A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience
In a remote part of southern California the new Topaz Solar Farm sprawls over an area about a third of the size of Manhattan, and these solar plants are only getting bigger. Continue reading… “Forget solar farms in the desert, more than enough solar energy can be produced in cities”
By turning the mattress-shaped batteries in Tesla’s electric car into upright pillars so they can be used to power homes, businesses and even utilities, Elon Musk is trying to pave the way to a better energy future. Continue reading… “Elon Musk trying energy storage fix where utility industry has failed”
Fossil fuels have provided the vast, vast majority of the world’s energy for many decades. But cleaner sources, like wind and solar have been growing at an astonishingly rate in recent years. Continue reading… “Clean energy growing fast, but still behind in the race against fossil fuels”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yixhyPN0r3g[/youtube]
The United States has joined forces with Britain to investigate a hi-tech new way of producing ‘clean energy’ – not from wind or waves, but from firing huge arrays of high-powered lasers at pellets of hydrogen.
Continue reading… “U.S. and Britain join forces to produce clean energy from ‘laser fusion’”
Last week President Obama spoke at Facebook, emphasizing during the townhall that the US needs to be bullish on Science and Math education if we are to pull out of the recession, “We want to start making Science cool. I want people to feel about the next big energy breakthrough and the next big Internet breakthrough the same way they felt about the moonwalk,” he said.
Taking off on that idea, Nancy Conrad, the wife of late astronaut Pete Conrad, has founded the Conrad Foundation in the memory of her husband. Pete Conrad was expelled from one school in the 11th grade because he had dislexia and then went on to graduate from Princeton and walk on the moon because he was taken under the wing of an educator who saw promise in the young man…
China produces nearly all the world’s supply of the minerals.
The United States is too reliant on China for minerals crucial to new clean energy technologies, making the American economy vulnerable to shortages of materials needed for a range of green products — from compact fluorescent light bulbs to electric cars to giant wind turbines.
Continue reading… “American Economy Vulnerable to Rare Earth Shortages”
