One of Scotland’s stunning North Atlantic beaches located in the northwest Scottish Highlands.
CREDIT: shutterstock

The world’s largest tidal energy project, capable of powering nearly 175,000 homes in the U.K. with 400 megawatts of power, will break ground next month in northeast Scotland. Atlantis, majority owner of the MeyGen project, announced that its flagship project had met all the conditions required to start drawing down finance through the U.K.’s Renewable Energy Investment Fund.

The completed project will have 269 sunken turbines, according to Atlantis, which expects to have about 60 of these installed and delivering power by 2020.

In the announcement to investors, Atlantis said: “The major construction and supply contractors to this iconic project have commenced design, engineering and procurement works in readiness for commencement of onshore construction at the project site in Caithness in January 2015.”

Tim Cornelius, Chief Executive Officer of Atlantis, said that Lockheed Martin’s project-specific 1.5 megawatt turbines were scheduled to be delivered on time for construction […]

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Credit: Treehugger.com

Deforestation of tropical forests in the world’s southern hemisphere is threatening world food production by distorting rainfall patterns across the rest of the globe, a study has indicated.

The deforestation is accelerating global warming and could result in changing rainfall patterns across Europe, the U.S. Midwest and China, researchers said.

In addition, tropical regions in Southeast Asia, Central Africa and the Amazon region of South America could see a 15 percent drop in rainfall by 2050, the study authors reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“When you deforest the tropics, those regions will experience significant warming and the biggest drying,” study leader Deborah Lawrence of the University of Virginia said.

Most deforestation is done to provide cleared land for agriculture, but the cutting down of trees and the planting of crops releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which adds to global warming, the researchers said.

Crops are also less efficient in retaining moisture than forests, with immediate effects on local weather.

“Tropical forests are often talked about as the ‘lungs […]

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These booties were designed for a child. Their colors are remarkably well preserved, given that more than 1,000 years have passed since they were created.
Credit: Professor Kerry Muhlestein

TORONTO — She’s literally one in a million.

The remains of a child, laid to rest more than 1,500 years ago when the Roman Empire controlled Egypt, was found in an ancient cemetery that contains more than 1 million mummies, according to a team of archaeologists from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

The cemetery is now called Fag el-Gamous, which means “Way of the Water Buffalo,” a title that comes from the name of a nearby road. Archaeologists from Brigham Young University have been excavating Fag el-Gamous, along with a nearby pyramid, for about 30 years. Many of the mummies date to the time when the Roman or Byzantine Empire ruled Egypt, from the 1st […]

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Members of the loosely organized “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West,” gather at a major protest in Dresden in eastern Germany on Dec. 8.
Credit: Der Spiegel

Disenchanted German citizens and right-wing extremists are joining forces to form a protest movement to fight what they see as the Islamization of the West. Is this the end of the long-praised tolerance of postwar Germany?

Felix Menzel is sitting in his study in an elegant villa in Dresden’s Striesen neighborhood on a dark afternoon in early December. He’s thinking about Europe. A portrait of Ernst Jünger, a favorite author of many German archconservatives is hung on the wall.

Menzel, 29, is a polite, unimposing man wearing corduroys and rimless glasses. He takes pains to come across as intellectual, and avoids virulent rhetoric like “Foreigners out!” He prefers to talk about “Europe’s Western soul,” which, as he […]

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Credit: Shutterstock

Here in Seattle, we are in the midst of a truly epic fustercluck. We’re trying to build a huge tunnel beneath our downtown and it is not going well, to put it mildly. If only someone had warned us! (Like, I don’t know, a mayor.)

Our own Nate Johnson has written about the propensity of transportation megaprojects to blow past their projected budgets. But what about my own personal obsession, power projects? Think, for instance, of the Kemper power plant in Mississippi, which is still under construction and already several billion dollars over budget and several years behind schedule.

Is this kind of thing inevitable? If large power projects — or certain kinds of large power projects — reliably go over budget, then it may be that we’re systematically mis-predicting energy scenarios and misallocating investment dollars. How much do we really know about which power projects go over budget and why?

Nerds to the rescue! As it happens, energy researcher Benjamin Sovacool and colleagues recently released […]

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