SFGate.com: Micosoft has launch a competitor to google sky, the popular software program that lets computer users fly through the universe, viewing stars, planets and celestial bodies. The new product is called Worldwide Telescope. The virtual service combines images and databases from every major telescope and astronomical organization in the world. Microsoft says it is providing the resource for free in memory of Jim Gray, the Microsoft researcher who disappeared last year while sailing his boat to the Farallon Islands on a trip to scatter his mother's ashes. The project is an extension of Gray's work. "I never imagined (the telescope) would be so beautiful," said Alexander Szalay, an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University who worked with Gray on astronomy projects for more than a decade. Gray was an expert in databases, and he came to be accepted as "a card-carrying member" of the astronomical community for his work in bringing astronomical data online, Szalay said. A special version of the product is being developed for astronomers, and it's being considered as one way to visualize data in the Virtual Observatory, a project by the National Science Foundation to integrate all astronomical data online.
Related news pickGoogle launches virtual observatory
London Review of Books: John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books reviews a series a books on global warming and ends his review with the following paragraphs:
The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse. If we do that we may find that we develop the technologies that China and India will need. If we can show that it is possible to cut carbon output dramatically without trashing our economy – well, that might be the single most important thing we could do, far outweighing the actual impact of our emission reductions.
We know all this, but whether any of it will actually happen is a different question. It is easy for politicians to stick wind turbines on their houses and ride bicycles, but effective action on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western electorates are willing to pay it. One per cent of global GDP is 600 billion dollars, most of which would be paid by the developed world. The idea is that by paying it now we would be keeping the world’s economy on track so that by 2050 the developed world would be 200 per cent richer and the developing world 400 per cent, while our emissions decline by 60 to 90 per cent and theirs increase by 25 to 50. (One problem is that 17 per cent of that growth in developing world emissions has already been used up.) The promised economic growth is jam tomorrow; we would be paying for it today, in the form of increased taxes and lost jobs. These things are all real to voters in ways that climate change perhaps is not. Are people going to give things up in the present in order to prevent things that computer models tell them are going to happen in 25 years’ time? If they – we – aren’t, then we’re heading for breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic.
BBC News: Nasa is making a bid to join the elite group using supercomputers whose power is measured in petaflops. By 2009 the US space agency aims to be running a petaflop supercomputer that will be able to do 1,000 trillion calculations per second. By 2012 it hopes to have boosted the power of this machine to 10 petaflops, to help with modelling and simulation. The new supercomputer will be at the Ames research center at Moffet Field, California.
Baltimore Sun: NASA has awarded the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab $750 million to develop an Solar Probe mission, which will study the streams of charged particles the sun hurls into space from a vantage point within the sun’s corona – its outer atmosphere – where the processes that heat the corona and produce solar wind occur. At closest approach Solar Probe would zip past the sun at 125 miles per second, protected by a carbon-composite heat shield that must withstand up to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit and survive blasts of radiation and energized dust at levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft. Launch is planned for 2015, with the craft's first solar flyby just three months later - thanks to a boost from the sun's gravity.
Nature News: Researchers are buzzing about a new type of software that allows them to manage their research paper downloads from online journals much more effectively. One of the most popular programs is Papers, a commercial offering released last year with a similar interface to iTunes, Apple's successful music-file organizer. Papers and similar programs are able to read a file's 'metadata' so that a batch of PDF (portable document format) files can be sorted by, for example, author, journal name or year. Users can add new files to their hard drives by 'dragging and dropping' or use the program to search and download directly from databases such as PubMed, IEEE Xplore and the arXiv preprint server.
NPR (audio): James Kakalios, author of The Physics of Superheroes, talks about the science of the action flick Iron Man.
New Scientist: A normal digital camera can take snaps of objects not directly visible to its lens, US researchers have shown. The "ghost imaging" technique could help satellites take snapshots through clouds or smoke.
Physicists have known for more than a decade that ghost imaging is possible. But, until now, experiments had only imaged the holes in stencil-like masks, which limited its potential applications.
