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perscientiamlibertas:

Image: Invelox
Invelox wind turbine claims 600% advantage in energy output
News on the wind power front! The US-based energy technology company SheerWind claims that, during tests, their “Invelox” wind turbine generated six times as much energy as its traditional equivalent, as well as with cheaper costs that allow it to compete with natural gas and hydropower.
According to a news release by SheerWind the Invelox wind turbine can also:
operate at wind speeds “as low as 1 mile per hour”
features an installation cost of “less that $750 per KW”
increases “energy production capacity to record high of 72%”
minimised environmental impacts
What makes Invelox different? According to gizmag:

“Invelox takes a novel approach to wind power generation as it doesn’t rely on high wind speeds. Instead, it captures wind at any speed, even a breeze, from a portal located above ground. The wind captured is then funneled through a duct where it will pick up speed. The resulting kinetic energy will drive the generator on the ground level. By bringing the airflow from the top of the tower, it’s possible to generate more power with smaller turbine blades”

As with all emergent energy technologies, especially those claiming a performance breakthrough, there results need to be treated with caution. Especially as

“SheerWind makes the claim based on its own comparative tests, the precise methodology of which is not entirely clear.”

Large-scale availability of the Invelox turbine is slated for 2014.
Continue reading / SheerWind Press Release
Further reading:
Rethinking wind power - Harvard research suggests real-world generating capacity of wind farms at large scales has been overestimated
Japan to replace nuclear plant with world’s largest wind farm
Wind, solar power paired with storage could be cost-effective way to power grid
Japanese breakthrough will make wind power cheaper than nuclear

rpgmaker:

thatbatterisaspy:

hairandbeardkommando:

punks not dead

Heosemys spinosa is an endangered species.

punks almost dead

ikenbot:

‘Smart Skin’ Transistors Give Robots “Sense of Touch,” Better Interaction With Touch Screens for Humans

The creation of an array of piezotronic transistors using nanowires that convert mechanical motion to electronic controlling signals means we will now have better touch-screen interactions with our tablets and smartphones—but also robots that have “a sense of touch.”
The arrays contain about 8,000 touch-sensitive transistors called taxels that are thin, clear, flexible sheets that wrap around a robotic limb like our skin.
“When we [humans] touch fire, we know it’s hot. [This technology] can allow robots to have that human sense - in other words, make robots more like humans,” lead researcher Zhong Lin Wang told TechNewsDaily.
The achievement of mimicking touch through electronic devices came through measuring changes in resistance caused by mechanical touch.
“Any mechanical motion, such as the movement of arms or the fingers of a robot, could be translated to control signals. This could make artificial skin smarter and more like the human skin. It would allow the skin to feel activity on the surface,” said Zhong Lin Wang, from the Georgia Institute of Technology and one of the study authors.
“This is a fundamentally new technology that allows us to control electronic devices directly using mechanical agitation,” Wang added in a news release. “This could be used in a broad range of areas, including robotics, MEMS, human-computer interfaces and other areas that involve mechanical deformation.”
The study was published in the journal Science.

From left Sherri Mishikawa, 4, Janet Hirata, 5, and Elizabeth Dobashi, 7, listen to Aileen Tanimoto, 10, play koto, a traditional Japanese instrument during celebration of Japanese Girls Day at Robert Hill School… It was the school’s first observance of Japanese Girls Day patterned after Japan’s traditional festival of the Doll. The idea of the holiday was projected by the principal, Mrs. Isabelle Ames, who spent three years in Japan as a child.
Los Angeles Times
March 4, 1964

tanacetum-vulgare:

Isabel Chen, a medical student at UBC, is part of a team that has invented a mobile panic button for street-based sex trade workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
A voice or text message is first recorded onto a SIM card, which is inserted into a GPS-enabled device such as a pager that would only need to be charged once a week. Pressing a button on the pager activates the GPS and sends an emergency message and GPS location to a contact who can get help. Because the GPS is not activated until the device is activated, the anonymity of the user is preserved.
(via UBC med student develops panic button for sex trade workers | The Ubyssey, UBC’s official student newspaper)
This is such a great idea I’m surprised it wasn’t already invented years ago!

ikenbot:

Will E.T. Look Like Us?
Evolution helps us imagine what aliens might be like
Side Note: I love these types of discussions, specifically because of their overall implications. The more we learn about how evolution works and where it works and under what conditions the more we see how life, while not always probable still very possible, can grow on other worlds. Think of how limited our technology still is in terms of what we are able to see and how many habitable planets we can currently detect. Now think how exponentially larger that scope of detection would become if its technology continue to progress. I imagine this would also change our minds about how we think evolution evolves elsewhere, how much more diverse it may be, and how often in occurs in the cosmos once the right conditions for life are set. I recommend reading this whole piece especially if you’re well into astronomy, biology, or astrobiology and the topic of evolution occurring elsewhere in the Universe.
Image: Cover art for Carl Sagan’s ‘The Dragons of Eden’

