Is Wind The Next Ethanol? -- A Commentary

A picture taken in May 2001 shows the world's largest offshore windmill farm, Middelgrunden Windmill Farm, located in the Oeresund, three km from Copenhagen harbour. (AFP/Getty Images)

From The Washington Times:

Subsidizing this source could mandate a hefty consumer cost.

Repeating past mistakes has long been a part of Washington's energy policy, but Congress used to wait a while before making the same blunder again. Not anymore. New legislation requiring wind energy closely resembles the ethanol mandate that sparked a backlash just last year.

For many years, wind has benefited from generous tax credits and subsidies, but it still provides less than 2 percent of the nation's electricity. By comparison, coal supplies around 50 percent (and with considerably fewer federal incentives). Natural gas and nuclear, meanwhile, account for about 20 percent each.

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How Sand Dunes Grow Huge

Giant dunes in Grand Erg Oriental, Algeria. Credit: Bruno Andreotti

From Live Science:

Anyone who has seen giant sand dunes, the tall ones stretching many hundreds, even thousands, of feet across the desert floor, has surely wondered how they get to be so big. Scientists, too, have deliberated the question for years.

The sandy behemoths form in China, the Sahara, Namibia, and Iran, among other desert areas, and they come in ridge, star, or crescent shapes.

Bruno Andreotti and Philippe Claudin of the Laboratory of the Physics and Mechanics of Heterogeneous Media in Paris and colleagues now have some answers. The team studied giant-dune fields on-site, analyzed aerial and satellite photos and meteorological data, and ran aerodynamic models to investigate dune growth.

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The First 43 Years And Next 43 Years Of Star Trek And Our World

From The Next Big Future:

The First 43 Years from 1966 to 2009

We start just a little before 1966 (when the first show of the TV series was aired, which would technically be the first 45 years) to get a sense of technology and the world while the Star Trek show was in its development phase through to today.

In 1964, Roddenberry secured a three-year development deal with leading independent TV production company Desilu (founded by comedy stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz). In Roddenberry's original concept, the protagonist was named Captain Robert April of the "S.S. Yorktown". Eventually, this character became Captain Christopher Pike. The first pilot episode, "The Cage", was made in 1964, with actor Jeffrey Hunter in the role of Pike after Roddenberry's first choice, Lloyd Bridges had reportedly turned it down.

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The Future Of 5 Telescopes In Space

(Photograph by NASA/AFP/Getty Images)

From Popular Mechanics:

This week has been an active one for earthlings' quest to understand the universe. Here is the big news on five telescopes in the sky.

On what is supposed to be the last space shuttle visit ever to the Hubble Space Telescope, astronauts successfully installed a new camera.

Mission specialists John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel installed the Wide Field Camera 3, an upgraded system that will produce larger, more detailed photos over a wide range of colors, according to NASA. The old camera, responsible for some of the most images of the cosmos since its installation in 1993, will be brought down for display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

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Is David Attenborough Set To Reveal The Missing Link In Human Evolution?

From The Daily Mail:

The BBC has made an extraordinary new documentary, presented by Sir David Attenborough, which will reveal the discovery of a fossilised skeleton that may be a vital ‘missing link’ in human evolution.

The 90-minute programme is top secret but The Mail on Sunday has learned from sources in America that the results of the study on which it is based will be revealed by a team of scientists and broadcasters in New York on May 19.

The centrepiece of the programme is the unveiling of the first-ever complete skeleton of an extinct animal called an adapid.

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Melting Threat From West Antarctic Ice Sheet May Be Less Than Expected; But U.S. Coastal Cities At Risk

Iceberg in Paradise Bay, West Antarctica. (Credit: iStockphoto/Micheal O Fiachra)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 15, 2009) — While a total or partial collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet as a result of warming would not raise global sea levels as high as some predict, levels on the U.S. seaboards would rise 25 percent more than the global average and threaten cities like New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, according to a new study.

Long thought of as the sleeping giant with respect to sea level rise, Antarctica holds about nine times the volume of ice of Greenland. Its western ice sheet, known as WAIS, is of particular interest to scientists due to its inherent instability, a result of large areas of the continent's bedrock lying below sea level. But the ice sheet's potential contribution to sea level rise has been greatly overestimated, according to new calculations.

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Lessons From Earth's Most Murderous People

This photo and caption released by Survival International on May 29, 2008, caused a stir: Uncontacted Indians in Brazil seen from the air, May 2008 © Gleison Miranda/FUNAI

From Live Science:

Decades ago, when I was a bright-eyed undergraduate student, I saw a documentary called "Dead Birds" in my cultural anthropology class about the Dani of New Guinea, and it changed my life.