Now Yanhua Shih of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and colleagues at the US Army Research Laboratory, also in Maryland, have now taken the first ghost images of an opaque object - a toy soldier.
Not everyone agrees that quantum effects are at work in ghost imaging, though. Baris Erkmen and Jeffrey Shapiro of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, point out in a recent paper that classical physics says light sources produce numbers of uncoordinated photons, not correlated quantum pairs.
They suspect ghost images might be produced without a quantum link between photon pairs, purely because some photons are just similar.
Related Link
Physical Review A (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.77.041801)
Mother Jones: The search for the perfect battery is fraught with obstacles—namely the laws of physics.
New York Times: Hewlett-Packard scientists reported Wednesday in the science journal Nature that they have designed a simple circuit element that they believe will make it possible to build tiny powerful computers that could imitate biological functions.
R. Stanley Williams, Hewlett-Packard’s director of the quantum science research group, and his team designed a circuit element that may make it possible to build tiny powerful computers. The device, called a memristor, would be used to build extremely dense computer memory chips that use far less power than today’s DRAM memory chips.
The memristor, an electrical resistor with memory properties, may also make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits, a class of reprogrammable chips known as field programmable gate arrays, that are widely used for rapid prototyping of new circuits and for custom-made chips that need to be manufactured quickly. Potentially even more tantalizing is the ability of the memristors to store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips use. This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech. Independent researchers said that it seemed likely that the memristor might relatively quickly be applied in computer memories, but that other applications could be more challenging. Typically, technology advances are not adopted unless they offer large advantages in cost or performance over the technologies they are replacing.
Das Spiegel: A tiny fraction of the sun's energy that shines upon the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East could meet all of Europe's electricity demands. The technology to harness the energy already exists. So why is hardly anyone investing in it?
Die Spiegel: Nuclear power is too dangerous. Coal is too dirty. Gas involves too much dependence on Russia. And renewables are insufficient. So just where is Germany going to get its power from?
BBC News: Two hundred years later, the general principle of using clocks to aid navigation still stands. But the latest generation of timepiece, to be launched into space onboard the Giove-B satellite, is a world away from Captain Cook's. "Such a clock has never been flown," Pierre Waller, an engineer at the European Space Agency (Esa), told BBC News. The beating heart of Giove-B, the second test spacecraft for Europe's Galileo global satellite-navigation system, is a hydrogen maser atomic clock. Following its launch from the Baikonaur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, it will become the most precise time piece to orbit the Earth. It will be accurate to one billionth of a second per day, or one second in three million years.
Technology Review: Earthquake researchers in California hope to take advantage of the motion sensors in laptops to create an earthquake-sensing network. By putting computers in homes and businesses to work as seismic monitors, the researchers hope to pull together a wealth of information on major quakes, and perhaps even offer early warnings, giving a few seconds' notice of a potentially devastating quake. The Quake Catcher Network (QCN) is in the beta testing stage, with links to several hundred laptops. It's a distributed computing network, like SETI@home, which searches for intelligent signals from space, and Folding@Home, which focuses on protein folding. Machines in the earthquake network would monitor motion and report big shakes to a central server. If a horde of reports came in from a particular area, it could indicate an earthquake. The network will initially focus on the quake-prone San Francisco Bay and the Greater Los Angeles Basin areas of California.
The Times: Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films - and cost far less to produce.
In a paper published in the current issue of Science, a team at the company's research centre in San Jose, California, said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for "weeks at a time", and would last for decades.
So-called 'racetrack' memory uses the 'spin' of an electron to store data, and can operate far more quickly than regular hard drives.
New York Times: Jet fuel is now the largest expense for most airlines, and for American carriers each penny increase in price per gallon costs nearly $200 million a year. The industry is also becoming increasingly nervous about what happens when that fuel is burned. Aviation is responsible for about 2 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases, and that share will rise as air travel continues to grow.
So the industry is scrambling to build greener airplanes — to save weight and improve engine efficiency, with an eye toward reducing operating costs and emissions.
