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Small wind turbines are a perennial point of contention. According to wind energy expert Paul Gipe, they often don’t live up to their hype. However, in very high-wind and off-grid situations, they may sometimes be useful. You really just have to do the best you can to evaluate your unique situation. Check out this guest post below for a look at the small wind turbines that lead the market. It seems not a month goes … Read More
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has said that it would repay the debt induced by the loan they received from the US government to develop electric vehicles early, and it appears this will be possible, with a bit of personal help from Elon. The company appears to be on track to pay the loan back years early, and that includes the interest. The loan was $465 million, and the Elon Musk is going to buy $100 … Read More
Going green is a much talked about topic. All kinds of rumors and false ideas are circulating about the environment and the actions we can take to help it. Here are 5 green myths debunked. 1. Going Green is More Expensive Many are under the impression that everything green is expensive. It is quite the contrary. Granted, organic food and products of such are more pricey than “conventional” food. But going green extends beyond nutrition. … Read More
A photosynthetic bacteria that can survive without light? What…? A strain of photosynthetic cyanobacteria has been genetically manipulated by researchers at the University of California – Davis and is now able to grow without the presence of light. “In this work, we used synthetic biology approaches to probe and rewire photoautotrophic (exclusively relying on carbon dioxide and light energy for growth) cyanobacterial metabolism for the ability to grow without light energy,” says Jordan McEwen, the … Read More
Have you ever tried to engage in a balanced discussion or debate over, say, macro-economics or maybe foreign policy — subjects that are complex and contingent upon many factors — and found yourself frustrated in your attempts by an extreme/unyielding ideological viewpoint? Well, the next time you’re confronted with an extreme (and typically over-simplified) political viewpoint, you might try asking that person to explain their viewpoint, that is, ask them to detail how they … Read More
In case you haven’t see the photos that are going around the Web, there is one below. The horse reportedly is owned by the president of Turkmenistan Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. The breed is Akhal Teke and there may be only about 3,500 of them in the world. Some are cream-colored like this one, and others have different colors such as chestnut, palomino, perlino, gray and black. The metallic sheen to their coats is a signature trait. … Read More
Research has found that approximately 99% of our planet’s land-locked ice is held up in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The remainder, however, is out in the open, located primarily in the glaciers dotted throughout the appropriate latitudes across the planet. And according to new research, those glaciers contributed approximately the same amount of water to sea level rise as the two ice sheets combined between 2003 and 2009. All glacial regions lost ice … Read More
Scientific understanding is continually shifting as time moves on. For decades now, scientists have assumed that ancient high tide lines referred to higher sea levels. These assumptions have led scientists to believe that if the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets were to completely melt, they would cause such a high sea level again. New research, however, has challenged these assumptions, by showing that the Earth’s hot mantle pushed up segments of ancient shorelines over millions … Read More
Genome sequencing diagnostics has some serious limitations to it, as researchers at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute recently discovered when they came across three children who had some of the rare inherited conditions collectively known as Congenital Disorders of Glycosylation (CDG), but only in some of the cells of their body, not all. The children are ‘mosaics’ — the term used for people who have different genomes in different parts of their body. The press … Read More
NASA’s relentless solar-powered Mars rover Opportunity has now set a new record — greatest distance traveled by a US made vehicle on another world. The Opportunity rover was originally scheduled only for a three-month mission that began back in January 2004, but the solar-powered rover has shown itself to be quite tough and long-lasting — greatly outlasting the original mission. The new record set by Opportunity eclipses a record set more than 40 years ago … Read More
