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Renewable Energy To Power Aussie SKA
schliz writes "New solar and geothermal energy facilities are being built in Australia to provide sustainable energy for the region's Square Kilometer Array (SKA) bid. The Australian Government yesterday announced A$47.3m in funding for a full-scale, hybrid solar and diesel plant for the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, and geothermal energy facilities for the Pawsey High-Performance Computing Centre, where data from SKA radio telescopes would be processed. ASKAP is part of the Australasian bid to host the $2.5 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which involves 20 countries and will investigate galaxy evolution, dark matter, and the existence of life. IBM expects the whole of the SKA to produce an exabyte of data per day."
The unfortunate side effects:
1. A massive amount of hardware has been required to filter all the content from the SKA to the data-centre, just in case it has any "NC" information in it.
2. All pictures of "Uranus" will be blocked.
3. Attempting to focus in on a picture of a "Black Hole" will have the whole thing disabled for upto a year.
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One Step Beyond!
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
You'd prefer some kind of ska-fusion?
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
They put out a surprisingly high number of top-notch astronomers and astrophysicists for a country of their size. Must be something about the ability to drive 50 miles outside any town and have crystal-clear desert skies free of moisture and pollution. It is a real shame that the US has been on a decline for R&D for at least a decade for the "Big Science" projects. That is not to say the US is not producing some interesting research nowadays but it a large amount of that is increasingly being done under DARPA directives which in whole or part makes any paper or discovery subject to review by an intelligence agency for release to the public.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I love Aussie Ska! The Allniters are one of my favorite bands!
They will probably need Skatalites for some exiting soundbites each day...
Sorry to be pedantic about this but the complete miss-use of the term 'renewable energy source' is getting out of hand. Geothermal is most certainly NOT renewable. Current neutrino models and measurements, using just expected composition within the Earth indicate there is no source of energy within the Earth, there is latent energy. Geothermal is a green source of energy in that it does not pollute and doesn't have a large impact on the surrounding environment when tapped.