Where Are The Solar Power Projects?

Electric towers and power lines cross the proposed site of a BrightSource Energy solar plant near Primm, Nev. The presence of existing towers make the area a prime site for solar development.

From Watts Up With That?:

From the Ventura County Star:

ROACH DRY LAKE, Nev. — Not a light bulb’s worth of solar electricity has been produced on the millions of acres of public desert set aside for it. Not one project to build glimmering solar farms has even broken ground.

Instead, five years after federal land managers opened up stretches of the Southwest to developers, vast tracts still sit idle.

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My Comment: A blunt and accurate assessment on the politics behind solar power.

Archive Gallery: 138 Years Of Architectural Landmarks

The Pentagon, 1943

From Popular Science:

PopSci's first looks at the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more.

We've heard it said that Rome wasn't built in a day. And while Popular Science isn't old enough to have witnessed the Colosseum going up, we have covered in our pages some of the 20th century's most important architectural achievements rise from nothing but a dream and a blueprint.

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Top 5 Ways The Universe Could Wipe Out Humankind

From Popular Mechanics:

The Universe looks like a pretty tranquil place to live, doesn't it? During the day the sun shines steadily, and at night the heavens are reassuring and unchanging.

Dream on. The Universe is filled to the brim with dangerous, nasty things, all jostling for position to be the one to wipe us off the face of the planet. Happily for us, they're all pretty unlikely—how many people do you know who have died by proton disintegration?—but if you wait long enough, one of them is bound to get us.

But which one?

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Highest-Paid Athlete Hailed From Ancient Rome

From Discovery News:

Ultra millionaire sponsorship deals such as those signed by sprinter Usain Bolt, motorcycle racer Valentino Rossi and tennis player Maria Sharapova, are just peanuts compared to the personal fortune amassed by a second century A.D. Roman racer, according to an estimate published in the historical magazine Lapham's Quarterly.

According to Peter Struck, associate professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, an illiterate charioteer named Gaius Appuleius Diocles earned “the staggering sum" of 35,863,120 sesterces (ancient Roman coins) in prize money.

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My Comment: I am just curious to know what happened to all of that money.

Web-Crawling Computers Will Soon Be Calling The Shots In Science

Computers may by programmed to generate hypotheses with little human intervention required. Photograph: Corbis

From The Guardian:

Within a decade, computers will be able to plough through scientific data looking for patterns and connections – then tell scientists what they should do next.

Move over scientists – computers will be asking the questions from now on. They will trawl the millions of scientific papers on the web and suggest new hypotheses for humans to test, according to an article in tomorrow's issue of Science.

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Richest Planetary System Discovered

A close-up of the sky around the star HD 10180. Credit: ESO and Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin

From Cosmos:

PARIS: A distant star orbited by at least five planets has been found, according to European astronomers, in the biggest discovery of so-called exoplanets since the first was logged 15 years ago.

The star is similar to our Sun and its planetary lineup has an intriguing parallel with own Solar System, although no clue has so far been found to suggest it could be a home from home, they said.

The star they studied, HD 10180, is located 127 light years away in the southern constellation of Hydrus, the male water snake, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said.

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Discovery Of Ancient Cave Paintings In Petra Stuns Art Scholars

Detail of a winged child playing the flute, before and after cleaning. Photograph: Courtesy of the Courtauld Institute

From The Guardian:

Exquisite artworks hidden under 2,000 years of soot and grime in a Jordanian cave have been restored by experts from the Courtauld Institute in London.

Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.

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Commercial Organic Farms Have Better Fruit and Soil, Lower Environmental Impact, Study Finds

A new study found that organic farms produced more flavorful and nutritious berries while leaving the soil healthier and more genetically diverse. (Credit: iStockphoto/Margarita Borodina)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 1, 2010) — Side-by-side comparisons of organic and conventional strawberry farms and their fruit found the organic farms produced more flavorful and nutritious berries while leaving the soil healthier and more genetically diverse.

"Our findings have global implications and advance what we know about the sustainability benefits of organic farming systems," said John Reganold, Washington State University Regents professor of soil science and lead author of a paper published in the peer-reviewed online journal, PLoS ONE. "We also show you can have high quality, healthy produce without resorting to an arsenal of pesticides."

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My Comment: This scientific study only reveals what every farmer knows .... stay away from pesticides and fertilizers and you will produce a better product.

Hurricane Alley Heats Up With Stormy Threesome

As Hurricane Earl nears the East Coast Thursday, two tropical systems linger behind: Tropical Storm Fiona, located north-northeast of San Juan, and Tropical Storm Gaston, located east of the Lesser Antilles. Credit: NOAA.

From Live Science:

Three swirling storms are roaring across the Atlantic with nervous East Coast residents keeping a close eye on the conveyor belt of tropical activity as hurricane season enters its busiest time.

Hurricane Earl is bearing down on the Carolinas and has strengthened into a Category 4 storm, with maximum winds of 145 mph (235 kph), according to the latest update from the National Hurricane Center (NHC). Category 3 storms or higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane strength are classified as major hurricanes. [In Images: Hurricane Hunters Flying into Earl.]

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Throat Cancer Rates Soar In Men

From The Telegraph:

Throat cancer cases have soared by 50 per cent in men in the last 25 years due to obesity and bad diet, researchers have found.

Back in the eighties around 2,600 men were diagnosed with oesophageal cancer every year but now the figure is more than 5,100.

