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nd why hydrogen over, say, gasoline or propane? Because you can't make gasoline out of water and sunlight.

Already done (the tax incentive bit) - you get (depending on the state) part of the cost paid by a grant, a break on property tax, and any excess electricity is often bought back by the utility at retail price (i.e. if you generate a total of X units/month, and use X units/month, you pay $0 - effectively getting to use the utility as a free giant battery). There's a major problem with increased solar cell sales, though: current solar cells use waste silicon wafers from semiconductor manufacture. Once you exhaust that supply - there are only a finite number of substandard wafers produced - you have to start paying the full price, putting solar cell prices up dramatically.

Add to that fuel cells in the basement to store excess power for use at night or in cloudy weather. (It should be noted that, contrary to common belief, solar roof systems do work in cloudy weather.)

They don't work too well at night, though - and trying to store power is very inefficient and expensive. (Someone linked to suitable batteries; one which could deliver a little over 100W through the night was $399. Painful.)

Every house should be able to coast for a few days on stored power during a blackout.

You want to store a few days worth of power?! Even the hardened, 100% self-sufficient solar/wind junkies don't attempt that. I'd also worry about what kind of problem you're planning for which would prevent the sun appearing for a couple of days ;-)

I'm surprised Mr. Bush did not announce a package of tax incentives to make these things a reality. But, I suppose that he takes a corporate, big oil point of view; simply swap hydrogen for petroleum and keep the existing infrastructure.

More accurately, he takes a pragmatic view: current batteries cost far, far more than the equivalent power station per kW, and that's just to store power rather than produce it!

A tax incentive for hybrid gas-electric cars would be nice, too. Cut oil consumption and solve so many other problems: dependence on nasty Arab dictators, greenhouse pollution, etc.

Again, already done. I'd prefer a strong move away from fossil-fuel power stations; if you scrapped them all, the only countries the US would be importing oil from outside North America would be the UK and Norway, without removing a single SUV or selling a single extra hybrid car. Or you feed America's agricultural waste (which is currently a pollution issue itself) into this - and make America the biggest oil producer on earth, making it entirely self-sufficient for oil at current consumption levels. No more oil imports from Canada, let alone the Middle East! Combine the two, and...

I don't know if they are already doing so, but it seems a natural match to use something like this in conjunction with a pulsejet.

Read it: http://www.discover.com/sept_02/featice.html

I am 39 and remember all of the hoopla in the early 70's (yes I wore bell bottoms) about the coming "ice age".
There were lot's of "facts" to prove it.
Since we only had about 20 years of oil left in the ground, and burning petroleum products contributed to "global cooling", we decided to lower the speed limits in the U.S.
Some things are just cyclical, natural things.
I am doing some minor googling and not coming up with much about global cooling.
That is not surprising since most of it occured prior to a widely used internet.
And since the groups that were behind the global cooling fad had an agenda which has now changed to global warming, they don't want to be seen as hypocritical.
I remember some widely circulated magazines carrying prominent articles about it like Time and Newsweek.
All I am saying is this may be like the ozone thing where we find out that man contributes 2% to the problem and it is natural and cyclical.

A couple of sites that I found without too much trouble are this one with a Newseek article from 1975 The Cooling World
And this one from 2002 The New Ice Age

DanH

"If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat?" - Steven Wright

This high-speed video capture is definitely the way to go for a first step, but of course the situation will be hugely improved when all that data can be taken back to the lab an scanned for drivability by software instead of by human brainpower.

Perhaps when the sun is low shadows would be cast over potholes that would lead to lower temperatures inside the crater than on the surface of the road. That would make infrared cameras an obvious choice for picking out the cold-bottomed potholes.

Or perhaps a rear vehicle could shine a light at an acute angle to the ground that would turn potholes into shadowy pits for easy detection by a forward vehicle on the other side of the pothole?

There are countless plans to go to Mars. I remember the talk about Bush saying we would go to Mars by 2015 or 2020 and the ensuing discussion about if it was possible. I think it would be if we put the same amount of effort in to it as the Apollo missions. But when we go to Mars, I want us to go to colonize, not visit once and leave. In order for that to happen we need to make it cheap enough to send tens of thousands of people to Mars with the equipment to survive there their entire lives. I don't know of any plans to do that in my life time, but I'm keeping my eye out for it.