Brought up in a nice, middle-class, white American family, I had no idea that there were people in the world who still lived in huts, kept pigs, and spent their days on high, swaying platforms looking for the enemy. And when the enemy came screaming over the hill, wearing elaborate feathered headdresses and carrying spears, I was stunned into becoming an anthropologist, right then and there.

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Color E-Paper That Rivals the Real Thing

Color scheme: A prototype in-plane electrophoretic display consisting of 1,000 pixels. Credit: Philips

From Technology Review:

Turning pixels on their side may finally mean high-quality color electronic paper.

Despite Amazon's promise to reinvent the newspaper and magazine industry with its new, large-screen Kindle DX electronic reader, some people may be reluctant to embrace the technology until full-color displays are possible. A new approach developed by Philips now offers fresh hope for color e-paper displays that are so bright and clear that even traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) will pale in comparison.

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Wolfram Alpha Search Engine Is Now Online

The Wolfram Alpha Search Engine is now online, and can be found here.

Heavy use of the search engine has caused it to send back a message that it has exceeded its "user limits" .... but otherwise it appears to be a cool and practical search engine.

Telescopes Poised To Spot Air-Breathing Aliens

Image: The next generation of space telescopes will be capable of detecting "biosignatures" in the light from planets orbiting other stars (Image: G. Bacon STSCI / ESA / NASA)

From New Scientist:

SIGNS of life on planets beyond our own solar system may soon be in our sights. Experiments and calculations presented at an astrobiology meeting last week reveal how the coming generation of space telescopes will for the first time be capable of detecting "biosignatures" in the light from planets orbiting other stars.

Any clues about life on these exoplanets will have to come from the tiny fraction of the parent star's light that interacts with the planet on its journey towards Earth. The Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have both detected gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapour in the atmospheres of a handful of gas-giant exoplanets as they pass in front of their parent stars. The gas molecules absorb light at characteristic wavelengths, and this shows up as dark lines in the spectrum of the starlight which has been filtered through the planet's atmosphere. But seeing evidence of life - so-called biosignatures - in the spectrum of worlds small enough to be rocky like Earth is beyond the sensitivity of these instruments.

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Sleep Can Improve Your Word Power

From The Telegraph:

Reading bedtime stories to children could help to improve their vocabulary, new research suggests.

Psychologists have discovered that a good night's sleep plays a crucial role in allowing the brain to store and remember new words learned during the day.

People who were asked to learn a set of fictitious words were better at remembering them after they had spent time asleep than if they were asked to recall the words just a few hours after being taught them.

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Melting Ice Could Cause Gravity Shift

The disintegration of the Antarctic ice sheet could cause catastrophic flooding on the east and west coasts of America. AFP

From The Independent:

The melting of one of the world's largest ice sheets would alter the Earth's field of gravity and even its rotation in space so much that it would cause sea levels along some coasts to rise faster than the global average, scientists said yesterday.

The rise in sea levels would be highest on the west and east coasts of North America where increases of 25 per cent more than the global average would cause catastrophic flooding in cities such as New York, Washington DC and San Francisco.

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Star Crust Is Ten Billion Times Stronger Than Steel

The outer crusts of so-called neutron stars (above, a neutron star in an artist's conception) are ten billion times stronger than steel—making it the strongest known material in the universe, scientists said in May 2009. Image by Casey Reed, courtesy of Penn State

From National Geographic News:

Move over, Superman.

The Man of Steel has nothing on the collapsed cores of massive snuffed-out stars, scientists say.

A new computer model suggests that the outer crusts of so-called neutron stars are the strongest known material in the universe.

To determine the breaking point of a neutron star's crust, the team modeled magnetic field stresses and crust deformation for a small region of the star's surface.

The results showed that the crust of a neutron star can withstand a breaking strain up to ten billion times the pressure it would take to snap steel.

"It sounds dramatic, but it's true," said study team member Charles Horowitz of Indiana University.

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Let The Planet Hunt Begin: Kepler Spacecraft Begins Search For Other Earth-like Worlds

Artist concept of Kepler in space. (Credit: NASA/JPL)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 15, 2009) — NASA's Kepler spacecraft has begun its search for other Earth-like worlds. The mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 6, will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars for telltale signs of planets. Kepler has the unique ability to find planets as small as Earth that orbit sun-like stars at distances where temperatures are right for possible lakes and oceans.

"Now the fun begins," said William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "We are all really excited to start sorting through the data and discovering the planets."

