, all based on whirligigs from childhood. They estimate the blood cell device would cost only 20 cents a piece to make, and since it’s human-powered, could be used all over off-the-grid locations to help diagnose diseases like tuberculosis.
The National Science Foundation helped fund research into walking efficiency and the artist who imagined a sad robot dystopia is here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
A recent satellite view of SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1 shows the single, large landing pad.
Apple Maps
As part of the process to gain federal approval for the simultaneous landing of its Falcon Heavy rocket boosters in Florida, SpaceX has prepared an environmental assessment of the construction of two additional landing pads alongside its existing site. The report considers noise and other effects from landing up to three first stages at the same time. After undergoing a preliminary review by the US Air Force, the document has been released for public comment.
First reported by NASASpaceFlight.com, the document offers some interesting details about the proposed launch and landing of SpaceX’s heavy lift rocket, which the company hopes to fly for the first time in the spring or early summer of 2017. After previously demonstrating the ability to land a single Falcon 9 booster, SpaceX also hopes to land the three first-stage boosters that will power the Falcon Heavy for potential re-use.
The company states this reusability as its rationale for the new construction—reducing the cost of access to space. “This purpose continues to support SpaceX’s overall missions for NASA and the USAF,” the document states. “The action continues to fulfill the U.S. expectation that space transportation costs are reduced in order to make continued exploration, development, and use of space more affordable.”
As part of the document, SpaceX also says it would like to build a Dragon capsule processing facility on the landing zone to support refurbishment of the Dragon 2 spacecraft, designed to carry crew into orbit. The 130-foot-long facility would provide a “temporary” facility for vehicle propellant load and propulsion system servicing.
Conceptual layout for Falcon Heavy landing pads. The pad at the right now exists as the main pad at Landing Zone 1.
GEAR Inc./SpaceX
When it originally designed its Landing Zone 1 facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, for the single Falcon 9 first stage booster, the company envisioned the need for one main pad approximately 200 feet across, and four smaller contingency pads, each approximately 150 feet in diameter. The chosen site had enough acreage to accommodate all five pads.
Improvements in the rocket’s landing navigation guidance system obviated the need for the contingency pads with the Falcon 9, however. So now the company wants to use the additional space to construct two concrete landing pads, each with an approximate diameter of 282 feet surrounded by an approximate 50-foot-wide hard-packed soil “apron.” This would give SpaceX three landing pads and the ability to bring back all three Falcon Heavy boosters to land while also retaining the option to land one or two on drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean.
In addition to the potential for a dozen Falcon 9 launches and landings each year, the document says SpaceX may eventually make six Falcon Heavy launches a year, potentially returning an additional 18 boosters to the Florida-based site. The new pads and crane sites would be configured to allow parallel processing of landed boosters. With US Air Force Approval, construction could begin as early as this spring.
If approval for the expansion of the landing zone is not granted after public comments, SpaceX indicated that it would still launch the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from Florida, but only a single booster would return to Landing Zone 1. “The remaining Falcon Heavy boosters would either fall into the Atlantic Ocean downrange or land on the droneship,” the document says. “SpaceX’s ability to fully meet the National Space Transportation Policy goals of providing low-cost reliable access to and from space would be negatively affected. Therefore, this alternative is not preferred.”
Uber is to publish trip data to help city authorities get more insight into road congestion. It’s an attempt to navigate the tricky balance between privacy and usefulness.
Users of the site won’t be able to track individual rides. Instead the data will be anonymized and aggregated. Rather than show specific start and end points, the rides will categorize locations based on the geographic zones used by transportation planners in the relevant area.
The idea is that the data will make it easier to see how journey times in particular places vary with traffic based on the time of day, week and even year, along with the effects of major events. One drawback may be that the fact people have chosen to use an Uber ride may make their journey unrepresentative: for example, heavy traffic might mean fewer passing cabs to hail, in turn pushing people towards using an app.
Uber has previously had problems at both ends of the data privacy scale. At one stage it built an application for internal use that tracked every journey in real time, something it scrapped over privacy fears. But it’s also cited privacy concerns itself in refusing a New York City request for data on driver locations and dropoff times, which officials say they need to check whether drivers are working excessive hours.
