| Colony Collapse and Ruptured Ribosomes; Minding Darwin's Beeswax The transcript of this podcast wil be posted in two to three weeks. John Williams, the beekeeper at Down House in England, talks about Darwin's bees. And May Berenbaum, entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, talks about the latest publication related to colony collapse disorder and ribosome damage in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Web sites related to this episode include www.bee-craft.com [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Future of Cars (preview) For a glimpse into what automobiles will be like 20 years from now, contributing editor Stuart F. Brown conducted a group interview with executives at General Motors, Tesla Motors and Toyota and also spoke separately with a program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute. The interviewees, whose comments have been edited for length, foresee increased communication among cars and a combination of vehicle types. Some, like Tesla’s current sports cars, will draw their energy from a battery pack. Others, in common with today’s Toyota’s Prius and the 2010 Chevy Volt, will be hybrid designs, relying on both electric motors and small internal-combustion engines. Many forthcoming hybrids will charge batteries by plugging into the electric grid, and hydrogen fuel cells might be a reality. But that is not all that the participants see. Read on. --The Editors [More] rss.sciam.com |
100 Percent Renewable?: One Danish Island Experiments with Clean Power [Slide Show] TRANEBJERG, Samso, Denmark--It can seem as if the icy, cutting wind off the North Sea never stops blowing on this Danish island in winter, bending back the grass, whipping straight the flags, and setting mammoth wind turbines to their stately spinning. That's good news for Samso's 4,000 or so inhabitants, seeing as they own shares in 20 of the 21 turbines that either tower over the island or rise from the offshore waters of the Kattegat Strait , which connects the Baltic and North seas.Some people see wind turbines as eyesores or complain about the sound of their whirring blades, but Soren Hermansen, chief proselytizer for the island's renewable energy experiment and director of the Samso Energy Academy , disagrees. "If you own a share in a wind turbine it looks better, it sounds better," he says. "It sounds like money in the bank." [More] rss.sciam.com |
Mayor Bloomberg’s Island Now that New York City is responsible for revitalizing Governors Island, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has to develop the space without crippling the city’s finances. nytimes.com |
Lessons learned? Engineering students set about designing a greener, more durable stove for African villagers Editor's Note: Students from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. The student-led group , known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), will file dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their eighth blog post for Scientific American. [More] Dartmouth College - Tanzania - Thayer School of Engineering - Engineering - United States rss.sciam.com |