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Supercomputer Helps SoCal Prep For The Big One

From Live Science:

Very few things in life are certain. If you live in Southern California, however, rest assured that some time in the next few decades you will experience an earthquake of significant magnitude.

And while the disaster itself is probably unavoidable, knowing which areas will be most affected can do a great deal to mitigate the aftermath. For example, where will the strongest ground movement occur, and how long will the shaking last?

Obviously, when it comes to new construction in an area with a high probability of an earthquake in the relatively near future, this knowledge is invaluable. Engineers crave this sort of data when they are designing the buildings of tomorrow.

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Can The Grid Handle Renewables?

Photo: LIGHTS OUT FOR THE OLD GRID? A six-month study will test the grid's ability to handle the load and fluctuation of a surge of renewable energy. FLICKR/PETER KAMINSKI

From Scientific American:

A new study aims to find out how much electricity from wind and sunshine the aging power grid can support.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission launched a six-month study today to determine how much renewable energy the electric grid can accommodate.

FERC will work with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on the $500,000 study to validate the preliminary frequency-response tool developed by the commission to gauge the grid's reliability if large quantities of renewable energy are sent to the system.

"We need a good metric – a good yardstick, a tool – to assess how much renewable energy can be injected into the bulk power ... system," said Joseph McClelland, director of FERC's Office of Electric Reliability.

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Water Way To Travel! Super Winged Submersible That 'Flies' Through The Ocean Unveiled

Sea for two: The Super Falcon Submersible surfaces
near San Francisco following 20 years of research

From The Daily Mail:

Man has raced across the land and launched into space, but traveling underwater has proved more tricky.

Now an engineer has built a high-tech winged submersible that he says can 'fly' beneath the waves.

The Super Falcon Submersible, which resembles Thunderbird 4, can reach depths of 1,500 feet and speed through the ocean at six knots, which is nearly seven miles per hour. It has a range of around 25 nautical miles.

Created by British inventor Graham Hawkes for Hawkes Ocean Technologies, it is the newest and most advanced sub of their Deep Flight series and the culmination of four generations of experimental prototypes.

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Space Shuttle Masquerades As Sunspot In New Image

Photo: NASA's space shuttle Atlantis is on an 11-day mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. The shuttle's silhouette can be seen against the sun in this image taken from Florida on Tuesday, when the shuttle was on its way to Hubble (Image: NASA/Thierry Legault)

From New Scientist:

The space shuttle Atlantis masquerades as a sunspot in this image, taken by photographer Thierry Legault as the shuttle sped towards the Hubble Space Telescope on Tuesday.

Atlantis is on an 11-day mission to give Hubble a new lease on life. In a series of five back-to-back spacewalks, astronauts are replacing old equipment, installing two new cameras, and repairing two others.

After a two-day journey to reach Hubble, the shuttle's robotic arm reached out to grab hold of the probe on Wednesday. Astronauts emerged the next day to outfit the telescope with a new camera and replace an old computer.

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Is Warp Speed Possible? We Ask a String Theorist

The Enterprise: Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic/Paramount Pictures

From Popsci.com:

PopSci talks to futurist Michio Kaku about the (not necessarily) impossible physics of Star Trek.

Science geeks, Trekkers, and action-movie fans have now had a few days to digest the newest incarnation of the Star Trek franchise. PopSci set out to answer some of the movie's most puzzling questions (aside from what Winona Ryder was doing on Vulcan): Can we time-travel through black holes? Can we seed said black holes using something called "red matter"? How about teleportation -- will someone named Scotty (or Chekov) ever beam someone up?

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Neandertals Sophisticated And Fearless Hunters, New Analysis Shows

Model of the Neanderthal man. Exhibited in the Dinosaur Park Münchehagen, Germany. (Credit: iStockphoto/Klaus Nilkens)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 14, 2009) — Neandertals, the 'stupid' cousins of modern humans were capable of capturing the most impressive animals. This indicates that Neandertals were anything but dim. Dutch researcher Gerrit Dusseldorp analysed their daily forays for food to gain insights into the complex behaviour of the Neandertal. His analysis revealed that the hunting was very knowledge intensive.

Although it is now clear that Neandertals were hunters and not scavengers, their exact hunting methods are still something of a mystery. Dusseldorp investigated just how sophisticated the Neandertals' hunting methods really were. His analysis of two archaeological sites revealed that Neandertals in warm forested areas preferred to hunt solitary game but that in colder, less forested areas they preferred to hunt the more difficult to capture herding animals.

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