In the short term, a revolution in jet engines is about to occur, with radically different designs that use gears to cut fuel consumption, noise and pollutants. And those new engines will power planes built more and more with carbon composite materials, which are lighter and may also be safer than the aluminum they replace.
The biggest change with aircraft is electricity: The 777, a mid-1990s design, can generate up to 270 kilowatts of electricity, enough to run a small neighborhood of houses. The 787, would make five times as much, 1.35 megawatts, in order to power a multitude of motors and pumps that help make the place lighter and safer.
New York Times: For a decade, the scientists have argued that the storied liner went down fast after hitting an iceberg because the ship’s builder used substandard rivets that popped their heads and let tons of icy seawater rush in. More than 1,500 people died. When the safety of the rivets was first questioned 10 years ago, the builder ignored the accusation and said it did not have an archivist who could address the issue. Now, historians say new evidence uncovered in the archive of the builder, Harland and Wolff, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, settles the argument and finally solves the riddle of one of the most famous sinkings of all time. The company says the findings are deeply flawed.
The Post Chronicle: Physicists Create Superinsulators by Staff U.S. and European scientists have discovered a fundamental state of matter that they say opens new directions of inquiry in condensed matter physics. via The Post Chronicle
USA Today: NASA's new Mars rover aims high. It's bigger, more powerful and more sophisticated than any other robotic vehicle that has landed on another planet. It will try to answer a big question: Has life existed elsewhere in the solar system?
Its very ambition has gotten the rover in trouble. Thanks to a mix of technological setbacks and engineering misjudgments, the rover's epic scale is matched by epic problems.
The new rover, known as the Mars Science Laboratory, is $235 million, or 24%, over budget. Work on it has run so late that engineers are racing to prepare the rover for its blastoff in 2009. After that, the next good launch window, when Mars and the Earth are closest, is in 2011.
"They aimed high, and they got burned," says Arizona State University's Phil Christensen, a Mars scientist who helped review NASA's Mars program.
New York Times: A vibration problem with a rocket that is to launch Orion, NASA’s next generation of manned spacecraft, is less severe than previously believed, officials of the agency said Thursday.
Fuller analysis and testing of the problem with the rocket, the Ares I, indicated that the vibrations, termed “thrust oscillations,” would not be strong enough to harm either it or the astronauts it will carry, the officials said in a telephone news conference.
In addition, they said, repairs will most likely dampen the residual vibrations, so that they will not interfere with the astronauts’ duties, like reading instruments and writing, during the climb into space.
Science: The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) based in China is designed to peer deeper into space and measure more spectral emissions than the project that inspires it, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
 Engineers this month are installing LAMOST's eyes and optic nerves: 1-meterwide hexagonal sections of its two mirrors and the 4000 optical fibers on its focal surface that will feed starlight into a battalion of spectrographs. Viewing conditions at Xinglong, in China's industrialized north, are not ideal: Independent experts say that siting the scope in western China would have been better. Every week, dust and sand blown in from the Gobi Desert have to be brushed off the correcting mirror. On the bright side, Xinglong, in the foothills of the Yanshan Mountains, gets an average of 270 clear nights of viewing each year. The whole system--which has cost $40 million so far to build--should be in place by fall, when final testing will begin, says LAMOST's chief engineer, Cui Xiangqun, director of Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology. Data collection should begin in earnest next year.
NPR: Projections for the evolution of green technologies to help curb greenhouse gas emissions are overly optimist, according to researchers writing in Nature. They say policymakers will need to implement stronger measures to reverse global warming.
ASPERA: How do you ship a magnet weighing more than 1000 tons (the equivalent of the take-off weight of four Boeing 747s) from Europe to Japan? Partly by breaking it up into smaller pieces say physicists from CERN who have donated the NOMAD magnet and other related equipment to Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization KEK. In January, 35 containers were filled with 150 pieces for a long voyage by truck, train and boat.
The equipment, worth millions of dollars, will be used in the T2K (Tokai to Kamiokande) experiment that will start operation in the autumn of 2009. The J-PARC accelerators at Tokai will send a 40 GeV proton beam to a target to produce an intense low-energy neutrino beam directed towards Super-Kamiokande, Japan’s neutrino observatory 300 km away. “We hope that it will be the most intense neutrino beam ever produced” says André Rubbia from the ETH Institute for particle physics of Zurich.
