MADISON, S.D. — Out across this wind-swept, wheat-growing state, Jeffrey Nelson sees a new crop rising – electricity from the world’s largest wind-turbine farms sending electrons thousands of miles east to Chicago or Boston. But it’s a vision the South Dakota Wind Energy Association president says will never happen without something far larger, more controversial, and even more expensive: gigantic new high-voltage transmission lines. Depending on whom you talk to, emerging plans to build 765,000 volt transmission lines to bring power from the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind in the Dakotas to population centers in the Midwest and East Coast are either vital to the nation or a boondoggle waiting to happen. ‘This state has vast resources it can’t use without building new power lines, says Mr. Nelson, gesturing at lines on a grid map at the East River Electric Power Cooperative in Madison, where he is manager. ‘These high-voltage lines are like farm-to-market roads, but instead of wheat, it’s electricity being transported. We need to think in those terms. Many are clearly doing just that. With political winds blowing toward renewable energy, power-line proposals are popping up to carry wind power around the country. President Obama […]
WASHINGTON — For the first time, some airline passengers will skip metal detectors and instead be screened by body scanning machines that look through clothing for hidden weapons, the Transportation Security Administration said Tuesday. An experimental program that begins today at Tulsa International Airport will test whether the $170,000 body scanners could replace $10,000 metal detectors that have screened airline passengers since 1973. Airports in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, Albuquerque and Salt Lake City will join the test in the next two months, TSA spokesman Christopher White said. The scanners aim to close a loophole by finding non-metallic weapons such as plastic and liquid explosives, which the TSA considers a major threat. The machines raise privacy concerns because their images reveal outlines of private body parts. ‘We’re getting closer and closer to a required strip-search to board an airplane,’ said Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union. Privacy advocate Melissa Ngo fears that passengers won’t understand that the scanners take vivid images that screeners view. FIND MORE STORIES IN: San Francisco | Miami | Las Vegas | Salt Lake City | Transportation Security Administration | American Civil Liberties Union | Albuquerque | Homeland Security […]
LIMA, Peru — Global climate change threatens the complete disappearance of the Andes’ tropical glaciers within the next 20 years, putting precious water, energy and food sources at risk, according to a World Bank report presented here Tuesday. The study says glacial retreat has already reduced by 12 percent the water supply to Peru’s dry coastline, home to 60 percent of the country’s population. ‘In Peru, (the glaciers) are melting very quickly. More than 20 percent of the glacial ice caps have disappeared since the 1970s,’ World Bank climate change specialist Walter Vergara told reporters in the capital, Lima. The report says that in neighboring Bolivia, the Chacaltaya glacier has lost 82 percent of its surface area since 1982. Meanwhile the Ecuadorean capital of Quito could face increased water costs of up to $100 million annually in the next 10 years as rising temperatures deplete nearby glaciers, Vergara said. The World Bank study on climate change in Latin America warns of three other major threats besides glacier disappearance: the destruction of coral reefs by warming oceans, which could cause the Caribbean basin’s ecosystem to ‘collapse’; wetlands devastation in the Gulf of Mexico due to deforestation, pollution […]
At a weekend meeting in Istanbul, 200 religious scholars and clerics met senior Hamas officials to plot a new jihad centred on Gaza. The BBC’s Bill Law was the only Western journalist at the meeting. In a hall crowded with conservative Sunni Muslim sheikhs and scholars, in a hotel close to Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport speaker after speaker called for jihad against Israel in support of Hamas. The choice of Turkey was significant. Arab hardliners were keen to put aside historic differences with the Turks. As one organiser put it: ‘During the past 100 years relations have been strained but Palestine has brought us together.’ Many delegates spoke appreciatively of the protest by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who stormed out of a Davos debate on Gaza two weeks ago. The conference, dubbed the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign, also gave impetus to Sunni clerics concerned about the growing power of Hezbollah, the Shia movement backed by Iran, which rose to international prominence in its own war with Israel in 2006. ‘Gaza is a gift,’ the Saudi religious scholar Mohsen al-Awajy told me. He and other delegates repeatedly referred to the Gaza war as ‘a […]
CHICAGO — The first mathematical use of the concept of actual infinity has been pushed back some 2,000 years via a new analysis of a tattered page of parchment on which a medieval monk in Constantinople copied the third century B.C. work of the Greek mathematician Archimedes. Infinity is one of the most fundamental questions in mathematics and still remains an unsolved riddle. For instance, if you add or subtract a number from infinity, the remaining value is still infinity, some Indian philosophers said. Mathematicians today refer to actual infinity as an uncountable set of numbers such as the number of points existing on a line at the same time, while a potential infinity is an endless sequence that unfolds consecutively over time. The parchment page comes from the 348-page Archimedes Palimpsest, the oldest copy of some of the Greek genius’ writings, which were hidden for centuries because a monk partly scraped them off the animal-skin parchment in the 13th century A.D. to clear the pages to print a prayer book. Also, a forger painted pictures over the prayer book hundreds of years after that. A scholar named Johan Ludvig Heiberg in 1906 studied the written remnants […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
