Economist
Cutting the clutter
Saturday, March 20th, 2010Image via Wikipedia
A wireless replacement for all those pesky power cables
BENEATH your correspondent’s desk is a cat’s cradle of tangled cables linking a pair of computers to numerous peripherals and laptops around the office. On the credenza opposite is another jumbled nest of wires for recharging mobile phones, cameras, netbooks, MP3 players [...]
Smoothing Out the Wind
Friday, March 19th, 2010A cunning plan to store energy underwater may help fulfil the promise of wind power
THE problem with wind power is that is cannot always be relied upon. The wind—and other transient, environmental energy sources such as solar—must either be used when it is harvested or stored expensively in batteries or specially [...]
Monitoring greenhouse gases
Monday, March 8th, 2010Image via Wikipedia
Highs and lows
You might think that measuring the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be a priority. If you did think that, though, you would be wrong.
IN NEGOTIATIONS on nuclear weapons the preferred stance is “Trust but verify”. In negotiations on climate change there seems little opportunity [...]
A quantum leap for lighting
Saturday, March 6th, 2010HOW many inventions does it take to change a light bulb? More than you might think. Around the world, many people are switching from traditional incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs, which require less energy to produce a given amount of light, and therefore save money and reduce carbon emissions. [...]
Data, data everywhere
Friday, March 5th, 2010Image by ldodds via Flickr
Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier, but also big headaches
WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire [...]










































