Construction begins on gravity-driven energy storage system

By portal-3

Empieza la construcción de un sistema de almacenamiento de energía impulsado por la gravedad

The company Gravitricity It's going to start manipulating massive weights on an axle to store and deploy energy as needed. The axles will rise almost 1.6 kilometers in height and the weights will range between 500 and 5,000 tons. Huge winches will raise and lower the weights, and the axles will be pressurized to increase power production.

As the company says on your website: 'Our patented technology is based on a simple principle: raising and lowering a heavy weight to store and release energy.'

Gravitricity

According to those responsible for Gravitricity, maximum energy generation can reach between 1 and 20 megawatts, with continuous production of up to eight hours.

Costs are lower than current energy storage systems, such as lithium-ion battery-based solutions. Those responsible for Gravitricity also point out that, unlike battery systems, its storage mechanism can be charged and discharged several times a day without loss of performance for more than two decades.

The system's efficiency rate is 80 to 90 percent, and the system should last half a century.

The prototype system being developed by Gravitricity in Scotland, which will be completed and tested next year, will be limited to a 15 meter high shaft and a capacity of 250 kilowatts. Large-scale implementation will follow, as Gravitricity envisions utilizing abandoned coal mining pits globally for such energy storage plants.

Gravitricity's lead engineer, Miles Franklin, explains how the prototype will work:

Our demonstrator will use two 25 ton weights suspended by steel cables. In a test we will release the weights together to generate maximum power and verify our response speed. We estimate that we can go from zero to full power in less than a second, which can be extremely valuable in the frequency response and backup power markets.

The founder of Gravitricity is Peter Fraenkel, who invented the world's first tidal energy turbine. 30 years ago, the Fraenkel created a turbine to use the power of a river's current to bring water to Sudan, where he worked for a charitable organization. The civil war and lack of financing truncated their plans.


The news

Construction begins on gravity-driven energy storage system

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

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This is how the prognosis of cancer patients is worsening due to COVID-19

By portal-3

Así es cómo está empeorando el pronóstico de los enfermos de cáncer por culpa de la COVID-19

A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention points out a drastic decrease in cancer screenings since the pandemic began.

The collateral effects of COVID-19 in this sense are clear: the delay in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer reduces the expectation of survival, As you can see in the following table.

Survival

According to This studio focused on the UK, this is the reduction in 10-year net survival per 3-month delay for 20 most common tumors:

Gr1

The study performed age-stratified and stage-stratified 10-year cancer survival estimates for patients in England, United Kingdom, for 20 common tumor types diagnosed in 2008-17 at age 30 or over from Public Health England.

Data were also used for cancer diagnoses made through the system's 2-week wait referral pathway in 2013-16. Cancer Waiting Times from NHS Digital. Hazard ratios (HRs) per day for cancer progression that were generated from observational studies of treatment delay were applied. The annual number of stage I-III cancers diagnosed through the 2-week wait pathway was quantified using age-specific and 2-week wait stage-specific breakdowns.

From these numbers, the total number of lives and life years lost in England due to delays per patient of 1 to 6 months was estimated.


The news

This is how the prognosis of cancer patients is worsening due to COVID-19

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

Read More

It doesn't matter what language you speak: if you speak louder, you are more likely to infect others than by coughing or sneezing

By portal-3

No importa el idioma que hables: si lo haces más alto, es más probable que contagies a los demás que tosiendo o estornudando

As revealed A study published in Nature, the transmission of infectious agents through the air depends more on how loudly we speak than on coughs or sneezes. The effect is independent of language.

The researchers analyzed the broadcast in four languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic.

Speech superspreaders

The hypotheses on the transmission of airborne infectious diseases have traditionally emphasized the role of coughs and sneezes, which are expiratory events that produce easily visible droplets and large quantities of particles too small to see with the naked eye.

However, it has long been known that normal speech also produces large quantities of particles that are too small to see with the naked eye, but large enough to carry a variety of transmissible respiratory pathogens.

The aforementioned study thus shows that the rate of particle emission during normal human speech is positively correlated with volume (amplitude) of vocalization, which varies from approximately 1 to 50 particles per second (0.06 to 3 particles per cm3) for low to high amplitudes, regardless of the language spoken (English, Spanish, Mandarin or Arabic). When you breathe, you are emitting particles from your saliva or respiratory fluid, from the trachea and from the lungs. If you talk, you emit 10 times more. If you scream or sing, 50 times more.

Furthermore, a small fraction of individuals behave as 'super-speech emitters', consistently releasing an order of magnitude more particles than their peers.

This can not only be explained by the phonic structures or the amplitude of speech, so the results also suggest that other unknown physiological factors, which vary dramatically between individuals, could affect the probability of transmission of respiratory infectious diseases and would also help explain the existence of superspreaders that are disproportionately responsible for outbreaks of airborne infectious diseases.


The news

It doesn't matter what language you speak: if you speak louder, you are more likely to infect others than by coughing or sneezing

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

Read More