“Hungary's reaction to the Russian-Georgian conflict is in line with that of the European Union,” Hungarian Spectrum reports. “Given Hungary's energy needs and its reliance on Russian gas and oil the country can't afford to lash out against Russia.”
Intel Shows Wireless Resonant Energy Link at IDF
Intel recently demonstrated wireless power transmission at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). They call it "Wireless Resonant Energy Link" (WREL), and it is based on principles proposed by MIT physicists (Marin Soljačić & others). Intel CTO Justin Rattner showed such a system lighting a 60 watt lightbulb on stage (too bad it wasn't a CFL -- they could have used 3). In 2007 MIT researchers had a prototype working at 40% efficiency, and now Intel claims that 75% is possible.
In case you ever wanted to see just how bad coal-fired pollution can get, the folks over at VBS.tv have produced
I went on a tour this weekend at the world's largest nuclear plant in Kashiwazaki Kariwa in Niigata prefecture, western Japan. It has seven nuclear reactors that are currently all undergoing repairs after the massive earthquake in July, 2007. The PR from Tepco, the electricity company that runs the plant, was confusing at first, and it is clear that damage was more severe than initially reported.
Green Fatigue and The Global Hothouse...Are We Hosed? A couple of weeks ago, one of the chief scientists at the U.K.'s Department for Environment Food and Affairs (DEFRA), Robert Watson, said that due to the uncertainty of containing carbon emissions, his country should prepare for a 4C (7F) rise in global temperatures this century. To which Guardian newspaper commentator and author Oliver Tickell responded that if the globe is going to heat up by 4 degrees Celsius, all we can prepare for is human extinction. ::Graham Hill
Huge amounts of relatively clean burning natural gas lie underground across extensive stretches of the U.S., trapped in shale deposits. Raising large amounts of capital and bearing the expense and risk of developing new drilling and production technology, pioneering oil and gas companies are now reaping the rewards, as was seen in Part One of this two part series.
photo: Leonardo Freitas
Every once in a while I come across a piece of writing that states something so perfectly that I really can’t imagine adding anything to it. What follows is by Carl Safina, co-founder and president of Blue Ocean Institute, and is from a recent post on the Orion Magazine website.
Making more Power-Efficient Computer Processors
Efficiency and power management are all the rage these days in the IT world. Novel ways of cooling data centers, virtualization and consolidation, etc. The hardware itself has also gotten better in the past few years (for example, desktop and server CPUs now have many of the features that used to be found only in laptop CPUs).
Nehalem's PCU, 1 Million Transistors
Omani blogger Muscati is car-less. Click on the link to find out why.
Balmoral is the Queen's Scottish summer retreat and her favourite place to go for R and R. Now HRH has taken steps to make her cottage completely self-sufficient, energy wise. She has installed a small hydro-electric plant developed on a rushing stream in the estate forest. It generates enough to supply electricity to the 1,000 residents in the area with the excess sold to the national grid. The Queen has registered all the woodlands with the Forestry Stewardship Council which supports sustainable forestry worldwide. All farming practices are registered with the Soil Association, which promotes organic food and farming.
While anticipating a question regarding China in Katie Couric's upcoming interview of American presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain, Out Of The Way blogger Ellaconic has instead opted to look toward India and a less-observed issue, and presents a lot of background which led up to the recently-approved India-US nuclear partnership deal.
The investment will go toward so-called Enhanced Geothermal Systems. Whereas conventional geothermal technology relies on finding naturally occurring pockets of steam and hot water in the ground, EGS works by injecting regular unheated water into “hot basement rock” deep below the planet’s surface. This heated water is the forced through and rises to the surface where it can be mined for all its hot water glory (remember: heat is an untapped source of stored energy!)
The US Department of Energy likes the potential of EGS:
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