sand

An entire town in Finland could very well get a lot of its heat from a giant sand battery before too long. The new battery has officially been announced and will be built by Polar Night Energy. It’s a really clever concept that will essentially just be made up of a massive silo filled to the brim with tons of sand or a similar material.The idea here is to pump excess energy generated during a spike from renewable energy sources and then transfer it into the sand using a heat exchange. The company says that the…

Sand Land, a 2000 manga from the late Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragon Ball, has a demo for its PS4 and PS5 video game adaptation out now ahead of its April 26 launch. Sand Land is an action RPG set in the world of Toriyama’s manga. In the game, players will take control of protagonist Fiend Prince Beelzebub. Along with his companions, Thief and Sheriff Rao, players will search the open-world desert for the Legendary Spring. Humans and demons are suffering from an extreme water shortage, so finding the Spring is…

A Sand Land demo is now available on PC, PS5, PS4, and Xbox Series X|S ahead of the game's launch at the end of April. The reveal came via a new trailer you can watch below.Although the 56-second-long trailer doesn't give too much info away, it does tease some of the game's action featuring the series' signature vehicles like Battle Tanks, Battle Armors, and motorcycles. Publisher Bandai Namco revealed that those who play the demo will receive 30 B-grade steel and 30 B-grade bolts when the full…

A new industrial-scale 'sand battery' has been announced for Finland, which packs 1 MW of power and a capacity of up to 100 MWh of thermal energy for use during those cold polar winters. The new battery will be about 10 times bigger than a pilot plant that’s been running since 2022.The sand battery, developed by Polar Night Energy, is a clever concept. Basically, it’s a big steel silo of sand (or a similar solid material) that’s warmed up through a heat exchanger buried in the center, using excess electricity from the…

Lala Lallia Star Dune in Erg Chebbi, Morocco. Credit: Prof. C Bristow Scientists have solved the mysterious absence of star-shaped dunes from Earth's geological history for the first time, dating one back thousands of years. The study by Aberystwyth University, Birkbeck and UCL academics is the first to date how long it took a star dune to form and…

The weak gravitational pull on a particle just half the mass of a grain of sand has been measured for the first time. This most precise measurement of its kind is a breakthrough towards the quantum realm and a potential Theory of Everything.Of the universe’s four fundamental forces – gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces – gravity is the one we’re most familiar with in everyday life, but it’s actually the only one that we can’t currently explain using the Standard Model of particle physics, our…

By Jake Coyle | Associated Press Three firm thumps into the Arrakis sand is all you need to summon a sandworm in Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two.” It’s almost as easy as hailing a cab or calling for the check. The big buggers can’t resist the sound, which is a little like how I feel taking in all the vibrations of Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction novel. Whispers, incantations and guttural sounds buzz throughout “Part Two,” a hissing hulk of a sequel that fluctuates between ominous…

The video game adaptation of cult classic manga Sand Land is set to launch on PS5, PS4, and Xbox Series X|S on April 26. Sand Land will launch in multiple versions, including standard, deluxe, and collector's editions. Preorders for each edition are available now from multiple retailers, and those who buy the game early get access to exclusive pre-purchase bonus DLC.We'll go over all the Sand Land versions and where you can preorder them below, but first, we want to point out that PC players can save 18%…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Millions of dollars are being spent to add sand to Southern California beaches—but a new study suggests technology can give a better understanding of how sand moves, offering data decision-makers could use in planning how to fix the eroding coastline. A new paper published recently by University of California, Irvine…

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.When governments find themselves fighting the threat of coastal erosion, their default response tends to be pretty simple: If sand is disappearing from a beach, they pump in more sand to replace it. This strategy, known as “beach nourishment,” has become a cornerstone of coastal defenses around the world, complementing hard structures like sea walls. North Carolina, for instance, has dumped more than 100 million tons of sand onto its…