For decades, the arrival of the first V-shaped flights of Bewick’s swans in Britain’s wetlands after a 2,000-mile journey from Siberia heralded the arrival of winter. This year, a dramatic decline in numbers of the distinctive yellow-billed swans skidding into their winter feeding grounds could be the harbinger of a more dramatic shift in weather patterns: global warming. Ornithologists at the main reserves that host the birds, the smallest of Britain’s swans, said only a handful had appeared on lakes and water courses. Normally, there would be several hundred. The latest arrival in a decade of Britain’s seasonal influx of 8,000 Bewick’s swans throws into sharp relief the debate on the effects of climate change as it enters a crucial week. As the Government’s forthcoming Climate Bill is finalised, Sir Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank economist, is expected to warn in a report on Monday that failure to tackle global warming will provoke a recession deeper than the Great Depression. But far from Westminster, the potential ecological impact of the same phenomenon was being noted in the absence of the high-pitched honking call of Bewick’s swans on reservoirs and wetlands from the Ouse to the Severn […]
Australia yesterday announced it would build one of the world’s biggest solar power plants amid warnings of blackouts unless it can increase generation to meet the growing demand for air conditioners. With climate change being increasingly blamed for the severe drought that has been affecting parts of the continent for six years, and with cities imposing punishing water restrictions, the government has begun to support alternative forms of energy. The new plant, expected to be built in Victoria by Solar Systems Generation, is expected to be a solar concentrator, an emerging technology that collects sun rays in hundreds of square metres of curved mirrors, then beams the concentrated heat on to photovoltaic panels. The 154-megawatt project, which will be heavily subsidised by federal and state grants, will be able to provide power for 45,000 homes and could produce temperatures as high as 1,000C (1,832F). Similar solar power stations are now being built in the US and many Mediterranean countries, and it is likely that Australia’s proposed plant will be nowhere near the largest in the world by the time it is officially completed in 2013. A Spanish solar power station using similar technology is expected to […]
There’s a missile-bunker vibe you get when walking into Solaicx, a Silicon Valley startup that manufactures the silicon wafers that are the building blocks of solar panels. In one half of the nondescript Santa Clara warehouse, three men sit hunched on a wood platform 8 feet above the cement floor, their eyes locked on two monitors. The screens show data and video gathered from a 24-foot-tall steel tower. The tower begins in a squat, gourd-shaped base and tapers to a cannon-size column with a long drum spinning slowly on top. Thick power cables snake down its sides. Another sci-fi-looking tower rises up off to one side of the building. Inside the tower that has everyone’s attention, molten silicon is being added to a thin, 8-inch-long rod, or ‘seed,’ of silicon. After 15 hours of precise spinning and pulling, the seed will grow to a mirror-finished ingot about 4 feet long and weighing more than 150 pounds. If it’s perfect – and that is the point of Solaicx’s cutting-edge technology – it will form a single crystal matrix, which is then trimmed and sliced into 1,000 wafers that sell for $5 apiece and are used by companies like General […]
DAHKA — the country is going through a severe power crunch, it is relevant to ponder the steps that need to be very urgently considered to augment power production. There are, of course, two major sides to be considered. The major urban centres are all supplied by conventional electricity from the national grid. The rural areas where electricity is being provided, also depend considerably on supplies from the national grid. But the urban areas get top priority in such supply. Therefore, in the present power-starved conditions, the authorities are supplying the bulk of the insufficiently produced electricity to urban centres leaving the rural areas grossly undersupplied or not supplied at all. This situation would not arise if the rural areas became gradually self sufficient in producing electricity on their own and their best option in this regard would be solar power. A report in this paper last Saturday described how 50,000 people in the rural areas of Natore are being benefited from the use of solar power. Apart from the non-dependability of adequate supply from the national grid, there are many rural areas where it would take no one knows how long for power from the national grid to […]
NEW YORK — The widening waistlines of Americans have increased the consumption of gasoline since 1960 according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Virginia Commonwealth University. A report by Laura A. McLay of VCU, concludes that Americans now pump 938 million gallons of fuel more on a yearly basis than they were in 1960 because of their increasing weight. obesity_fat.03.jpg As American’s waistlines continue to grow, so does their consumption of gasoline. ‘Although the amount of fuel consumed as a result of the rising prevalence of obesity is small compared to the increase in the amount of fuel consumed stemming from other factors such as increased car reliance and an increase in the number of drivers,’ the report stated, ‘it still represents a large amount of fuel, and will become even more significant as the rate of obesity increases.’ Americans’ reliance on cars for private transportation has increased as low rise construction, single-family homes and highways associated with suburbs have grown since the end of World War II. McLay began the study as a doctoral student of Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor of computer science and director of the simulation and optimization […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
