Mpow 12000mAh Portable Backup

Mpow 12000mAh Portable Backup boasts built-in intelligent circuitry, which provides 7 layers of protection: Battery over charge; Battery over discharge; High voltage charge; High current charge; High power charge over heat; Short circuit.

Made with a Samsung polymer battery core, it has far better discharge performance compared to its competitors. It automatically goes into hibernation mode in 40-seconds if inactivity is detected to minimize power dissipation.

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Cup Holder Battery Tester Power Station – keep track of your car battery charge, while you charge your phone

There are a ton of in-car devices chargers on the market, some of them great, some not so. But we particularly likes ones which add a little bit extra functionality to the mix, to deliver better value for your buck.
This Cup Holder Battery Tester Power Station fits into any standard car cup holder block, and offers twin USB sockets to charge up your phones and/or tablet computers. So far so normal. But the extra coolness comes in the form of a bank of indicator lights which tell you what the state of your car battery is at any one time.

This means that you can keep tabs on your vehicle’s battery while you’re charging up your gadgets, especially useful if you’ve got the engine off (at which point your battery is rather vulnerable to too much drain). It’s a simple thing, but useful.

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US fusion lab almost breaks even, takes a big step towards clean, limitless power

The National Ignition Facility in California has become the first fusion power facility to create a fusion reaction that generates more power than it requires to get the reaction started. This is perhaps the most important step ever towards the always-just-out-of-reach realization of clean, self-sustaining, limitless fusion power.

The NIF, operated by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), creates a fusion reaction by focusing the world’s most powerful laser (some 500 terawatts), split into 192 separate beams, onto a small capsule (called a hohlraum) containing a mix of deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen), situated in a fusion chamber (pictured above). The lasers strike the hohlraum (pictured bottom) with precision timing, causing a perfectly uniform explosion, which creates a massive reaction force that causes the deuterium/tritium fuel to perfectly and uniformly implode — hopefully starting a fusion reaction. This process is called inertial confinement fusion, as opposed to magnetic confinement fusion, which before today was generally considered to be a more mature technology.

For the past half-century, fusion power has always remained tantalizingly out of reach. Whenever we think we’re getting close, another roadblock pushes us back a few years. This has led to the coining of the phrase, “fusion is always 20 years away.” The irritating thing is, we have an almost complete understanding of how fusion should work, but transporting those theoretical ideas into the physical universe has proven to be surprisingly difficult, usually due to various system or material inefficiencies that weren’t evident until they were put under enormous strain.

A hohlraum, which carries a few grams of deuterium/tritium fuel.
With this latest breakthrough, it seems that the NIF overcame an inefficiency in how energy from the laser beams is transferred to D/T (deuterium/tritium) fuel. Previously, the ablator — a plastic shell that surrounds the D/T fuel — had been breaking up improperly and interfering with the implosion. By changing the shape of the laser pulse, the scientists reduced the asymmetricity of the explosion/implosion, reducing the and thus increasing overall efficiency. The end result is that the fusion of the D/T fuel produced more energy than the energy delivered to the hohlraum — but the overall energy consumption, measured at the (large) wall outlet, was still higher than the energy produced. This is due to other inefficiencies in the system.
The next step, of course, is actually achieving the NIF’s eponymous goal: ignition. To do this, the facility will have to develop a system that is efficient enough that the fusion reaction actually creates enough energy to sustain itself. Realistically, we still have some way to go — and even if NIF does reach ignition, it’s not set up to act as a fusion power plant; it’s a research facility, nothing more. As far as actual, usable fusion power goes, the European ITER fusion reactor in France is probably our best bet, with a tentative timeline of 2027 for the first D/T fusion.

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Signal King High Power WiFi Antenna – grab an Internet signal from up to 3 kilometers away and WIN!

There are three truths in life – you will always be standing in the queue that moves the slowest, if you take an umbrella it will not rain and you can never ever have enough WiFi signal.
If you’ve ever suffered from the painful drop out or stuttering video blues, you’ll be first in line to admit that your wireless connection sucks. Well now there’s a solution. The Signal King High Power WiFi Antenna supports Macs, Linux and Windows computers, plugs into a standard USB port and makes all your WiFi problems go away.

The package contains drivers, but if you’re using a later version of Windows you won’t need them, as the operating system will find and install the drivers automatically. You can disable your internal wireless if you want, or just ignore it and use the Signal King as your main connection. The device is designed to really boost your range, they claim up to 3 kilometers away, and also to cope with things like basement signals, and situations where your signal is weak for one reason or another.

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