The beam will look to see if the neutrinos oscillate between the three types of neutrino. To date, only the first two of the three mixing angles have been measured precisely. The T2K experiment will attempt to determine the third, which is the “Holy Grail” for neutrino physicists.
The Register: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has thrown its new "Blackswift" hypersonic-aircraft programme open to all (US) comers, and confirmed outline details of how the new unmanned hyperplane prototype will work.
In a government pdf released last week, DARPA says that Blackswift will indeed, as speculation had it, be reusable and make takeoffs and landings from an ordinary runway. The hyperplane will be required to reach Mach 6 - well in excess of the best speeds yet reached by runway aircraft - and maintain that stably for at least a minute.
Washington Post: China is rapidly becoming a leading manufacturer of solar-cells. Unfortunately, the highly toxic waste -- silicon tetrachloride -- from the production of polysilicon, which is used to make solar cells, is polluting ground water and the surrounding villages around the plants. Unlike in the West where stricter environmental regulations are in effect, solar plants in China have not installed technology to prevent pollutants from getting into the environment or have not brought those systems fully online, writes Washington post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha.
"The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite -- it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it," said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University. Shi Jun, a former photovoltaic technology researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences estimates that Chinese companies are saving millions of dollars by not installing pollution recovery. "If this happened in the United States, you'd probably be arrested," he said.
Various: The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), Europe's new orbital cargo ship, launched from French Guiana on a mission to resupply the space station two days ago reports the BBC.
The 20-tonne unmanned freighter, the biggest and most complex spacecraft Europe has built, left the Kourou spaceport at 0403 GMT, riding atop an Ariane V rocket. Only one glitch arose out of the flight, with one of the four engines malfunctioning says the Washington Post.
The ATV will still be able to dock with the international space station next month after the space shuttle has successfully delivered a Japanese laboratory to the station. Endeavour launched early this morning on a 16-day flight.
In just 2 1/2 years, the US will no longer have any spacecraft of its own capable of carrying astronauts and cargo to the station, in which roughly $100 billion is being invested. The three space shuttles will be retired by then, because of their high cost and questionable safety, and NASA will have nothing ready to replace them until 2015 at the earliest. The ATV is seen by NASA as a new option to reduce NASA's dependancy on Russian spacecraft to service the station says Marc Kaufman in the Washington Post.
Related Links
Glitch Found on European Spacecraft (Washington Post)
European Spacecraft Takes Off (NPR)
Huge space truck races into orbit (BBC)
NASA Wary of Relying on Russia, Looking forward to new ESA space tug (Washington Post)
Space.com: NASA is facing the prospect of trying to explore deep space without the aid of the long-lasting nuclear batteries it has relied upon for decades to send spacecraft to destinations where sunlight is in short supply.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin told a House Appropriations subcommittee March 5 that the U.S. inventory of plutonium-238 - the radioactive material essential for building long-lasting batteries known to the experts as radioisotope power systems - is running out quickly.
"Looking ahead, plutonium is in short supply," Griffin told lawmakers during the first of two days of hearings on the U.S. space agency's 2009 budget request.
Though Griffin did not mention it, the U.S. Department of Energy over the winter quietly shelved long-standing plans to resume domestic production of plutonium-238. In 2005, the Department of Energy (DOE) gave public notice of its intent to consolidate the nation's radioisotope power system activities at Idaho National Laboratory and start producing plutonium-238 there by 2011.
Restarting production was projected at the time to cost $250 million and take five years. Those plans are now on hold. "DOE did not request funding in 2009 for [Plutonium-238] production, since NASA has been directed to fund any new production capabilities," Angela Hill, an Energy Department spokeswoman told to space.com. "Production may or may not resume based on NASA's decision. Based on current mission plans, DOE will only continue to provide new Radioisotope Power Systems until 2015."