by SciAm’s Michael Shermer
What are the odds that intelligent, technically advanced aliens would look anything like the ones in films, with an emaciated torso and limbs, spindly fingers and a bulbous, bald head with large, almond-shaped eyes? What are the odds that they would even be humanoid? In a YouTube video, produced by Josh Timonen of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, I argue that the chances are close to zero (www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKAXrmkx12g). Richard Dawkins himself made this interesting observation in a private communication after viewing it:
I would agree with [Shermer] in betting against aliens being bipedal primates, and I think the point is worth making, but I think he greatly overestimates the odds against. [University of Cambridge paleontologist] Simon Conway Morris, whose authority is not to be dismissed, thinks it positively likely that aliens would be, in effect, bipedal primates. [Harvard University biologist] Ed Wilson gave at least some time to the speculation that, if it had not been for the end-Cretaceous catastrophe, dinosaurs might have produced something like the attached [referring to paleontologist Dale A. Russell’s illustrated evolutionary projection of how a bipedal dinosaur might have evolved into a reptilian humanoid].
I replied to Dawkins that if something like a smart, technological, bipedal humanoid has a certain level of inevitability because of how evolution unfolds, then it would have happened more than once here. In his 2001 book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright argues that our existence precludes other terrestrial intelligences of our level from arising. But Neandertals were as close as one can get to a counterfactual experiment: they had hundreds of thousands of years to themselves in Europe without our interference and showed nothing like the technological and cultural progress of the modern humans who displaced them. Dawkins’s rejoinder to me is enlightening:
But you are leaping from one extreme to the other. In the film vignette, you implied a quite staggering rarity, so rare that you don’t expect two humanoid life-forms in the entire universe. Now you are … pointing out, correctly, that a certain inevitability would predict that humanoids should have evolved more than once on Earth! So, yes, we can say that humanoids are fairly improbable, but not necessarily all that improbable! Anything approaching “a certain inevitability” would mean millions or even billions of humanoid life-forms in the universe, simply because the number of available planets is so huge. Now, my guess is intermediate between your two extremes … I suspect that humanoids are not so very rare as to justify the statistical superlatives that you permitted yourself in the vignette.
Good point. But of the 60 to 80 phyla of animals, only one, the chordates, led to intelligence, and only the vertebrates actually developed it. Of all the vertebrates, only mammals evolved brains big enough for higher intelligence. And of the 24 orders of mammals only one—ours, the primates—has technological intelligence. As the late Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr concluded: “Nothing demonstrates the improbability of the origin of high intelligence better than the millions of phyletic lineages that failed to achieve it.” In fact, Mayr calculated that even though there have evolved perhaps as many as 50 billion species on Earth, “only one of these achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization.”
The late astronomer Carl Sagan, in a Planetary Society debate with Mayr (Bioastronomy News, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1995), noted that technologically communicating species “may live on the land or in the sea or air. They may have unimaginable chemistries, shapes, sizes, colors, appendages and opinions. We are not requiring that they follow the particular route that led to the evolution of humans. There may be many different evolutionary pathways, each unlikely, but the sum of the number of pathways to intelligence may nevertheless be quite substantial.”
Thus, the probability of intelligent life evolving elsewhere in the cosmos may be very high even while the odds of it being humanoid may be very low. I strongly suspect that we are blinded by Protagoras’ bias (“Man is the measure of all things”) when we project ourselves into the alien Other.

animalcruelty-notok:

Colombia moves closer to animal circus ban
The Colombian Senate Committee discussing the Bill to end the use of animals in circuses has voted through the Bill, by a vote of 8 to 1 (4 absent) – it now goes to final vote in plenary session.
Since the launch of the Animal Defenders International (ADI) undercover investigations of animal circuses in South America in 2007, bans have been secured in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay. Now we are a step closer to an animal circus ban in Colombia!
Bill 244 2012, has already been voted through the Colombian House of Representatives. This first stage in the Senate was a hearing in the Fifth Committee of the Senate. Evidence was given by Eduardo Peña, ADI South America Campaign Coordinator, and representatives of the animal circus industry also spoke. The Bill has widespread public support, as well as from a number of Colombian public authorities, celebrities and organizations. The people of Colombia were horrified by the evidence; abuse of elephants, tigers, ponies, llamas and shockingly, an elderly female chimpanzee screaming as she was repeatedly punched in the face and beaten with a chain. Dogs, tigers and a horse displayed abnormal, stereotypical behavior, indicating suffering due to deprivation.
National measures to restrict either all or wild animals in circuses are in place in over 20 countries, including: Austria, Bosnia Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Malta, Slovakia, Sweden, Portugal, Taiwan, Singapore, Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, Costa Rica, India and Israel. Similar laws are being discussed in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Norway. In the US, we gained huge support for HR3359 in the last Congress, and it will be reintroduced in the new Congress this year.