This month's Discover Magazine has an amazing article about building our first starship. It starts out saying we'll probably detect our first Earth-like planet as soon as 2007 or definitely by 2015. By then we could have technologies like hot fusion or even anti-matter engines (not holding my breath), but even if we don't we could probably get to Alpha Centauri in my lifetime with a laser sail. Back here in the Sol system we'd set up a big solar collector that would focus a laser at the ship, pushing and powering it all the way to nearby stars. This to me is a lot more exciting and probable than Mars colonization.

Discover Magazine just did a story on something like this. Unfortunately the full story is only available in dead tree format. If you wait until next month the older article will be available. You can probably check it out at your Dentist's office like I did if you feel like getting a filling.

EnergyInovations is working on a small version. From the Discover article it discusses how they refined the stirling engine with the best tradeoffs of manufacturing costs to effiency. IIRC they are also making this small enough to make it fit on a roof top.

Geek fact of the day: A stirling engine is an external combustion engine that runs off the pressure created when one side of its engine gets very hot while the other side stays cool. The greater the temperature difference, the greater the pressure, the greater the energy generated.

The March 2003 issue of Discover Magazine had a good article on music and swarm behavior. If you think hyperscore, etc. is neat, check this out!

The March 2003 issue of Discover Magazine had a good article on music and swarm behavior. If you think hyperscore, etc. is neat, check this out!

Anything Into Oil

This info was posted to slashdot a few months ago.

Here's the link I referenced: TDP

Along with recycling the waste we're currently creating, I think we should go into a proactive recycling of old waste. Along with reusing the glass and plastic, we should look at using techologies such as >TDP </a> (Thermal Depolymerization Process) to better break down the waste.<p>It frustrates me as an American to see what a wasteful society we are. <i>Everything</i> is desposible. I'd be okay with that if everything was being recycled as well. If there was some synthetic ecosystem of waste and reuse, I wouldn't have to feel the massive guilt I do everytime I purchase something that's whole purpose is to be used one and then discarded.

I wonder how many new species we will see before and after the earth slides into an ice age?

this is the future

this

I guess not.

They've done it, and with lots more than sea water...

Additionally, the Discover article also talked about the various instances of sudden onset autism. One of the examples presented was the case of a 3 year old girl named Nadia, who was capable of drawing a picture of a horse and rider in such detail that it would've taken a experienced artist to do. The article shows one of Nadia's drawings, which IMHO is very beautifully rendered.

Now, if only to find that machine so I can calculate the Mayan calendar past 2012...

-Cyc

I wonder if it would be easy to turn people into ethanol.

1. Collect waste products
2. Convert to useable fuel products and other raw materials.
3. Sell raw materials. Profit!
4. Sell some oil. Profit!
5. Use remaining oil to fuel massive hydrogen refining process.
6. Sell hydrogen. Profit!

Just do what these guys are doing and recycle all the carbon and metal and such to make new oil and metals etc.

then lets just recycle all the carbon we use back into oil and base chemicals like these guys are doing now

That's because Bush doesn't read Discover Magazine.

Changing the keyboard layout helps, because the Dvorak layout was designed for typing English words, while QWERTY was not. It takes less effort to keep up the same WPM, and less effort means you can type for longer, or place less strain on your hands.

Dvorak has a much better defense than "the Navy wouldn't do that." Discover Magazine ran an article that convinced me to switch; read it here.

HJ Hornbeck

http://www.discover.com/may_03/featoil.html

This is an article talking about new technology to convert garbage (literally) into oil. So instead of buying oil from OPEC, we produce our own and are 100% self sufficient. Also it doesn't add any new CO2 to the atmosphere since it uses recycled materials.

Oil/gas as an energy storage mechanism has proven safe, effective, dense + cheaper than all alternatives. Solar power--always 10 years away. Electric cars--batteries always heavy, don't store enough power, and wear out too quickly, not to mention incredibly expensive.

I don't necessarily claim to understand his art, but I found fascinating a recent Scientific American article (sorry only first paragraphs available) where they did a mathematical analysis of various magnifications of Pollock's paintings and found that they were 1.6 to 1.9 fractals. This is almost exactly the same as found in many places in nature like tree branches. Discover also has a somewhat interesting article on the topic. Also, there was a recent movie about his life that I've heard is pretty well done.

