Coconut fusion reactor.
New Scientist goes tropical, revealing what a fusion reactor has in common with a pina colada: The coconuts will be used to generate 10,000 cubic […]
engineering
Salt, paper, battery!
The technical chefs at M.I.T. have come up with a cheap, fun recipe – with simple ingredients like salt and paper, you can start cooking […]
Science Art: $2 Silver Certificate, 1896 (Science Presents Steam and Electricity to Commerce and Manufacture.)
Lovely ladies, all of them. Science, the mother of Steam and Electricity, presents her children to their new, lugubriously lolling caretakers. This was, of course, […]
Land of the Rising Solar Panel
PhysOrg reveals why Japan is going to outlast us all – because instead of (or in addition to) prospecting for oil reserves, they’re going to […]
Affordable solar? Hair’s the ticket.
OK, sorry for that headline. Ahem. But here! There are these two kids in Nepal who figured out how to make solar energy a heck […]
Reclaiming forgotten power.
I just had an enjoyable email exchange with a friend who asked me about something he’d been wondering. (These are generally the best kinds of […]
Science Art: Some NACA Muroc personnel with snowman, 1949.
Click to embiggen In the good old days, computers looked like this. “Computer” was a job, not a tool, and it was often done by […]
Drones that think.
Endgadgets prepares us for robot dominance of the skies by 2047: In its recently released “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047” report, the US Air […]
Feather in your tank.
The Daily Green recently revealed an alternative fuel scheme that may be much better than bird-brained: Finding novel uses for chicken feathers is a pet […]
Drinking air.
It’s practically like the moisture farms in Star Wars. Scientific Blogging has this thing about how we could be getting drinking water from *humidity* and […]
Science Art: Mort de Harris (1824), from the Tissandier Collection at the Library of Congress.
Click to embiggen. The Death of Harris, who jumped from a hydrogen balloon in 1824. It was not a “perfectly good balloon,” as the sky […]
None more deep.
New Scientist has a picture taken by the world’s deepest-diving robot: “Nereus is like no other deep submergence vehicle,” says oceanographer Tim Shank of WHOI. […]
Oops. Uh, sorry, Martians.
“Oops,” of course, is a word that means science is going about its job correctly, because by discovering mistakes we learn what works and what […]
Science Art: Pelton Wheel, p. 1593, Webster’s New International.
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 […]
Breathe out.
The MIT Technology Review (and other sources) have reported on a new technique that Canadian doctors devised for preparing lungs for transplants – or repairing […]