Daily Archives: January 22, 2009

Fence lizard in camouflage – you can’t see me! photo: Tracy Langkilde

The world is a rapidly changing place these days, and one strategy to deal with change is to evolve. In the southeastern United States our native fence lizards are evolving… into a fitter species. It took Charles Darwin over 20 years to complete ‘on the origin of species’ and even then only because Wallace was poking about with similar ideas. Yet it has only taken the fence lizards 68 years (38 generations) to evolve new behaviors and longer hind legs. What has caused this rapid evolution of long legged lizards?

If you’ve ever been to Thailand then no doubt you will have stopped by Phuket for at least a quick visit. As one of Thailand’s best island destinations, a holiday to Phuket is unforgettable, so you’re going to want to make the right decision when booking that Phuket hotel room.
Whether you want to spend a [

]

Sardines

With Tomatoes and Rosemary Image credit:Urban Sardines, On Food And Wine, blog

Ok, I admit the title is hyperbole. But the science is certain, important, timely, and fascinating, I promise.

A newly published research paper describes how bony marine fishes have been found to sequester significant amounts of carbon, as calcium carbonate, a.k.a. “gut rocks.” Marine fish pooping ‘gut rocks’ are estimated to drop “3 to 15% of total oceanic carbonate production” of the oceans – right on Neptune’s rug. Read on mermaids and mermales. It gets weird

.

Janie Osborne for The New York Times

The New York Times says “No trees died in the building of this house”- the logs are made of precast concrete. They are wrong; trees die all the time as an externality of making concrete. A ton of carbon dioxide is released for every ton of concrete made, increasing climate change that is destroying forests across the west and north of the continent; the trucks carrying those logs spewed diesel fumes along their entire route.

Frank Lloyd Wright said “Each material has its own message”- what does a concrete log say?

We Call B.S. on Battery Claims
About 6 months ago we covered the announcement by Shelby SuperCars (SSC) that it would make the “World’s Fastest Electric Car” and explained why we thought these types of “halo” EVs have a role to play. But back then, SSC hadn’t released much technical details

Maybe it was better that way.

Read on for more details

.

photo: © Big Sue LLC

While there are larger rooftop solar arrays out there (GM’s 12 MW solar array in Zaragosa, Spain being the current world leader in that category), a new, albeit much smaller, rooftop solar array sets a first of its own: First in commercial net-metered solar power array in New York City. Here are the details:

Electric 2e Rolls Out of the Factory
We already knew that Aptera, after making some design changes, had pushed back production to October 2009. But while we wait to see the final production model, this pre-production 2e (electric version) that just came out of the factory floor should give us an idea of what to expect.

Read on for more details

.

How do you inspect wind turbine blades for damage? With this cool new robot, obviously! At least that’s what it’s developers at at the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation are hoping. It’s called the RIWEA and, pulling itself up a rope system, can work on onshore or offshore turbines of any size, climbing up turbines to discover damage too small to be detected by the human eye:

exploding sewer in Los Angeles

We have noted dismay before when infrastructure money was going to be thrown at roads instead of renos, but at least there were going be big bucks for transit and water and sewer. Not any more; now we have taxes before Transit. Representative Jim Oberstar explains:

The reason for the reduction in overall funding — we took money out of Amtrak and out of aviation; we took money out of the Corps of Engineers, reduced the water infrastructure program, the drinking water and the wastewater treatment facilities and sewer lines, reduced that from $14 billion to r

>

Theoretical Efficiency of 85%!
Thermal photovoltaics has been around since the 1960s, but it never produced enough power to compete with solar thermal using steam turbines, or more traditional photovoltaic solar panels. But MTPV Corp. (which stands for micron-gap thermal photovoltaics, the name of the technology they’re using) claims it can deliver “an order of magnitude” more power than regular thermal photovoltaics.

Read on for more

.