The most dramatic rise was among men in their 50s, as rates increased by 67 per cent over the same period.

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When Drones Go Wild

When Drones Go Rogue In Friendly Skies, How Do We Bring Them Home? -- Popular Science

An advanced fly-by-wire system capable of landing grossly damaged unmanned aircraft—demonstrated on video saving a plane missing 80 percent of one wing—is key to solving one of unmanned flight’s biggest problems.

Word spread last week that a rogue MQ-8B Fire Scout copter drone entered restricted airspace just 40 miles shy of Washington D.C. after losing contact with its operators. The revelation occurred smack in the middle of AVUSI 2010, the world’s largest UAV tradeshow. And it served as a poignant reminder that all the game-changing technology on display here at the Denver Convention Center still has some innovating to do, especially when flight crews lose control of their unmanned craft.

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My Comment: The video is impressive .... watch it.

Shape-Shifting Robot Compensates For Damaged Limb

From New Scientist:

Think that shape-shifting robots, or ones that march on no matter how many limbs they lose, are just for Terminator films? Think again. A team of European roboticists have developed software that allows a modular robot to adapt when one part stops working.

David Johan Christensen at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, working with Alexander Spröwitz and Auke Ijspeert at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, simulated a quadruped robot constructed from a dozen Roombots – identical rounded robots that have been developed in Lausanne and which can combine to form a variety of modular shapes (see picture).

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Astronaut’s Eye View: Time-Lapse Videos of Earth

From Wired Science:

A NASA astronaut on the Space Shuttle Endeavor brought space back down to Earth. Astronaut Don Pettit took over 85 time-lapsed videos of Earth from his stint on the International Space Station to highlight features of the changing planet.

"There is phenomenology that happens on a timescale that you can't see in real time," he said. "It occurred to me that making time-lapse movies on the space station would bring out things that you normally don't observe."

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Death Of The Couch Potato:

More users are watching TV on their laptops than ever before, according to a new study (picture posed by model)

Death Of The Couch Potato: Study Finds More Than A Third Of Viewers Now Watch Their Favourite TV Shows Online -- Daily Mail

An increasing number of viewers are watching their favourite TV shows online rather than on television, a new survey as found.

More than a third of users (34 per cent) now watch their favourite programmes online compared to only 29 per cent who watch them mostly on television.

The figures - from a joint survey by SeeSaw.com and Radio Times - show how the way we consume television is changing rapidly.

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My Comment: Count me as one of those who watches 90% of his shows and movies online.

Double Space Strike 'Caused Dinosaur Extinction'

From The BBC:

The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by at least two space impacts, rather than a single strike, a new study suggests.

Previously, scientists had identified a huge impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico as the event that spelled doom for the dinosaurs.

Now evidence for a second impact in Ukraine has been uncovered.

This raises the possibility that the Earth may have been bombarded by a whole shower of space rocks.

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My Comment: Regardless if there was one or more asteroid strikes .... it was a bad day for the dinosaurs when the first one happened.

Oxford English Dictionary 'Will Not Be Printed Again'

The second OED was published in 1989 Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

The next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the world’s most definitive work on the language, will never be printed because of the impact of the internet on book sales.

Sales of the third edition of the vast tome have fallen due to the increasing popularity of online alternatives, according to its publisher.

A team of 80 lexicographers has been working on the third edition of the OED – known as OED3 – for the past 21 years.

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Researchers Create Ultra-Sensitive Robotic Nose Using Frog Eggs As An Olfactory Sensor

Detecting Molecules with Frog Eggs

From Popular Science:

Researchers at the University of Tokyo are using frog eggs to enhance what might seem like an unlikely element of robotics: olfactory sensing. By injecting the eggs with the DNA from various insects known for expressing keen senses of smell, the team was able to create a robotic nose that can detect molecules at levels as low as a few parts per billion.

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Roots of Gamblers' Fallacies and Other Superstitions: Causes of Seemingly Irrational Human Decision-Making

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2010) — Gamblers who think they have a "hot hand," only to end up walking away with a loss, may nonetheless be making "rational" decisions, according to new research from University of Minnesota psychologists. The study finds that because humans are making decisions based on how we think the world works, if erroneous beliefs are held, it can result in behavior that looks distinctly irrational.

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My Comment: I guess saying 'the Devil made me do it' is not going to fly.

Massive Mega-Star Challenges Black Hole Theories

This artist's impression shows the magnetar in the very rich and young star cluster Westerlund 1. This remarkable cluster contains hundreds of very massive stars, some shining with a brilliance of almost one million suns. Credit: ESO / L. Calçada.

From Live Science:

Astronomers have discovered a massive star that once dwarfed our sun and is now challenging theories of how stars evolve, die and form black holes.

The star is a peculiar cosmic object known as a magnetar. Magnetars are extremely dense, super-magnetic stars that can form from supernova explosions. [Photo of the massive star. ]

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My Comment: That is one hell of a big (and heavy) star.

Loud Video: NASA Test Fires Largest-Ever Solid Rocket Motor

From Popular Science:

In Utah today, NASA completed a successful test of the world's largest, most powerful solid rocket motor, the DM-2. For two minutes, the motor, designed to provide up to 3.6 million pounds of thrust, roaringly fired a column of flame, while some 760 instruments monitored its every aspect. Best to turn down your speakers before the countdown in this video hits zero.

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