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What do you do if you build a wind farm smack dab in the middle of a major bird migration route, and want to avert the anger of conservationists? Put up a radar system that's designed to shut down the entire thing when it detects a mass of birds on the way. That's what's been done at the 202 MW Peñascal Wind Farm in Texas: System Detects Birds Approaching Four Miles Away The system uses radar originally developed for NASA and the US Air Force to detect birds as far as four miles away, The Guardian reports. When it picks up the approaching birds, it analyzes the existing weather conditions and determines in real time whether those birds are in danger of flying into the blades. The system then automatically restarts the turbines when the birds have passed.

Following last summer's record minimum ice cover in the Arctic, current observations from ESA's Envisat satellite suggest that the extent of polar sea-ice may again shrink to a level very close to that of last year. Envisat observations from mid-August depict that a new record of low sea-ice coverage could be reached in a matter of weeks. The animation above is a series of mosaics of the Arctic Ocean created from images acquired between early June and mid-August 2008 from the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument aboard Envisat. The dark grey colour represents ice-free areas while blue represents areas covered with sea ice.

So far, CNG vehicles haven't made a blip on my radar screen, even though the group Natural Gas Vehicles for America (NGVA) estimates there are 150,000 NGVs on U.S. roads today and over 5 million worldwide. It took a phone call from sunny Southern Utah to clue me in to recent developments, which include a local refueling station overflowing with CNG-hungry vehicles. There are about 1500 CNG refueling stations in the US, which is about the same number of commercial stations offering E85 ethanol blends. Utah has a total of 91 CNG filling stations, most of which are reserved for commercial fleet use, but there are 20 open to the public. According to an article by the Associated Press, you could drive Utah from top to bottom and hit 22 different stations offering compressed natural gas.

The world's first floating wind turbine is to be towed out to sea this weekend. Statoil's Alexandra Beck Gjorv told the BBC the technology, the Hywind, to be put off Norway's coast - "should help move offshore wind farms out of sight". And it could lead to offshore wind farms eventually being located many miles offshore, away from areas where they cause disruption, Ms Gjorv added. This would benefit military radar operations, the shipping industry, fisheries, bird life and tourism.

What started as a low-profile trip by the PM to Shetland to announce a household energy policy and pat a pony has become an under the radar inspection of an oil field with the potential to tear apart the union. Are the UK government and BP in cahoots or is it just 'utter nonsense'?

Interested in the open source OS but unsure what to try? Linux has always been the outsider's operating system. Even more hipster than Apple's iOS and completely off the radar of most Microsoft Windows users, the open source OS umbrella covers an ever increasing collection of mutations and flavours, known to its users as distros (short for distributions).