Related papers: History of Prime Movers and Future Implications

The role of the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, volcanic and other aerosols, as well as the extraordinary solar activity of the late 20th century are discussed in the context of the warming since the mid-1970s.…

The main advantage of wind and solar power plants is the power production free of CO2. Their main disadvantage is the volatility of the generated power. According to the estimates of H.-W. Sinn[1], suppressing this volatility requires…

A plethora of solar dynamic events, such as the formation of active regions, the emission of jets and the occurrence of eruptions is often associated to the emergence of magnetic flux from the interior of the Sun to the surface and above.…

Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…

Maximizing the amount of work harvested from an environment is important for a wide variety of biological and technological processes, from energy-harvesting processes such as photosynthesisto energy storage systems such as fuels and…

The rocket technology dates back as far as medieval China. Used initially for entertainment and religious practices over time rockets evolved into weapons and finally into means of transportation. Today, we are nearing the top of the…

We seek to model the coupled evolution of a planet and a civilization through the era when energy harvesting by the civilization drives the planet into new and adverse climate states. In this way we ask if triggering "anthropocenes" of the…

Identifying the two physical mechanisms behind the production and sustenance of the quiescent solar corona and solar wind poses two of the outstanding problems in solar physics today. We present analysis of spectroscopic observations from…

It is frequently assumed that the fundamental purpose of vision is to extract information from light and process it in the brain in order to gain knowledge about environmental objects. Treating vision as an information-driven process has…

Solar neutrino physics is an exciting and difficult field of research for physicists, where astrophysics, elementary particle and nuclear physics meet. \ The Sun produces the energy that life has been using on Earth for many years, about…

Understanding the origin and long-term evolution of the Solar System is a fundamental goal of planetary science and astrophysics. This chapter describes our current understanding of the key processes that shaped our planetary system,…

Coronal jets represent important manifestations of ubiquitous solar transients, which may be the source of significant mass and energy input to the upper solar atmosphere and the solar wind. While the energy involved in a jet-like event is…

The dominant feature of industrial development in the nineteenth century was the use of power, but closely associated with it and of scarcely less importance was the enormous increase in the use of metals made possible by metallurgical…

In a previous paper we have shown that Newton's third law cannot strictly hold in a distributed system of which the different parts are at a finite distance from each other. This is due to the finite speed of signal propagation which cannot…

Which technologies are currently booming in power generation? The answer can clearly be seen in the trends in global electricity generation data. Analysing this data using the theory of diffusion of innovations reveals how photovoltaics and…

Earth is connected gravitationally, magnetically and electrically to its heat source - a neutron star that is obscured from view by waste products in the photosphere. Neutron repulsion is like the hot filament in an incandescent light bulb.…

The concept of thermal energy was only fully formulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The search for the understanding of calorific phenomena was what provided the construction and development of the concept of thermal energy.…

The main advantage of electric vehicles, namely, their non-polluting operation, is compromised when the electricity they use comes from burning fossil fuels. The number of electric vehicles on the road is growing much faster than the amount…

We attempt to provide a comprehensive model of evolution of science across millennia taking into account the contributions of other intellectual traditions, cultural value system and increasing in sophistication of humans in their study of…

The reward system is one of the fundamental drivers of animal behaviors and is critical for survival and reproduction. Despite its importance, the problem of how the reward system has evolved is underexplored. In this paper, we try to…