Behold the Pelton wheel. This is a kind of water turbine designed to turn babbling brooks into industrious electrical generators.

Beautiful imagery from the Wikipedia entry: “There exist multi-ton Pelton wheels mounted on vertical oil pad bearings in hydroelectric plants.”

Imagine how it must feel to be in the same room with that. Iron and water. A gently rolling mountain. [...]

Just in case you thought we knew everything there was to know about the ancient world, New Scientist brings a little mystery back with their list of eight untranslated alphabets:

These fall into three broad categories: a known script writing an unknown language; an unknown script writing a known language; and an unknown script writing an unknown language. The first [...]

…but this new memory technology Neatorama’s talking about will be here to stay:

Berkeley… researcher Alex Zettl and colleagues created a physical memory cell composed of an iron nanoparticle that can be moved back and forth in a nanotube. The position of the iron particle represents the state of the bit, which leads to very dense and highly stabile [...]

You’d expect the rising ocean levels to decimate coastlines, but the New York Times points out that melting glaciers are, rather surprisingly, raising land levels in some coastal areas:

The geology is complex, but it boils down to this: Relieved of billions of tons of glacial weight, the land has risen much as a cushion regains its shape after [...]

Click to embiggen vastly

June marks the official beginning of hurricane season. Here’s where they start from, whirling spirals off the coast of North Africa. Soon, I imagine, a couple of these youngsters will gain enough strength to pop across the Atlantic and cause all kinds of trouble in the Caribbean, the American Southeast and Gulf states and throughout South [...]

SONG: “If I Believe It” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “The science of voodoo: When mind attacks body “, New Scientist, 13 May 2009, as used in the post “Imaginary Poisons.” (Although recent coverage of the H1N1 flu virus also played a large role.) (Also, anthropological note: New Scientist’s article [...]

I’ve always reveled in the way Komodo dragons killed their prey – by having dirty mouths, chomping on quicker-moving prey and letting septicemia slowly finish them off. Well, New Scientist pokes a hole in that horrifying story by revealing that they actually have gigantic venom glands in their bottom jaws:

“They slash and pull back, but it’s the venom [...]

PhysOrg.com has a new piece of the climate change puzzle, a discovery some call the “holy grail” of climate science:

The effects of tiny airborne particles called aerosols on cloud formation have been some of the most difficult aspects of weather and climate for scientists to understand. In the climate change science field, which derives many of its projections [...]

BBC says that Coke’ll kill you, man:

This is because the drink can cause blood potassium to drop dangerously low, they report in the International Journal of Clinical Practice.

They tell of the curious case of an Australian ostrich farmer who needed emergency care for lung paralysis after drinking 4-10 litres of cola a day.

He made a full recovery and [...]