In the two months since launch, controllers have powered up the satellites' navigation and formation flying equipment, tested its green propellant thruster, and successfully navigated around orbital debris threats.
interesting guy indeed ...
"Forget today's green technologies like electric cars, wind turbines, solar cells and smart grids, in other words. None meets what Mr Khosla calls the "Chindia price"-the price at which people in China and India will buy them without a subsidy. "Everything's a toy until it reaches that point," he says.
I also like this one since its a bit like ACT topic selection:
""I am only interested in technologies that have a 90% chance of failure but, if they do succeed, would change the infrastructure of society in some radical way," he says."
should we propose SPS to him ? :-)
one more:
""I never compute returns. If you start forecasting cash flows, you lose innovation, you lose instinct. You average yourself down to mediocrity."
"I've had many more failures than successes in my life," admits Mr Khosla. "My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed."
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).
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.
Reminds me of this - the discovery of the LGM-1 (LGM= Little Green Men indeed): http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200602/history.cfm
It turned out to be the first discovery of a pulsar, re-compensated by a Nobel Prize in Physics
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".
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.
NASA is, rather, testing the deployment mechanism.
In 2008, engineers were given just four months to devise a solar sail. They pulled it off, but the rocket carrying the sail experienced launch failure.
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
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...
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.