Electricity is generated at power plants. You know that already. But to really understand how it gets to your house—and why you can count on it getting there reliably—you have to understand that our electric system is more complicated than it looks. The electric grid isn’t just about you and your connection to a power plant. There are lots of thing that have to happen behind the scenes to make sure your refrigerator stays cold and your lights turn on…
This googly eyed gentleman is named Dan Considine, and he’d like to take you on a tour of accents from across the globe, starting with the Land of Blarney and ending in the good ol’ U.S. of A…
Back in 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the economics Nobel Prize for showing that human beings don’t have a really good intuitive grasp of risk. Basically, the decisions we make when faced with a risky proposition depend more on how the question is framed than on what the actual outcome might be.
The classic example is to tell a subject that there’s going to be a disaster. Out of 600 people, she has a chance of saving 200 if she takes x risk. If she doesn’t take the risk, everybody dies. Most people will take the risk in that scenario, but if you present the same situation and frame it differently—”If you take this risk, 400 people will die”—the decisions suddenly flip in the other direction. Nothing has changed about the outcome. But everything has changed in terms of how people feel about the decision they have to make. This is the kind of thing that matters a lot to economics because it helps to explain why economic behavior in the real world isn’t always as rational and self-interested as it is in theory…
China alone is forecast to see auto sales rise to 30 million units by 2020, 80 percent above the previous U.S. record.
The BMW 3-Series sedan might look like the conventional BMW but a closer inspection reveals it’s been stretched 11 centimeters — about 4 inches for metrically challenged Americans — almost all of that going to rear-seat occupants.
Sucks for American clean tech. Never mind that the industry is pretty universally regarded as one of tomorrow’s most important drivers of job growth and innovation—the already too-meager, maddeningly scattershot government support for clean energy is about to dry up altogether. So, goodbye ARPA-E?
David Roberts points us to this graph from a newish report from the Breakthrough Institute, the World Resources Institute, and the Brookings Institution, and, as you can see, it’s not pretty. And that sad-looking $11 billion stump too will disappear unless there’s a shift in policy.
From left: physicists Luis Delgado-Aparicio and David Gates.
Physicists have discovered a possible solution to a mystery that has long baffled researchers working to harness fusion. If confirmed by experiment, the finding could help scientists eliminate a major impediment to the development of fusion as a clean and abundant source of energy for producing electric power… Continue reading… “Scientists see solution to critical barrier to fusion”
“China’s evaporating cheap labor pool will disrupt supply chains and consumption habits around the world.”
Shaun Rein takes a hard look at the economic colossus in The End of Cheap China. Rein is managing director of China Market Research Group, a strategic market intelligence firm with clients like Apple, DuPont and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Artist’s impression based on a real atomic force microscopy (AFM) image showing conductive supramolecular fibers trapped between two gold electrodes spaced 100 nm apart. Each plastic fiber is composed of several short fibers and is capable of transporting electrical charges with the same efficiency as a metal.
Researchers from CNRS and the Université de Strasbourg, headed by Nicolas Giuseppone (1) and Bernard Doudin (2), have succeeded in making highly conductive plastic fibers that are only several nanometers thick. These nanowires, for which CNRS has filed a patent, “self-assemble” when triggered by a flash of light. Inexpensive and easy to handle, unlike carbon nanotubes (3), they combine the advantages of the two materials currently used to conduct electric current: metals and plastic organic polymers (4). In fact, their remarkable electrical properties are similar to those of metals.
Dr. Julie Palais (left), NSF-OPP Glaciology Program Manager, and Anais Orsi (right) inside a back-lit snow pit at WAIS Divide
Because of global warming, ice sheets in Antarctica are melting and ancient creatures, which have been trapped there for hundreds of thousands of years, are being released into the world.
A well-worn premise for a sci-fi movie? No, actually – it’s happening for real…
Signs of the impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and scientists and fishermen point fingers towards BP’s oil as being the cause.
Two years after BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, fishermen are finding deformed fish and mutant shrimp in their seafood catch…
In an article in today’s New York Times, “A sharp rise in retractions prompts calls for reform,” Carl Zimmer documents and analyzes the sharp increase in the proportion of papers retracted in the scientific literature. From 2000-2009 the trend is disturbing (pictured above).
The article notes:
In October 2011, for example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent. In 2010 The Journal of Medical Ethics published a study finding the new raft of recent retractions was a mix of misconduct and honest scientific mistakes… Continue reading… “Scientific retractions increasing exponentially”
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