800 Foot Tall Wind Turbines are Feasible and Doubling power of a wind turbine reduces emissions by 14% per kwh

Environmental Science and Technology – Wind Power Electricity: The Bigger the Turbine, The Greener the Electricity? The average size of commercial turbines has grown 10-fold in the last 30 years, from diameters of 50 feet in 1980 to nearly 500 feet today. On the horizon: super-giant turbines approaching 1,000 feet in diameter. For every cumulative …

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Europe will build 1.08 billion euro 40 meter E-ELT telescope

ESO (European southern Observatory) is to build the largest optical/infrared telescope in the world. At its meeting in Garching today, the ESO Council approved the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) Programme, pending confirmation of four so-called ad referendum votes. The E-ELT will start operations early in the next decade. The E-ELT will collect 100 million …

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Health Benefits not enough by themselves for Adoption of Soot-free Stoves

Traditional cookstoves are to blame for much of the pollution that leads to millions of deaths in the developing world. Safer stoves are available, but few people buy them. Stanford researchers say that’s because the newer models aren’t designed to give people what they really want. Preparing a meal in some of the world’s poorest …

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Steel-Strength Plastics and Environmentally Friendly

Prof. Moshe Kol of Tel Aviv University’s School of Chemistry is developing a super-strength polypropylene — one of the world’s most commonly used plastics — that has the potential to replace steel and other materials used in everyday products. This could have a long-term impact on many industries, including car manufacturing, in which plastic parts …

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Self-inflating Adaptable Membrane for Space based solar power

Last month, a team of science and engineering students at Strathclyde University developed an innovative ‘space web’ experiment which was carried on a rocket from the Arctic Circle to the edge of space. The experiment, known as Suaineadh – or ‘twisting’ in Scots Gaelic, was an important step forward in space construction design and demonstrated …

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Shell Estimates Iraq could Produce 6 to 10 million barrels of oil per day in the early 2020s

NY Times – Iraq produces around three million barrels a day, and few analysts believe it can reach its goal of 10 million barrels a day by 2017, a target Baghdad recently reduced from a previous estimate of 12 million barrels a day by that year. But Hans Nijkamp, Royal Dutch Shell’s Iraq country chairman, …

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Depleted Uranium can be used to provide chemical industry feedstocks from carbon monoxide

A simple three-step chemical reaction which could herald the introduction of new sustainable feedstocks for the chemical industry has been developed by scientists at The University of Nottingham. Scientists in the School of Chemistry have developed a recyclable system for converting carbon monoxide (CO) directly into more complicated organic molecules using depleted uranium. The research, …

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Brillouin funded for $2 million and Acoustic Cavitation Fusion

1. PESN reports that low energy nuclear reaction company Brillouin was funded for $2 million. Brillouin is starting an SRI contract middle of June. 2. Impulse Devices’ Extreme Acoustic Cavitation™ from Impulse shows the potential to produce plasma at the super-concentrated cores of the collapsed bubbles, making this technology well-suited for producing acoustic inertial confinement …

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“Supercomputing on demand” becoming a reality

In 2006, Amazon unveiled the Elastic compute cloud, which allowed individual users to rent large numbers of CPUs from Amazon’s server farms. Since then Amazon has repeatedly slashed the cost of the CPUs. For organizations requiring supercomputing levels of power, a company called Cycle computing is able to gather tens of thousands of CPUs from …

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