US Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar said in a speech Monday that wind mills placed off the east coast of the United States could do away with the need for coal fired power plants in the US. According to the AP article, Salazar classified the technology required to make this switch ‘here and now.’ A change like this, however, would devastate Kentucky’s economy which is heavily reliant on coal mining. In response to a Business Lexington query about Salazar’s comments the Kentucky Energy and Environmental Cabinet released a statement saying: ‘The comments Interior Secretary Salazar made regarding wind power were focused solely on the theoretical potential if offshore wind resources were fully developed and if the transmission infrastructure were in place to actually transport the energy to end users. He acknowledged in his statements that he did not expect such potential to be fully developed. Today, coal generates about 50 percent of the nation’s electricity, using existing infrastructure, including transmission lines, and does so in an affordable and reliable manner. ‘Governor Beshear’s energy plan, released in November, stresses the importance of diversifying our energy portfolio, including renewable resources such as wind and solar, but also stresses […]
The highest-profile test of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s plan to overhaul how the Pentagon buys weapons will be whether he succeeds in winding down production of the most advanced fighter the Air Force has ever flown. The F-22 Raptor is capable of almost hovering in place and can detect and kill an enemy more than 200 miles away. The Air Force boasts that the fighter is so far ahead of its competitors that it gives the U.S. a clear advantage in the sky. The plane’s production involves politically important states such as Georgia, where it is assembled, and Connecticut, where its engines are made. Lockheed Martin Corp., the Pentagon’s biggest contractor by sales, leads the project with Boeing Co. as its major subcontractor. But despite its political muscle and technological prowess, more F-22s don’t have a place in Mr. Gates’s vision. He wants to curtail production after 187 jets are delivered, some 60 jets short of what the Air Force has told lawmakers it wants. That could lead to thousands of job cuts. Mr. Gates sees the F-22, which costs $143 million apiece, as overkill for a military that needs to be more focused on hunting […]
Australian scientists have made a discovery that may one day remove the need for a lifetime of toxic immunosuppressive drugs after organ transplants. Professor Jonathan Sprent and Dr Kylie Webster from Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, in collaboration with colleagues, Dr Shane Grey and Stacey Walters, have successfully tested a method, in experimental mice, of adjusting the immune system for just long enough to receive a tissue transplant and accept it as ‘self’. At no stage, during or after the procedure, is there any need for immunosuppressive drugs. The results are now online in the current edition of the prestigious Journal of Experimental Medicine. ‘Under normal circumstances, the body would attack a transplanted organ unless immunosuppressive drugs such as cyclosporin were given,’ said Sprent. ‘In this project, mice were given a substance, or ‘complex’, that altered their immune systems, so that they accepted transplanted cells as their own.’ Sprent developed the ‘complex’ with Professor Charles Surh from California’s Scripps Research Institute and Dr Onur Boyman, physician and Head of the Basic Immunology Unit at the University Hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland. The complex combines a molecule, interleukin-2 (IL-2), with an antibody in order to […]
US newspaper owners, their advertising revenue evaporating, their circulation declining and their readership going online to get news for free, are fighting mad. The enemy? Websites that use their stories without paying for them. ‘We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more,’ said the chairman of the Associated Press, a cooperative of over 1,400 US newspapers, borrowing a line from the anchorman character in the 1976 movie ‘Network.’ ‘We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,’ Dean Singleton said at a meeting this week of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) in San Diego, California. Singleton’s battle cry came just a few days after News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch launched a broadside against Internet giant Google, whose Google News website is one of the most popular news aggregators on the Internet. ‘Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?’ asked Murdoch, the owner of newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States, where his holdings include The Wall Street Journal and New York Post. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ the News Corp. chairman said. Robert […]
An ‘alarming rate’ of melting in the Antarctic Peninsula has finally snapped the ice bridge that held the Wilkins Ice Shelf in place, experts say. The 25-mile-long (40-kilometer-long) ribbon of sea ice that secured the Jamaica-size ice shelf (which is just out of view in the above pictures) to Antarctica had been ‘hanging by a thread’ since August 2008 (above, top, in November 2008 in a European Space Agency satellite image). On Saturday, April 4, the bridge broke at its weakest point (bottom)-at about 1,640 feet (500 meters) wide-and shattered into hundreds of small icebergs. The ice shelf, which is now exposed to the open ocean, is more vulnerable to breaking up, experts say. ‘We’ve been watching it all summer, waiting for it to go, and bang-now it’s gone,’ David Vaughan, a glaciologist for the British Antarctic Survey, told National Geographic News. ‘It’s the culmination of yet another ice shelf retreat that’s been driven by [warming] climate,’ Vaughan said. The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 1950s, he said-’something that people should take note of.’ (Related: ‘Antarctica Heating Up, ‘Ignored’ Satellite Data Show’.) The massive ice shelf […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