NASA's 2009 budget request includes no money for re-establishing the Department of Energy's long dormant plutonium-238 production capability.
Nature: The €10-billion (US$15-billion) international fusion reactor ITER could be damaged by violent bursts of energy called edge localized modes (ELM) that are expected to rocket out of inner plasma core, unless a proposed solution is implemented, says Rick Moyer, a plasma physicist at the University of California, San Diego. A proposed solution will be put Norbert Holtkamp, the project's construction leader on the 18 March. It is expected to call for a complex arrangement of magnets to dampen the effects of the ELMs. Solving the problem is proving to be controversial, as any solution will cost and delay the already over-budgeted project further.
New York Times: After a decade of no activity, two prototype solar thermal plants were recently opened in the United States, with a capacity that could power several big hotels says New York Times reporter Matthew L. Wald. Another 10 power plants are in advanced planning in California, Arizona and Nevada that could provide as much power as a nuclear reactor while built in one fifth the time. As prices rise for fossil fuels and worries grow about their contribution to global warming, solar thermal plants are being viewed as a renewable power source with huge potential.
National Geographic: Self-induced drought and climate change may have caused the destruction of the Maya civilization, say scientists working with new satellite technology that monitors Central America's environment.
LA Times: An atomic-powered craft, being built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and scheduled for a 2009 launch, aims to settle once and for all whether the planet has ever been suitable for life.
Science: As a legendary designer of communications satellites, Harold Rosen doesn't need to spend his ninth decade figuring out how to land a cheap probe that can maneuver and send back pictures from the moon's surface. But when Google announced last year that it was joining with the nonprofit X Prize Foundation to sponsor the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, the National Medal of Technology winner decided to dust off an idea for a tubular, spinning payload that had been "in the back of my head" for decades. "We think we have the team to win it, and we're raring to go," says Rosen, who believes he can do for $20 million.
Forbes.com: Apparently, it's time to ban Edison's venerable, now vilified, light bulb. European leaders, green pundits and the widely reported light bulb provisions of the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 all urgently push the abandonment of incandescent bulbs.
The New York Times: Solar power generated by photovoltaic cells is among the greenest of energy options. The cells just sit there, basking in the sun and emitting nothing but electrons.
But cells are manufactured, and the manufacturing process is not benign. Over the life cycle of solar cells — from the mining of raw materials to the finished product — just how green are they?
Nature: The dream of perpetual flight without fuel has inspired pilots to take to the skies in solar-powered planes. Vicki Cleave looks at a mission to fly a solar plane through the night — and around the world.
Nature: A record-breaking beam has been developed at the University of Michigan.
New York Times: All that glitters golden is not gold. It could be aluminum. Or tungsten. Or another metal of Chunlei Guo’s choosing. In a feat of optical alchemy, Dr. Guo, a professor of optics at the University of Rochester, and Anatoliy Y. Vorobyev, a postdoctoral researcher, use ultrashort laser bursts to pockmark the surface of a metal in a way that is not perceptible to the touch — it still feels smooth to the finger — but that alters how the metal absorbs and reflects light. The result, published in Applied Physics Letters, is that pure aluminum looks like gold, and the appearance is literally skin deep.
Related Links
Colorizing metals with femtosecond laser pulses
The Christian SCience Monitor: In the next 18 months, the US is likely to deploy a potentially breakthrough robot-vision system in Iraq and Afghanistan.
CNET: Although it's on the fringe of Europe geographically, Finland has for years been at the center of the continent's tech industry.
The country gave birth to cell phone leader Nokia and has emerged as a place where multinationals like to recruit and erect labs. The government and local entrepreneurs are now moving into clean technology.
CNET: Stanford University researchers have made a discovery that could signal the arrival of laptop batteries that last more than a day on a single charge.
Physics Today: Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt gave the first NASA 50th anniversary lecture of 2008 at the Newseum in Washington D.C. earlier today. In his 40 minute speech he urged NASA and other space agencies to consider public-private partnerships and open data standards to drive the next stage of space innovation.