One (what this story started as) is a diesel conversion kit that you install on your car - you still have a diesel tank that you must fill (much less often), and you add another tank with fry grease. You start the car/truck on reg. diesel (or biodiesel if you're so inclined). Once the engine is warm, you flip a valve, and you will be them pumping SVO as they call it - Straight Vegetable Oil - to your injectors. The SVO must be warmed to flow properly through your fuel system and into the injectors. Running vegetable oil into a diesel engine was designed before running petro-oil into a diesel engine. Not a very new concept, although the people doing this have been on the fringe.

The other, Thermal Depolymerization, is a relatively new process (more precisely, an old process that has recently been improved to make it closer to cost-effective) that takes anything with hydrocarbons, and breaks the molecules down into components, including water, whatever non-hydrocarbon stuff was in the input, and an oil that can be re-distilled into whatever product you want (gasoline, diesel, etc).

There is a third process not directly mentioned here, but the process of making biodiesel. This is accomplished with a vat of fry oil, some lye, some methanol, a mixing apparatus, and time. You mix the stuff up, and get some glycerin, and regular diesel that you can put in your fuel tank for your car, truck, farm tractor, diesel generator, etc. The article I linked says the guy gets about 85% diesel and 15% glycerin from his fry oil, and if he gets the oil for free, the other ingredients work out to 54 cents a gallon, plus his time.

Of course, the majority of us with our gasoline engines, are still stuck with petroleum coming out of the ground, or maybe in the future from the Thermal Depolymerization process.

and nitrogen fertilizer onto his fields.

"for those who don't want to look at the paper-based article in Discover"

Here is the online version of the article.

(Apologies if someone already posted the link.)

you could turn turkey guts and plastics into oil and oil products!

Does this look legit? I am always wary of this kind of stuff, but there's no obvious reasons to doubt it - it isn't making fantastic claims...

The future of mankind is clearly any thing at all Turkey offal into oil and water. Presto!

Not only that, but it actually works. This ain't no lab experiment.

It will be interesting to see if the shock waves from the cavitation (the sudden formation of the tiny bubbles) affects the operation of the chip or erodes the surface, limiting the life.

No, no! It won't be the shock waves that reduces the life of the chip...rather, it will be the hard radiation from the resulting sonoluminescence and nuclear fusion that will undoubtedly occur.

But they .

Yeah, just so you know, I read it in the latest Discover I got in the mail. I mean, the process could be, and they're taking Discover for a ride (haven't read the article yet), but I doubt it was posted in jest.

Amusing side note: I'm guessing that one of the readers had their own laugh at the expense of the editors. One of the letters about this "discovery" that got reprinted in the next issue purported to be from "Shigatsu Baka" of the San Francisco Small Mammal Zoo and Discovery Center

The article did appear in the latest Discover magazine. A quick google search brought up this website, which says that Discover quit running an April fools article in 1998. I believe this one is legit.

I rest my case:

"Intelligence analysts once assumed that terrorists organize in isolated cells. But social-network maps revealed that the 9/11 hijackers' cells morphed into a hub-and-spoke pattern with an obvious leader: Mohammed Atta. The active structure resembled that of an IBM project team." from discover.com

This raises a serious question: What is this "IBM" and what kind of "project" are they planning?

It has already been done. There was an article on this called Treasure Under Saddam's Feet, in Discover magazine.

It said during the first Gulf War the Iraqis would place things like Anti Aircraft batteries at high points, the problem being these high points were mounds caused by ancient building, with artifacts lying underneath.

They would also park planes near artifacts, the article details how the U.S. skipped some targets to preserve historical items.

• Approval voting, where you cast one vote for every candidate you approve of, and the results are added up;
• The Borda count, where you rank the candidates in order of preference;
• The Condorcet method, similar to Borda but the results are counted differently.

oops forgot

How on earth is this offtopic?
In a discussion about mammoths (who have trunks) a joke was made about them using them to breathe underwater.
How is it then OT to mention that trunks may have been used for this purpose?

There was an excellent article on this same topic in Discover recently. The possibilities are nice... leaving "personal notes" for your friends at a specific spot in the world. I think the best quote from the article was this one: "When you can stand where others have stood and learn how it affected them, and then share your own impressions in return, public space becomes more deeply public than it was before." It reminds me of a nice book on Native American religious tradition by Vine Deloria, Jr. The idea of bringing technology back to the "primitive" notion of public spaces is appealing to the hippie inside me.

