Group items tagged

The drone derived craze takes on new life. Still not too bad for electric.

breakthroughs vs. accelerated deployment in climate change mitigation technologies.

indeed. puts me in mind of the often reinvented private ACT idea. actually there's a bunch of interesting looking articles on his website. http://www.khoslaventures.com/khosla/papers.html . No sps in the solar one as far as i can tell :) found this bit intriguing too in that, albeit presumably out of context, it doesn't make sense ""The solution to our energy problems is almost the exact opposite of what Khosla says," declares Joseph Romm, who is the editor of Climate Progress, an influential climate blog, and a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress Action Fund, a think-tank. "Technology breakthroughs are unlikely to be the answer. Accelerated deployment of existing technologies will get you down the cost curve much more rapidly than a breakthrough."" found this seemingly not very well considered piece (to be fair a blog post) by the guy http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/02/is-anyone-more-incoherent-than-vinod-khosla/ . maybe he's written some more convincing stuff in this vein somewhere.

"Mr Khosla (...) is investing over $1 billion of his clients' money in black swans" Well, with his own money his approach might be a little different :-)

Here, we show that fluorescent proteins4, 5 in cells are a viable gain medium for optical amplification, and report the first successful realization of biological cell lasers based on green fluorescent protein (GFP).

Duncan and Xurxo have a look at this - just discussed today :-)

Short article on the AMS policy statement on geoengineering in US (see also the other bookmark I posted)

very interesting indeed ... we are almost too late :-)

interview with the head of the "big greed innovations" - nothing spectacularly new though ...

did you read this one? "When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. During this lovely dinner I was forced to liberate a small portion of wind and was relieved that I managed to do so very discretely. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced."

After previously investing in the company, Google has now acquired Makani Power, a green energy startup that is currently building airborne wind turbines. The acquisition was first reported in Brad Stone's Businessweek story about Google X, and judging from Stone's story, the team will join Google X.

Really? Is this what we were all waiting for?

to be honest, while the alien megastructure is a cookie idea, I highly doubt that those aliens woke up one day and thought: "hm, let's send laser pulses at this particular random spot in space sometime in the next 6 days".

Ideas for ESTEC 2 ...

There are few certainties in plant biology. But, surely, leaves are green and designed to engage in photosynthesis. Well, it ain't necessarily so. Underground leaves of Philcoxia trap and digest nematodes...discovering a new carnivorous plant.

UK researchers say they have achieved data transmission speeds of 10Gbit/s via "li-fi" - wireless internet connectivity using light. The researchers used a micro-LED light bulb to transmit 3.5Gbit/s via each of the three primary colours - red, green, blue - that make up white light. This means over 10Gbit/s is possible.

Dissolving in sodium hydroxide vs freeze-drying... which one for you?

Nice... Now I have a lame question: after you have discovered ~500k asteroids, all moving (I assume more or less) chaotically in that asteroid belt, how do you tell one from another?

That's what I thought but when presented as a green "goo" in the video, it appears rather unordered... so I guess this is just an impression evoked by a not-to-scale presentation?

It depends... orbits can be chaotic if the orbital period is in a resonance with Jupiter, although such orbits are not stable. Such configurations tend to get disrupted pretty quickly (in cosmic terms :P) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkwood_gap

Cynthia - please have a look ... can we check the OoM?

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101022/full/news.2010.558.html hmm should be the ACT in Nature, no? ;)

Yeeesss :) So the "non-commercial" rockets do not emit soot? And how many "non-commercial" launches per year are there in comparison to the commercial ones? Finally commercial space-flight seems more realisable than ever, and "non-commercial" guys will do everything to prevent situation in which they have to compete on an open market... Coming years should be very interesting...

Let's start betting which party Aliens vote: GREEN, BLUE, RED, BLACK?

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/ for the moment is down. My bet, the microbe they found notified its cousins and they are currently invading the US

you can still see the rest of it here: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html a good link with a summary and discussion on the announcement is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/02/nasa-life-form-bacteria-arsenic

here we go - a quite significant step in getting SPS off the ground !!

The cables would link existing and new windmills off the German and British coasts with Belgian and Danish tidal power stations and Norwegian hydroelectric plants. The €30-billion project would compensate for the irregular nature of renewable energy and provide a steady flow to the countries involved.