Continue reading "Google CEO says NASA should become more 'open source'" »
The New York Times: The results of the research project by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Energy Department, released Wednesday, suggest that if households have digital tools to set temperature and price preferences, the peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by up to 15 percent a year.
ZDNet: A research collaboration between La Trobe University's Centre for Technology Infusion (CTI), Peregrine Semiconductor Australia (PSA) and the CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) have come up with a new chip design they hope will be integrated into the world's largest radio telescope.
BBC: A new type of super-efficient household light bulb is being developed which could spell the end of regular bulbs.
Technology Review: Advanced biofuels, more-efficient vehicles, and solar power top the most notable energy stories of 2007.
Telegraph.co.uk: A "universe in a test tube" that could be used to assess theories of everything has been created by physicists.
PC World: IBM's uptight, starched-shirt image has survived for many decades, but the stereotype may finally meet its demise at the hands of a giant boulder and a meeting room up in the sky.
Los Angeles Times: Pacific Gas & Electric Co. went surfing Tuesday, becoming the first U.S. utility to commit to buying electricity generated by the tumult of the sea.
ScienceNow: Although improvements in laptop computers and other electronics continue at a torrid pace, the batteries that power them have made only modest strides in recent years. A new advance in nanotechnology could change all that. Lithium ion batteries made with tiny whiskers of silicon can store as much as 10 times the charge of conventional rechargeables, researchers report. In principle, the new technology could result in laptop batteries that run for days and electric cars that cruise for hundreds of kilometers on a single charge--but it must still clear some key hurdles to make it to market.
Nature: Turning optical-fibre messages into sound could help store the information.
Wired: About 400 technical hobbyists are taking advantage of a glut of surplus precision timekeeping gear to pursue a serious interest in very precise timekeeping. They call themselves Time Nuts, and they spend their spare cycles collecting, repairing, tweaking -- and occasionally using -- super-precise atomic clocks. Wired magazines has the details on how to build your own atomic clock.
New Scientist: A paper in Nature Physics suggests that a desktop synchrotron particle accelerator could soon be able to freeze-frame the frenetic motion of atoms and molecules. An international team of physicists led by Dino Jaroszynski of Strathclyde University in Scotland have built a prototype light source, which they claim can be upgraded to produce intense, ultra-short pulses of X-rays. Synchrotrons are in great demand because their intense X-ray beams have so many uses, from analysing biological molecules to etching electronic components and seeing inside microscopic fossils.
Reuters: IBM says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.
Guardian Unlimited: Laser fusion Magnetic fusion has long been heralded as the future of renewable energy, but could it be lasers that hold the key? James Randerson looks into science's latest power saviour
NPR: NPR look at two different techniques for generating power without having to worry about CO2 emissions. Richard Harris visits Iceland to see how the country uses 'hot rocks' to generate power. Iceland is a geo-active area in which hot magma, usually ten-of-miles deep under the Earth, is close to the surface. Engineers pump water close to the magma, turning it to high pressure steam which is used to run turbines and supply hot water to the surrounding towns. One accident at the plant led to a 50m deep crater known as 'Man's Hell', a reminder of the dangers of geothermal operations. Meanwhile Greg Allen visits a prototype turbine that will be dropped into the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream has a strong and predictable North-East current about 15 miles off the coast of Florida, making it ideal for providing a reliable power source for potentially one-third of Florida's needs. As well as using turbines to generate power, researchers at Florida's Atlantic University are also investigating the thermal differences between the warm surface water and the deep cold water near the ocean floor. Exploiting these ocean thermal differences remains a goal of a number of university labs worldwide.
Continue reading "Researchers look to oceans, volcanoes to generate power" »
Christian Science Monitor: Engineers who want to produce hydrogen for fuel have to think outside the box. Standard processes are too costly and inefficient. A sample of research reported this year illustrates the unexpected possibilities such creative thinking opens up.
The Christian Science Monitor: Hydrogen from bacteria, from coal – and how about a hydrogen generator small enough to power your lawn mower?
ScienceNews: The ancient craft of bridge design still holds surprises
The New York Times: Steadying himself on the heaving foredeck of an inspection ship recently, his fa |
