| Chevron plans to pump oil with solar power Chevron will tap sunlight to help it get more oil out of the ground in California. The company will partner with BrightSource Energy --a solar start-up that Chevron helps fund--to develop 29 megawatts of thermal power from the sun's rays. [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Long-Lost Siblings of the Sun (preview) People have often sought solitude in the starry night sky, and it is an appropriate place for that. The night is dark because, in cosmic terms, our sun and its family of planets are very lonely. Neighboring stars are so far away that they look like mere specks of light, and more distant stars blur together into a feeble glow. Our fastest space probes will take tens of thousands of years to cross the distance to the nearest star. Space isolates us like an ocean around a tiny island.Yet not all stars are so secluded. About one in 10 belongs to a cluster, a swarm of hundreds to tens of thousands of stars with a diameter of a few light-years. In fact, most stars are born in such groups, which generally disperse over billions of years, their stars blending in with the rest of the galaxy. What about our sun? Might it, too, have come into existence in a star cluster? If so, our location in the galaxy was not always so desolate. It only became so as the cluster dispersed in due time. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Mining For Online Game Gold And Other Amazing Stories Scientific American magazine editor-in-chief Mariette Dichristina talks about the January issue, including articles on the chances of conditions conducive to life elsewhere in the multiverse and the growing practice of virtual gold farming, in which legions of online game players in developing countries acquire currency in the game that they sell to other players for real money. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Losing the race: Illegal trade devastating Madagascar's radiated tortoise Armed bands of poachers are illegally collecting Madagascar's radiated tortoise ( Astrochelys radiata ) by the truckload for the lucrative pet and meat trades, according to a report from the Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA) and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). As a result of this rampant overexploitation the once-common species could be driven into extinction in the next two decades. Radiated tortoises, considered by many to be one of the most beautiful of all turtles, and therefore highly valued in the pet trade, are only found in Madagascar. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Wee ants protect African savanna trees from elephants It's a David versus Goliath kind of story, with an ecological twist: In African savannas (regions with both trees and grass), acacia-dwelling ants can repel voracious, tree-eating elephants, according to new research by published online September 2 in Current Biology . [More] Tree - Savanna - Current Biology - Goliath - Biology rss.sciam.com |