Also of note in the Discover article is a brief introduction to geo-caching. Unrelated, but sounds like fun. :)

--madgeorge

The *real* name for this is photic sneezing. Get the Straight Dope on it from this page. There was an article on it in Discover magazine; you might be able to find that online. A quick search just turns up this, which isn't the article I remember, but contains the interesting fact that "The trait travels in families -- approximately 50 percent of children born to photic sneezers are photic sneezers themselves -- so it should be possible to identify one or more genes that are responsible."

It's called "photic sneeze reflex". I have it and so does my Mom. Here's a quick blurb on it.

The February 2003 issue of Discover Magazine had an interview with ornithologist and evolutionary biologist Alan Feduccia about this same topic. He argues that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, and talks about scores of fake fossils coming from a rumored "fossil-factory" in China. Interesting read.

This pic compares the Sigma X3 camera to the Nikon F-Series FILM camera, showing pixelization on the part of the film camera.

Here's a clue: Film has no pixels until it it encounters a FILM SCANNER. So the pixelization is not film's fault, but a limitation of the scanner used to digitize it.

I like the Foveon concept, but this is a misleading comparison.

Is there any news on actual practical applications of these new magnets we've been hearing about? BTW... Discover Magazine had an article on Carbon magnets, quite interesting, because carbon is not *supposed* to be magnetic. Link here. Just my comments...

I agree that there are legal and moral issues involved if we try to "steal somebody else's rain," but I don't think anyone would mind if we got rid of hurricanes. The destruction they cause is obvious, but I cannot think of anything useful that hurricanes bring. One Florida company, Dyn-O-Mat, is in the process of developing a product that can get rid of clouds, storms, and possibly even hurricanes (there is an article at Discover Magazine about it). The idea is simple, yet elegant: baby diapers are filled with stuff that absorbs several times its weight in liquid. Let's make it into a powder, put it into a storm/hurricane, and it will suck up all the rain in the storm. It then falls down into the ocean, and is neutralized by the saltwater. Poof! No more storm.
Their goal is to prevent hurricanes, which, incredible as it may sound, seems likely in the next decade (assuming their product isn't toxic, etc). I'm surprised no one has mentioned this company yet, since they seem to be the most prominent weather-control project in the news lately. I think that this product, which is called Dyn-O-Storm, has much more potential than seeding clouds with dry ice (whose effectiveness, after decades of testing, is still inconclusive). The test of Dyn-O-Storm in the article says that it made a cloud completely disappear from radar within minutes. Admittedly, this is only a cloud, not even a storm. However, I think it is a very impressive step. They will try to test it on a hurricane sometime in the near future, weather permitting. :-)
Does anyone know how the testing of Dyn-O-Storm is coming? It would be nice to hear when they actually try it on the hurricane.

I agree that there are legal and moral issues involved if we try to "steal somebody else's rain," but I don't think anyone would mind if we got rid of hurricanes. The destruction they cause is obvious, but I cannot think of anything useful that hurricanes bring. One Florida company, Dyn-O-Mat, is in the process of developing a product that can get rid of clouds, storms, and possibly even hurricanes (there is an article at Discover Magazine about it). The idea is simple, yet elegant: baby diapers are filled with stuff that absorbs several times its weight in liquid. Let's make it into a powder, put it into a storm/hurricane, and it will suck up all the rain in the storm. It then falls down into the ocean, and is neutralized by the saltwater. Poof! No more storm.
Their goal is to prevent hurricanes, which, incredible as it may sound, seems likely in the next decade (assuming their product isn't toxic, etc). I'm surprised no one has mentioned this company yet, since they seem to be the most prominent weather-control project in the news lately. I think that this product, which is called Dyn-O-Storm, has much more potential than seeding clouds with dry ice (whose effectiveness, after decades of testing, is still inconclusive). The test of Dyn-O-Storm in the article says that it made a cloud completely disappear from radar within minutes. Admittedly, this is only a cloud, not even a storm. However, I think it is a very impressive step. They will try to test it on a hurricane sometime in the near future, weather permitting. :-)
Does anyone know how the testing of Dyn-O-Storm is coming? It would be nice to hear when they actually try it on the hurricane.

Here's the article I was talking about. Discover Magazine

Regardless of the religious connotations of such an action, there's the issue of the limited knowledge we have about clonning.

Until very recently,scientists where at a loss to explain why so many clones failed either to come to term, or if they were "successfully" brought to term, why did they have so many anomalies.

Discover magazine, as one of their top science stories for 2002 (number 33), report that biologists have discovered a particular gene Oct 4 that affects the outcome.

The thing is, we still don't know how to control that gene, so we are still left playing the odds.

John