The Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE) located in New York, NY has come up with an ingenious way to capture the Sun’s rays - use office windows as solar power generators to augment or power the building. ‘The reason we’re interested in windows is because they have the largest surface areas, typically, in buildings - especially in tall, urban buildings,’ said Anna Dyson head of CASE and a professor of architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. ‘We have a lot of vertical surface area to work with to really generate a lot of power.’ The new technology, called ‘integrated concentrating dynamic solar façade’, consists of a grid of clear pyramids that are inserted on a window or the building’s façade. The pyramids contain a lens that is capable of focusing sunlight by more than 400 times onto a highly efficient solar cell. The pyramids were designed to rotate to follow the Sun across its daily path through the sky maximizing the solar potential. The solar cells generate the electricity needed to heat, cool, and light the building. The solar cells are cooled with a fluid that also captures the waste heat that was not […]
he US is facing a surge in anti-government extremist groups and armed militias, driven by deepening hostility on the right to Barack Obama, anger over the economy, and the increasing propagation of conspiracy theories by parts of the mass media such as Fox News. The Southern Poverty Law Centre, the US’s most prominent civil rights group focused on hate organisations, said in a report that extremist ‘patriot’ groups ‘came roaring back to life’ last year as their number jumped nearly 250% to more than 500 with deepening ties to conservative mainstream politics. The SPLC report, called Rage on the Right, said the rise in extremist groups was ‘a cause for grave concern’ given their propensity to use violence during their heyday in the 90s, most notably with the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. It added that the issues driving support for such groups were increasingly populist and that ‘signs of growing radicalisation are everywhere’. ‘Patriot groups have been fuelled by anger over the changing demographics of the country, the soaring public debt, the troubled economy and an array of initiatives by President Obama that have been branded ‘socialist’ or even ‘fascist’ by his political opponents,’ […]
Although perhaps not as jolting as an alarm clock, a cat’s ‘soliciting purr can still pry its owner from sleep. And, when sufficiently annoying, the sound may actually coerce them from bed to fill a food bowl. This particular meow mix-an embedding of her cat’s high-frequency natural cry within a more pleasant, low-frequency purr-often awakens Karen McComb, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex in the U.K. and lead author of a paper about that sound published today in Current Biology. ‘Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom, McComb said in a statement. To understand just how cats vocally manipulate owners, including herself, McComb and her team set up a series of experiments. First they recorded the purrs of 10 cats; some were recorded when a cat was actively soliciting food and others in a non-solicitation setting. Fifty people then listened to the sounds at the same volume. Individuals judged pleading purrs as more urgent and less pleasant than normal purrs. When the researchers played the purrs re-synthesized to exclude the hungry cries, leaving all else the same, the volunteers perceived […]
Here we go again. With the Obama administration’s promise of federal loan guarantees to build two new nuclear power plants at a cost of $8.3 billion, the radioactive monster is rising from a long dormancy, pumped to life by the lobbyists for nuke designers, nuke contractors, nuke operators and nuke consultants and their generous spending. Over the last decade, the nuclear industry has spent more than $600 million lobbying the federal government and another $63 million in federal campaign contributions, according to an analysis of public records by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. Today, the industry is using our desperate need for jobs and worries about global warming to further its cause. But let’s not forget the reasons that citizens across the nation have been successfully opposing expanded reliance on nuclear energy since the 1970s. First and foremost, there is the waste issue. Nuclear power generates a radioactive waste stream from hell that will threaten even our grandchildren’s grandchildren. We still have no repository for the waste and no plan to dispose of it. Two decades and billions of taxpayer dollars later, a proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada has been all but abandoned. The […]
OSLO (Reuters) – Large amounts of a powerful greenhouse gas are bubbling up from a long-frozen seabed north of Siberia, raising fears of far bigger leaks that could stoke global warming, scientists said. It was unclear, however, if the Arctic emissions of methane gas were new or had been going on unnoticed for centuries — since before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century led to wide use of fossil fuels that are blamed for climate change. The study said about 8 million tons of methane a year, equivalent to the annual total previously estimated from all of the world’s oceans, were seeping from vast stores long trapped under permafrost below the seabed north of Russia. ‘Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap,’ Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, said in a statement. She co-led the study published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science. The experts measured levels of methane, a gas that can be released by rotting vegetation, in water and air at 5,000 sites on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf from 2003-08. In some places, methane was bubbling up from the seabed. Previously, the […]
Schwartzreport Podcast
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
