NASA have now made their amazing montage of city lights across the Earth at night available as a layer on Google Earth.
To switch it on, go to Layers > Featured Content > NASA > Earth City Lights, but before you do that, for maximum impact, navigate to an area you know well, like Scotland, and [...]
Posted on Sunday 22nd July 2007 in Blog, Science tagged Computers, energy, environmental, landscapes, mapping, Photos, Science, space, technology, with no comments.
Hopefully Richard Branson’s $25m climate challenge will do for carbon sequestration what the Ansari X Prize has done for private spaceflight.
Millions of pounds are on offer for the person who comes up with the best way of removing significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Whether we can successfully engineer our way out of [...]
Posted on Sunday 11th February 2007 in Engineering, Science tagged climate change, energy, Engineering, environmental, Science, technology, transport, UK, with no comments.
George Monbiot, a journalist and activist, has proposed a 10 point plan to help us limit climate change by rapidly reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. While this will involve some changes in lifestyle, it will not be as radical as those changes that will be required if we don’t act now.
The general ideas can be [...]
Posted on Friday 10th November 2006 in Engineering, Politics tagged climate change, construction, energy, Engineering, environmental, future, Politics, technology, transport, UK, with no comments.
According to the BBC, a ramp has been designed that “_creates_” power as cars drive over it. BBC News story
On first reading it seems that the inventor has conveniently circumvented the laws of thermodynamics, and is creating power from nothing.
I assumed the ramp is to be used as a speed hump, to slow down traffic, [...]
Posted on Sunday 18th December 2005 in Engineering tagged energy, Engineering, technology, with no comments.
An interesting concept for generating renewable energy is the Atmospheric Vortex Engine.
This is an extension of the principal of the solar chimney. The solar chimney is a device where a current of air is created by the difference in temperature and hence pressure between the base and the top of the stack.
The issue with this [...]
Posted on Tuesday 4th October 2005 in Engineering tagged climate change, energy, Engineering, environmental, Science, with no comments.
