Tag Archive

The Achilles’ Heal of Aging

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Understanding the biological basis of senescence may allow us to delay or prevent the degenerative declines long accepted as an inevitable part of getting older.
The chief causes of natural death among the elderly form a concise set: Heart disease and cancer are the big killers, with strokes, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or opportunistic infections claiming [...]

Hybrid Solar Panels Combine Photovoltaics with Thermoelectricity

Columbia University and N.Y. engineering firm Weidlinger Associates are developing a layered approach that will draw electricity from the sun’s energy in multiple ways
Tar and shingles are hardly environmentally friendly materials, so the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) hopes to soon help homeowners and businesses replace the roofs over their heads with something greener. To [...]

Are Engines the Future of Solar Power?

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Stirling engines might be the best way to harvest the power provided by the sun
Nearly 200 years after their invention, and decades after first being proposed as a method of harnessing solar energy, 60 sun-powered Stirling engines are about to begin generating electricity outside Phoenix, Ariz., for the first time. [...]

Combating climate change by observing the Earth

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As part of the U.S. charm offensive at the recent Copenhagen summit on climate change, a roughly one meter-diameter orb helped display a decade’s worth of climate data collected by NASA satellites. “This is the golden age,” NASA’s Jack Kaye told me. As associate research director for the agency’s Earth Science Division, he’s [...]

Mobiles offer new view of reality

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Virtual Reality has been a mainstay of sci-fi for decades but 2010 could see a pared-down version become mainstream.
Augmented reality (AR) has had a quiet launch on mobile handsets but it set to explode next year, experts say.
AR is a technology that allows data from the web to be overlaid on a view [...]